©2007 By Jane Junn and Natalie Masuoka
To appear, Perspectives on Politics

Given our contention that Asian American racial identity may be constructed differently than that for African Americans, we first began our study by conducting semi-structured interviews with Asian American youth in California. We selected a number of racial group consciousness and political participation questions that have been asked in previous public opinion surveys. Through these interviews we observed how Asian American respondents answered these questions, which informed the development of survey items and analysis in the following section. We also used the in-depth interviews to provide a sense of the words and ways in which respondents describe their racial identities and how they feel their identities are related to politics. While the data are exploratory inasmuch as they do not emanate from a randomly selected sample of the populations in the locales in question, the responses from these Asian Americans provide a clear window into the power of that identity. Despite the complexities and the hesitations respondents often express in claiming a racial group identity as Asian American, a sense of racial consciousness clearly exists.

Assemblyman Ted Lieu is taking an increasingly prominent role on issues affecting Asian-Americans as he prepares to assume the chairmanship of the Asian Pacific Islander Legislative Caucus.

Lieu, D-Torrance, has taken the lead in pressuring the administration of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to appoint more Asian-American judges.

The issue has pushed Lieu, typically a moderate consensus-builder, into pointed conflict with the Republican administration. He has allied with the Legislature's Latino and black caucuses in threatening to cut off funding for judges if Schwarzenegger's appointments do not become more diverse.

"One person in California gets to shape the entire judicial branch," Lieu said in a recent interview. "He has wielded this tremendous power in a way that is insensitive to the rich diversity of California."

WASHINGTON -- Seeking to limit damage within the Indian-American Democratic community, White House hopeful Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) said Monday it was a "screw-up" and "stupid" and a "mistake" for his campaign to issue a memo slamming ties rival Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and her husband, Bill, have to India and Indian-Americans.

"In sum, our campaign made a mistake," Obama said in a statement released through a group of Indian-American supporters called South Asians for Obama '08.

"Although I was not aware of the contents of the memo prior to its distribution, I consider the entire campaign -- and in particular myself -- responsible for the mistake."

In Iowa campaigning, Obama told the Des Moines Register on Monday, "It was a screw-up on the part of our research team." He added, "I thought it was stupid and caustic."

Yuri Kochiyama with her late husband Bill. Mr. Kochiyama dedicated his life to supporting his family and his wife's activist efforts.

First, I wish to thank Steve Kim of the Asian Caucus and Don Brown of AHANA for inviting me to your school, and encouraging students to come out today. I am really heartwarmed that Asian Pacific American students are interested in learning about their history, their culture, their language, and that of other people's history, culture, language. I have chosen the topic - "Expanding Our Horizons, Decolonizing Our Minds and Crossing over borders." I feel this is the task for Asian American students today. Those in power and society itself, want us to have a limited outlook, cocoon ourselves from others, withdraw within ourselves, not interact with nor trust others, and narrow our perspective. A polarization has been taking place, dividing us from one another. How do we challenge this? Why must we challenge this?

Actually, American history has been one continuous narrative of events that have divided us - by race, color, class, gender, religion, politics, culture, region, and even accents. Americans are a divided people because America wants us divided. Americans do not look at one another as equals, or consider one another as brothers, sisters, neighbors. And I feel the basis for this is because of racism and slavery that began with America's birth. Racism has contaminated life in these United States, has tainted its institutions, deprived and denied its people who have been targeted and marginalized, stigmatized and looked down upon, most often because of color/race/national origin. History has shown this over and over again. Sadly, we Asian/PacificIslanders, while having been victims, have also been influenced by negative aspects of Euro-American ideas and thoughts. At the same time, we cannot blame everything with an American tag on the ills of society. Oftimes it could be our own frailties. But we must change the course of American history. And we are changing it, little by little. All of you are changing it, thankfully, because you are aware and concerned. You would not be organizing these wonderful events called Asian Pacific American Heritage Months, except for the fact that you want to bring APA people together and discuss the issues that pertain to you. APAs back in the 60's were the pioneers in this movement. I am glad that your generation is continuing the legacy.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign excluded reporters for the Bay Area's two largest ethnic newspapers from a fundraiser Friday at the Sheraton Palace Hotel -- a perceived snub that led to days of harsh coverage.

