This is my last column of the year. I had been waiting for a news peg to write about Asian-American issues, but it’s now the last week of publication and I’m realizing there won’t be any. And that’s the problem. As a group, we are poorly represented in the American consciousness.
There are no prominent Asian-American members of Congress or the Senate. At the state level, Bobby Jindal, who was recently elected governor of Louisiana, is the only Asian-American leader besides the governor of Hawaii. Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao became the first Asian-American member of Cabinet when she was appointed by President Bush, but has anybody read a single news item about what she’s done since? Given the Republicans’ lack of labor love, she’s probably not going anywhere from there.
Asian-Americans are rarely seen on TV or in movies. They don’t make the A-list. They don’t top Billboard charts. When they win Oscars or Grammys, it’s in categories you don’t care about that get flashed briefly before the commercial break.
It is the same in the business world, barring a few businessmen in Silicon Valley. And in sports.
What I’ve noticed is that nobody thinks all this is much of a problem.
But it is. A lack of visibility in society prevents Asian-Americans as a group from being perceived as American. It casts them as inconsequential in society, as non-contributors. And it shows how despite high achievement by Asian-Americans in schools, something is still preventing them from achieving the top prizes.
Asian-American issues are rarely editorialized on. Even Asian-Americans themselves often find this topic dull or unimportant. One Asian Daily editor told me a columnist who wrote about Asian-American issues was annoying because his columns dealt with such boring subject matter.
And Americans as a whole don’t appear to feel the same outrage about injustices versus Asian-Americans as they do versus other groups. Part of the reason is also the problem: Asian-Americans are perceived as less “one of us” than, say, blacks, who are seen as having contributed more to the building of America. (Never mind that Chinese and Japanese immigrants built the railroads that helped the country’s westward expansion, a fact that enjoys about a paragraph in American textbooks.) The other is that the injustices seem less severe. Unlike blacks and Hispanics, Asian-Americans don’t make up disproportionate percentages of the prison population.
But the fact that other minority groups have worse odds in society doesn’t make it any less real that Asian Americans are disadvantaged when it comes to getting ahead, and that this imbalance should be fixed.
I don’t pretend to know how these sweeping changes can be made. I know it will be a long process. But like any multi-step plan, the first step is to get the public to realize that the issue is there. And it matters.
Medill senior Jenny Song can be reached at
