Entry 5

So here's something I haven't spent much time in my life thinking about or considering: Racism against Asians. Perhaps I am hopelessly out of touch, but in the past I have been much more concerned about racism against African Americans and Hispanics because I suppose those issues are brought up the most. However, recently in studying the history of racism in the United States and that of undocumented laborers, I've realized that as a nation we seem to have a very deep-seeded nationalist fear of anyone who doesn't fit into our homogenized box. With a history like ours, I'm really curious as to where the whole "Melting Pot" and immigration friendly idea came from.

The statue of liberty inscription reads:

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses, yearning to breath free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest tossed to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

We obviously don't mean that. Our hostility to non-native groups is historically documented. The California legislature required Chinese and Latin Americans mining for gold there to pay a special tax not required of Whites called the "Foreign Miners Tax," in the 1850's, and also in California a group of Whites murdered 19 Chinese immigrants in a vicious hate crime in the 1870's. Racism against the Chinese was again institutionalized in the Chinese Exclusion Act passed by congress in 1882 which prohibited the Chinese from immigrating for ten years. The Chinese Exclusion Act was only finally repealed in 1943.

Because I have been thinking about racism towards Asians recently, I was especially touched by the essay in our Diversity and Social Justice Readings by a Korean American girl, Olivia Chung, titled "Finding My Eye-dentity" in which she explains that the way that American society defines beauty excludes people of color. She writes about pressure from her mother and friends for a cosmetic surgery to add a crease to the eyelid to make her more beautiful. As a white female, I am pretty familiar with our society's strict definition of beauty, but I never thought about how the availability of beauty products for White women is a great example of white privilege. In her essay, Ms. Chung describes her experience reading Seventeen magazine's eye-make-up tutorial and realizing that the instructions were only available for people with an eyelid crease. A quick google search using the keywords "white privilege and beauty products" will return a gazillion articles and blog posts on this problem.

I also wanted to include this video, which is a great example of how racism/nativism is NOT dead. During the Super Bowl this year, Pete Hoekstra (R), who is running for a Michigan senate seat against incumbent Debbie Stabenow (D), ran an incredibly offensive political smear ad featuring an Asian-American girl riding her bicycle through a rice paddy and speaking in broken English on how Stabenow's policies are ruining the American economy and sending all the jobs and money to China. It is pretty ridiculous, and should make everyone uncomfortable. It is shocking to me that somehow a group of adults decided together that this would be a good idea in some way. Here's the video link :http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrbdXUWryXk&feature=related

It is really sad and strange that there is all this nativism that can be exploited by political candidates. It really is fear-mongering and desperately needs to be publicly recognized as such, so that this particular kind of politics loses it's power.