by: Angie Chuang, University of Colorado Boulder
Posted: Mar 27, 2021 / 09:39 AM MDT / Updated: Mar 27, 2021 / 01:36 PM MDT
Jessica Lang pauses and places her hand on the door in a moment of grief after dropping off flowers with her daughter Summer at Youngs Asian Massage parlor where four people were killed, Wednesday, March 17, 2021, in Acworth, Ga. At least eight people were found dead at three different spas in the Atlanta area Tuesday by suspected shooter Robert Aaron Long. Lang, a local resident who lives nearby, said she knew one of the victims. (Curtis Compton/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP)
(THE CONVERSATION) Since the Atlanta spa shootings, the U.S. media has been working harder than usual to describe and understand Asian Americans. They represent a population of 21 million people, with astounding ethnic and socioeconomic diversity. Yet the same two stereotypes often emerge in news coverage about them.
One is that of Asian Americans as the “perpetual foreigner” – immigrants who constantly struggle, never assimilate. That’s how the six Chinese and Korean American women killed in the Atlanta area on March 16 came off in early stories about the massacre. The news media persisted in referring to victims as “women of Asian descent” – versus “Asian American women” – even after it became clear several were not recent immigrants.
These victims, six of the eight dead, don’t fit into the other Asian American stereotype of the upwardly mobile, educated, and eager-to-fit-in immigrant – the “model minority.” Both stereotypes have been levied in tandem against Asian immigrants to the U.S. for centuries.
Model minority
In the mid-1800s, Chinese laborers made up the first significant wave of Asian immigration to the United States. Recruited during the Gold Rush and to build the Transcontinental Railroad, the men were described by employers like industrialist Leland Stanford as “quiet, peaceable, patient, industrious and economical.”
As that initial population of 4,000 Chinese Americans in 1850 burgeoned, though, they were accused of taking white men’s jobs. Hostility and violence also grew against them. From the subsequent Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which prohibited the immigration of Chinese laborers, to the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II, Asian Americans were still seen as hardworking and submissive – yet also dangerous and alien.
The model-minority myth emerged later. In 1965 the Hart-Celler Act opened immigration quotas that had previously favored Western Europeans. That spurred a major wave of immigration from across the globe, including Asia, to the United States. Bolstered by university offers of international graduate scholarships, this policy favored highly skilled immigrants from Taiwan, South Korea, India, Japan, and beyond.
Asian Americans grieve, organize in wake of Atlanta attacks
Many of the Hart-Celler immigrants were funneled into growing numbers of professional jobs in science and technology fields. They were part of the United States’s push to become a world leader in everything from the space race to transportation.
Out-earning all other racial groups, Asian Americans became the “model minority,” a term first coined by sociologist William Petersen in a 1966 New York Times article, “Success Story: Japanese American style.”
Perpetual foreigner
As U.S. immigration policy shifted to favor family reunification and diversity of origin, waves of Asians came to the U.S. from the mid-1970s to 1980s and onward. Some were refugees resettled from places where the U.S. had gotten involved in wars, like Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and South Korea. Other immigrants came from China, South Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, India, Bangladesh, the Philippines, and more, attempting to lift their families out of poverty.
Without the same educational and professional sponsorships as some had, many in these later waves founded mom-and-pop businesses and peer lending networks. They gravitated toward blue-collar industries and “pink-collar” jobs in salons, food service, or child care.
https://www.krqe.com/news/national/two-ste...
Posted By: Steve Williams
Saturday, March 27th 2021 at 4:33PM
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