The New Anti-Asian Hysteria,
Made in the U.S.A.

Revolutionary Worker #1109, July 1, 2001, posted at http://rwor.org

This past April, when a U.S. spy plane collided with a Chinese plane, killing the Chinese pilot, the government of China demanded the U.S. apologize. The U.S. refused, asserted its right to spy on China and arrogantly demanded the return of their plane. Meanwhile, the U.S. media whipped up anti-Asian sentiments aimed at Asians living in the United States:

At Duke University an Asian American woman was walking to her dorm room when a group of guys started harassing her, demanding that she return the spy plane.

Another student came back to his room to find it ransacked. On his desk was a copy of his freshman yearbook. His picture was crossed out with a red pen with the note "It's time to go home, chink." He received two threatening e-mails, one full of racial slurs and the other with an article about a decapitated man. The police didn't even interview the student until a month after the incident. Then they accused him of making up the whole thing, threatened him with two years in jail and tried to force a confession out of him.

In San Francisco, where over 30% of the population are Asians or Pacific Islanders, radio talk show host Don Bleu talked about the spy plane incident in what he described as a "fry over." He then played music from the film, "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," called a restaurant in China and taunted the person who answered the phone for not speaking English!

Across the country, other radio hosts also whipped up racist anti-Asian sentiment by calling for the internment of Chinese Americans and a boycott of Chinese restaurants and other businesses. One talk show host on the air called people with Chinese last names and harassed them. In Houston, after hosts on three radio stations called for boycotts of Chinese restaurants and other businesses, Asian Americans and others formed the Coalition Against Asian American Bashing to challenge these attacks.

A host at nationally syndicated Fox News called for the firing of Chinese employees of U.S. national weapons laboratories. In Los Angeles, a sports radio station did an anti-Chinese segment that included calls to send Dallas Mavericks basketball recruit Wang Zhizhi back to China or bench him until the U.S. plane was returned.

Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Pat Oliphant--who once said that "political correctness drives me crazy"--drew a racist cartoon that was published across the country. It featured a buck-toothed Chinese waiter delivering cat gizzard noodles to a customer, Uncle Sam, who says that he has been slowly getting used to doing business with China. The waiter trips, dumping noodles on the head of Uncle Sam and then jumps up and down saying "Apologize Lotten Amellican!"

A skit performed at the annual convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors featured a white man dressed in a black wig and thick glasses impersonating a Chinese official who gestured wildly as he yelled, "ching, ching, chong, chong." A room full of top newspaper editors in the country, predominantly white, laughed heartily at the skit. The incident would not have come to light except that Amy Leang, a Chinese American student photographer, had been assigned to cover the convention. Leang said she was so upset by the skit that she woke up the next morning crying. She wrote a story about the experience that was quoted in newspaper stories nationwide.

Many people called for the American Society of Newspaper Editors to apologize for the incident. But Association President Tim McGuire, editor of the Minneapolis-St Paul Star Tribune, refused to issue any kind of apology. Instead, he said, "Very few people reacted the way (Leang) did. I don't think that we can make an apology because we didn't control anything." When McGuire was asked if he laughed at the skit he said, "Of course I did."

The U.S. spy plane incident was not the first time the bourgeois media has whipped up anti-Asian sentiment surrounding a news story. In 1999, The New York Times published a major article--which won a Pulitzer Prize--on China's supposed theft of nuclear warhead technology from the U.S.. The article identified Wen Ho Lee, a Taiwan-born scientist at the government-run Los Alamos Laboratory, as the main suspect in the case. Lee was arrested, charged with treason, and threatened with the death penalty. Despite an almost complete lack of evidence, Lee was tried in the media and called "the spy of the century." He was held in solitary confinement for over one year. After most of the charges against him were eventually dismissed, Lee was released from prison in September 2000.

After Lee's arrest, the media was filled with articles portraying Chinese Americans as "sneaky spies"--casting suspicion on every Asian government employee. UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies Professor Ling-Chi Wang described how "Overnight all Chinese American scientists were denaturalized and became foreigners, rendering Chinese Americans synonymous with espionage and treason."

