Report Examines Issues Facing APIs
March 6, 2000
By Janet Dang While the Asian American population continues to grow, educational, economic and political progress has been achieved. Despite these gains, however, Asian Americans are still largely absent from national discussions on race and continue to be viewed as “perpetual foreigners,” according to a new report on APIs and race relations.
Titled The State of Asian Pacific America: Transforming Race Relations, the report documents for the first time racial attitudes toward Asian Americans and the way in which public policy has been shaped in response to this rapidly “transforming” group. Indeed, since 1960 the API population has doubled each decade and is expected to reach at least 20 million by 2020.
The State of Asian Pacific America was released earlier this month and is the fourth major public policy report produced by the UCLA Asian American Studies Center and LEAP Asian Pacific American Public Policy Institute.
Three of its authors — Paul Ong, director of the Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, UCLA School of Public Policy and Social Research; Don T. Nakanishi, director of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center; and J.D. Hokoyama, president and executive director of Leadership Education for Asian Pacifics — examined the growing complexity of race relations in the United States. They also looked at how racial identity is created and reflected in individual attitudes and institutional practices.
Michael Omi, another co-author of the report and associate professor at U.C. Berkeley’s ethnic studies department, said it’s crucial that racial dialogue reflects the rapid changes within the API community.
“We are becoming much more multiracial. There is an increase in visibility and heterogeneity … We need to re-think the fundamental premises of social policy making. We can’t have one size fits all,” he said.
Included in the 507-page report are analyses of the multi-ethnic Census categories to be used for the first time this year; the isolation and integration of inter-ethnic groups; and the continuing problem of hate crimes perpetuated against and by Asians.
In looking at racial classification and the Census, the report reveals how racial boundaries are subject to interpretation. Certain groups, for example, have questioned the appropriateness of their being counted as part of the API category. Some Filipino Americans, largely motivated by the desire to emphasize their unique cultural identity and to benefit from affirmative action programs, have wanted be re-classified, according to the report. And Native Hawaiians, spurred by the claims that they aren’t recognized as an indigenous population, have successfully been removed from the Asian Pacific Islander category.
This type of racial reshuffling needs to be continually integrated in public policy making, Omi said.
The report delves into the “model minority,” myth and mainstream perception that Asian Americans are foreigners.
Though such a stereotype may not be surprising for many APIs, having the data in hand is invaluable, said Hokoyama.
“The report enables Asian Americans around the country to move their own agenda and to have hard data to back it up. That’s the real value of our report. If you only have anecdotal information, people can easily dismiss you.”
The report also found that APIs are seen by most Americans as facing few barriers to success. At the same time, the study points out that APIs are left in the vulnerable position of having their successes exploited for leverage against less-advantaged minorities, including African Americans. Moreover, often the hardships APIs face go unrecognized.
Those hardships include discrimination, which most Asian Americans have experienced according to the study, as well as race-based crimes, which go severely undercounted.
APIs are guilty of discrimination as well, the report states. In looking at Asian American residential patterns, segregation has increased over the past two decades, notably in major metropolitan areas including New York City, Houston, San Francisco and San Diego. A majority of Asian Pacific American respondents clearly preferred living in an all-Asian Pacific American neighborhoods, and similar to white respondents, are more likely to feel comfortable with integration when their potential neighbors are either white or Asian.
For a copy of The State of Asian Pacific America: Transforming Race Relations, call LEAP at 213-485-1422 or the UCLA Asian American Studies Center at 310-825-2974.
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