The views and opinions expressed on this site and blog posts (excluding comments on blog posts left by others) are entirely my own and do not represent those of any employer or organization with whom I am currently or previously have been associated.
Academic Version: Applying my personal experiences and academic research as a professor of Sociology and Asian American Studies to provide a more complete understanding of political, economic, and cultural issues and current events related to American race relations, and Asia/Asian America in particular.
Plain English: Trying to put my Ph.D. to good use.
Earlier this week, well-renowned and respected professor, author, and social activist Howard Zinn passed away at the age of 87. Professor Zinn is most famously known for writing A People’s History of the United States and for being a vocal and active anti-war and civil rights activist. The New York Times’s obituary provides more details of his life:
Published in 1980 with little promotion and a first printing of 5,000, “A People’s History†was, fittingly, a people’s best-seller, attracting a wide audience through word of mouth and reaching 1 million sales in 2003. Although Professor Zinn was writing for a general readership, his book was taught in high schools and colleges throughout the country . . .
“A People’s History†told an openly left-wing story. Professor Zinn accused Christopher Columbus and other explorers of committing genocide, picked apart presidents from Andrew Jackson to Franklin D. Roosevelt and celebrated workers, feminists and war resisters. . . .
He attended New York University and Columbia University, where he received a doctorate in history. In 1956, he was offered the chairmanship of the history and social sciences department at Spelman College, an all-black women’s school in segregated Atlanta.
During the civil rights movement, Professor Zinn encouraged his students to request books from the segregated public libraries and helped coordinate sit-ins at downtown cafeterias. He also published several articles, including a rare attack on the Kennedy administration, accusing it of being too slow to protect blacks.
He was loved by students — among them a young Alice Walker, who later wrote The Color Purple — but not by administrators. In 1963, Spelman fired him for “insubordination.†(Professor Zinn was a critic of the school’s non-participation in the civil rights movement.) His years at Boston University were marked by opposition to the Vietnam War and by feuds with the school’s president.
Professor Zinn retired in 1988, spending his last day of class on the picket line with students in support of an on-campus nurses’ strike. Over the years, he continued to lecture at schools and to appear at rallies and on picket lines.
I never had the privilege of meeting Professor Zinn or seeing him speak, but he was still a strong influence in my life and my career. Professor Zinn was a role model of an activist academic — someone who did not try to pretend that everything he taught, researched, or write about would be completely objective or unbiased.
Instead, he was not afraid to take a stand on controversial issues and just as important, Professor Zinn was willing and indeed eager to get out of the isolation of the college campus (the “ivory tower” as many call it) and go out into the cities, neighborhoods, and communities where discrimination was taking place and to physically contribute to the struggle for social equality.
It is also notable, at least for me, that as a White American, Professor Zinn acknowledged and personally owned how the legacy of racial inequality in the U.S. had benefited him and that because of his racial identity, he was privileged in many ways. But rather than just implicitly recognizing his privilege, he used it to give back to the less-privileged.
Professor Zinn’s example is one that I have tried to follow, with this website and blog being one way for me to try to continue his legacy of using your knowledge to make a contribution to the cause of true human equality — to not just talk the talk, but also walk the walk.
Thank you Professor Zinn, may you rest in peace, and may your life continue to inspire others.
It seems that every successive generation of Americans has to have a name or label. I’m sure you’re already familiar with the “Baby Boomer” generation that was born in the two decades after World War 2. Most have presumably also heard of “Generation X” (to which I belong), who were born between 1965 and 1980.
Most recently, we have the “Millennial” generation — those born between 1981 and 2000. Growing up in the age of computers, the Internet, cellphones, social networking, and multimedia proliferation, in many ways the Millennials represent a milestone generation within American society. To capture and describe some of their characteristics, the Pew Research Center recently conducted a series of reports on various demographic and cultural traits and attitudes of this generation. Below are some highlights of their report that relate to the cultural and racial/ethnic views and composition of the Millennial generation:
They are the most ethnically and racially diverse cohort of youth in the nation’s history. Among those ages 13 to 29: 18.5% are Hispanic; 14.2% are Black; 4.3% are Asian; 3.2% are mixed race or other; and 59.8%, a record low, are White.
