This speech was given on February 19, 1991 at the ARCO Forum, John F. Kennedy School of Government, as the keynote address for Actively Working Against Racism and Ethnocentrism (AWARE) week. This event was sponsored by the Office of Race Relations and Minority Affairs, Harvard University.

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The United States is now in the midst of a great wave of immigration. Since 1980, immigrants have made up one-third of our nation's population growth. Were it not for the foreign newcomers, California would gain only two congressional seats, not seven. These are but two of the many indices of the growing diversity in the American population -- a diversity which will bring about profound changes in American culture. We must prepare ourselves for such changes.

As many of you can see, I'm an Asian American. I would like to open a window into our awareness of cultural diversity by talking about the group of Americans to which I belong, to share with you how others see us, and how we see ourselves. In so doing, I hope to convey to you the challenge of multicultural sensitivity that will be required of each of us in the next century.

A few years ago, there was a great deal of press attention paid to a Vietnamese girl graduating as valedictorian of her class, who only four years earlier had been one of the boat people. It seemed to me the feat was indeed remarkable, but the attention was out of proportion. I soon realized the fascination with this young woman's story had to do with the fact that for most Americans this young woman was the latest version of the American Dream.

Most Asian Americans, in fact, are viewed as Horatio Alger's stories replicated a thousandfold in miniature. We are known as the people who pull ourselves by our bootstraps. I'm referring, of course, to the model minority image that has been heaped on us, of late, by every media outfit you can think of -- "60 Minutes", U.S. News and World Report, Newsweek, Parade Magazine, and so on. And based on the numbers alone, it would seem as if we Asian Americans, as a group, are doing well. For instance, according to the Population Reference Bureau, the median family income for Asian Americans is $23,000, as opposed to $20,800 for white families. Not evident in that figure, however, is that more members of Asian American families work, thereby increasing the overall family income. It's not just the father, it's the mother, it's the uncle, it's the cousin, etcetera. Therefore, it looks like we make a lot of money from one family.

Our academic prowess has become a matter of lore. The high school and college completion rate for Asian Americans is greater than any other population group in this country. We are so overrepresented in the so-called "good schools" that informal quotas have been put into place to limit our admissions. For instance, many of you may have heard that the [former] chancellor at U.C. Berkeley acknowledged that such quotas were indeed in place, apologized for their existence, and announced plans to change that policy direction. Unsurprisingly, the unemployment rate for this highly educated, hard-working group is very low.

Now let me share with you a Gary Trudeau cartoon strip which underscores what I have just said. And this is important because I think Gary manages to catch the pulse of our general American culture. In this strip, we have two female students -- one white and one Asian American. Jennifer, the white student, says "National Merit Scholar! How do you do it, Kim?"

And Kim says, "I don't know. I guess I just study."

"No way, I tried that once. You've got some edge," replies Jennifer.

"Edge? Like what, Jennifer?"

"You know. Some genetic edge. Getting good grades is a racial characteristic, isn't it? An Asian thing?"

"You won't tell everyone will you?" asked Kim.

"I knew it!" Jennifer exclaims, "You guys are some sort of super race aren't you?"

"We mean you no harm. We only seek computers for our young."

I laughed and then called Gary and said, "You know it really hits closer to home than I would like because this is indeed what people think we are -- these super technicians." This cartoon and the success stories hyped in the press promote the perception that we are highly-educated, hard-working, over-achieving automatons who do not make waves. It is an image which fills me with a great deal of ambivalence. It both angers me and instills pride.

I'd be less than honest if I didn't say how proud I am when I hear that a majority of the finalists at the Westinghouse Science contest are Asian American students -- year after year after year. Or, when I read in an academic journal that if America is to regain its premier position in science and engineering, it will be because of Asian Americans majoring and doing research in those very disciplines. I'd be a liar if I did not admit my wonder at how a minority group, which now only makes up 2% of the U.S. population, comprises 30% of the student body at U.C. Berkeley, and other major segments at Harvard and the other Ivies.

I am pleasantly astounded when I discover that the premier cellists and violinists of this country are Asian Americans and that, in general, Asian Americans are reshaping the culture of this country for the better -- according to many -- by adding a little complexity here, a little simplicity there. It does seem as if we have achieved much as a group, but I am angered because while we're carted out and shown off as models, we are also treated differently for the way we look. the question, "Where do you come from?", will often refer to another country as opposed to another state, even if we have been here for four generations. Other people may never believe that this, too, is our country. I suspect, as well, that our uniqueness as models has more to do with our small numbers, and that should we mushroom to become a significant population group, there would be fear among many of our doing too well.

