Canwen Xu is a senior at Columbia University and an advocate on Asian American issues. She hosted a TEDx talk, “I Am Not Your Asian Stereotype.”
I grew up Asian American in North Dakota, South Dakota and Idaho, some of the whitest states in this country. I learned to speak accentless English. I had mostly Caucasian friends until college, and I learned to eschew the meek and submissive stereotypes that plague so many Asian Americans today.
Did these things make people think I was American? Absolutely not. I was constantly asked where I was from — even though my race is the only indication that I could be from anywhere but the United States.
Entrepreneur and former presidential candidate Andrew Yang argued in The Post this week that Asian Americans demonstrating their “American-ness” is the best way to combat racism related to the covid-19 pandemic. His message was effectively: There’s no practical use in telling folks not to be racist. So let’s combat racism by showing everyone how American we are. He urged people to follow the example of Japanese Americans who enlisted in the military during World War II, demonstrating their own “American-ness” in a time of crisis. Yang omitted the fact that while 33,000 volunteered to serve in the war, more than 120,000 were placed in internment camps at home.
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During Yang’s run for the Democratic presidential nomination, I appreciated his solution-based thinking. That drew me to his campaign, and it helped me overlook his previous tone-deafness toward race issues. But for many Asian Americans, myself included, his op-ed went too far. Instead of calling out the recent hostility toward Asians for what it is — the reincarnation of historical misconceptions that Asians are dirty and uncivilized — he chose to be a people pleaser. Specifically, the white-people pleaser. He further entrenched the decades-old myth of the model minority: that Asian Americans are the obedient people of color, the ones who are willing to uphold a system that is rigged against us by submissively working within.
He does this through his insistence on adherence to a “win-win” framework, which tries desperately not to offend anyone. As Anand Giridharadas described in his book “Winners Take All,” prominent business executives, thought leaders and philanthropists such as Yang have adopted the mind-set that solutions can be found to problems without ever criticizing the culprits. In practical terms, that means that instead of fighting “income equality,” we can fight “poverty.” Instead of calling out “sexism,” we can choose to “uplift women.” And instead of criticizing anti-Asian racism, Asian Americans can be told to wear red, white and blue in hopes that other Americans will finally think we’re one of them.
But ignoring the root causes of social issues leads us toward shallow, and often temporary, fixes for problems while neglecting larger structural issues and precluding lasting solutions. The middle-aged men in hoodies that Yang mentions in his op-ed will not stop looking at him accusatorily simply because he dons an American flag-patterned hat. And the racism and other-ization of Asian Americans will not stop simply because our community shows its “American-ness.” When the president of the United States still refers to covid-19 as the “Chinese virus,” I have a hard time believing that the issue is simply that white Americans in the United States haven’t seen Asian Americans mobilize yet.
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Perhaps the main difference between Yang’s opinion and mine is that he focused on showing “without a shadow of a doubt that we are Americans who will do our part for our country in this time of need,” suggesting that the solution to hostility against Asians is just getting the virus under control. I personally have a hard time believing that people from, say, France, England or Sweden would face the same hostility if the coronavirus had originated in those countries rather than China.
I appreciate Yang’s call to action, but his argument was atrociously framed. We, as Asian Americans, should absolutely be part of the solution to coronavirus. We should certainly “do everything in our power to accelerate the end of this crisis.” But that’s not because our actions will demonstrate that we are American. They won’t. It is because we are obligated to as members of our communities and, most importantly, as human beings.
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