They are starting out as the most politically progressive age group in modern history. In the 2008 election, Millennials voted for Barack Obama over John McCain by 66%-32%, while adults ages 30 and over split their votes 50%-49%. In the four decades since the development of Election Day exit polling, this is the largest gap ever seen in a presidential election between the votes of those under and over age 30. . . .
They are the least religiously observant youths since survey research began charting religious behavior. . . .
The graph shows the percentage approving of interracial dating for each of four cohorts (or generations), tracking their responses across the 13 separate waves of polling between 1987 and 2009. Several things are evident from the graph. One is that there is an upward trend in acceptance of interracial dating in most cohorts as time passes. . . .
Another conclusion from the graph is that each younger cohort is more supportive than the cohorts that preceded it. Baby Boomers were more supportive in 1987 than members of the Silent Generation, and remained that way throughout. Generation X (at 82%) was more supportive than the Baby Boomers when it first appeared in the surveys. And the Millennial cohort is the most supportive of all.
The part of the Pew reports about the racial/ethnic composition of the Millennials was not surprising, although I expected the proportion Asian American to be a little higher. Nor am I surprised that the Millennials tend to be the least religious of all the generations, although I expect their levels of religious participation to increase as they get older.
I am also not surprised that the Millennials are the most supportive of interracial dating, as the graph illustrates. However, in looking at the graph, it shows that somewhere around 2007, the approval rates for interracial dating actually declined slightly for Baby Boomers, Generation X, and the Millennials. Further, at this point, we do not yet know whether the approval rate for interracial dating will continue to decline, or whether it will rebound and continue its upward trajectory.
I find this recent development a little perplexing, particularly considering that was when Barack Obama, the child of an interracial couple, began his rise in popularity on the way to the Presidency. I am left to wonder, could it be due to the subtle rising White backlash against the increasing levels of racial/ethnic diversity in this country?
In other words, as I’ve written about before, starting even before Barack Obama’s rise in popularity and even accelerating ever since, there were indications, events, and incidents that showed how racial/ethnic relations in the U.S. were becoming increasingly polarized, with a rising group of White Americans increasingly feeling resentful and threatened by such demographic and cultural changes taking place in “their” community and “their” country.
If that is indeed the case, the Millennial generation indeed represents a watershed moment in the evolution of American society. On the one hand, they might replicate the racial/ethnic and cultural splintering of the country that may lead to the de facto split of American society into a White part and a non-White part. On the other hand, the Millennials have the opportunity to draw upon their shared institutional beliefs and cultural practices and help the country heal its racial/ethnic divides and lead us toward coalescing into a true multicultural nation.
I believe that this will be the primary challenge — and ultimate legacy — of this Millennial generation.
Below is an announcement about a research project and online survey in need of Asian American respondents.
Seeking Volunteers for Online Survey Study
My name is Nellie Tran, and I am a psychology doctoral student at the University of Illinois at Chicago. I am conducting a study to understand experiences of discrimination, racial consciousness, and their effects on their mental health for Asian Americans. Your voice and experiences could contribute greatly to an understanding the experiences of different racial/ethnic groups and those of different generational statuses. If you are interested in completing the survey, please access the survey at the following link.
Participation in this survey is voluntary and open to all individuals. The survey will take about 20-25 minutes to complete. You will be asked for an email address at the end of the survey in order to be entered into a random drawing for one $50 Amazon.com Gift Card. This research has been reviewed and approved by the University of Illinois at Chicago Institutional Review Board. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me at the information below. Thank you so much!
Looking forward to hearing from you,
Nellie Tran, M.A.
Doctoral Candidate, Psychology
University of Illinois at Chicago
Ntran2@uic.edu
As part of this blog’s mission of making academic research and data more easily accessible, understandable, and applicable to a wider audience and to practical, everyday social issues, I highlight new sociological books about Asian Americans and other racial/ethnic groups as I hear about them. A book’s inclusion is for informational purposes only and does not necessarily mean a full endorsement of its complete contents.
