Asian political participation is possible and key

When I began research for this book five years ago, I had a somewhat different purpose in mind. I was to focus on developing a theory of political behavior that can help explain the apparent disparity between Asian American economic and political accomplishments observed in the census data. I was to move quickly from a brief review of the general history of Asians in America and rely heavily on statistical analysis of survey data to interpret the meanings of being Asian American as compared to other American groups. And I was not to question assumptions of their relative passivity and complacency, but to take them as a given. This approach soon crumbled as I tried to reconstruct the group’s history of community formation in the new land. I could not help but be drawn in by the sophisticated and audacious means the men and women who came before me used to adapt to and to fight the system. The stories of how these unsung heroes and heroines negotiated with both a repressive system and with other racial and ethnic groups have loomed larger in this project than I have planned. It is impossible to try to present a more comprehensive profile of the political participation of Asian Americans without paying proper attention to these decisions and actions. It has been a luxury and an awesome experience to share their stories and learn about myself, my community, and my adopted country. What is America? Part of any speculation about the future of America depends on developing a more accurate picture of the past and present status of its major racial and ethnic groups. Although Asian immigrants have resided in the United States since at least the mid1800s and they were the nation’s fastest growing minority group in the 1990s, their stories of exclusion, adaptation, and participation have been largely missing from scholarly discussions on such vital issues as race and diversity. This book aims to fill that void by offering an interdisciplinary interpretation of the political experience of Asians in America that bridges research in Political Science and Asian American Studies. It will unravel stereotypes and misconceptions about the supposedly monotonous, conformist, and uniformly inconsequential character of Asian American participation in U.S. politics and explore the meanings of political participation by Asians in multiracial/multicultural America and in both historical and contemporary settings.1 The last fifteen years have seen the emergence of excellent single authored historical accounts in Asian American Studies (e.g., Daniels 1988; Ichioka 1988; Jensen 1988; Takaki 1989; Chan 1991; Yu 1992; Wei 1993; Friday 1994; Okihiro 1991, 1994; Yung 1995; Takahashi 1997; Tchen 1999). But formal, quantitative analyses of the sociopolitical status of Asian Americans have been scarce. This book attempts to strike a balance between the two approaches. It opens with an overview of the multifaceted and multiethnic group history of political participation prior to 1965 and follows with an examination of issues at both organizational and mass political levels that relate to the creation of a distinct, socially constructed race and a transnational and multiethnic community in contemporary America. To compare the patterns of political attitudes and behavior between Asians and those of non-Hispanic whites, Blacks, and Latinos,2 I analyze an extensive set of archival data on American public opinion collected in the 1990s that contains a significant number of Asians in the sample. To account for the increasing diversity in the ethnic and national origin of Asian Americans, I make comparisons between populations of, for example, Chinese and Filipinos, and Chinese and Koreans and Vietnamese. I also pay special attention to the remarkable progress of Asian American women and the lingering barriers they face compared to Asian men and other groups of men and women in becoming equal partners in U.S. society and polity. The results of this project should provide not only benchmark data on the political participation of Asian Americans but also a more comprehensive understanding of the continuity and change in the status of Asian Americans and their relationships with other American groups in multiracial/multicultural America than has been available to date. One thesis of the project is that, contrary to a triangulated group image of cultural docility, socioeconomic success, and political complacency, peoples of Asian descent have always been able to interact with a transpacific system of multiple forms of repression to bargain for their best possible space in American society and polity. Rather than being passive objects of social forces, Asian American men and women have been pragmatic and calculating actors who have adopted a multifaceted style of politics to maximize their chances of survival and their interests. Prior to the eras of modern civil rights and electoral politics, they manifested a variety of political strategies ranging from active resistance to accommodation, of tactics ranging from protest to litigation, and of styles encompassing both the left and the right ends of the political spectrum. Their explicit forms of political expression reflected the confluence of a complex dynamic between internal community structure and external legal, social, political, and international context. Their participation not only earned them a rightful place to survive and thrive in America but helped transform the identity of both the foreign- and the U.S.