Word: asianized
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Come on, you've heard it all before: thanks to our decisively Asian values, Asian Americans have "made it" as an immigrant group; we have surpassed all other minorities and, in some cases, even our white counterparts. That quiet Asian classmate of yours who spent all his time doing extra homework between Kumon and piano lessons had it right; his work ethic explains the rise of the Asian tigers, or at least it did until the recent financial crisis. A great story, a model in fact, but interestingly enough, its protagonist, the quiet Asian American, appears oddly silent...
...Asian Pacific American (APA) community congregates this weekend at "Living Out Loud: the New Voice of Asian America," the 9th annual Harvard intercollegiate conference of its kind, I find myself considering what it means for Asian Americans to "live loudly" or to live in silence. The myth of our success as the model minority, has led to a misrepresentation of Asian Americans in the mainstream American imagination. These distortions come at great material and political costs...
Hume's claims of socioeconomic parity serve as a prime example. Her article effectively silences the hundreds of thousands of APAs below the poverty line. Nationally, 23 percent of Asian Americans, ages 25 and over, do not have a high school diploma. Compared to the highly-educated, the proportion unemployed of these disadvantaged APAs is over twice as high...
Ironically, many of these residents come from the refugee waves Hume lionizes. Clearly the policy ramifications are tremendous; if Asian Americans have "made it" in the public imagination, even if many work in sweatshops and live in dilapidated ethnic enclaves, we don't need to think about them. The quiet Asian fades into the shadows...
Looking at Asian American voice in the political process reveals similar processes of silencing. A 1992 report from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights identified numerous structural barriers to APA voting, such as apportionment schemes that in Los Angeles, for example, split APA populations across electoral districts, inadequate publication of multilingual ballots and voting literature and redistricting distortions caused by undercounting in the census. Moreover, the report identifies longstanding bias in the major parties against Asian American politicians...