This is the first week of classes for many colleges and universities around the country, including here at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. This semester I am teaching a new course: “The Sociology of Immigration” (in case you’re curious, you can download a PDF of the syllabus). It’s a topic that is central and directly relevant to many issues that I cover in this blog, and a course that I have always wanted to teach but haven’t had the opportunity to do so until now.
President Obama has also recently suggested that immigration reform is one of the next major policy issues that he and his administration want to address next (although he said this before the upset victory of Republican Scott Brown in MA). Presuming that he follows through on this promise, immigration is set to again move to the front burner of American discussion and controversy.
With these things in mind, I plan on writing a more detailed post about immigration reform soon but in the meantime, I would like to highlight some new books on different aspects of the immigration issue that I will be using as source material for my “Sociology of Immigration” course and that will hopefully provide some sociological data and analysis to help us tackle the question of immigration reform.
The first book, Reinventing the Melting Pot, is the textbook that I have assigned to my students in my “Sociology of Immigration” course.
In Reinventing the Melting Pot, twenty-one of the writers who have thought longest and hardest about immigration come together around a surprising consensus: yes, immigrant absorption still works-and given the number of newcomers arriving today, the nation’s future depends on it. But it need not be incompatible with ethnic identity-and we as a nation need to find new ways to talk about and encourage becoming American.
In the wake of 9/11 it couldn’t be more important to help these newcomers find a way to fit in. Running through these essays is a single common theme: Although ethnicity plays a more important role now than ever before, today’s newcomers can and will become Americans and enrich our national life-reinventing the melting pot and reminding us all what we have in common.
African Americans grappled with Jim Crow segregation until it was legally overturned in the 1960s. In subsequent decades, the country witnessed a new wave of immigration from Asia and Latin America—forever changing the face of American society. In The Diversity Paradox, Jennifer Lee and Frank Bean take these two poles of American collective identity—the legacy of slavery and immigration—and ask if today’s immigrants are destined to become racialized minorities akin to African Americans or if their incorporation into U.S. society will more closely resemble that of their European predecessors.
The Diversity Paradox uses population-based analyses and in-depth interviews to examine patterns of intermarriage and multiracial identification among Asians, Latinos, and African Americans. Lee and Bean . . . show that Asians and Latinos with mixed ancestry are not constrained by strict racial categories. Racial status often shifts according to situation. Individuals can choose to identify along ethnic lines or as white, and their decisions are rarely questioned by outsiders or institutions. These groups also intermarry at higher rates, which is viewed as part of the process of becoming “American†and a form of upward social mobility.
African Americans, in contrast, intermarry at significantly lower rates than Asians and Latinos. Further, multiracial blacks often choose not to identify as such and are typically perceived as being black only—underscoring the stigma attached to being African American and the entrenchment of the “one-drop†rule. Asians and Latinos are successfully disengaging their national origins from the concept of race—like European immigrants before them.
The Diversity Paradox is an extensive and eloquent examination of how contemporary immigration and the country’s new diversity are redefining the boundaries of race. The book also lays bare the powerful reality that as the old black/white color line fades a new one may well be emerging—with many African Americans still on the other side.
As the authors state in Chapter 1, “[T]he movement of people across national borders represents one of the most vivid dramas of social reality in the contemporary world.†This comparative text examines contemporary immigration across the globe, focusing on 20 major nations.
Noted scholars Peter Kivisto and Thomas Faist introduce students to important topics of inquiry at the heart of the field, including: (a) Movement: explores the theories of migration using a historical perspective of the modern world; (b) Settlement: provides clarity concerning the controversial matter of immigrant incorporation and refers to the varied ways immigrants come to be a part of a new society; and (c) Control: focuses on the politics of immigration and examines the role of states in shaping how people choose to migrate.
Immigrants and their children comprise nearly three-fifths of New York City’s population and even more of Miami and Los Angeles. But the United States is also a nation with entrenched racial divisions that are being complicated by the arrival of newcomers. While immigrant parents may often fear that their children will “disappear” into American mainstream society, leaving behind their ethnic ties, many experts fear that they won’t—evolving instead into a permanent unassimilated and underemployed underclass.