Soon after this, Oregon Congressman David Wu, the only Chinese American ever elected to the House, was denied entrance to the Department of Energy headquarters by two guards who demanded that he tell them whether he was a U.S. citizen. Only after being interrogated for 15 minutes was Wu allowed into the building. His aide, Ted Liu, was not allowed in the building. Wu had been invited to the headquarters to give a speech for Asian Pacific Heritage month.

Even before the Wen Ho Lee case and the spy plane incident, racist portrayals of Asians in the mainstream media have been common. And it has also become acceptable for racist stereotypes of Asians to pass as humor on MAD TV, Saturday Night Live or the Letterman and Leno talk shows. Comedians in comedy clubs around the country tell "Chinaman jokes."

In a highly segregated society, where it's hard for different nationalities to get to know each other, racist anti-Asian images in the media and culture have helped create widespread negative attitudes towards Asian Americans. According to a study released in late April, 68% of people in the U.S. "have a negative attitude toward Chinese Americans in general" and 25% say their view of Chinese Americans is "very negative."

Racist, violent attacks against Asian Americans have also been on the rise over the last several years. A study by Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium showed that anti-Asian violence in Southern California increased from 63 incidents in 1994 to 113 incidents in 1995. And a quarter of the 458 anti-Asian incidents reported nationwide that year occurred in Southern California alone.

The recent annual report on anti-Asian Pacific American violence showed that the number of officially reported incidents of Anti-Asian violence in 1999 rose 13% over 1998. The report also talked about "the twin effects of underreporting by law enforcement agencies and by the news media" which hides these crimes "behind a wall of invisibility." The report goes on to point out, "The unbalanced coverage poses a serious problem for the Asian Pacific American community. It compounds the stereotype that APAs are the 'model minority,' supposedly untouched by racism."

In the past year there have been a number of anti-Asian attacks on college campuses in California.

Last October at the University of California at Davis, located near Sacramento, members of an Asian American sorority were creating a message with the rocks at the Yolo Causeway levee, a traditional student activity. A group of white males, members of a UC Davis fraternity, arrived. Upset that the sorority was there first they began making threats and racial slurs, forcing the Asian American women to leave, fearing their safety.

This same month, after an argument in a parking lot, a group of 15 white males affiliated with Kappa Sigma fraternity broke into an apartment and assaulted five Korean Americans, calling them "chinks" and ransacking the apartment.

Then in December, there was a fight at the levee between at least 70 members of Kappa Sigma and three Asian American fraternities who were trying to spell out messages with rocks. The Asian American students reported that the frat guys pushed one Asian student, saying, "Get off the hill, chink."

The University argued that this was just a case about "drinking" and not a racist attack. The administration also dealt with these attacks as "private, individual matters," keeping the incident quiet so that most students didn't even know about it. Many students were angry at how the school tried to sweep the incident under the rug.

This is the school where in the late 1970s, Alan Bakke filed a suit against affirmative action in 1977--leading to the wave, continuing today, of reversing such programs. And today, despite the fact that 35% of the students at Davis are Asian American, there is no established Asian American Studies Department.

In February, 400 students of all nationalities and community activists rallied on the Davis campus and marched from the student union to the administration building to protest attacks on Asian American students. Victor Hwang, staff attorney with the Asian Law Caucus, addressed the crowd, saying, "When they tell you that this is an isolated incident I tell you that this is a lie."

In April and again in late May, flyers were found posted around the Davis campus signed by "the Davis Knights of the Ku Klux Klan." One of the flyers called ethnic studies "worthless and non-challenging" and targeted, by name, the heads of ethnic studies departments on the campus. A man who identified himself as a Klan Imperial Wizard told the Sacramento area press that a Klan chapter does exist in Davis and that a student leads it.

While this was happening on the Davis Campus, a struggle also erupted at Stanford University. Over spring break, racist graffiti appeared on campus, including on the Center for East Asian Studies. The graffiti said, "Rape all Asian Bitches" and "Nuke Hiroshima."

Like at Davis, many students were upset by the response of the University administration--which was to just write a two-paragraph letter to the editor of the Stanford Daily campus newspaper. Students rallied against the attacks, linking the racist incidents to campus policies that underfund community centers and to the lack of diversity among faculty and staff.

Several factors are contributing to this increase in racist violence against Asian Americans.

