Eric, Will, and Penny conclude their conversations about Asian Americans focusing on Asian bias during COVID and how the stories we tell create a sense of belonging or a sense of alienation.
Transcript: Asians in America. The Stories We Tell.
Eric: No, history says we shouldn't be surprised.
Will: Racial prejudices that have died down, really that nearly gone underground and they come roaring back, you know, very easily.
Eric: Proper contextualization. To understand the large story. And I think what what people miss is just that the large story, the larger story of struggle, of oppression, of perseverance, that's common to to to all of us. In this context, this American context. There's there's no good excuse for being fractured in terms of folks who are in the the the ethnic minority.
Penny: Welcome to the diversity and inclusion for all project supported by Calvin University and the Calvin Institute for Christian Worship. Together, we'll listen to key perspectives, build our knowledge, inform our thinking, and get a little better equipped to engage our world.
I think a couple helpful things to talk about for our current moment is how COVID has really brought to the fore, I think, some lingering or continuing Asian American bias or biases against Asian-Americans. And we've seen this in some of the violence, especially in spring of 2021 against there, some against just older Asian-Americans who were attacked. And also there was in March of 2021, the Atlanta shootings, which I'm not sure were related to COVID (but) at the same time, it came at a time where there were a lot of reports of Asian violence and discrimination against Asians related to COVID. And then we had the Atlanta shootings, which was a man who targeted Asian massage spa's and killed a number of people, most of whom were… would identify as Asian and were Asian women or Asian-American women.
For me, during this time period, too, I've had to fight my own ghosts a little bit. So I did not want to feel scared about going out in public or feel intimidated by others. But at the same time and I would tell myself, oh, you know, you're you're blowing it out of proportion and nothing's going to happen and nothing has. But I still felt this little bit of fear, like… I really don't want to go alone at maybe an odd time to a store and in certain areas and risk someone basically looking at me or spitting on me or, you know, reacting to me in a way that somehow it's going to make me feel guilty for the COVID flu, the COVID virus. But I know that other people have and continue throughout, you know, COVID and even earlier to really still be the victims of different kinds of of hate, basically. A dear colleague I know his wife is a little scared to walk in her neighborhood because she has been out walking several times and people will roll down their windows and basically yell things like go back to where you came from, insert expletives that I don't want to say on a podcast. And this has happened more than once. And, you know, if that happens in your own neighborhood, it really affects how you see the world and how you think about how welcome you are (or) aren't in your community.
Eric: I've heard stories where people close to me and incidents have been recurring. The history in this country, a history of Asian presence in this country. In one sense, this is keeping with the history. This this just this, this is a continuity. But of course, context, you know, this is a different context in which you have a person in the White House at the time who purposely and intentionally used language to cast blame on China for the outbreak of COVID worldwide, especially the United States. He continually said that and had a rancorous exchange with an Asian-American reporter who called who called him out on something that he directed toward her. She asks, Are you asking me because I'm Asian? So this is this is all part of that context. And so you have people who take it upon themselves and to keep vitriolic language and epitaphs of people of Asian descent. And our students here on campus about they they've experienced this. So this this this is this is this is hit home. Yeah, it's it's at least for some people, I think it was it was quite alarming because of the myth of the model minority as well as Asian folks. Yeah. They're hardworking. They they do this. So, you know, they own the the laundromat in my in my neighborhood. Oh, I, I go to the local Chinese restaurant to get the you know, to get my takeout. And this I've been knowing so-and-so for years. Above all Bad things happened. I'm surprised. No, history says we shouldn't be surprised.
Will: It's a reminder that even the good minority, the model minority, ultimately, it's about race. You can adapt successfully. You can succeed by American terms. You can in every other way except skin color, you know, be indistinguishable from another American. But because you have a skin color and other physical features that look Asian, you're always going to be viewed as either not fully American or outright unwanted. And as you were talking, Penny, I was reminded of groups like the Cherokee in the American South in the 1820s, 30s and 40s. They, you might say, were model minorities. They'd they'd successfully adapted written language, modern American styles of farming and all sorts of things like that. But ultimately, it didn't matter the fact that they were Native Americans, what mattered and they were unwanted. And there is a long history of this. And the current example is a cruel reminder that when push comes to shove in crisis, racial prejudices that have died down, really that have nearly gone underground, and they come roaring back, you know, very easily.
Penny: I think we've seen this in the last year and a half with the COVID crisis, that despite the fact that there are lots of model minority things out there with Asian-Americans and that, I think, Asian-Americans has as a group have made a lot of strides and have gained a lot of respect. And we're even seeing more Asian-American or Asian representation in movies and films right now, Crazy Rich Asian, which, you know, you can argue was good or bad. We've had a couple of different Disney movies that tried to display or to depict Asian traditions and myths and stories in kind of a positive light. But yet when you get COVID coming and you get different kinds of ways to refer to that, that really link it to China and reinforce then all the negative, then all that stuff comes up, all the negative stuff comes up.
So I feel like no matter what progress we make in terms of living together peaceably, of becoming one nation, of working together for a common good, when there's a stress moment, when something comes up and we can fall back on something race-based to hate each other, to to be divided, that that we are… we tend to do that. And I it's so depressing.