Inheriting the City confronts these fears with evidence, reporting the results of a major study examining the social, cultural, political, and economic lives of today’s second generation in metropolitan New York, and showing how they fare relative to their first-generation parents and native-stock counterparts. The authors studied the young adult offspring of West Indian, Chinese, Dominican, South American, and Russian Jewish immigrants and compared them to blacks, whites, and Puerto Ricans with native-born parents.
They find that today’s second generation is generally faring better than their parents, with Chinese and Russian Jewish young adults achieving the greatest education and economic advancement, beyond their first-generation parents and even beyond their native-white peers. Every second-generation group is doing at least marginally—and, in many cases, significantly—better than natives of the same racial group across several domains of life. Economically, each second-generation group earns as much or more than its native-born comparison group, especially African Americans and Puerto Ricans, who experience the most persistent disadvantage.
Inheriting the City shows the children of immigrants can often take advantage of policies and programs that were designed for native-born minorities in the wake of the civil rights era. Indeed, the ability to choose elements from both immigrant and native-born cultures has produced, the authors argue, a second-generation advantage that catalyzes both upward mobility and an evolution of mainstream American culture. . . . Adapting elements from their parents’ cultures as well as from their native-born peers, the children of immigrants are not only transforming the American city but also what it means to be American.
Today we celebrate Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday and legacy as a national holiday. I would like to use this occasion to reflect a little bit on one part of Dr. King’s dream and how far we have come toward accomplishing it.
Specifically, I refer to Dr. King’s wish that one day soon, we would live in a society in which, as he eloquently put it, people “would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” a vision that we commonly refer to as a “colorblind” society. This ideal has remained an ultimate goal for many in American society, from a wide variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds. But are we there yet? How close are we to achieving that dream?
Many Americans thought that Barack Obama’s election was the culmination of Dr. King’s dream and concrete proof that we have evolved into a “post-racial,” colorblind society. Unfortunately, as I and many other sociologists and commentators have argued, even in this past year, we have seen numerous incidents that illustrate just how prevalent racial distinctions and racism still are in American society.
As another example, just recently, there was the uproar over Senator Harry Reid’s comments from the presidential campaign that Barack Obama had a good chance of being elected because he was “light-skinned” and had “no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.” Many conservatives charged that Senator Reid’s comments were racist and that similarly due to the racist comments uttered by former Senator Trent Lott, Reid should resign. Others pointed out that conservatives were being hypocritical in pointing out this particular example of “racism” while basically ignoring other examples of racism directed toward Barack Obama over the past few years.
Similarly, others like Professor Joe Feagin point out that Harry Reid was just verbalizing an implicit reality that still operates within American society — the “backstage” racism that still exists among many White Americans who are reluctant or unwilling to vote for an African American candidate (or even any candidate of color) unless that candidate looks and acts as “White” as possible.
The point of these examples is to illustrate that in contrast to what many Americans had hoped, unfortunately we are not yet close to living in a colorblind society. While Dr. King’s dream remains the ideal, the realities of the U.S. racial/ethnic landscape are quite different.
With this in mind, I would also argue that allies and supporters of anti-racism and racial equality should accept this reality, that race is still a significant marker of differentiation in our county, rather than naively proceeding with the assumption that being colorblind is the best approach within this context.
In other words, many Whites (and other Americans of different racial/ethnic identities) try to fight back against racism by trying to be colorblind in their daily lives. They try to treat everybody they meet, interact with, or hear about, solely as an individual rather than as a member of a racial group. They genuinely believe that ignoring race is the best way to move forward toward a colorblind society. Even worse, many Americans who otherwise consider themselves “progressive” criticize people of color for “obsessing” over race and that we somehow create our own oppression by recognizing race.
While trying to be colorblind is indeed a noble and well-intended idea on the individual, interpersonal level, the problem is that the idea of colorblindness is not reinforced on the institutional level and therefore, it is just not practical given how American society continues to be racialized, as I described above, and how racism continues to largely operate independently of individual motivations. In other words, ignoring the problem will not make it go away, nor will it solve anything.