"Our main concern is open access for Chinese media and other ethnic media in this presidential campaign," said Joyce Chen, news editor for Sing Tao, a daily published in Chinese. "We stand by our commitment to serve our readers and our community, which often lack access from government and exposure from mainstream English (language) media."

Readers in the Chinese community have an intense loyalty to Sing Tao and the World Journal, said Sandy Close, head of New America Media, a national ethnic media coalition based in San Francisco.

"If they're disrespected by a candidate, no matter what the security conditions, space requirements and pressures they were under, (campaign officials) should move to remedy it immediately," said Close, who counseled the Clinton campaign when it sought her advice this weekend. "If they move quickly, they can use it to build a bridge, not burn a bridge."

Reporters from Sing Tao and Chinese-language daily World Journal, as well as the smaller China Press were denied entry to the noon fundraiser.

Some communities are effectively in a political blind spot, where not only their speech, but the very existence of their voice, is obscured and marginalized. They have difficulty finding an audience, not only because audience preferences are dominated by mainstream perspectives, but also because any potentially receptive listeners won't know of the communities' perspectives or even think to look for them. Such communities cannot benefit from the Web's low entry barriers and search costs. If no one knows you're speaking, no one will look you up on Google, and certainly no one is going to link to your site, even if many people might actually be inclined to do so.

For the most part, Asian Americans exist in a political blind spot. Widely misperceived as perpetual foreigners, Asian Americans are rarely recognized as active and legitimate participants in the American political process and contributors to American political discourse. As a result, politicians courting the Asian American community don't seem to engage in any kind of research or reflection on Asian American perspectives, as they invariably would when speaking to other interest groups.

Democrat James Webb's Senate campaign accused Sen. George Allen (R) of making demeaning comments Friday to a 20-year-old Webb volunteer of Indian descent.

S.R. Sidarth, a senior at the University of Virginia, had been trailing Allen with a video camera to document his travels and speeches for the Webb campaign. During a campaign speech Friday in Breaks, Virginia, near the Kentucky border, Allen singled out Sidarth and called him a word that sounded like "Macaca."

"This fellow here over here with the yellow shirt, Macaca, or whatever his name is. He's with my opponent. He's following us around everywhere. And it's just great. We're going to places all over Virginia, and he's having it on film and its great to have you here and you show it to your opponent because he's never been there and probably will never come."

After telling the crowd that Webb was raising money in California with a "bunch of Hollywood movie moguls," Allen again referenced Sidarth, who was born and raised in Fairfax County.

"Lets give a welcome to Macaca, here. Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia," said Allen, who then began talking about the "war on terror."

Novice candidate Jennifer Kim, who entered the race as a young unknown but outraised and outsmarted three competitors, landed a seat Saturday on the Austin City Council.

She beat former Sierra Club employee and 2003 candidate Margot Clarke in a race observers say boiled down to a battle between the staunch environmentalism of the past and the moderate, business-friendly slant of today's council.

LOWELL, Mass. -- Shortly after becoming an American citizen last year, Van Chim voted in his first election.

The 39-year-old machine operator and Lowell resident cast his ballot for U.S. Sen. John Kerry, and said he expects to vote in the City Council elections on Nov. 8.

“I want to vote,” he said with a shrug and a smile when asked why he decided to register. “It was good.”

Voting is still a rare feat for most of Lowell's estimated 30,000 residents of Cambodian descent. But more than 750 Cambodian-Americans registered to vote in the year prior to February, according to officials with the Lowell Cambodian-American Voting Project.

Resignations, scandal, defeat threaten to cut political fortunes

By Vanessa Hua and Rachel Gordon
©2005 San Francisco Chronicle
April 24, 2005

When City Assessor-Recorder Mabel Teng announced earlier this month that she was resigning, a stark reality emerged for Asian Americans: Their elected representation at City Hall will be cut in half.