The model minority stereotype tends to gloss over the fact that we, too, are discriminated against. I am angered because while the Wall Street Journal chronicles the corporate world's effort to tap the Asian American market because supposedly we're so rich, the San Francisco Chronicle reports a surge in anti-Asian racism supported by Department of Justice figures. The Chronicle attributes this violence against Asian Americans to our increased visibility, to an unstable economy, and a trade imbalance between the U.S. and Japan.

I am angered because the term, "Model Minority," invites resentment, not only from other minority groups, but from white Americans as well. Such stereotypes generate the kind of climate that created the Vincent Chin tragedy in Michigan, where a Chinese man was clubbed to death by unemployed auto workers who thought he was Japanese, or the recent boycotts of Korean-owned grocery stores by African Americans in New York and Washington D.C. I am angered because this term does not include the entire truth about the Asian American experience. The high personal cost of our so-called success, for instance, or the fact that Harvard and Berkeley statistics do not include the Hmongs or the Vietnamese who are having a difficult time adjusting to or simply living in the U.S. Not all of us become valedictorians. Instead, there are far too many of us with college degrees who will never reach the higher echelons of management in American institutions because we are perceived as technicians, not as managers, executives, or administrators. Moreover, we are, for the most part, underpaid given our high educational attainment.

The stereotypes that I have described for you not only limits how other people see us, but also has great impact on public policy. Because Asian Americans are perceived as able to take care of themselves, they have to fight to be included in government programs designed for minorities, including bilingual education, business setasides and affirmative action. In fact, in Washington D.C., there was a point where Asian Americans considered filing a suit against the local government because they were not included as a minority group.

Language does make a difference, and the blame is partially ours. Asian Americans have achieved excellence in academia, art, and business, but not in politics and governance. The majority of us are not even involved in the most elementary form of political involvement -- voting. So, I run around all over the country exhorting my fellow Asian Americans to make a difference by increasing their presence in the voting booth. I tell them that if we do not vote, then we haven't earned the right to complain about the streets, about crime, about education, about discrimination against our own people. People in my home country of the Philippines wrap their arms around ballot boxes in order to protect the right to vote, but once they get here they take that right for granted. The result is our political invisibility, our lack of presence in the policy-making bodies of this country.

As corny as it may sound, I personally believe that with citizenship comes responsibility. This is true for Asian Americans as well, and therefore, ought to have a say in the way it is run. It sounds very simple and rational, but it is difficult to actually convince people to vote. Asian Americans have yet to see the direct relationship between politics and their daily lives, between the act of voting and the ability to right a wrong.

This problem also exists for Hispanic Americans -- the fastest growing minority group in this nation [sic] -- for whom I have had the same message since many of them do not vote either. The actual political power of this group has yet to be felt. We have much to learn from our African American brothers and sisters who discovered long ago the power of political action, whether it is lobbying, voting, or holding elected or appointed office in order to have their concerns addressed. Civil rights have not been fully secured, but think of where minorities would be, were it not for the African American leaders of the Sixties who broke ground and led the fight for equality.

The century of diversity is upon us: it's not around the corner. On the radio the other day, I heard that in the greater Washington metropolitan area, only 29% of the labor force is white male and native-born, the rest are women, minorities, part-time workers, or immigrants. In fact, the surge in immigration will speed up what is called the "browning of America." Would you believe that even in Indiana, a state whose population is 90% white, the population growth this year was purely attributable to the 36,000 immigrants who went there. If it were not for the 36,000 immigrants, the state of Indiana would be witnessing a loss in population. There are many who feat this change, who think "Oh, my god, more people to compete in what is already a very tight labor market, more people for whom we have to provide social services, more people than this country can withstand."

But let me remind those who may have those fears that just as the first wave of immigration at the turn of the century provided America with new talents, skills, and ideas, the current wave of immigration will also bring a new vitality. This new vitality will result in increased economic growth. Already decaying areas of major cities have been revitalized by the arrival of new residents. There are also those who believe that America's preeminent position in science and engineering will be sustained by the talents represented by this wave of newcomers.