-born generations into one that is both ethnic and American. Based primarily on theories of racial formation and panethnicization, I argue in Chapter 2 that it takes a strand of coalition-building movements for liberation, justice, and empowerment at the organizational level in the post-1965 era to transform the ethnic-specific group identity into one that is panethnic in nature. The chapter depicts the onerous birth and growth of the pan–Asian American community and identity after 1965, in arenas moving from the margins to the mainstreams of American politics as well as from ethnic-specific group politics to panethnic and transnational politics. These transformations were made possible by the drastic expansion of the community population base since the passage of the 1965 U.S. Immigration Act, but they were also made more difficult by the subsequent rise in the diversification and fragmentation of the population. Nevertheless, concurrent changes in the domestic sociopolitical and global economic context threatening the primary identity and interests of the localized community created organizing momentum for a more coherent community, which demography alone does not predict. The fallacy of the cultural deficiency hypothesis in predicting Asian American political behavior is further attacked in Chapter 3 by examining the situation of Hawaiian Asians in mainstream electoral politics. The goal of the chapter, however, is to illustrate another thesis of the book: Political participation by Asian Americans matters, either as immigrants or citizens, men or women, leaders or followers of organized community, student, and labor groups, or as governing elites, voters, or other participants in the formal electoral process. Both the Asia-born and the U.S.-born protested immigration exclusion and other discriminatory legislative and administrative actions and contributed to the establishment of important precedents in civil rights litigation. Participation in community-based and social movement organizations helped construct and reconstruct ethnic identity in America. In this chapter, I argue that, whereas the presence of Asians in Congress was highly significant to the uplifting of Asian American political efficacy, the more important role of these men and women sent to Congress from the Pacific states has been their contribution to constructing a more viable political community for Asian Americans nationwide. Acting as more than a reflection of constituency opinions, many took it upon themselves to advocate for justice and rights for Asians and other communities of color. Their participation in government, in turn, helped mobilize mass participation in the electoral process. Evidence of support for the second thesis can be found in the remaining chapters. Both organizational- and mass-level results demonstrate, among other findings, that given proper social and political context and equal access to resources, political participation can help forge a larger sense of community beyond racial, ethnic, class, and gender boundaries for Asians as well as for other groups of Americans. Key to transcending primordial boundaries is the presence of bridging institutions such as interethnic or interracial couples and multiethnic or integrated organizations. These institutions have facilitated the forging of cross-ethnic and -racial coalitions in both historical and contemporary times based either on common class status, anti-racist ideology, shared neighborhoods, economic interest, or friendship and marital ties. I also find that becoming U.S. citizens and voters or getting integrated into the political system can help reduce the racial, ethnic, and gender gaps in political opinions between Asians and others as well as among Asian subgroups. Last but not least, I emphasize in Chapter 6 that, like Asian American men (whose presence dominated the majority of the group’s history), Asian American women engaged in numerous incidences of individual and collective political action to fight against repression based on ethnicity, race, class, and gender and for democracy and freedom in both the United States and their ancestral homelands. They were essential in preserving and transmitting ethnic cultures and enabling social and political mobility of the community in America. Nevertheless, for reasons arising from societies of both the East and the West, the political experience of Asian Americans has been mostly an uphill battle against multiple forms of oppression in race, ethnicity, class, and gender. Outside of Hawaii, there is a severe case of Asian underrepresentation in the American political system, even though the extent of political incorporation varies greatly from one locality to another and it does not necessarily correspond to Asian population share or size in each community. This reflects, in part, the lack of citizenship and voting registration of individual Asians. More importantly, it implies the reality of the American racial and class systems and the paradoxical and ambivalent racial status of Asian Americans as simultaneously superachievers in education and income, underachievers in politics and participation, and constant outsiders to mainstream culture and institutions. The participation potential of Asian Americans has been suppressed by discriminatory legislation regarding immigration, citizenship, education, and other social and economic rights throughout history. The divide-and-conquer policy has prevented Asians from forming partnerships with one another. In the post-1965 era, the transformations of community population structure as well as the political and economic restructuring on both sides of the Pacific have presented new opportunities for, but also challenges to, the conception of community identity and citizenship as well as the efficacy of panethnicbased empowerment strategy. Braving the confluence of these forces, how have Asian American men and women of various ethnicity, class, nativity, and other backgrounds been able to express themselves politically and cooperate with men and women of other racial and ethnic origins? The quantitative part of this project strives to provide a more accurate and sophisticated understanding of the contours of Asian American political attitudes and behavior than currently exists. I present in the tables summary statistics of behavior domains that are as diversified as data permit. I also discuss results of multivariate regression analysis to help distinguish or specify the unique influence of race, ethnicity, class, and gender and their interrelationships. However, because of the lack of nationally representative data and the multitude of methodological issues associated with the surveying of Asian American political opinion (as discussed in the Appendix), the answers provided in the statistical analyses can only be tentative, and readers are asked to exercise extreme caution when interpreting results.