꽤 오래 준비하고 공을 많이 들인 기사이다. 관련 논문도 최근 3년 내에 발표된 것은 거의 찾아 읽었고, 많은 사람들을 인터뷰했다. 그런데 노력했던 바에 비해서는 반도 제대로 풀어내지 못한 것 같아서 아쉽기는 하다.
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아시안 내부·소수 인종간 연대부터 한걸음씩
https://www.hani.co.kr/.../international_general/996091.html
등록 :2021-05-21
황준범 기자 사진
황준범 기자
[미국 아시안의 딜레마]
아시안 사이에서도 문화 등 큰 차이
흑인·히스패닉 시선도 곱지 않아
“최근 아시아계에 대한 혐오 급증
인종주의에 맞선 연대 관심 촉발”
미국 하원에서 아시안에 대한 증오범죄 방지법이 통과된 18일(현지시각) 주디 추 연방 하원의원이 ‘#아시안 증오를 멈춰라(#StopAsianHate)’라는 해시태그가 적힌 마스크를 쓴 채 의사당에서 열린 기자회견에 참석하고 있다. 워싱턴/ AFP 연합뉴스
미국 내 아시아계에 대한 증오를 없애려면 이들도 온전한 미국 시민이라는 인식의 전환이 필요하다. 사회 전반에 걸친 교육과 아시아계의 정치력 신장 등 상당한 시간이 드는 일이다. 최근의 아시아계 혐오·폭력 증가 및 이에 대한 관심 고조와 맞물려 우선 필요한 것은 아시아계 내부, 그리고 소수인종 간의 연대다. 하지만 이 또한 여러 걸림돌을 마주하고 있다.
우선, 아시아계 내부의 연대부터가 쉽지 않다. 출신 국가와 언어, 역사, 문화가 너무도 다양하기 때문이다. 퓨리서치센터 자료를 보면 미국 내 약 2300만명의 아시아계가 뿌리를 둔 국가는 20여개에 이른다. 중국(23%)이 가장 많고, 인도(20%), 필리핀(18%), 베트남(9%), 한국(8%), 일본(6%) 등이다. 지난해 5월 흑인 조지 플로이드가 백인 경찰의 무릎에 목이 짓눌려 숨진 뒤 미 전역에 걸쳐 지속적이고 대대적인 ‘흑인 목숨도 소중하다’(Black Lives Matter) 운동이 일었다. 이와 비교해, 지난 3월 조지아주에서 아시아계 여성 6명 등 8명이 숨진 사건은 폭발적인 운동으로까지 번지지는 못했다. 한 활동가는 “흑인들은 조상의 나라를 따지지 않고 뭉치지만 아시아계는 출신국을 묻는다”고 말했다.
아시아계 내부에서 인종 갈등에 대한 세대 차이도 있다. 장성관 미주한인유권자연대(KAGC) 사무차장은 “최근 급증한 인종주의 기반 폭력 사건에 대해 이민 1세대는 경찰력 증가와 한인 거주지역·상점 순찰 강화를 요구하는 반면, 2세대는 경찰력 증가는 흑인·히스패닉에 대한 불균형한 체포로 이어지고 인종 간 갈등을 심화할 소지가 있다고 반대하는 편”이라고 말했다. 2세대는 경찰력 증가보다는 사법당국과 지방정부의 소수인종 언어 지원 서비스나 문화 이해도 훈련 등이 더 낫다고 본다는 것이다.
소수인종 간 연대는 더욱 어렵다. 한인과 흑인의 갈등이 존재하고, 아시아계를 보는 다른 소수인종의 시선도 곱지 않다. 장 사무차장은 “블랙(흑인), 브라운(히스패닉) 사회와의 연대는 아시아계 사회의 외부적인 정치집단화 과정에서 가장 큰 과제”라며 “흑인·히스패닉 사회에서는 아시아계를 ‘우리 동네에 와서 아무 기여도 하지 않고 돈만 벌어가는 약은 사람들’로 보는 인식 또한 존재한다”고 말했다.
하지만 희망의 싹도 보인다. 보스턴대학교 반인종주의연구소의 레이철 리 매니저는 “아시아계 혐오의 급증이 아시아계 사이에서 인종주의, 혐오에 맞선 연대에 관한 관심을 촉발했다고 본다”고 말했다. 그는 이민 2세대들이 흑인에 반감을 지닌 부모들과 대화할 방법에 관해 자신에게 조언을 구해오고 있다며 “아시아계 내부, 다른 유색인종 커뮤니티의 연대가 무슨 의미인지에 관한 대화를 하는 게 긴급하다는 의미”라고 말했다.
