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- Black Racism
- By: Ying Ma
- UMJ NEWS Volume
2.30
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This
is a true story, the Chinese man was abused by African
American. In what passes for discussions on race these days, small
problems are often blown up large, while real traumas
are completely ignored. For instance, despite what
President Clinton’s “Race Initiative” panel has
said, the very rawest racial conflicts in present-day
America don’t even fit into the tidy mold of
white-majority-oppressing-colored-minority that
activists constantly promote. Though civil rights groups
and most of the media studiously ignore this fact, the
nation’s most fractious racial battles are now
conflicts between minority populations. Particularly
horrific is the animosity directed at Asian Americans by
blacks in low-income areas of urban America. During my secondary school years, racism, and then the
combination of outrage and bitterness that it fosters,
accompanied me home on the bus every day. My English was
by now more fluent than that of those who insulted me,
but most of the time I still said nothing to avoid being
beaten up. In addition to everything else thrown at me,
a few times a week I was the target of sexual remarks
vulgar enough to make Howard Stern blush.
When I did respond to the insults, I immediately
faced physical threats or attacks, along with the
embarrassing fact that the other “Chinamen” around
me simply continued their quiet personal conversations
without intervening. The reality was that those who
cursed my race and ethnicity were far bigger in size
than most of the Asian children who sat silently. “Yee-ya,
Ching-chong, ah-ee, un-yahhh!” At markets and in the
streets of poor black neighborhoods, Asians would be
told, “Why the hell don’t you just go back to where
you came from!” In
poor neighborhoods across this country Asians endure
daily racial hatred just as I did. Because of their
language deficiencies, their small size, their fear of
violent confrontations, they endure in silence. Unlike
me, many of them will never depart for a new life in a
beautiful place far, far away. So each day they grow
more bitter against a group that much of America refuses
to acknowledge to be capable of racism: African
Americans. In a
fair and peaceful world, racial harassment will be
decried without regard to its source. The problem today
is that prominent black leaders rule out even the
possibility of black racism. Activists like Al Sharpton
and Jesse Jackson intone that racism equals “prejudice
plus power,” and that since blacks in America lack
power, they are simply not capable of practicing racism
against anyone. John Hope Franklin, chair of President
Clinton’s race panel, angrily insists that racism is
something suffered, not dished out, by blacks. Many
black professors, writers, polemicists, and politicians
repeat the same mantra. What might appear to be black
racism, writes syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts,
actually boils down not to racism but to acts of crime
and rudeness from the perpetrators, and tough luck for
the recipients. Unfortunately,
Asian Americans-and especially their leaders-have failed
to speak out on this matter. Complaints from wounded
individuals regularly boil into public view, however. In
mid-August, I attended a crowded press conference held
in New York’s Chinatown to discuss Indonesia’s
history of discrimination against ethnic Chinese (which
peaked this May in a wave of bloody anti-Chinese riots).
One woman at the event began to hysterically scream out
her frustrations over black American racism against
Asians. The
woman, Mee Ying Lin, shouted, “Chinese suffer from
racial discrimination by blacks every day. We should
help persecuted Chinese overseas, but why is no one
dealing with our own troubles in America?” Tsai
explains that Asian involvement in politics is at a
nascent stage, that it is difficult for her organization
even to convince Asian immigrants to vote, let alone
make a political stink against racial harassment.
“Asians are just not used to standing up for
our own rights,” says another Bay Area Chinese
activist with frustration. In
this vein, Asian activists consistently mention that
racial problems occur when Asian merchants move into
predominantly black neighborhoods and flourish. The
vicious year-long black boycott of a Korean store in
Brooklyn in 1990, and the looting and burning of Korean
stores in south-central Los Angeles during the 1992
Rodney King riots serve as shining examples of conflicts
linked to economic disparities. In
any case, the economic disparities rationale falls apart
in the many instances where racism flourishes in the
absence of class differences. At
San Francisco’s Hunter’s Point public housing
complex, for instance, low-income Southeast Asian
residents, who are in the minority, have consistently
encountered racial harassment from their black
neighbors. Racial
slurs, physical threats, violence, and destruction of
property have festered for years. Philip Nguyen of the
Southeast Asian Community Center, who has worked on the
case for years, notes that there are no economic
differences between the Asian and black families in the
complex. The Asians, he says, are very quiet and have
made every effort to befriend the black residents, yet
serious friction has persisted for ten years. Joe
Hicks, executive director of the Los Angeles City Human
Relations Commission, painstakingly tried to bring
blacks and Asians together after the Rodney King riots.