As many educators point out, if anything, trying to be colorblind only makes racism worse because people then mistakenly and naively believe that all forms of racial inequality and discrimination have been eliminated, that everybody is now on an equal playing field with equal access to all social opportunities, and that American society is a true meritocracy.
More generally, the fundamental problem is not racial differences themselves. Instead, the root of racism is that certain racial markers or characteristics have been assigned institutional value judgments of “good” versus “bad,” “normal” versus “abnormal,” and “human” versus “sub-human.” This process has led to certain racial groups being privileged and systematically advantaged over others. Or in the words of Audre Lorde, “It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.”
Ultimately, the best way for us to work toward achieving the ultimate colorblind ideal is to recognize, accept, and understand that racial distinctions still matter and that they are still the basis for continuing discrimination and inequality in American society today. Only by doing so will we move forward on achieving Dr. King’s final ideal — true racial equality.
As part of this blog’s mission of making academic research and data more easily accessible, understandable, and applicable to a wider audience and to practical, everyday social issues, I highlight new sociological books about Asian Americans and other racial/ethnic groups as I hear about them. A book’s inclusion is for informational purposes only and does not necessarily mean a full endorsement of its complete contents.
In Marketing Dreams, Manufacturing Heroes Anna Romina Guevarra focuses on the Philippines — which views itself as the “home of the great Filipino worker” — and the multilevel brokering process that manages and sends workers worldwide. The experience of Filipino nurses and domestic workers — two of the country’s prized exports — is at the core of the research, which utilizes interviews with employees at labor brokering agencies, state officials from governmental organizations in the Philippines,and nurses working in the United States.
Suspended Apocalypse is a rich and provocative meditation on the emergence of the Filipino American as a subject of history. Culling from historical, popular, and ethnographic archives, Dylan RodrÃguez provides a sophisticated analysis of the Filipino presence in the American imaginary. Radically critiquing current conceptions of Filipino American identity, community, and history, he puts forth a genealogy of Filipino genocide, rooted in the early twentieth-century military, political, and cultural subjugation of the Philippines by the United States.
Suspended Apocalypse critically addresses what RodrÃguez calls “Filipino American communion,” interrogating redemptive and romantic notions of Filipino migration and settlement in the United States in relation to larger histories of race, colonial conquest, and white supremacy. Contemporary popular and scholarly discussions of the Filipino American are, he asserts, inseparable from their origins in the violent racist regimes of the United States and its historical successor, liberal multiculturalism.
RodrÃguez deftly contrasts the colonization of the Philippines with present-day disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and Mount Pinatubo to show how the global subjection of Philippine, black, and indigenous peoples create a linked history of genocide. But in these juxtapositions, RodrÃguez finds moments and spaces of radical opportunity. Engaging the violence and disruption of the Filipino condition sets the stage, he argues, for the possibility of a transformation of the political lens through which contemporary empire might be analyzed, understood, and perhaps even overcome.
Pilipino Cultural Nights at American campuses have been a rite of passage for youth culture and a source of local community pride since the 1980s. Through performances—and parodies of them—these celebrations of national identity through music, dance, and theatrical narratives reemphasize what it means to be Filipino American. In The Day the Dancers Stayed, scholar and performer Theodore Gonzalves uses interviews and participant observer techniques to consider the relationship between the invention of performance repertoire and the development of diasporic identification.
Gonzalves traces a genealogy of performance repertoire from the 1930s to the present. Culture nights serve several functions: as exercises in nostalgia, celebrations of rigid community entertainment, and occasionally forums for political intervention. Taking up more recent parodies of Pilipino Cultural Nights, Gonzalves discusses how the rebellious spirit that enlivened the original seditious performances has been stifled.
Here are some more announcements and links out that have come my way relating to Asians or Asian Americans. As always, links to other sites are provided for informational purposes and do not necessarily imply an endorsement of their contents.