One factor is the changing demographics in U.S. society. Recently released census numbers show the population of Asian Americans increased by nearly 65% in the 1990s, growing from 7 million in 1990 to 11.5 million in 2000. This is the largest percentage increase of any group. This increase is largely driven by the needs of the U.S. imperialists who use Asian immigrants both as cheap wage-workers, especially in the manufacturing and service sectors of the economy, and who also draw Asian engineers and scientists away from their home countries to meet the high-tech needs of the U.S. capitalist economy.

The new Draft Programme of the RCP speaks to this: "The bourgeoisie brags about its 'great melting pot' as it lures immigrants into its cheap labor pools. At the same time it actively fans anti-immigrant and anti-foreign hysteria throughout society to degrade and isolate immigrants and keep them in subhuman and superexploited conditions."

At the same time capitalist globalization sets up sweatshops exploiting workers in places like Vietnam and China. And then politicians and the media promote anti-Asian sentiment by claiming workers in Asia are "taking away American jobs." In 1982 Vincent Chin was beaten to death in Michigan by two white auto workers who said, "It's because of motherfuckers like you that we're out of work." (Vincent Chin was Chinese, the auto workers were angry at Japanese car companies.)

Another factor fueling these attacks is U.S. foreign policy toward China and the accompanying anti-Asian overtones promoted by politicians and in the media. Especially in the last few years sections of the U.S. ruling class have pushed for a more aggressive U.S. policy toward China. China's leaders, who restored capitalism after the death of Mao in 1976, have sold the Chinese masses as cheap labor to capitalist corporations. At the same time the U.S. wants to contain China, fearing that China could take action that would be destabilizing to U.S. interests in the region. This has led at times to some sharp disagreements with China's rulers, as was reflected in the U.S. spy plane incident.

The Draft Programme points out, "Throughout U.S. history, immigrants have been scapegoated and demonized to suit the changing economic and political needs of the U.S., domestically and in foreign policy, and this continues today. Japanese were put in concentration camps during World War 2. Arabs are painted as 'terrorist' suspects. Chinese are 'model minorities' one day and 'sneaky spies' the next. Haitians and Africans are cast into 'America's most wanted' along with the African-American population in this racist country. And Mexican workers are abused as 'freeloaders' and 'criminal aliens' for coming to El Norte to work."

Too often, some among the masses get sucked into the climate of anti-Asian racism. In part this is because the ruling class often presents Asian Americans as a "model minority" and uses this stereotyped image as a club against other oppressed nationalities saying, "they have made it here, why can't you?" The ruling class also works overtime to keep different nationalities separate and ignorant of each other's culture, in order to increase divisions within the working class and weaken the people's struggle. Racism and national oppression is essential to the functioning of U.S. capitalism--built into the foundation and whole framework of capitalist society in the U.S. and the whole structure of U.S. imperialist rule and domination in the world. But the masses of people have no interest in siding with racist stereotypes and attacks on oppressed nationalities and immigrants. As the Draft Programme says: "In the communist future, the idea of borders that divide and rank people will be as absurd as the idea of 'racial divisions,' and the word 'immigrant' itself will lose it meaning."

Anti-Asian violence on the rise

• On June 19, in Highland Park, MI, a Chinese American engineer, Vincent Chin, is bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat by two white autoworkers who shouted, "It's because of motherfuckers like you that we're out of work!" The killers are tried and sentenced to three years probation and a $3,780 fine. Later, a conviction in a federal civil rights prosecution is overturned on appeal and neither killer ever serves a day in prison.

• Vietnamese high school student Thong Huynh is taunted by a group of white kids and then stabbed to death in Davis, CA.

• In Lowell, MA, a Cambodian American teenager is drowned by a youth shouting racial slurs.

• Patrick Purdy fires 105 rounds from an assault rifle at students in an elementary schoolyard in Stockton, CA , killing five Southeast Asian children before shooting himself. Purdy reportedly blamed all minorities for his problems.

• Ming Hai "Jim" Loo, a Chinese American, is shot outside a pool hall in Raleigh, NC on July 29. His two white assailants, Lloyd and Robert Piche, allegedly shout, "We shouldn't put up with Vietnamese in our country."

• Xan Than Ly, a Laotian American restaurant employee in Yuba City, Calif., and two white female co-workers ask for a ride and are then attacked with a hammer by two white men.