America, as we now know it, will never be the same. But until these immigrants are successfully absorbed, their arrival will cause additional strains, especially in major cities which now face diminished resources. New York City, for instance, has 178 identifiable ethnic groups, many of whom cannot speak English and make very big demands of medical and social services. So, in the short run, there will indeed be some problems. In addition, as they become more a part of the existing minority groups, political tensions are also bound to develop. Juan Williams in the Washington Post offered what I consider one of the better analyses of what this new political mosaic. According to Mr. Williams, there are four major shifts, shifts which will define the new terms of political confrontation.

First of all, because of the rapid growth of the Hispanic population, this group will become major political players for the first time. Race relations in the United States will not just be a matter between blacks and whites, but browns as well. By the end of this decade, Hispanics will be the largest minority in this nation. Second, the babyboomers will age and the over 55 population will comprise 25% of this country's population, with the ability to exert a major political influence. What is important is that the social security benefits for these babyboomers who are predominately white will be supported by a smaller group of workers who will be disproportionately Asian, Hispanic and African American.

Third, political power in congressional and presidential elections will shift to the south and the west. Hispanics will be a major segment of the population in Florida, Texas, and California. According to Mr. Williams, since Hispanics are predominantly Catholic, they will keep those states politically and culturally conservative. Lastly, the underclass of poor people in the cities, the majority of them black, will continue to grow. As other minorities, including blacks, move into middle-class neighborhoods, this underclass will become increasingly isolated. Given this scenario, no doubt increased tensions between competing interests will emerge -- one minority group versus another, the rich versus the poor, the young versus the old, child care versus Medicare, the Northeast versus the Southwest. Some of this is already beginning to happen.

On the positive side, a shrinking labor force will mean more opportunity for women and minority workers. The 1990s, in short, will offer the best chance for these groups to gain an economic foothold in this society. More blacks and other minorities will move into the middle class as well. In addition to this potential economic clout, commensurate political clout will emerge as more and more members of these groups become participants in the political arena. Sheer numbers alone will push both major parties to develop strategies to lure these constituencies
in order to win.

Take, for instance, the Republican Party's latest effort to attract African American, Latino Americans and Asian Americans. The appointments of minorities to some senior level positions in the Bush Administration reflect that commitment. It is, therefore, a desire of that party which has traditionally been seen as predominantly white, conservative and representing the establishment, to somehow broaden itself for sheer survival. Unfortunately, political strategy has run counter to public policy. The President, as you know, has recently vetoed the Civil Rights Act because he disapproves of quotas. There is a sense among minority communities that perhaps his commitment is not as deep as they thought it was before.

Many of you have heard about the controversial Jesse Helms campaign ad against Harvey Gantt. A pair of white hands crumpled a piece of paper, ostensibly a notice that this person has not gotten a job. The spokesman denounces racial quotas and he links them to the other candidate, Harvey Gantt, who is black. Such Republican Party appeals to people's fears of blacks taking jobs, scholarships, or promotions away from white Americans enabled them to portray the Democratic Party as only caring for a narrower segment of people, the poor and the disadvantaged.

When asked about the issue of affirmative action, Harvey Gantt wisely responded that it is not a question of what racial remedy you employ to bring equality into the work place, but whether you want America to be truly competitive in the future. If, indeed, America's future workforce will be browns, blacks, and women, then it's incumbent upon our society to provide the best training and the best education for this labor pool to be most productive for our nation. This is a sound argument which I support, but it will not stop Republican Party strategies from using quotas as a tool in the upcoming presidential election.

The Democratic Party, traditionally supported by a multi-racial coalition and generally perceived to be more progressive on issues of concern to women and minorities, is not entirely blameless either. While women and minorities continue to be the most dedicated segments of this party, there is a great sense among these voters that somehow many of the issues that are most important to them are not always fully addressed. With each presidential election, the same platform fight emerges, where we try to maintain the same statement in every election cycle. The challenge facing the Democratic Party is how to maintain its base of women and minorities, and at the same time appeal to the American middle class.

However these two parties decide to attract or retain the emerging constituencies which will determine America's future, it is still incumbent upon those very constituencies to make their own grab for power. Seats at the decision-making table are not going to be given away. Consequently, it is important for new Hispanic districts to be carved out as in Los Angeles, where Molina, Gloria
and Torres, Art
are running for supervisor. In New York's Chinatown, possible new seats will enable an Asian American to be a member of the City Council for the first time in well over a century since Asian Americans first got there.