Will: Yes. Yeah.
Penny: Like here we are again.
Will: Well, it reminds me of the so-called Spanish flu of 1918, 1919. You know, the century-ago precursor of the current COVID crisis. Well, it was called the Spanish flu in the United States. And people of Spanish descent and Latino descent, you know, protested. The Russians called it the Chinese flu. I mean, that was their immediate enemy. I think the Spanish themselves associated with Italians and, yeah, associating disease with unwanted peoples is common. And it usually overlaps some sort of ethnic or racial identity, some sort of alleged immorality or wrong religious views.
There's long been the argument that there are two ways of thinking about citizenship in the United States. One puts the emphasis on people's political and moral values. And if you embrace values like freedom and equality before the law and things like that, you can be a good American. The other mode of citizenship being more ethnically defined, you know, people of certain ethnic and religious backgrounds are at the core and everybody else is at the margins or excluded. And the pattern in American history has been that that during good times that more civic, political and moral values-conception of citizenship grows in influence and immigrants are more welcomed or at least less opposed. But in periods of economic crisis, when jobs are scarce, then that anti-immigrant, more ethnic or cultural vision of American citizenship roars back into power.
Penny: I think it's important to recognize, too, though, that if there was in a year a new virus that came out of London or Paris or maybe even Berlin, and that we could prove that it was originated there, we wouldn't suddenly start seeing hate crimes against white looking people as reasonable.
Will: or or against Roman Catholics if there was some sort of way to statistically correlate it from a Catholic country. I think you're exactly right.
Penny: So that just says that we do this negative stuff. We react we behave badly to people who are already the minority, are marginalized in ways that we don't to to people who are white. And that's part of our story of race in America, really.
Will: I think you're right that visible minorities, that's that's enduring in a way that it wouldn't be for ethnic identities in Europe. I think you're right. You're quite right that people are not likely to worry about Italian Americans today in the same way that they still seem to associate disease with Asian Americans.
Eric: A lot of that has to do even with representation, the same the same Hollywood of a form of media. Yeah. You think of the Godfather trilogy in one sense, The Godfather Trilogy really put an Italian an Italian American culture history into the American mainstream. And we haven't had that yet with Asia or Asian and Asia, different parts of Asia. And Asian Americans haven't had it yet. Will it happen? I don't know.
Penny: I think some of the stories that we see in media and depicted, you know, some are truer than others, let's say. But there's a point at which for some groups, those stories become part of our big story, the story of America. Yeah, maybe the Italian Americans are a little bit that way, like it's this curious and kind of romantic and kind of ugly….But it's part of our story now. And I think we haven't had that with all our groups, especially not Asian-Americans. We still look at those as a story of an other who might be in this country also. But it's not part of our story in the same way.
Will: So one of the things that happens after World War Two, and in some ways even before World War Two, is Chinatown's as tourism or Asian-American cultures as appropriated. So already in the early 20th century and not just in the US, but in Canada, there's a book I'm thinking of called Vancouver's Chinatown, which which is a history of this. But Chinatowns in places like San Francisco and Vancouver becoming tourist destinations, an exotic place to go to close to home with exotic food to eat close to home after World War Two. You have American G.I.s, white G.I.s coming back from having served in Japan and maybe after the war being stationed in Okinawa or having served in Korea or later Vietnam. And you get the growing popularity of martial arts, whether kung fu or karate or more recently, taekwondo. The popularity of Asian foods. And so, on the one hand, these things become part of American pop culture, you know, so I'll speak here for white Americans. It's part of our culture. And yet, at the same time, it makes exotic both Asian cultures back in Asia, but also Asian-American communities here. And so it's not just the story of ongoing prejudice and outbreaks of violence, but at the same time, a story of consumption. You know, I mean, what's what's more American thing than, you know, martial arts movies and things like that. People love them. At the same time, they may still well hold virulent anti-Asian prejudices.
Penny: And I think the idea, too, that we take the exotic and we treat it as a tourist destination or we treat, you know, I'm going to say Asian-looking women sometimes as an object of exotic romantic fantasies. And, of course, that's linked to the Atlanta shootings, too, right, that he… that this person who killed the women felt he needed to sort of somehow get rid of the temptation that he felt. Right. And I'm thinking, all right, there's just a lot to unpack there. But at the base of it is this association/stereotypes with the look of a person, the sort of phenotype, let's call it race. And then I get to do what I want to that other-- not my race, but the other race, because they are causing me harm or they are a temptation or they are associated with something that makes me scared or I feel like I need to defend myself because they represent a threat to me, whether they actually do or not, whether it's because I'm tempted by their sexuality or by the look of them, or because I think they might hit me or they're trying to enter my house. If I feel threatened, I have a right to do what I want, say what I want, yell things out my window. But only white people can do that.
