Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen
NOBODY KNOWS THE TROUBLE I’VE SEEN: The Roots to the Black-Asian Conflict Through a Socio-Historical Comparative Analysis Between Asian Americans and African Americans (also titled “Political Détente through the Medium of Jazz: Notes from a Work in Progress”) by Fred Wei-Han Ho, originally published June 19-25, 1991, The City Sun, an African American-owned Brooklyn, NY-based newspaper
When my Afro-Asian Music Ensemble’s debut Soulnote recording was released in late 1985/early 1986, Martin Johnson, a young African American reader, did a feature on me in The City Sun. A reader, Yusef Salaam, wrote a letter to the paper noting the political comments I had made about “jazz” (1) but took exception to my use of the term “Afro” in the title of my band. To him, an “Afro” was a hairdo; he preferred that I use the phrase “African-Asian”.
It was not until much later (1990) in another feature done on me by Esther Iverem, another African American arts writer for New York Newsday, that I publicly clarified my use of the term “Afro-Asian” as inspired by and taken from the Afro-Asian Unity Conference” of Bandung of the mid-1950s. This was the initial summit meeting of leaders from the newly independent nation-states and anti-colonial movements of Africa and Asia that included Julius Nyerere, Chou En-lai, Kwame Nkrumah, Nehru, among others. The conference gave birth to the Non-Aligned Movement or Third World” (not “third” as in lesser than first or second, but as an alternative to the two major power blocs of the West/Europe-USA and the East/Soviet bloc).
I had begun my ensemble to express musically a vision of unity between the cultural-socio-political struggles of African Americans (the originators and innovators of jazz”) and Asian Americans. Since my teen-age years, the Black Power movement (particularly the leading ideas of Malcolm X) and the Black Arts Movement (especially the poetry of Baraka, Sanchez, Scott-Heron and the Last Poets, and the music of Mingus, Coltrane, Shepp, Parker, Ellington and Cal Massey) greatly inspired my social consciousness and identity as a Chinese American (to understand that I, as an Asian in America, suffered as a victim of white racism and the need to wage a comprehensive struggle to end this systematic oppression).
Because I did not grow up in a community with many other Chinese Asian Americans, I looked to the revolutionary thought and cultural expression of the growing African American intellectual and artistic community who came to teach in the colleges of the Amherst, Massachusetts area in the early and mid-1970s (including Max Roach, Archie Shepp, Sonia Sanchez, Reggie Workman and others). I immersed myself in the music, literature and political activism of Black Power, finding analogous conditions and perspectives in the struggles of Asian Americans. Since those days, and having embarked on a career as a composer/baritone saxophonist/band leader, I have sought to promote the solidarity of Asian Americans and African Americans (musically, by forging what I have termed “an Afro-Asian New American Multicultural Music”).
The recent, highly media-sensationalized “Black-Korean” conflict of Brooklyn and other altercations between Asian small-business owners and African Americans have raised the question: How united are people of color? To the more politically consciousness, the media preoccupation with conflicts and divisions among people of color seemed to exacerbate disunity rather than offer a perspective as to the source of the problems. In these incidents, the media seemed to revel in pointing out that people of color could be racist toward one another, without the active presence of white people. In his “Do The Right Thing” film, Spike Lee seemed to suggest that the Korean grocer would be the next target of the African American community’s anger and frustration. While Korean merchants had given hefty financial contributions to the electoral campaigns of Jesse Jackson and the successful mayoral bid of David Dinkins, African American political leadership in unifying and “healing” the conflicts has been minimal at best.
In my view, neither Asian Americans nor African Americans are to blame for the prejudices, ignorance, misunderstanding and racism (2) held against the other. In a white-racist, oppressive society, the victims of that racism and oppression can be expected to harbor the racist attitudes, xenophobia and even self-hatred fostered by segregation, Eurocentric education and endemic powerlessness, which fuel frustration, fear and mistrust. What is needed from educators, activists and intellectuals is dialogue and knowledge about each other’s experience and social history of oppression and struggle rather than convenient, copout (quick) explanations of “cultural differences”. (The “cultural differences” thesis presumes that what is needed is greater cultural sensitivity” and not political consciousness and organizing around common interests as peoples of color).
The primary difference is that the experience and historical process of slavery forged African Americans into a distinct nationality while Asian Americans are a composite of diverse minority nationalities: Chinese American, Japanese American, Korean American, Filipino American, Thai Pakistani, Asian Indian, Cambodian, Hmong, Vietnamese, etc.(3) Generations of slavery fused the diverse West African peoples brought to the Americas into one common people who no longer trace their ancestral origin to a specific West African people; the varying languages of Yoruba, Ibo, Wolof, etc. were replaced by the language of the slave master (English in the British colonies). Their identity, religion, music and history were no longer any specific African tradition, but became definitively African American. Thus, some contemporary African Americans, endeavoring to reclaim their African heritage, divest themselves of “slave names” such as Smith, Jones, Johnson, Washington, etc. for a range of self-identifications, such as X’s, Islamic and other non-European adoptions.