In a city where nearly a third of the residents are Asian American, with Chinese Americans accounting for the largest bloc at about 20 percent, the community is still fighting to make its political clout match its numbers.

Other than Teng, the only other Asian American holding elected office at City Hall is Supervisor Fiona Ma, who represents the Sunset and Parkside districts. In the late 1990s, there were three supervisors on the 11-member board, an all-time high.

Population gains slowly taking hold

By Cindy Chang
©2005 San Gabriel Valley Tribune
May 14, 2005

It has been more than two decades since immigrants from Taiwan and Hong Kong began their massive influx into the San Gabriel Valley. Yet Asians have not achieved political power anywhere close to their numerical dominance.

A smattering of Asians sit on local school boards and city councils. Two of the area's representatives in the state assembly are Chinese American.

But of the eight area cities with majority or near-majority Asian populations, only Monterey Park and Walnut have more than one Asian city council member.

40 Years After "Bloody Sunday," A Promise Still Unfulfilled

In 1964, there were only approximately 300 African Americans in public office nationwide, including just three in Congress. There are now more than 9,100 black elected officials, including 43 members of Congress, the largest number ever. The VRA also has opened the political process for many of the more than 6,000 Latino public officials that have been elected and appointed nationwide, including approximately 260 elected at the state or federal level, 27 of whom serve in Congress. And Native Americans, Asians and others who have historically encountered harsh barriers to full political participation also have benefited greatly.

A year ago, Mayor Michael Bloomberg joined Korean-American entrepreneurs in Queens to declare that a proposed industrial project symbolized "the strength of the city's diversity" and would create hundreds of new jobs.

Eight months after the Feb. 3, 2004, announcement of the College Point Wholesale Development initiative, the mayor abandoned the project. Both then and now, some Korean-American entrepreneurs employed words such as "unfair" and "disappointed" to describe their response to Bloomberg's about-face.

When people talk about the L.A. mayoral race, four voter blocs are almost always discussed: African Americans, Latinos, Jews, and Republicans. Yet one of the largest groups in the city is rarely mentioned: Asian Americans.

The 2000 census revealed that Asian Americans represent about 10% of the city's population. When it takes as little as 25% of the vote for a mayoral candidate to make a runoff, 10% matters.

SA's Asian community emerges as a voting bloc

Pham Van Phuc's family made the front pages of local newspapers on April 25, 1975, after flying to San Antonio International Airport from a refugee camp in Arkansas, less than a week before the fall of Saigon in South Vietnam. Pham, his wife My, and their 10 children had fled Saigon ahead of a tide of Viet Cong soldiers who would soon raise a North Vietnamese flag over the presidential palace, where Pham had served as chief of staff to South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu.

"We have lost everything," Pham told reporters. "We are starting over; we even lost all our savings in the bank (in Saigon). But we are happy to be here."

Heflin challenge could reverberate statewide

By Amy Smith
©2005 The Austin Chronicle
January 28, 2005

By the time the Lunar New Year rolls in early next month, the state's Asian-American community may well have a whole new perspective on Texas politics.

Perhaps it's a long shot, but the Year of the Rooster could bring about a dramatic shift in the voting patterns of Asian Americans, who typically vote conservatively but not necessarily as a one-party bloc. Now, thanks to the Republican Party's obstreperous efforts to oust the first Vietnamese-American ever elected to the Texas Legislature, the Asian vote could become the Democrats' secret weapon.

The GOP's problem with Houston Rep. Hubert Vo is not his ethnic heritage but his party. Vo is a Democrat who narrowly defeated Talmadge Heflin, a powerful 22-year Republican incumbent, and last session's chair of the mighty House Appropriations Committee.

Sam Yoon, the first Asian-American to run for Boston City Council, can tick off Asian-Americans who have ventured onto the political stage in Massachusetts on just one hand: a Newton alderman, a Lowell city councilor, a Randolph selectman, a couple of others who took a stab at office and didn't succeed.

