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Your Career in Politics

Why should you get involved in politics? Because you already are, whether you want to admit it or not. Someone decided the admissions standards for your college, the hiring requirements for your job and the rules governing your retirement plan. Someone else decided how far you can park from the curb, how fast you can drive on the highway and how much exhaust can legally escape from your exhaust pipe. Someone has decided that gay people cannot get married in most places, that life does or does not begin at conception and that immigrants can or cannot be eligible for various Constitutional guarantees.

Those of us who think we can put our nose to the grindstone and make it on merit don’t understand Asian Pacific American history. Like many early 20th century immigrants, my Tajitsu grandparents had tremendous intelligence, skills, determination and resiliency, yet overt and covert discrimination held them back from reaching their full potential.

After several decades of civil rights victories, today’s APA immigrants don’t face rigidly segregated schools, widespread exclusion from professions or publicly-acceptable racial epithets. Yet, as the widespread prejudices experienced by Filipino and South Asian Americans in the year since Sept. 11 have shown us, barriers remain in the way of full equality and justice in this society. We have come this far because of political activism, but we need even more political activism if we are to help this country live up to its founding ideals.

The generation that founded APA studies, APA culture and the “Asian American Movement” had to work as an oppositional force to racism, sexism, heterosexism and working class bias. Those of us who broke down barriers and cracked the glass ceilings started from an outsider’s place even as we were learning the insider’s rules. We formed separate student groups, employee support groups and community groups to nurture and support each other as we battled entrenched hierarchy and unfairness. While we grew new organizations, new vocabularies and new ways of thinking, our politics were largely defined as a politics of opposition.

Today, the struggle has shifted, and more of us have the credentials, skills and contacts to play the insider game. We don’t have to settle for being the president of the Asian Pacific American Students’ Association anymore; we can aspire to be the President of the entire college student body.

With these new opportunities, however, come new challenges and new responsibilities. As more of us get involved in the world of electoral politics and the politics of governing, we must maintain both the passion and sense of justice of the outsider, and the nuts-and-bolts pragmatism of the insider.

Having spent the last few years observing and participating in this paradigm shift here in Washington, I am pleased to report that much progress has been made, while even more remains to be done. Among the positive developments:

• A group of APA Senators and Representatives had enough courage to just say no to President Bush’s call for a war on Iraq. Rep. Mike Honda, D-Calif., and Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., went a step further, courageously upholding the separation of Church and State by refusing to keep the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Alliance and retain the phrase “In God We Trust” as the nation’s official motto.

• Strong networks of Republican, Democratic and independent APA politicos are developing, nurtured by non-partisan groups such as the Conference on Asian Pacific American Leadership (www.capal.org) and the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies (www.apaics.org).

• New sources of non-partisan APA political news are becoming available, such as the Rainmaker Political Group (www.rainmakerpolitical.com), publisher of the widely-read online weekly newsletter, Political Circus (www.politicalcircus.com).

• A new APA political action committee, the Asian American Action Fund (www.aaa-fund.org) has gone beyond the non-profit model of community advocacy to explicitly encourage and take political contributions — which are not tax deductible and which are the lifeblood of the current campaign contribution system.

• A seasoned cohort of APA civil rights advocates have learned the legislative process and are now ready to be the decision-makers themselves, instead of just the legislative aides and press secretaries.

What are the challenges facing this generation of political activists as we prepare to enter the system as candidates, contributors, volunteers and, ultimately, legislators and government officials?

• First and foremost is campaign finance reform, which some have called the great civil rights issue of our generation. The continuing unfair influence of big money on every aspect of campaigning and governing has got to end before we can have true democracy in this country.

• Related to this is an end to the winner-take-all system of governance, which undermines and suppresses the voices of minority communities such as ours. Combined with archaic ballot access rules and suppression of third party viewpoints, it perpetuates a two-party system, which results in low voter turnout, legislative gridlock and a disengaged populace.

• The continuing lack of parity for female legislators and executives, despite 30 years of the modern women’s movement, shows how deeply entrenched patriarchy has been and continues to be in our society. The next APA Congressional candidate we support in 2004, the way many of us have rallied to Stan Matsunaka in 2002, should be a woman.

• Diversity within our diversity is still an issue 30 years after the modern APA movement took our political struggle to its current quantum level. Finding, nurturing and actively supporting candidates from outside the West Coast, and who are not Japanese or Chinese American, has to be a priority.

No matter what your current job is, and no matter what your ultimate life and career aspirations are, you owe it to yourself, your family and your community to devote time to politics. Join your building co-op, your town library board or your school PTA.

Unless APAs stand up and participate as fully empowered participants in this country’s political system, we are condemned to be perpetual second-class citizens.

Reach Phil Tajitsu Nash at pnash@campaignadvantage.com.