Asian Americans are a plurality of nationalities that retain their ancestral family names and specific national cultural heritages including language, customs and traditions, as well as national histories. Chinese Americans are quite different from Japanese Americans, who are also quite different from the more than a dozen varying Asian/Pacific Islander minority nationalities in the United States. They are Wongs, Chins, Yamaguchis, Salvadores, Parks, etc. Obviously, the first generation of Asian peoples in American retain more of their ancestral identity, while subsequent generations in the United States experience identity crises and cultural confusion.
Under slavery, African Americans could not hold illusions about their status in U.S. society. They were simply property, a condition maintained by total force for virtually two and a half centuries prior to the mid-19thcentury. Asian immigration into the United States began in the mid-1800s, and was the result of a combination of what social historians term push/pull” factors. “Pushed” by the devastation of their ancestral homelands from crushing poverty, semi colonial penetration, government and social corruption and varying types of cheap-labor recruitment (a semi slavery or indentured servitude). “Pulled” by hyped promises of America as the “Mountain of Gold” (the Chinese expression for the United States was literally that) and promises for opportunities to make a new and better life. Because of this combination of ambivalent, contradictory impulses, between the sojourner (who came to work with the idea of returning to Asia) and the immigrant (who came to stay), Asian Americans reflect ambivalent responses to their conditions in America, rooted to the questions: Is American home? Immigration has prefigured as a critical and dominant characteristic in the Asian American experience.
In U.S. society, one is either white, Black or foreign. American racism has lumped its Latino, Asian and even Native American groups into “other”. Even fourth-generation Asian Americans still face this condition of subtle racism when told to “go back where you came from” or that they “speak good English”, as well as not-so-subtle racism as targets of racist violence.
Prior to the 20th century, the concentration of African Americans had been the “Black Belt” region of the South. For Asian Americans (mostly Chinese until the 1900s), it was the West Coast and Hawaii. Even well into the 20th century, there was little social intercourse or contact between these peoples, except for a small population of resettled Chinese laborers in the South as a short-lived experiment to replace slave labor. Two significant contrasts between African Americans and Asian Americans were evident in late 19th century U.S. society: the failure of Reconstruction for African Americans and the period of exclusion for the Chinese in America, which eventually befell to all Asian immigrants until well into the second half of this century.
The smashing of Reconstruction by what DuBois noted as an alliance between Northern finance capital and Southern agrarian interests thwarted the possibility of genuine emancipation for the African American people. Furthermore, without “40 acres and a mule” – the granting to African Americans basic capital through ownership of land and basic means of production – African American economic (as well as political) empowerment was restricted and suffocated. While a tiny African American middle class (petite bourgeoisie) did emerge under segregation, it was not until the Great Migrations of World Wars I and II to Northern industrial urban centers did African Americans achieve some measure of social mobility and economic advancement. Indeed, the proletarization of the African American masses, with increasing presence and activity in the burgeoning labor movements and trade unions, was probably the chief means of economic advancement. African Americans joined the ranks of trade union workers in steel, auto, municipal and public-sector employment. African American economic life, though having a distinct segregated market, increasingly became part and parcel of the general functioning of the U.S. capitalist, industrial and urban economy.
This was not the case for Asian Americans. The anti-Asian and Yellow Peril racist movements of the late 19th century were in large part led by the white labor movement, culminating in a series of Exclusion Acts passed by Congress that halted Asian immigration to the United States with the exception of members of the merchant class and students. Heretofore, Asian laborers were overwhelmingly single, young men. The few Chinese women in the mainland United States invariably were prostitutes. The halting of immigration made it impossible for the wives or families of these male laborers to join them. Thus, these single Chinese male workers were condemned to an enforced existence as a bachelor society, unable to find love and to procreate. It was tantamount to genocide. Consequently, the Chinese population in the United States severely declined from 1890 until the mid-1960s.
The ghettoization of the Chinese, from a rural/farming-based existence, to Chinatown urban, isolated communities, led to the formation of the ubiquitous Chinese restaurant and laundry trade – employment in which the Chinese would not find themselves in competition with hostile white labor. The Chinese and other Asian laborers were effectively denied proletarization; confined to marginal small business economic activity, dispersed to West Coast cities such as San Francisco (which were not industrial centers). Since their days as workers on the transcontinental railroad, the Chinese have tried their hand at every possible kind of work, only to be scapegoated and targeted by hostile white labor. They were eventually excluded from virtually all forms of economic activity except for a small handful of occupations. By World War II, African Americans, however, had become a significant presence in key industries and unions.