Though Asian-American communities across the state are growing, they are not making themselves heard in the political arena. Voter registration levels among Asian-Americans lag, and relatively few Asian-Americans run for office, which further depresses political participation, Yoon and others said.

When he was 9 years old, Robert Takeo Matsui turned to one of his friends in downtown Sacramento and said, "You know, I really don't like being Japanese." Matsui hated that he and his parents had been forced into internment camps along with 120,000 other Japanese Americans branded "enemy aliens" by the U.S. government during World War II.

And he hated "the teasing, the characterization of Asian Americans with buck teeth and slanted eyes that he would run into in the post-World War II era," recalled Norman Mineta, his longtime friend and colleague in Congress.

Internment camp experience shaped Matsui's political sensibilities

Sacramento's 13-term Democratic congressman Robert Matsui, who as a 5-month-old infant was sent with his family to an internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II, has died at age 63 of complications from a rare disorder, his family said Sunday.

Matsui, who headed his party's unsuccessful campaign to retake the House in the November election and who was expected to play a key role in debates on changing Social Security in the new Congress that opens Tuesday, died Saturday night at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., a Washington suburb.

The claims of western values are mocked by Iraq and the rise of Asia

Martin Jacques
©2004 The Guardian (Manchester, UK)
May 15, 2004

Underpinning the argument in support of the invasion of Iraq has been the idea of the moral virtue of the west. In contrast to Saddam Hussein's brutal dictatorship, the "coalition" espouses the values of democracy and human rights. The invasion of Iraq represented the high watermark of western moral virtue. In retrospect, it is clear that the idea had been gaining momentum since two coincidental events in the 1970s: the end of the Vietnam war, which profoundly scarred the reputation of the United States, and the beginning of the modern era of globalisation. With Vietnam out of the way, and globalisation the new bearer of western and, above all, American values, the latter found an ever-expanding global audience, a process enormously boosted by the collapse of communism. Democracy and the market became the new western mantra, applicable to every society, wherever they might be and whatever their stage of development. Following its implosion, the former communist world, at least in Europe, gratefully embraced the new philosophy, even though in Russia it was to prove a disaster, as Roman Abramovich's monstrous, ill-gotten wealth only serves to illustrate. The process of globalisation came to be seen, during the 90s, as virtually synonymous with westernisation. There was one model of modernity - the western model - and globalisation was its natural vehicle. As East Asia has modernised at breakneck speed over the past three decades, its progress has almost invariably been interpreted as a simple process of westernisation.

Race and Election 2004

The 2004 presidential contest was a warning shot across the bow of all progressives.

While the president and the Republican pundits vastly overstate their "mandate," progressives need to become clear on the motion of racial politics if we are to get ourselves in shape for the coming battles.

Many spin doctors would have us believe that the story of the 2004 election turns on evangelicals and moral values, the better to advance their rightwing agenda in both the Democratic and Republican parties, not to speak of the halls of power.

But an examination of the exit polls shows something very different (though not at all new): the centrality of race in U.S. politics. The bad news is that the Republicans, trumpeting their program of aggressive war and racism, swung the election by increasing their share of the white vote to 58 percent. This represents a four-point gain over 2000; a 12-point gain over 1996 and a grim18-point gain over 1992.

New Homeland Chief Fathered Daughter in Korea

Bernard Kerik, the man tasked with protecting the United States from the threat of terrorist attacks, fathered a daughter with a South Korean woman while serving on the peninsula in the mid-1970s, U.S. media reported over the weekend.

Kerik, who was selected to replace Tom Ridge as secretary of the Homeland Security Department on Thursday, had the baby with a woman identified as Sun-ja after arriving in South Korea as a 19-year-old military policeman in December 1974, according to several reports.

The baby, named Lisa, was born in 1975. But Kerik deserted her and her mother when he left the country in February 1976.

BEDMINSTER, N.J. -- Having lived in the United States for nearly 30 years, Zaheer Jan thought his credentials as an American were beyond question.

