After the Lifetime movie Charles and I watched episodes four and five of the PBS documentary mini-series Asian Americans (note the absence of a hyphen), “Generation Rising” and “Breaking Through.” I’d like to begin my comments by noting one of the more interesting stories from episode three, “Good Americans,” which I didn’t mention in my earlier post about it: the China Daily News, a newspaper published in the early 1950’s for the Chinese-American community (and written entirely in Chinese characters except for the paper’s name) which was driven out of business by McCarthyite investigators because it occasionally published articles by authors in mainland China (at the height of the U.S.’s decision not to recognize Mao Zedong’s Communist government for its first 23 years in power) and reported developments in mainland China sympathetically. The paper wasn’t a propaganda outlet for the regime but was treated by the U.S. authorities as if it were; it was driven out of business and the people who had worked for it were blacklisted by the U.S. media. This theme of the position of Asian-Americans and their ability to navigate both the prejudices and the promises of American society being dependent on world events around them continued through the last two episodes, including the fact that the U.S. fought major wars against Asians three times in as many decades: World War II in the 1940’s, Korea in the 1950’s and Viet Nam in the 1960’s.
But “Generation Rising” began with a welcome “take” on one of the most significant domestic civil-rights struggle of the 1960’s, the labor conflicts in California’s Central Valley and the rise of the United Farm Workers. This story is usually told as a political opening and coming of age of the Latino-American community (I hate and will never use the loathsome term “Latinx” — pronounced “Latin-ex,” by the way, which makes it even worse, as if the people so designated used to be Latinos and Latinas when in fact they still are — which gets trotted out later in this series), with César Chávez as a Latin-American equivalent to Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Later writers have argued that his organizing partner Dolores Huerta has got short shrift in the histories because she was a woman, but the real unsung hero of the farmworkers’ struggle was the third partner, Larry Itliong. Itliong was a Filipino-American who in 1962 had been delegated by the AFL-CIO to lead the Agricultural Workers’ Organizing Committee (AWOC) and launch an organizing drive in California’s farm country. César Chávez and Dolores Huerta organized a separate, independent union in 1963 called the National Farm Workers’ Association (NFWA), but both groups ran into the quagmire the growers had used to sink all previous unionization drives: the split between Mexican and Filipino workers. If the Mexicans called a strike, the growers could get the Filipinos to scab; if the Filipinos called a strike, the growers could get the Mexicans to scab. The legendary grape pickers’ strike that started in 1965 was actually called by Larry Itliong and the AWOC, and there was a lot of tension over whether the Mexicans would join it. At least one person who was at the famous meeting at a Filipino venue where both Filipinos and Mexicans attended and the Mexicans decided to join AWOC’s strike was interviewed for this program and recalled that when the Filipinos asked the Mexicans to join, at first the Filipinos thought the Mexicans were saying, “Hell, no!” In fact they were saying “¡Huelga!,” the Spanish word for “strike.”
Since farmworkers were not covered by the basic U.S. labor law, the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (Southern Democrats had insisted they not be because they didn’t want to see African-American farmworkers organizing unions in the South), they had a hard time getting the growers to recognize their union and couldn’t use the standard mechanisms of getting a union certified as a bargaining agent for its workers — but not being covered by federal law also gave the United Farm Workers (as it was called once NFWA and AWOC officially merged) access to a tool a Republican Congress had made illegal for federally covered unions in 1947: secondary boycotts. The UFW could — and did — not only lead a campaign to get people not to buy California grapes but to picket stores that sold them and urge people not to shop there, and for five years (until at least some growers started signing UFW contracts in 1970) it told a lot about Americans’ politics whether they shopped at Safeway (the prime target of the UFW’s secondary boycott campaign) or served grapes. (I remember a certain degree of culture shock when I was once again able to eat grapes.) Much of the material in “Generation Rising” was personally familiar to me — including the extended student strike at San Francisco State University in 1968-1969, which I followed as a radical high-school student in Marin County just north of San Francisco. It was begun by the Black Students Union (BSU) and it issued ten so-called “non-negotiable demands” (though in practice the student leaders and their supporters on the university faculty were willing to negotiate on the demands) centered mostly on the creation of ethnic studies programs so Blacks and other students of color could learn about American history, geography and culture from the perspective of their communities and not from the white-triumphalist perspective with which those subjects had historically been taught.