My name is Reimar Macaranas and I am the Community Program Manager at Leadership Education for Asian Pacifics (LEAP). I wanted to ask for your help in outreaching to your Asian and Pacific Islander students in regards to the paid summer internship we have offered each year for the past 13 years.
This is a two-month summer internship where we put interns in Asian and Pacific Islander community-based organizations (a full list of past
organizations we have worked with is on the website link provided) for 4 days of the week, where they would be working hands-on with communities on specific projects the organizations have proposed to us. The other day of the week, they would be at LEAP, going through workshops, community dialogues and panels to not only increase personal development, but community development as well.
Reimar Macaranas
Community Program Manager
Leadership Education for Asian Pacifics, Inc. (LEAP)
(213) 485-1422×4102
(213) 485-0050 (fax)
rmacaranas@leap.org
www.leap.org
Call for Applications: “Settling Into Motion“ – The Bucerius Ph.D. Scholarships in Migration Studies. The ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius Ph.D. scholarship program in migration studies “Settling Into Motion” offers up to eight scholarships for Ph.D. theses addressing migration in changing societies.
For 2010, research applications on “Migration, Diversity and the Future of Modern Societies†are especially welcome. Qualified Ph.D. students of – in a broad sense – social sciences can apply until 25 February 2010. Please find further information as well as the online application on the program’s website.
Migration leads to increasing diversity in many countries all over the world. Sometimes this results in challenges of established institutions as well as cultural practices of modern societies. Current migrant populations are more heterogeneous than ever before: migrants and their descendants have not only different religious, cultural and ethnic roots, but they also differ with regard to their citizenship status, as well as their professional and economic backgrounds.
At the same time, governments in receiving societies frequently react to this phenomenon with integration schemes that implicitly address a non-existent homogeneous “migrant populationâ€. On the other hand, there are examples where diversity and cultural pluralism are seen as strength and advantage. We encourage the following topics, but will also consider other approaches:
Diversity and political order
Migration and cultural, ethnic and religious diversity
Integration policies
Cultural policy and the management of diversity
Concepts and categories in migration and integration debates
Innovative approaches both in terms of subject matter and methodology are highly encouraged.
Re-SEAing SouthEast Asian American Studies. Memories & Visions: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow.
San Francisco State University
March 10-11, 2011
The third tri-annual interdisciplinary Southeast Asians in the Diaspora conference will take place at San Francisco State University. The San Francisco Bay Area is home to sizable populations of Burmese, Cambodian, Filipino, Hmong, Indonesian, Lao, Malaysian, Singaporean, Thai, and Vietnamese Americans. This conference will foreground the large Southeast Asian American communities of the Bay Area, Silicon Valley, and the Pacific Northwest, as well as continue to build momentum and grow just as the Southeast Asian American demographics increase in size and visibility here in the U.S. and in particular, on the West Coast.
The main objectives of this conference are:
to encourage the interdisciplinary and comparative study of Southeast Asian
American peoples and their communities
to promote national and international cooperation in the field
to establish partnerships between academia and the community
This two-day conference explores memories (e.g., memories of homeland; memories of war; memories of childhood and growing up American; historical memories; embodied memories; intergenerational memories; technologies of memories; and imagined/created memories) and visions (actual sightings and sites of Southeast Asian Americans and their communities, both real and imaginary). Because this conference takes place after the constitutionally mandated 2010 census, the focus will be on locating/situating Southeast Asian American Studies for the 21st century.
The conference invites proposals for panels, workshops, and individual papers from all disciplines and fields of study that explore the dialectical relationship between memories and visions related to the following topics:
Southeast Asian American health and wellness
Southeast Asian American social justice
Southeast Asian American and critical pedagogy
Southeast Asian American youth cultures
Southeast Asian American folklore, folklife, and religions
Southeast Asian American families, relationships, and communities
Southeast Asian American queer cultures and spaces
Southeast Asian American sexualities
Southeast Asian Americans of mixed heritage/race
Southeast Asian American transnationality, transnationalization, and transnationalism
Sino-Southeast Asian Americans
Explorations of how artists (writers, filmmakers, visual artists) “see†and envision themselves and their communities as Southeast Asian Americans
The location and relationship of Southeast Asia to Southeast Asian America
The shifting demographics of Southeast Asian Americans vis-Ã -vis (in)visibility
Papers will also be considered on any related topics in Southeast Asian American Studies. 250 word abstracts should be submitted by June 15, 2010 to Dr. Jonathan H. X. Lee at jlee@sfsu.edu with the following information: a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, and d) abstract with title.