He helped design a massive pipeline project to bring Alaskan natural gas to the Midwest. He rallied neighborhood residents against a disruptive highway project, and serves as president of his condominium association.

A Democrat making his first run for elected office in this solidly Republican suburb that counts publishing magnate and former presidential candidate Steve Forbes, and former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean among its residents, Jan nonetheless stood a good chance of winning a seat on the township committee in the Nov. 2 election.

But the night before, virtually every home in Bedminster received a campaign flier from the two Republican candidates claiming Jan and his running mate, Allen Mass, were being funded by "foreign nationals, not local residents." The implication could not be clearer to Jan, who was born in India but grew up in Pakistan.

Racial prejudice is part of what fuels the Clinton campaign scandal

By Robert Wright
Slate
January 2, 1997

The New York Times runs a lot of headlines about scandals, but rarely does it run a headline that is a scandal. On Saturday, Dec. 28, it came pretty close. The headline over its lead Page One story read: "DEMOCRATS HOPED TO RAISE $7 MILLION FROM ASIANS IN U.S." On the inside page where the story continued, the headline was: "DEMOCRATS' GOAL: MILLIONS FROM ASIANS." Both headlines were wrong. The story was actually about a 1996 Democratic National Committee document outlining a plan to raise (as the lead paragraph put it) "$7 million from Asian-Americans."

LIHUE, Hawaii - A member of the Kauai Police Commission has apologized for referring to the new police chief in an e-mail as "Hop-Sing."

Leon Gonsalves Sr. said his e-mail was meant to be private and not hurtful to either new Police Chief K.C. Lum nor Deputy Chief Ron Venneman, whom he called "Little Joe" in the e-mail.

Hop-Sing was the name of the Chinese cook on the television show "Bonanza" and Little Joe was the son of a rancher on the show. Some people consider the Hop-Sing character to be a negative racial stereotype.

DETROIT — In an election already marred by provisional ballot challenges, numerous reports of voter discrimination from nonpartisan poll monitoring groups underline the possible flaws in the nation’s voting systems.

Further impeding the voting process were accounts from student polling volunteers who said that ballot challengers were intimidating voters, signifying how fierce partisanship of the election permeated polling sites.

WASHINGTON -- The next Congress will look slightly more like the real America, with more women, Hispanics and blacks, including the first black man to enter the Senate in a quarter century.

In addition to senator-elect Barack Obama, D-Ill., only the third black ever to be elected by popular vote to the Senate, newly elected senators Ken Salazar, D-Colo., and Mel Martinez, R-Fla., will become the only Hispanic-Americans in the Senate.

The House will see the arrival of Bobby Jindal, R-La., the son of immigrants from India and only the second Indian-American to serve in Congress.

I know that we would like to question the whole of democracy. I can't believe Bush won either, but there isn't time to despair. What is needed now is action, not hopelessness. What is important is that there has been tremendous progress in mobilizing people to create change. Remember, more voters turned out this year than in the last three decades. Although it might be said that we can't expect change overnight, there really was a very rapid shift in the way we view politics. We have become unafraid of voicing our opinions, using our power, pooling our resources, and allowing our differences to aid us instead of keeping us apart.

These new ways of looking at ourselves politically redefine what it means to be an American. It takes what used to be a very passive identity and turned us all into revolutionaries. In a short time, we activated activism, something that lay dormant in many of us and had not been awakened until now.

With Election Day nearing, people are beginning to show their support for their candidates through bumper stickers of "Vote Kerry" or "4 More Years!" lawn signs and coming together at rallies.

Vietnamese-American filmmaker Timothy Linh Bui decided to show his democratically powered opinion by launching an anti-Bush Web site and selling t-shirts.

"This war in Iraq is a big mess. We went there for the wrong reasons and now that there are is no proof of weapons of mass destruction, we can't get out of it, and Bush was the one that got us there," said Bui, calling from his Los Angeles home. Bui wrote, produced and directed the hit movies "Green Dragon" and "Three Seasons."