With these new districts, of course, we have new leaders, and therein lies America's hope. No one race and no one gender has a special corner on good ideas. So, the promise of a diversified decision-making body, whether in the state legislature or in Washington D.C., may be a wealth of new expertise and hopefully new solutions to age-old problems. But until such time as we, peoples of color, have representatives in sufficient numbers to articulate our concerns, we must vote as if our lives depended on it. Because frankly, they do.

For too long, women and minorities have suffered whisker-burns from the lip service both parties have paid to the sharing of power. And it is time that we remind both the Democratic and the Republican Party that it is our votes that has loaned them this power, and that it is not an interest-free loan. The interest on our loan demands fairness and equality in every segment of our society. But to collect on that loan, we must not only march, we must not only write letters -- we must vote. In other words, the responsibility is ours, to gain a political foothold in this country. And it is the responsibility of society as a whole to support our claims for equal representation because that is the premise of which this country was built.

The successful leaders of the future will not only try to manage diversity, but also to celebrate it. That is the painful challenge facing whites, Asians, blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans. The myth of the American melting pot must give way to the American tossed salad with each ingredient retaining its own integrity, while forming a delicious whole. Our hops is embedded in the first paragraph of the Constitution, and it remains our task, even today, to form that more perfect Union. It is difficult even to define that perfect Union, but surely it must be a place where women are the equals of men, where African, Hispanic, Asian and Native Americans are the equals of white Americans.

Source: Irene Natividad, "Political and Cultural Diversity: America's Hope and America's Challenge," in Asian American Policy Review, Spring, 1991, pp. 91-7.

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Article 2
Beyond the Black/ White Binary: II 

Journal of Asian American Studies 1.1 (1998) 104-107
Copyright © 1998 The Johns Hopkins University Press for the Association of Asian American Studies.
All rights reserved. This work may be used, with this header included, for noncommercial
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Book Review
Monitored Peril: Asian Americans and the Politics of TV Representation. By Darrell Y. Hamamoto. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.

