"ASIAN-AMERICAN HERITAGE"

 “ASIAN-AMERICAN HERITAGE”

The official celebration of Asian-American Heritage began in May, 1979.  It began as a week of celebration and has now expanded to a month.  The month of May was chosen to commemorate the immigration of the first Japanese to the USA in 1843 and to remember the work of the Chinese workers on the Transcontinental Railroad, which was completed in May, 1869.   In the evolving American system of race, people of Asian descent have not reached “ethnic” status as people of Hispanic/Latinx have.  So, they are still classified as a “race,” even though no one really fits under that oppressive word, designed by Anglo men to be able to exploit labor and lands as those who were on top of the racial ladder. 

The recent killing of Asian-American women in Atlanta is a reminder of the deadly power of race in American culture.  A young man classified as “white” blamed Asian-American women for his sexual addiction, and rather than seeking a group to help him cope with his addiction, he decided to seek to eliminate what he took to be the source of the problem.  He saw Asian-American women as the “other,” as the enemy.  There is an enraging and long history of this kind of treatment of people of Asian heritage in USA, from the Chinese Exclusion Acts to the Japanese internment camps of WW II to the blaming of Asian-Americans for Covid, leading to many random vicious attacks. 

    Because the system of race has so long focused on Black and white issues, it is not clear where Americans of Asian heritage fit into the system.  Using Isabel Wilkerson’s category of “caste,”  people of Asian heritage would be considered in “the middle caste,”  not quite Black but certainly not white.  We had a few Asian families in my small hometown of Helena, Arkansas, and in our separatist school system, they went to the “white” school.  At that time, people categorized as “Asian” were seen as descendants of what we then called “Far-East Asia,” such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vientamese.  As far as I can recall, we had no families of Indian or Pakistani or Sri Lankan heritage in Helena, but they now are incorporated into the category of “Asian.”

    Asian-Americans present a profound problem for the system of race, because many of them routinely beat those classified as “white” on national test scores for academia and research. If those classified as “white” are superior to all other racial categories, then why do Asian-Americans score higher on the intelligence tests?  Indeed two years ago, some Trumpsters brought charges against Harvard for discriminating against Asian-American applicants, in order to let “less worthy” people classified as “Black” into the university.  The federal judge wisely saw that this was a Trojan horse for an attack on what is left of affirmative action, and they dismissed the suit.  

    I noted at the Post Office last week that a stamp had been produced with the name and likeness of Chien-Shiung Wu, and because of my white provincialism, I had never heard of her.  She was a physicist born in China who later came to USA.  Her intellect and development as a critical thinker was encouraged by both her parents, especially her father in China. When she came to this country,  she was somewhat shocked at the system of “inferiority” of women that she encountered in USA.  She came to the University of Michigan in 1936 to get her doctorate degree, but she  was appalled when she learned that at Michigan, women were not allowed to use the front entrance of the physics department.  She decided to transfer to University of California Berkeley, where women’s work in physics was more accepted.  She got her PhD there and graduated Phi Beta Kappa, but despite their “liberal” approach, U-C Berkeley would not hire her on the faculty as a woman physics professor.

    She decided to go back to China to teach there, but World War II intervened, and she stayed in the States, teaching at various universities before being hired for the faculty of Columbia University.  While she was there, she became involved with the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb.  Her work helped to develop the capacity to separate uranium into various isotopes so that it could be used to create the bomb.  Like many of those who worked on the Manhattan Project, she came to regret her work on it, but her work there helped to develop a vision of how to make things work in physics.  Indeed, during the late 20th century, Dr. Wu continued to be seen as the top experimental physicist in the world, and many physicists asked for her guidance in proving certain hypotheses that they held.  She died in NYC in 1997, having been recognized as one of the great physicists of the century.  Having become an American citizen in 1954, she is now known as a great American of Asian heritage.