As noted earlier, merchants were one of the classes of Asian immigrants who were not excluded. Trade between Asia and the United States made for the presence of a merchant, entrepreneurial class in the various Asian communities scattered across America. These merchants ran the social-political-economic life of these communities through clan-based merchant associations. The Asian continent was penetrated by European colonization to varying extents (from total colonization as in the case of India to total independence as in Japan, which made for Japan’s undisturbed development into an independent industrial capitalist power by the 20th century whereas most of the non-European world had its economic course of history dominated and disrupted by the West). Africa, in contrast, was thoroughly colonized; its very borders redrawn and parceled out to European powers. Asian merchants, one the one hand, serviced a unique Asian American market in these ghetto, urban, isolated communities (the demand for Asian foods an other cultural-based products, sharing a common language); on the other hand, import-export trade influenced relations with the mainstream of American economic and political life; e.g., the silk trade was big business until the development of nylon.
African Americans had no African merchant class that maintained a distinctive connection to Africa. Both African Americans and Asian Americans have been greatly influenced by the geo-political changes in Africa and Asia, respectively. Malcolm X so forcefully made the connection:
“There was a time in this country when they used to use the expression about Chinese, He doesn’t have a Chinaman’s chance.’…You don’t hear that saying nowadays…Just as a strong China has produced a respected Chinaman, a strong Africa will produce a respected Black man anywhere that Black man goes on this earth.” (Malcolm X: By Any Means Necessary, Pathfinder Press, 1970, p. 136.)
Middle class Asian Americans grew in part due to the influx of merchants and educated classes. African American mobility was largely a result of unionism and industrial urban concentration.
The greatest changes and progress for both groups occurred during the 1960s. Asian immigration restrictions were finally removed in 1965 by the liberalization of the Immigration and Naturalizations Quota, restoring Asian entries to the same number as other groups. Much of this change occurred in the context of the civil-rights movement, led by African Americans. The byproducts of the African American civil-rights and Black Power movements benefited most of America. A college-educated, professional African American middle class grew dramatically. Asian families could now immigrate to the United States. They brought a lifetime of savings as start-up investment capital, though most continued to labor in Asian ghetto-based industries such as restaurant, garment and service occupations.
In the past decade, Asian immigration to the United States has been the largest of any group, doubling the Asian American population. Much of this immigration has been to the urban centers, with an extensive diversity of economic and educational backgrounds, national origins (with large numbers of Filipinos – the fast-growing Asian/Pacific group – Koreans; Southeast Asians). These new immigrants commonly settle in areas bordering on longtime African American or Latino ghettos. Many start up small businesses from their savings, as they are unable to find jobs commensurate with their education or training. Thus, it is not uncommon to find a Korean engineer or technician, unable to find work in this area, to invest a pool of savings in order to start a grocery or dry-cleaning business, working long hours and employing several family members.
A large part of the xenophobia against these recent Asian immigrant stems in part from the prevailing Model Minority Myth or stereotype that Asians are innately driven toward super achievement. Some Asians themselves buy into this myth, attributing it to “cultural values” such as Confucianism, the education ethic, respect for family, etc. Educational achievement and attainment is often viewed as a means to economic advancement, and on a limited lever, it works. But education and income are not a measure of real economic and political power. The presence of successful Asian Americans does not equate with power on the level of the monopoly bourgeoisie, which is still white.
Black success stories are also not a measure of the overall condition for the masses of African Americans. The number of Black millionaires is about 100,000 – mostly athletes and entertainers. The presence of a Bill Cosby, Eddie Murphy or Kareem Abdul Jabbar represents only individual wealth, not corporate monopoly power. Neither the Asian American nor the African American wealthy represents any real power or competition to U.S. corporate capitalism. Just to demonstrate the fallacy of equating educational attainment an economic power, according to the 1980 census, Chinese American males were the second most highly educated group (after Asian Indians) in years of education, but they also were the least-paid for that level. The highest-paid group in years of education was Black women Ph.D.s!
Despite the relatively significant growth of a Black middle class since integration and affirmative action of the 1960s, the gap between the masses of African Americans and whites has widened rather than lessened. Nearly one out of every four African American males is in jail, on parole or probation. African American unemployment is double to quadruple the percentage of white unemployment. Thirty-three percent of African Americans live in poverty compared to 10 percent of whites. While African Americans are 12 percent to 15 percent of the U.S. population, they make up only 2 percent of the elected and appointed government officials (albeit this is progress from 10 years ago when the figure was less than 1 percent). The deterioration of social conditions in the United States generally (homelessness, crime, cuts in education and social programs) combined with government weakening of affirmative action and civil rights has meant even harder times for African Americans. “Last hired, first fired” remains the situation for the vast majority of African Americans.