Reviewer: George Lipsitz
University of California, San Diego

Darrell Y. Hamamoto makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of race, representation, and power with this comprehensive study of television programs about Asians and Asian Americans in the United States. His survey ranges widely, spanning the entire five decades of commercial network television and covering every conceivable genre, including situation comedies, serial dramas, made-for-television movies, action-adventure programs, westerns, documentary reports, variety and musical performances, talk shows, news reports, and even late night, program-length commercials.
        Given the discriminatory mechanisms that routinely deny Asian Americans and members of other racialized "minority" groups access to the television industry's key artistic and administrative positions, and given the medium's historic over-representation of White middle-class individuals and experiences, one might expect the key issue in this book to be the dearth of Asian American images on television. Yet, Hamamoto's research shows that television images of Asians and Asian Americans have been frequent, pervasive, and significant, even though they have almost always been degrading, insulting, and implicated in the most vicious and pernicious forms of racial ridicule and stereotyping. It is not difficult to explain the absence of positive images of Asian Americans on United States television, but the volume, intensity, and obsessive repetition of negative images that Hamamoto uncovers demands explanation, analysis, and interpretation.
        The particular images deployed against Asian Americans on television will be familiar to most students of Anglo-American racism and White supremacy. Over and over again, Hamamoto's research shows that television programs represent Asian Americans as perpetually foreign and never American. They depict Asians as murderous and mysterious, as amorous or amoral, as symbols of danger, refuge, inspiration, and forgiveness, but never as people with diverse histories, needs, interests, or ambitions of their own. Television representations draw upon the storehouse of sexual racism pioneered in Hollywood films and popular novels, depicting Asian American and Asian men as effeminate while constructing hypersexualized images of Asian and Asian American women. Given the infinitely plural and diverse ways of being Asian or Asian American, why do these exceedingly narrow frames appear again and again in commercial culture?
        Hamamoto argues that media racism exists to hide the crimes of history. Anti-Asian racism in the United States, in his view, grew logically out of the White supremacist narratives fashioned in the past to justify genocide against Native Americans, to rationalize the enslavement of African people in America, and to legitimate the conquest of Mexican and Native American lands. Thus, a racialized story was already in place before people of Asian origin arrived in the United States in large numbers in the middle of the nineteenth century. Subsequent stories emerged from the particular abuses enacted on Asians in America -- stories about the sexual "peculiarities" of Asian American men and women served to hide the legal barriers that Whites created against family formation among immigrants from Asia. The history of United States imperialism in the Pacific and wars against the Philippines, Japan, Korea, China, and Viet Nam loses its economic and political dimensions when represented as encounters between "innocent" Americans (almost always White) and enemy soldiers marked by their sadism, or native civilians characterized by submissive gratitude for the presence in their countries of White Americans.
        Similarly, caricatures of nineteenth-century Chinese cooks, laundry workers, and laborers make low wage labor the peculiar cultural property of Asian immigrants rather than a result of racist exploitation, while the specter of avaricious Asian and Asian American businessmen in the modern world deflects resentments and anxieties about capitalism onto the bodies and cultural identities of the Asian other. These maneuvers move Asians and Asian Americans out of history and into nature, and they conceal the actual history of conquest, exploitation, and racist vigilante terror behind a mask of "cultural misunderstandings." Hamamoto argues that these cultural constructs have deadly serious social consequences, that they loom behind and legitimize acts of anti-Asian violence, and they perpetuate the scapegoating of Asian Americans for the unresolved contradictions of United States capitalism.
        With Monitored Peril, Darrell Y. Hamamoto joins an emerging group of film and television scholars exploring the connections between media representations and racialized power. Like Herman Gray, Craig Watkins, Rosa Linda Fregoso, Carl Gutierrez-Jones, Jane Rhodes, John Kuo-Wei Tchen, and Renee Tajima-Peña, he presents us with important evidence about the ways in which mass media productions shape as well as reflect the perpetually racialized character of United States culture and social relations.
        As with any original work in a fundamentally new field, his book has shortcomings and in some areas raises more questions than it answers. This book would have been stronger if Hamamoto had been able to understand racism and sexism as mutually constitutive and intersectional realities rather than as  competing hierarchies. Hamamoto's confident assertion that racism always trumps sexism among Asian Americans, that "male oppression -- however problematic -- is of secondary importance within the Asian community" (p. 56) replicates exactly the kinds of binary oppositions and hierarchical identity politics that make racism so difficult to fight in the first place. In order to pursue this argument, Hamamoto feels compelled to add his voice to those of the irredeemably sexist critics who feel that an anti-racist agenda is served by belittling Maxine Hong Kingston's writings as "fantasies of feminist liberal empowerment." (p. 59) He gloats over evidence that White women can be racist (p. 139), acting as if he believes that most feminists doubt that can be the case, because he thinks it offers refutation of "the implied claim to female moral superiority" that he attributes to Carol Gilligan and Nancy Chodorow. One can well understand the author's frustration with arguments that privilege the fight against sexism over the struggle against racism, but simply to invert the two categories offers no real solution. It is disappointing that a researcher capable of finding nearly every representation -- no matter how obscure -- of Asians and Asian Americans in the history of television has been unable to familiarize himself with feminist writings by "women of color," including Gloria Anzaldua, Angela Davis, Lisa Lowe, Chela Sandoval, and others who refuse to give metaphysical priority to either racism or sexism, but rather use their situated knowledge as people who cannot find liberation on only one axis of emancipation to theorize what Lowe, in her book Immigrant Acts (1996), calls the hybridity, heterogeneity, and multiplicity of social identities.
        In addition to provoking us to learn more rather than less about feminism, Hamamoto's work also challenges us to develop more comprehensive theories about culture as a dynamic social force. By focusing so much on plot summaries, Hamamoto leads us to believe that audiences always ingest what is presented to them uncritically. Yet "response" theorists have shown that there is often quite a gap between mass media's inscribed preferred readings and the uses and effects of media texts at the grassroots, even if we concede the crucial importance of dominant narratives in framing social experience for the general audience. Hamamoto often treats popular culture as a fraud -- a mask that prevents people from seeing the objective truth about social relations. Even if he is correct, we would still need to know which stories work to do this successfully and why. Much of the best contemporary scholarship -- by Janice Radway, Michael Rogin, Linda Williams, Eric Lott, David Roediger, Stuart Hall, Jose Saldivar, and Gary Okihiro among others -- draws on theorists as diverse as Louis Althusser, Antonio Gramsci, Fredric Jameson, Mikhail Bakhtin, Pierre Bourdieu, and Nestor Garcia-Canclini to answer those very important questions. Hamamoto's work would only be enriched by engagement with this body of work, because it would add a more complex sense of culture to the very valuable and important archival and empirical work in Monitored Peril. Nonetheless, he has provided us with indispensable evidence about the most important discursive medium of our society and about the role that it plays in creating, perpetuating, and legitimating unjust social relations. For that, Hamamoto and his book should be commended.