All papers will go through an internal review process and decisions regarding acceptance of papers for the conference will be communicated by October 15, 2010. Information on previous conferences:
Jonathan H. X. Lee, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies
San Francisco State University
Department of Asian American Studies
1600 Holloway Ave, EP 103
San Francisco, CA 94132
Do you know of any non-profit organizations which benefit the Asian American community? If so, please encourage their Executive Director to consider spending a week at Harvard to sharpen their leadership skills and make their organizations more effective.
For the 5th consecutive year, the Harvard Business School Asian American Alumni Association (HBS4A) will be sponsoring a full tuition, room, board, and materials scholarship for a non-profit organization executive director to attend the Strategic Perspectives in Non-Profit Management program at HBS this July. Alaric Bien, last year’s HBS4A Scholarship recipient and Executive Director of the CISC had this to say after completing the program last year:
“The SPNM experience was truly amazing! Scary and somewhat intimidating at first to be part of a group of such high powered, incredibly sharp and dedicated nonprofit executives from literally all over the world, but what a wonderful privilege to have access to all those resources and knowledge.
The professors were awesome – incredibly expert in their fields, inspiring, great teachers, and they really understand what it’s like to work in the real world of the nonprofit sector. I came back to CISC charged up and eager to put into practice what we learned during that short, but oh so intense week at HBS. This was a once in a lifetime opportunity!”
Previous organizations which have benefited from the HBS4A scholarship include the New York Asian Women’s Center in 2006, the Chinese Community Center in Houston in 2007, the Southeast Asian Mutual Assistance Association of Philadelphia in 2008, and the Chinese Information and Service Center of Seattle in 2009.
If you know of an Executive Director at a non profit organization which benefits the Asian American community, please direct them to the scholarship website for more information! Thanks to all the HBS4A dues-paying members for helping make this empowering program possible!
2008: Handbook for Young Muslim Americans A new book helps young Muslim Americans in negotiating the challenging racial, religious, and cultural terrain of contemporary American society.
2006: Changing Names Among Asian Americans An article from Northwestern University explorers a question that many young Asian Americans wrestle with — whether or not to change their Asian names.
2005: Further Proof Against Spying Recent dismissals of charges of espionage against Asian Americans highlight prosecutor misconduct and the dubious nature of such allegations in the first place.
First, I hope everyone had a nice holiday season and that your new year is off to a good start.
As reflected in the origin of its name (Janus, the Roman god of beginnings and endings), the first month of the new year is traditionally a time to reflect on two “opposite” ideas. In this case, I’d like to use a recent Time magazine article profiling Harvard University basketball player Jeremy Lin as an opportunity to explore opposing and contradictory racial presumptions in college and professional basketball.
First, the article describes the success Jeremy is having as Harvard’s star player:
It’s been 64 years since the Crimson appeared in the NCAA tournament. But thanks to senior guard Jeremy Lin, that streak could end this year. Lin, who tops Harvard in points (18.1 per game), rebounds (5.3), assists (4.5) and steals (2.7), has led the team to a 9-3 record, its best start in a quarter century.
Lin, a 6 ‘3″ slasher whose speed, leaping ability, and passing skills would allow him to suit up for any team in the country, has saved his best performances for the toughest opponents: over his last four games against teams from the Big East and Atlantic Coast Conference, two of the country’s most powerful basketball leagues, Lin is averaging 24.3 points and shooting nearly 65% from the field.
“He’s as good an all-around guard as I’ve seen,” says Tony Shaver, the head coach of William & Mary, which in November lost a triple overtime game to Harvard, 87-85, after Lin hit a running three-pointer at the buzzer. “He’s a special player who seems to have a special passion for the game. I wouldn’t be surprised to see him in the NBA one day.”
