Overturning Economic Oppression
By Phil Tajitsu Nash

There is no perfect correlation between poverty and a person’s phenotype (how we look on the outside). Likewise, there is no perfect correlation between poverty and the language we speak, the foods we eat, or the culture in which we grew up.

Poverty is caused by humans based on our inhumanity toward other humans, and our inability to wean ourselves of a consumer culture that values commodities and profits over respect for our planet and the nurturing of interconnected, mutually-dependent human relationships.

As we explore the topic of Asian Americans and poverty, it is important to remember that our community’s early history was shaped by persistent exclusion from economic opportunities. Even when those with higher per capita incomes immigrated here after 1965, they were consistently paid less than their European American counterparts with comparable levels of education and experience.

Asian Americans since 1965 have been in what some refer to as a bipolar occupational structure. The 1980 Census, for example, showed that 56 percent of employed Asian immigrants were in managerial, professional, technical, and administrative positions. Meanwhile, another 33 percent were in unskilled, semi-skilled, and labor-intensive jobs.

The way we as a community are portrayed in discussions of race and economic achievement proves deceptive: our “per household” rates of pay are shown as superior to all other groups, including whites. How can our wages be so high, when there are so many of us who earn so little? The answer is that “per-household” income is not the same as per capita income. We tend to have a lot more people in our households, including cousins, grandparents, and others, who contribute to a household income that is higher than the prototypical mom-pop-and-2.1-kids situation.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Asian Americans were segregated into work that paid little, held little prestige, and was highly monotonous, if not dangerous. Asian Indian American loggers had to fell giant trees in the Pacific Northwest. Chinese American railroad workers had to build railway trestles high over raging gorges in the Rocky Mountains. Japanese, Filipino and Korean American agricultural workers had to endure the hot, midday sun and the back-breaking labor of picking crops.

Early cartoons showed our community as an economic threat to honest, hard-working European Americans. We were seen as wage slaves who would work for little pay under inhuman conditions.

Indeed, Asian Americans were brought to Lowell and North Adams, Massachusetts in the early 20th century to break shoemaker strikes. As historian Gary Okihiro and others have pointed out, some Chinese Americans were brought to the South after the Civil War to keep the plantations going. Many whites feared newly-emancipated African Americans, and considered Chinese Americans less of a threat in terms of voting and the taking of power.

Whereas we as a community have endured substandard wages, employment segregation, glass ceilings, and outright exclusions from some professions, we should start the new millennium not just by decrying unfairness (which, unfortunately, continues), but by celebrating the courageous individuals and organizations that have fought back against racial and economic injustice. In an important lesson for Asian Americans today, we can look back on their lives and see that at the same time they were fighting injustice to help their own families and communities, they were also helping strengthen the broader American society, both now and in the future.

The Beikoku Nihonjinkai (Japanese Association of America), founded 100 years ago this year in San Francisco, is one such organization. According to Yamato Ichihashi’s Japanese in the United States, by 1905 the Beikoku Nihonjinka had succeeded in uniting 30 Japanese immigrant organizations from all over California at a conference that resulted in a federation of local organizations to fight racial discrimination.

Having helped to form national Asian American student and lawyer organizations in the 1980s and ‘90s (when we had far more resources and far less overt hostility to deal with), I can only begin to imagine how hard this must have been for the JAA organizers in 1900.

Similarly heroic efforts to fight racial and economic discrimination occurred many times in Asian American history. Pablo Manlapit and the Filipino Federation of Labor joined with Japanese American plantation workers to demand higher wages and working conditions in 1920. Chinese American laundry owners founded the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance in 1933 to combat discrimination and unfair bonds and registration fees directed at them, but not at non-Chinese laundries.

In short, racial and economic unfairness has proven a regular part of the Asian American experience. And we have just as regularly fought to correct that unfairness. And in the process, we have become a vital force in this country for improving wages and working conditions for all Americans.