Will: Well, and there's a long history of this with African-American women as well. And maybe the opposite side of that is where we need to bring in gender as well as race. That whether it's Asian or Asian American women or African-American women, they can be an object of desire, exotic, taboo, but nonetheless treated as objects of desire and and claimed. Whereas African-American men and I would presume in similar ways, Asian-American men are seen as dangerous. And both of those are toxic, because even where it's about attraction to Asian-American or, say, African-American women, it's still an attraction precisely because it's exotic and taboo. And so the attraction and the assimilation of aspects of Asian culture can quite easily go along with ongoing prejudice and perhaps even loathing if you're attracted to something that's taboo, perhaps there's a part of you that necessarily also says, oh, it's kind of wrong. And it's that toxic mix that somehow explains the attraction. And anti-Asian animus.
Eric: This this is real stuff and it's part of the whole dynamic. And the whole relationship and how how white folks and even blacks, how how the see Asians, especially Asian women.
Penny: I think the tendency to exotifyi another group of people has some real dangers to it, and I just think that's part of our history as well. And we need to kind of realize that as we move forward in trying to live together.
Will: I'm not sure what the right word delicate balance may be between, on the one hand, exoticizing people that they are foreign and other, you know, and so focusing on difference and the whether the hatred of or attraction to the difference, that common commonality starts to disappear on the one hand, and seeing and treating people who are different as just like you, on the other hand, where you're missing something, when you don't notice, you know, how different cultures are different. We don't do that well.
Eric: Right. Yeah. And that's that's why I appreciate the say, Amy Tan’s the Joy Luck Club, where it's she she goes back and forth in the book. She she talks about what's going on in the present … where the novel is set. But she's also telling those back stories about the mothers and grandmothers. So it gives you that proper contextualization to understand the large story. And I think what what people miss is just that: the large story, large story of struggle, of oppression, of perseverance, that's common to to to all of us
Penny: Some of my takeaways from what the little bit I've gotten to know about the history of Asians and Asian immigration in the United States is that Asians have been pushed down by different groups to in order to push them up. So in the past, different immigrant groups would discriminate against and lobby for disadvantages for Asian groups in order to give themselves advantages. So the kind of if I push you down, it pushes me up. Kind of.
Will: Yes
Penny: The difference is and the model minority myth with that have been used to drive a wedge to divide Asian-Americans from other immigrant, from other minority groups so that all the minority groups or different minority groups didn't bond together and form partnerships that could have been more politically powerful. And part of that is making Asian immigrants ineligible to citizenship so that they don't they're not going to get the political power anytime really soon. And so that's another way we've used race specifically in the Asian context in America that has really, I think, hurt, definitely hurt Asian-Americans, but hurt others as well. And then the whole idea of exoti-fying or sort of looking at Asians as an other and either being repulsed or interested in perhaps unhealthy ways.
And the thing is that I actually think that all of these could be pushed in a positive direction, right. We could we could look at our differences and actually partner together. We could look at how we're different and similar and build on each other's strengths and weaknesses to get our whole group, our whole society, our whole community to a better place. And we could appreciate the food or the different layers of the clothing of another group in a way that's very respectful and honoring and not sort of objectifying and dishonoring. And I just feel like, can we get to those more positive ways of dealing with these differences that exist between us?
Will: It's not just Americans, native born people, whatever their ethnic or racial background who are trying to figure out a new immigrant group. The immigrants are going through something similar, trying to figure out this new society they're a part of. They take many of the values of their of their own, of their own country and know when they look at the United States, they see all the things they think need fixing. And, yeah, if you could get both groups, whether it's the native-born group, especially when it's white, that has the power and the the immigrant groups, and see, yeah, what is most beautiful and interesting from each other's cultures, rather than this sense of zero-sum game where what is good for this group, this necessarily means my group or other groups lose something. Yeah, …that that would be a good place to be.
Eric: Yeah. And I can do to remind myself that the work of anti-racism is not simply to dismantle anti-black racial policy, but to dismantle anti-Asian, -Native American, -Latinoamerica, as well as African-American. Policies. So it's it's it's one for and off one.
And they don't want to be cliches about this, but still in this context, this American context, there's there's no good excuse for being fractured in terms of folks who are in the the the ethnic minority.
Will: If we could not just see the admirable and the beautiful and the good in different cultures, but also recognize that people from every social groupings struggle and have difficulties, and that there are, too we can we can find empathy. Our difficulties may be different. And they certainly were different. The… the prejudices say that Irish American experience when they were the unwanted in a group are different from the prejudices and less enduring than the prejudices that Chinese Americans have experienced. But there are an awful lot of ways to see shared… shared histories, both in the things that we love and value, add in the challenges, traumas and difficulties we've experienced.
Penny: If you're interested in continuing to learn about Asians in America, I encourage you to listen to the podcast :Asians in America. Triangulation” for some interesting ways to think about the position that Asian-Americans have had in our country from the very first immigrants up and through the 20th and 21st century.
If you enjoyed today's episode, please subscribe to our podcast to stay informed about future episodes. Do you have a friend who would be interested in today's topic? We'd love it if you'd share our work with them. Our hope is that this project will spark good conversations and provide learning resources that inspire diversity and inclusion work.
All views and opinions expressed in our episodes are those of the individual and do not necessarily reflect the views and positions of Calvin University or the Calvin Institute for Christian Worship.