The media-hyped “success” of Asian Americans (the Model Minority Myth) points to the relatively higher proportion of Asians in elite institutions of higher education. The jokes are that M.I.T. stands for Made in Taiwan and U.C.L.A. is University of Caucasians Living among Asians. It’s cited that Asians are 20 percent of the student body at U.C. Berkeley (but not mentioned that Asian/Pacific Islanders are about 40 percent of parts of the Bay Area). While Asians are a higher percentage of the student body at Harvard or Brown that their 4 percent of the U.S. population, it is not examined that Asians are not admitted to the proportion of their applicants; i.e., even more Asians do better than whites on standardized tests than are admitted to these schools. Asian Americans have charged that a ceiling quota has been in place, which penalizes them for “outperforming” whites. Some Asian Americans are doing well, but the majority are not well off, made up of Southeast Asian refugees living below the poverty line, working at jobs below their skills, facing language and cultural barriers and discrimination. In a study of attitudes toward race and affirmative action at San Jose State University, it was found that the greatest support for special programs for minorities was among Southeast Asian Americans! Any careful examination of the socio-economic realities for Asian/Pacific Islander Americans reveals a diversity and complexity in class bipolarity.
Finally, Asian Americans have experienced every form of oppression that African Americans have (including anti-miscegenation laws, denial of land ownership, school segregation, lynching, racist legislation) and then some! (Asians faced racist Cubic Air laws that restricted how much air they could breathe; laws that prevented them from carrying poles, as this was a common form of work; laws that restricted the length of their hair; etc.) Unlike white, European immigrants who undeniably faced discrimination and xenophobia, people of color had their oppression codified in law – i.e., institutionalized. But it is pointless to debate the degree of severity of oppression between peoples of color. As Malcolm X pointed out, it’s not whether the knife stuck in you is six inches or three inches; the point is that you’ve been stabbed and have wounds that need to be healed.
Certain forms of racism persist for Asian Americans, which African Americans no longer encounter. The Hollywood racist practice of blackface (in which whites wear Black makeup to caricaturize African Americans) has ceased, but persists for Asians in the form of yellow face or “Scotch tape Orientals” – for example, the Charlie Chan revivals, David Carradine in Kung Fu, the opera “Nixon In China”, and the current objection to Broadways’ Miss Saigon. (Native Americans and Latinos still face this odious tradition, though stereotyping has become slightly more sophisticated.)
Also in media entertainment, the interracial sex/love taboo still holds between Asian men and white women, but in the 1960s, this taboo was broken between Black men and white women. (In the film 100 Rifles, Jim Brown made love to Raquel Welch, who in fact is Chicana, but has always hidden this fact and masqueraded as a white sex symbol. In television, William Shatner/Captain Kirk, albeit forced and against his will by cruel aliens, kissed Nichelle Nichols/Lt. Uhura in an episode of Star Trek.)
African Americans and Asian American exhibit common symptoms of their oppression: self-hatred with their physical features, weak cultural identity and infatuation with things-European, ignorance about their own respective histories and struggles, disunity and jealousies, etc. The struggle to unite oppressed peoples must proceed from an informed consciousness first as victims of oppression, and subsequent clarity about the target of out struggle: the system of colonialism, white supremacy and monopoly capitalist imperialism.
Footnotes
(1). The word “jazz” is problematic, just as words “Oriental”, “Negro”, etc. – appellations that the dominant Euro-American society has put on oppressed nationalities (“people of color”). “jazz” comes from either the word “jizz” or “jass”, which referred to semen, as the music was originally common to houses of prostitution. Another explanation is that “jazz” comes from the French verb, jasser, — as New Orleans, the birthplace of the music, was a French colonial territory – which means to “chatter nonsensically”. In either case, the word “jazz” has a pejorative context, as do many terms from the legacy of colonialism and oppression. If one objects to “Afro-“, does that objection apply to such a term as Afrocentric?
(2) Some would contend that “racism” implies institutional power to oppress groups of people, and that by definition, oppressed people don’t have such power and, therefore, can’t be “racist”. However, I believe that oppressed peoples can hold “racist” ideals and thereby perpetuate their own disunity and continued victimization.
(3) The U.S. Census allows for well over a dozen entries for “Asian/Pacific Islander American”.
Notes from the author:
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EXCERPTED FROM THE SOON-TO-BE PUBLISHED AFRO ASIA: REVOLUTIONARY POLITICAL AND CULTURAL CONNECTIONS BETWEEN AFRICAN AND ASIAN AMERICANS by Fred Ho and Bill V. Mullen (Duke University Press).
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