Asian-Americans are not “post-racial”: Reflections on Asian Pacific-American Heritage

We’re smack in the middle of Asian Pacific-American Heritage Month, but you wouldn’t know it.

This new, supposedly “post-racial” phase we’re in is particularly ironic for Asian-Americans.

Asian-Americans are immigrants, but not in the tradition of Ellis Island. We are viewed as minorities, but not quite. We are routinely trotted out as proof of national diversity, yet few can name a famous Asian person who does not bear an association to kung fu.

Overtly racist caricatures are out. Yet caricatures nonetheless still surface in subtle ways. For example, last year’s animated movie “The Tale of Despereaux” made all the evil rats Asian, occupying an Orientalized sewer system, while the heroic mice inhabited a perfect European hamlet. The sinister Siamese cats of “Lady and the Tramp” have given way to more nuanced—and thus more insidious — ways of conveying the same old racial meanings.

It’s not simply that Asian-Americans have been “disappeared” in public culture, but that the racial meanings that connect us to the history of civil rights have been erased.

Thus, the fact that Asians in the United States have suffered because of racism is often met with skepticism. Gene Luen Yang’s 2006 National Book Award-nominated graphic novel, “American Born Chinese,” depicts a Chinese-American adolescent who undergoes psychic splitting, imagining himself to be white in a fantasy portrayal of race passing. Incredulous as to whether this degree of racial self-hatred applies to Asian-Americans, a New York Times book reviewer questioned, “Is it so bad to grow up Asian in America? One might be forgiven for asking upon encountering “American Born Chinese.” … After all, Asians are widely perceived to have it easier than other minorities in the United States.”

Have it easier?

A history of exclusion laws? Check.

Denied naturalization rights? Check.

Abrogation of civil rights? Check.

Targets of rioting, segregation, hate crimes, deportation, and general intimidation? Check, check, and check.

Oh, and prosecution as traitors to the nation? Again, check.

Americans have heard this song before; they recall the beat, but they just can’t remember the lyrics.

I suppose that it is small consolation that hordes of sports fans don’t don conical hats and pull their eyes up in unison at stadiums across the country.

President Obama famously accepted the Democratic Party’s 2008 nomination with the assertion, “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there is the United States of America. There’s not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America; there is the United States of America.”

For once and at long last, it was a relief to be recognized, to receive the presidential shout-out. Yet it boggles the mind that this imagined unity could be taken as proof that racism is officially over.

It’s strange that we as a nation are now in a supposedly colorblind era when, for Asian-Americans, cultural and political visibility has yet to be fully realized. Moreover, it’s particularly ironic to think that we can be co-opted as symbols of achievement, as a group overcoming an oppressive racial history, when simultaneously met with disbelief that we ever suffered one.

For Asians in the United States, as for others, declaring that we are in a “post-racial” era is premature.

Like the president’s half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, we occupy a place on the stage of this country’s historic moment — not exactly repressed, but behind and a little bit off to the side.

Like Obama’s half-sister at the White House, we may serve as proof of the national and newly globalized family, but we’re not exactly moving in yet.

Leslie Bow is associate professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She is currently writing a book on the position of Asians in the segregated South and the processes of racial categorization. She can be reached at pmproj [at] progressive [dot] org.