Though the BSU started the student strike, other students of color soon joined it and the umbrella organization that coordinated it adopted the deliberately provocative name “Third World Liberation Front” (after the National Liberation Front, the Viet Namese guerrilla movement that, along with the North Viet Namese army, were our principal enemies in the Viet Nam war). The show makes the interesting point that, once the students won their demands for ethnic studies curricula, many of the student strike leaders stayed in academe and eventually became ethnic studies professors. It did not point out that it’s become increasingly difficult for ethnic studies departments to attract enough students to stay open; as the cost of college has risen to insane levels and all too many students graduate with crushing student loan debts — often at six-figure levels — they’ve forsaken knowledge-driven curricula like ethnic studies in favor of business, law, computer science, engineering and other fields that at least hold out the hope of being lucrative enough to pay off their student loans. Of course “Generation Rising” also mentions the experience of the Viet Nam war itself, especially from the standpoint of the Asian-Americans who served in it … and frequently got asked by the Viet Namese, “Why are you fighting us when you look the same as we do?” One servicemember who spoke enough Viet Namese to work as an interpreter recalled being asked to interrogate a captured NLF “Viet Cong” guerrilla who’d already been, as he put it, “worked over” by the soldiers of the U.S.’s puppet regime in South Viet Nam, and he asked the guerrilla, “Why are you here?” The guerrilla fired back, “This is our home! Why are you here?” There was also an interview with an Asian-American woman who went to Viet Nam to serve as a U.S. Army nurse — and the first day she arrived, one of the doctors asked her to be his “special companion” for the year of her tour. Not surprisingly, that wasn’t the only pass that got made at her by U.S. servicemen; most of the advances she had to deal with were shorter-term and even crueler and more demeaning.
“Generation Rising” ended on an optimistic note that
suggested the joint struggles of the 1960’s would bring together the U.S.
communities of color and lead them to work together instead of against each
other. Sadly, that didn’t turn out to be the case; though the first story told
in the final episode, “Breaking Through,” was the murder of Chinese-American
Vincent Chin in Detroit in 1982 (by two former auto workers, a father and son,
who mistakenly thought a) that Chin was Japanese and b) that the Japanese were
responsible for the collapse of the U.S. auto industry — which was true only to
the extent that as the gasoline shortages and price hikes of the 1970’s led
Americans to want smaller, more fuel-efficient cars, the U.S. automakers
obstinately refused to manufacture them so Americans who wanted smaller cars had to buy them from other countries) and the paltry
sentences — a $3,000 fine and probation — given to his killers by a judge who
said Chin’s murderers were “not the kind of people you put in prison.” Vincent
Chin’s killing was in essence an old-fashioned lynching — different only in
that it happened in a major Northern city and the victim was a person of color
but not an African-American — but
as presented here it woke the Asian-American community to how precarious their
hold on any level of social position or power. The next major story told in
“Breaking Through” was the Los Angeles riots of 1992 and the long history of
antagonism between the city’s Black and Korean communities that led Black
rioters to target and virtually destroy L.A.’s Koreatown. The show documented
Korean-language newspapers in L.A. that ran stories about vicious and predatory
Black criminals, and it showed that as store rents and other expenses in
Koreatown itself grew too high for many Korean shopkeepers, they looked to
expand into the neighboring and largely Black area of South-Central Los Angeles
— where they were met with heavy-duty opposition from African-Americans over a
long history of Korean shop owners treating them disrespectfully and calling
the police on them at the slightest provocation.