• After Japanese Americans interned during World War 2 began getting reparations under the 1988 Redress Act, the Japanese American Citizen League office in L.A. get at least 15 racist hate letters saying things like, "You birds should move back to Tokyo instead of lobbying constantly for Jap ideas in America."

• Luyen Phan Nguyen a 19-year-old Vietnamese American pre-med student in Coral Springs, FL, is beaten to death Aug. 15 by a mob of white youths who call him "Chink" and "Viet Cong."

• Junko Nakashima, wife of a prominent Watsonville nurseryman Doug Nakashima, a Nakashima cousin, and another victim are killed when Mark Cleaver, heavily armed and wearing military fatigues, shoots his way into the Nakashima household. According to a relative, Cleaver felt Japanese came to the U.S., "bought up land and got rich" while "Americans remained poor."

• In the Wattupa Heights housing development in Fall River, Massachusetts, Cambodian Americans Sophy Soeung and Sam Nhang Nhem are attacked outside their apartment Aug. 14 by several white men who call them "gooks." Nhem later dies from his injuries.

• The Sacramento office of the Japanese American Citizens League is firebombed Oct. 2. No one is injured, but the blast causes $20,000 in damage. The Aryan Liberation Front claims responsibility.

• Vietnamese American Tuong Phan is badly beaten outside his home in Westminster, CA, in May, when a man yelling racial slurs attacks him with a four-foot-long stick.

• Vietnamese American Thanh Mai and two Vietnamese American friends are in a nightclub in Alpine Township, Michigan on June 18, when three white men attack Mai, calling him a "gook." Mai dies after he is knocked down and his skull is split open.

• Eddy Wu, a Chinese American, is attacked Nov. 8 outside a supermarket in Novato, CA, by a man who reportedly tells police that he wanted to "kill a Chinaman."

• Vietnamese American Thien Minh Ly, a 24-year-old master degree graduate of Georgetown University and a former student at UCLA, is stabbed to death March 3 by what police describe as two "white supremacist types." Investigators say one suspect, Gunner J. Lindberg, bragged to a friend, "Oh, I killed a Jap a while ago."

• A UC Irvine undergraduate circulates an e-mail to about 60 Asian American students, blaming them for crime, filth and what he says is the unpopularity of the school. "I personally will make it my life career to find and kill every one of you personally," says the message.

• Six Asian American students and their white companions say they are denied service at a Denny's in Syracuse, NY, on April 11 and are later beaten up by white patrons.

• In April, Rohnert Park police in Sonoma County fatally shoot Kwan Chung Kao. Officer Jack Shields and Mike Lynch claim that Kao, who was drunk and waving a broomstick, was shot because they "thought he was a martial arts expert." The DA clears the officers of criminal charges and the U.S. Department of Justice announces it will not file charges.

• Benjamin Nathaniel Smith, 21, goes on a shooting spree over the July 4 weekend in Evanston, IL, targeting Jews, Asians and African Americans. He wounds six Orthodox Jews and kills Korean student Won-Joon Yoon and Ricky Byrdsong, an African American man, before shooting himself.

• On Aug. 10, white supremacist Buford Furrow wounds five people at a Jewish Community Center in Los Angeles and then shoots and kills Filipino American postman Joseph Ileto.

• Police target Asian American youth profiling them as gang members and criminals at the East Meets West JamFest in Los Angeles. Police threaten to shut down the event, a cultural program hosted by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month.

• On April 28, 2000, Richard Scott Baumhammer shoots and kills five people and seriously injures one person in the Pittsburgh, PA area. The victims were Baumhammers' next-door neighbor Anita Gordon, a 63-year-old Jewish woman; Thao Pham, a 27-year-old Vietnamese restaurant delivery man; Je-Ye Sun, 34, the owner of the Chinese restaurant where Pham worked; Garry Lee, 22, a student at a Karate center; and Anil Thakur, 31, who was shot at an Indian grocery store. Sandit Patel, 25, the manager of the Indian grocery, was shot in the neck and remains paralyzed.

This article is posted in English and Spanish on Revolutionary Worker Online
rwor.org
Write: Box 3486, Merchandise Mart, Chicago, IL 60654
Phone: 773-227-4066 Fax: 773-227-4497
(The RW Online does not currently communicate via email.)