He believes that “much of the hostilities are due to
blacks’ jealousy of Asian economic success, a sense of
alienation, and the self-perpetuating belief that blacks
will always lose out in the racial equation in
America.” He adds that “certainly economics gives a
basis to many of the problems,” but asserts that
“even if tomorrow we can have a level playing field
for both racial groups, we would still have animosity
and racial strife” because prejudices would still
remain. Asian
activists who are not otherwise inclined to ignore
prejudice are often strangely anxious to apologize for
black racism. In interviews, they note that Asians
harbor many prejudices against blacks too. This
explanation, however, has no power to explain the kind
of harassment I and many others like me experienced as
young immigrant children beginning life with no animus
toward anyone. Asian
prejudice toward blacks surely exists. But whatever
biases might be harbored in the minds of Asian
immigrants, many of whom had never seen a black person
before arriving in the U.S., they certainly don’t rate
at the level of destroying black people’s property,
scaring their elderly folk, or threatening and
assaulting their children-the kinds of pressures Asians
in many urban areas now endure routinely. Asian youths
in particular typically start out with little or no
inclination to distrust or dislike African Americans.
Young Asians are usually far more willing than their
parents to accept a new country and new friends,
including black ones. In many cases, it was only after
innumerable frightening chases, assaults, and
humiliations that Asian attitudes toward blacks turned
defensive. Those of us whose open minds were confronted
with hostility and hatred will never accept the
insulting assertion that our suffering resulted from our
own prejudices. It
seems that leaders of the Organization of Chinese
Americans, the Asian American Legal Defense Fund, and
related groups are disconnected from the real concerns
of many of the Asians they claim to represent. David
Lee, whose Bay Area organization is attempting to
promote local dialogue among minority journalists,
believes that a fundamental disconnection exists between
the national Asian spokesmen and the new majority of
Asians who are recent immigrants. The prominent Asian
civil rights leaders, he notes, tend to be American
born, to speak little of their ethnic languages, and to
be unable to read the local ethnic newspapers. Many of
them do not know or understand the problems in low
income areas, because they live comfortable middle-class
lives. And so “it is not surprising that they are
silent about black-on-Asian discrimination,” Lee
summarizes. Bong
Hwan Kim, executive director of the Korean Youth and
Community Center in Los Angeles and an active member of
the Black-Korean Alliance that attempted to bring
African- and Korean-Americans together in the eight
years before the south-central riots, describes a
disconnection in the Korean community between
first-generation immigrants and acculturated second
generation residents with less familiarity with
inner-city life. After the shops of Koreatown were
looted or burned, he reports, the more suburbanized
Koreans pushed inter-ethnic bridge-building efforts,
while the first-generation immigrants who toiled in
menial jobs, bridled at having to sit across the table
from those who looted and burned their property.
Meanwhile, few of the prominent national Asian
organizations even condemned the violence perpetrated
against Koreans in L.A. Stanley
Mark of the Asian American Legal Defense Fund argues in
defense of the national Asian organizations that people
hear less from the Asian leaders about black-on-Asian
racism than white-on-Asian racism simply because there
is less of the former than the latter. Mark insists he
knows of no case where an Asian was seriously hurt or
killed by a racist black American. Underlining
the disconnect between national and local perceptions,
Liu Yu-xi, an organizer of the New York coalition of
Chinese Americans that mobilized hundreds of thousands
of normally politically apathetic Chinese to protest
Indonesian violence against Chinese residents, chuckled
at Stanley Mark’s ignorance of cases of black racism.
Liu, who has known of many racially motivated physical
attacks against Chinese in New York, observes, “Such
crimes are reported often in the local Chinese papers,
but the national Asian activists obviously do not know
how to read Chinese.” When
asked why prominent Asians have said little about racial
harassment by African Americans, Bill Tam of San
Francisco’s Chinese Family Alliance flatly stated,
“I think they are afraid to say anything.” To him,
it appears that Asian leaders are often fearful of the
national black leadership.
National Asian organizations generally follow the
lead of black civil rights groups like the naacp so
slavishly, another Bay Area activist told me, that even
when the latter’s stances (for instance, on quotas and
preferences) are opposed to the interests and beliefs of
many Asian citizens, the Asian activists don’t
challenge their allies. Rose
Tsai of the San Francisco Neighbors Association was a
little more blunt: “Most Asian leaders do not wish to
acknowledge that there exists a problem because they do
not want the minorities to fight amongst themselves.”
As a result, national Asian spokesmen speaking for their
brethren are without any inkling of the real problems
they face, or what kind of racism is dragging them down.
Recognizing the complex issues between blacks and
Asians, Philip Nguyen of the Southeast Asian Community
Center has a simple proposal: “Fight, not against or
for any group, but against racial discrimination.” |
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