The flash point of the
tensions came when 15-year-old Latasha Harlins was killed by Korean store owner
Soon Da-Ju for allegedly shoplifting a $1.79 bottle of orange juice. According
to the Wikipedia page on the incident, “Du concluded Harlins was attempting to
steal, and did not see the money Harlins held in her hand.” The situation
escalated and ultimately Harlins tried to leave and Du shot her in the back,
killing her. Security footage documented the incident and Du was prosecuted,
but the Korean-American community in Los Angeles took up her case and organized
in support of Du. The ultimate verdict was strikingly similar to that in
Vincent Chin’s case — the judge essentially took Du’s side and sentenced her to
a fine, probation and community service — and Blacks in L.A. responded to this
flagrant miscarriage of justice by targeting L.A.’s entire Korean community.
Though the proximate cause of the 1992 L.A. riots was the beating of
African-American Rodney King by four white L.A. police officers and the
acquittal of all four, L.A. Blacks saw Koreans (and, to a lesser extent, other
Asian-Americans) as part of the establishment that was out to get them, with
the result that Koreatown was targeted by Black rioters, its stores destroyed
and their owners put out of business and forced into poverty en masse. “Breaking Ground” also depicts the leading role of
the Asian-American community in pushing the so-called “DREAM Act,” and claimed
that U.S. Senators Richard Durbin (D-Illinois) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah)
actually had a 62-vote Senate majority to pass it when the 9/11 attacks
happened on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Not
only did Congressional support for any pro-immigrant legislation evaporate in the wake of 9/11, the attacks
led to a new wave of xenophobia and a so-called “Special Registration” program
that targeted young men from predominantly Muslim countries and was widely seen
as a precursor to a mass internment of Muslim Americans, including ones from
Asian countries like Indonesia, Pakistan and India (the countries with the
three largest Muslim populations in the world, by the way — you have to go down
to the fourth country on the list of nations with the most Muslims, Egypt, to
get to the Middle East and the Arab culture most people associate with Islam).
Though Asian Americans ends on an
oddly hopeful note about the successes Asian-Americans have enjoyed, especially
in the high-tech industry (among the people profiled is Jerry Yang, co-founder
of Yahoo! — though Yahoo!’s prestige and revenue have tumbled considerably
since the mid-1990’s when it was founded), it’s all too obvious that
Asian-Americans are in for a new round of scapegoating and prejudicial attacks.
Every person of color in the
U.S., and every politically liberal or progressive white person as well, is directly threatened by the combination of President Trump’s
general racist animosity towards all
people of color, his determination to restore the U.S. to a position of white
power and a dominant white majority, and the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic which Trump
has outright blamed on China, repeatedly calling it the “China virus” and the
“Kung Flu” (I’m not sure what bothers me more about the term “Kung Flu”: its
racism or its sheer stupidity) and saying that if he hadn’t slapped a travel
ban on China in the early days of the pandemic the death and infection rates in
the U.S. would be even worse than they are. (In fact, the U.S. rates of
SARS-Co-V-2 and COVID-19, the disease it causes, are the worst in the world, so
much so that other countries, including the entire European Union, are slapping
travel bans on us.) A lot of
Americans, even people who don’t support Trump and have no intention of voting
to re-elect him, still don’t understand the depth and power of his
determination to rid America of as many people of color as possible, by
whatever means necessary — whether by deporting them, endorsing discrimination
against them, stripping them of political power through voter suppression (the
real reason Trump said and did nothing to acknowledge the recent death of long-time African-American
Congressmember and activist John Lewis is that his entire presidency is
committed to undoing each and every one of the reforms and civil-rights
advances Lewis worked so hard his entire life to achieve) or simply letting
them die en masse of COVID-19. I
have come to the conclusion that, just as Adolf Hitler ordered the Holocaust to
make Germany, Europe and ultimately the entire world Judenrein (literally “rid of Jews”), so Trump is exploiting
every crisis and every natural disaster, as well as every power he has to make
policy, to make the U.S. Afrorein, Latinorein and Muslimrein — and no matter how hard they’ve tried to be the “model minority” and
avoid or turn back the racist stereotyping, Asian-Americans are, like all Americans of color, squarely on the hit list for
Trump’s genocide.
