Despair not, we’re not alone!

If per chance you feel disheartened by all the purposeful bashing of these isles, despair not for the moneyed people at the US Textile Labor Unions have hired pet tigers in the Clinton administration and the US Congress to inflict economic discrimination and annililation against the NMI.

Notice their agility when making reference to these isles as a “foreign country”, an “American Soil?” if it suits their purpose, or a “state” for purposes other than ours? Despair not my friends for the only sin we’ve committed in this unjustified, unwarranted and discriminatory federal agenda is the phenomenal economic success we’ve attained under the free enterprise system.

It seems too that the biggest sin we’ve committed is the original sin of being US Citizens of color riddled with stereotypes and fantasies by White America. Despair not for even Asian Americans across the country (even in the NMI) still suffer the stereotype leveled against anybody who isn’t caucasian despite their contributions to their new mother country. Sonia Shah of Knight Ridder News Service recently wrote:

Asians have sometimes been viewed as “model minorities,” and at other times pilloried as spies and interlopers. But we are always held at a distance – no matter how ”American” we may become. Part of the difficulty is the label itself. Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Hmong, Pakistanis, Thais and Indians, among others, are all lumped together as a single group: Asian Pacific Americans.

But unlike other diverse ethnic and racial groups, such as African Americans and Native Americans, Asian Pacific Americans share no common historical trauma like slavery or colonization. We share no “Asian” language or ethnicity or nation or color. Most of us don’t think of ourselves as Asian Americans. And some of us who self-consciously use the label often wonder why. The reason, of course, is that Americans know so little about our differences that the stereotypes imposed upon any one group of us bleeds over onto the next.

As a result of such stereotypes, many Asian-American groups have faced hardship in this country. In the mid- to late-1800s our nation passed laws excluding Chinese people from becoming citizens, owning property, marrying or attending public schools with whites. As late as the 1940s, the American Federation of Labor opposed ending Asian exclusion laws.

In 1942, the U.S. government stripped 110,000 Japanese Americans of their homes, possessions and savings and forced them into concentration camps. The 1980s economy sparked another wave of anti-Asian violence: In 1982, unemployed autoworkers beat Chinese-American Vincent Chin to death with a baseball bat. They thought he was Japanese. And they didn’t serve a single day in jail.

In 1987, a gang of youths beat Navroz Mody to death in New Jersey, home of the “dotbusters” (a vicious reference to the Indian bindi). Today, many Asian Americans are pitted against blacks in the affirmative-action debate. And – most tragically – in Los Angeles during the 1992 riots, Asian Americans were viewed as targets by some blacks. But blacks, Asian Americans and other minorities have much more in common as outsiders in America. Undocumented Asian workers take the jobs nobody else will tolerate, toiling in sweatshops and factories. In one notorious case, a Southern California sweatshop was found to be holding dozens of Thai workers against their will in a barbed-wire enclosure.

Even the much-lauded professional Asians are harassed and excluded on the basis of their accents. Their degrees are often devalued and held to higher-than-usual standards. For all the fanfare regarding their success, most of them still make less money than whites with comparable education. The story of Asian-American history is a story of not belonging. Yet, despite all this ambivalence about our place in U.S. society, Asian Americans have played a big role on the American stage, and they have made lives and history change as a result.