I think it’s important to first recognize Jeremy’s success. He’s worked hard academically and athletically to be in the position he’s in right now. In many ways, he represents a nice example of how Asian Americans can balance both model minority expectations with a physical or extracurricular passion on the way to a well-rounded sense of personal balance.
The article later acknowledges the elephant in the room and points out why Jeremy’s success is unique — he’s Asian American. Unfortunately, he’s also experienced some racism from opposing fans based on his racial identity:
A Harvard hoopster with pro-level talent? Yes, that’s one reason Lin is a novelty. But let’s face it: Lin’s ethnicity might be a bigger surprise. Less than 0.5% of men’s Division 1 basketball players are Asian-American. . . . Some people still can’t look past his ethnicity. Everywhere he plays, Lin is the target of cruel taunts.
“It’s everything you can imagine,” he says. “Racial slurs, racial jokes, all having to do with being Asian.” Even at the Ivy League gyms? “I’ve heard it at most of the Ivies, if not all of them,” he says. Lin is reluctant to mention the specific nature of such insults, but according to Harvard teammate Oliver McNally, another Ivy League player called him a c-word that rhymes with “ink” during a game last season.
Just last week, during Harvard’s 86-70 loss to Georgetown in Washington, D.C., McNally says one spectator yelled “sweet and sour pork” from the stands. In the face of such foolishness, Lin doesn’t seem to lose it on the court. “Honestly, now, I don’t react to it,” he says. “I expect it, I’m used to it, it is what it is.”
It would be simple enough to point out the obvious contradiction in Jeremy’s situation — why is it apparently acceptable (or at least tacitly tolerated) to hurl racial slurs at an Asian American basketball player but not at say, African American players?
How would bystanders, teammates, coaches, security personnel, and even opposing players react if a fan in the stands yelled the N-word at a Black basketball player at a game? Chances are, that “fan” would immediately face backlash and would be ejected from the building faster than you can say “codes of conduct.” In fact, Dartmouth recently issued an official apology to Harvard in the wake of anti-Semitic and homophobic slurs hurled at some of its squash players at a recent match.
But in Jeremy’s case, there doesn’t seem to be any sense of collective backlash or outrage over the racist comments he routinely receives on the court. Apparently it’s another sad example of Asian Americans being seen as the invisible minority, perpetual foreigners, or as easy targets for racism.
But beyond that, I have to wonder whether his status as an Asian American — as opposed to an Asian — player plays a role as well. In other words, we have seen an influx of professional athletes from Asia in basketball (Yao Ming, Yi Jianlian) and baseball (Hideo Nomo, Ichiro, Daisuke Matsuzaka, etc.) recently but unfortunately, there is still a glaring underrepresentation of Asian American professional athletes in the highest-profile sports such as football, basketball, and baseball.
Although it’s a documented fact that many Americans can’t or won’t distinguish “Asians” from “Asian Americans,” my question is, are Americans (or in this case, sports fans) likely to accept Asian athletes more readily than Asian American ones?
Perhaps fans consciously or unconsciously are more comfortable with the idea that Asian athletes are likely to remain “foreigners” and therefore will eventually return to “their own” country and won’t settle down in the U.S. and be in direct competition with Americans for jobs, etc., while Asian American athletes are in fact homegrown and are perceived to be a greater economic “threat” to “real” Americans. After all, many already perceive Asian Americans to be “taking over” other areas of American life such as colleges and universities.
So based on these perceptions, perhaps fans are unconsciously spewing racism — or at least remaining silent when such slurs are made — at Asian American athletes as another form of backlash against the ongoing socioeconomic success of Asian Americans.
The mentality and contradictions of racism are always subject to speculation but the examples keep adding up.
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Update: If you’re reading this, you probably know that in January 2012, Jeremy was signed by the New York Knicks. He promptly seized this opportunity and has since blown up the basketball scene and is now a national and international sensation. To read my sociological take on this “Linsanity” phenomenon, check out my recent post “Jeremy Lin Mania and How to Relates to Colorblindness.”
