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The Victimization of Asians in America
| Article
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10123 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1993 |
6,491 Words |
| Author
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Gary Y. Okihiro
Gary Y. Okihiro is associate professor of history and director
of the Asian American Studies Program at Cornell University in
Ithaca, New York. |
Asked which of the country's ethnic minorities has been subjected to the most discrimination and the worst injustices," observed sociologist William Petersen in 1966, "very few persons would even think of answering: 'the Japanese Americans.' Yet, if the questions refer to persons alive today, that may well be the correct reply. Like the Negroes, the Japanese have been feared prejudice. Like the Jews, they have been the object of color and hated as hyperefficient competitors. And more than any other group, they have been seen as the agents of an overseas enemy. Conservatives, liberals and radicals, local sheriffs, the federal government and the Supreme Court have cooperated in denying them their elementary rights--most notoriously in their World War II evacuation to internment camps."
Writing in the aftermath of the 1965 Watts riot in Los Angeles, Petersen noted that normally the treatment accorded to America's Japanese would have created a "problem minority," like blacks, characterized by low incomes, poor health and education, high crime rates, and unstable families. Race prejudice, inferior schools, and social ostracism, common wisdom argued, tended to produce a "cumulative degradation" such that even after a formal end to segregation and discrimination, "the minority's reaction to them is likely to be negative--either self-defeating apathy or a hatred so all consuming as to be self-destructive. For all the well-meaning programs and countless scholarly studies now focused on the Negro, we barely know how to repair the damage that the slave traders started.
But the history of Japanese Americans, countered Petersen, challenges generalization about America's minorities. "Every attempt to hamper their progress resulted only in enhancing their determination to succeed. Even in a country whose patron saint is the Horatio Alger hero, there is no parallel to this success story." Moreover, Petersen claimed, by any criterion of good citizenship that we choose, the Japanese Americans are better than any other group in our society including native-born whites." In an allied report some five years after Petersen, Newsweek declared that Japanese Americans had "outwhited the whites."
Indeed, Asian Americans as a whole--not just Japanese Americans--have been held up us America's "model minority." In an article published in the same year as Petersen's essay, U.S. News & World Report praised Chinese Americans' success: "Visit Chinatown U.S.A.," the report contended, "and you find an important racial minority pulling itself up from hardship and discrimination to become a model of self-respect and achievement in today's America." And
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