대만계인 존 양 아시안아메리칸정의진흥협회(AAJC) 회장은 <한겨레>와 한 인터뷰에서 “아시아계 혐오를 없애기 위해 증오범죄법 제정 등 법적 해법 외에도 아시아계에 대한 언어·법률·정신건강·고용·이민서비스 지원 등 단단한 사회안전망이 필요하다”고 말했다. 그는 “미국 초·중·고와 그 이상의 학교에서 아시아계 미국인의 역사를 가르치는 것도 필요하다”고 말했다.
워싱턴/황준범 특파원 jaybee@hani.co.kr
관련기사
“영어 잘하네” 아시안 칭찬 뒤엔 미국사회 ‘영원한 이방인’ 낙인
신고 꺼리고 입증 어려워…드러난 증오범죄 ‘빙산의 일각
“영어 잘하네” 아시안 칭찬 뒤엔 미국사회 ‘영원한 이방인’ 낙인
https://www.hani.co.kr/.../international_general/996069.html
등록 :2021-05-21
전정윤 기자 사진
전정윤 기자
구독
황준범 기자 사진
[미국 아시안의 딜레마]
급증한 아시안 대상 증오범죄
코로나·미중 갈등이 불댕겼지만
그 이면엔 뿌리깊은 인종주의
“흑인이 미국사회 안 타자라면
아시안은 사회에 끼지도 못해”
미국 로스앤젤레스(LA) 한인타운에서 지난 3월27일(현지시각) 열린 반아시안 인종차별과 증오범죄 근절을 촉구하는 ‘전국 행동의 날’에 참가한 시위대가 ‘아시안에 대한 증오를 멈추라’는 손팻말을 들고 있다. 로스앤젤레스/이철호 통신원
1966년 미국 사회학자 윌리엄 피터슨은 <뉴욕 타임스 매거진>에 일본계 이민자의 성공을 흑인과 비교하며 ‘모범적 소수계’(Model Minority)라는 말을 썼다. 언뜻 ‘칭찬’으로 보이는 이 개념은, 미국 사회에서 아시아인을 성공한 이민자로 정형화하는 고정관념을 만들었다.
반세기 넘게 미국 사회에서 모범적 소수계로 불린 것이 무색하게도, 지난해 도널드 트럼프 당시 미국 대통령이 코로나19를 “중국 바이러스”로 규정한 직후 아시안을 대상으로 한 증오범죄가 급증했다. 비영리단체인 ‘아시아·태평양계(AAPI) 혐오를 멈춰라’는 2020년 3월부터 2021년 2월까지 아시아인에 대한 언어폭력은 68%가 늘었고, 신체폭행도 11%가 늘었다고 보고했다. 지난달 말 미 상원에 이어 18일(현지시각) 하원도 아시안에 대한 증오범죄 방지법을 압도적 찬성으로 통과시킬 정도로 사태가 심각하다.
미국과 아프리카 국가가 반목한다고 미국 내 아프리카계에 대한 공격으로 이어지지는 않지만 미-중 갈등은 순식간에 미국 내 아시아인 전체에 대한 혐오로 전이됐다. 20일 오전 존스홉킨스대 통계 기준 확진자 3302만여명, 사망자 58만7천여명에 이를 정도로 최악이었던 미국의 코로나19 상황과 그에 대한 공포와 분노가 영향을 미쳤다. 하지만 그것만으로 설명되지 않는 미국 사회의 뿌리 깊은 인종주의와 아시안의 취약한 입지가 재조명되고 있다. 박정선 캘리포니아주립대(도밍게즈 힐스) 아시아학과 교수는 최근 <한겨레>와 한 전화 및 이메일 인터뷰에서 “아시아인은 미국 사회에서 철저히 타자화되어 있고, 이것이 아시안 차별이 흑인 차별과 다른 점”이라며 “흑인은 미국 사회 안의 타자인 반면, 아시아인은 미국 사회에 들어오지도 못하는 타자”라고 분석했다.
‘모범적 소수계’ 신화, 인종차별 왜곡할 뿐
<한겨레>가 지난 10일 전화로 인터뷰한 윤은영(54)씨 가족은 미국 사회에서 아시아인의 이미지로 통용되는 ‘모범적 소수계’의 전형처럼 보인다. 부부는 1992년 미국 로스앤젤레스로 이주했다. 남편은 1970년대 이후 ‘아메리칸드림’의 현장이었으나 이제는 쇠락하고 있는 지역 소매시장 ‘스와프 미트’에서 주로 라틴계를 상대로 의류를 판매한다. 윤씨는 ‘한인타운 노동연대’라는 비영리단체에서 노동자의 권익을 보호하는 일을 한다. 첫째 데버라 최(27), 둘째 데이비드 최(25), 셋째 다이애나 최(20)는 모두 서부 명문 버클리 캘리포니아대에 들어갔다. 로스쿨을 졸업한 큰딸은 텍사스주 오스틴의 비영리단체에서 무슬림을 법률적으로 돕고 있고, 아들은 “로스앤젤레스를 더 나은 곳으로 만들고 싶어” 시청 공무원이 됐다. 아직 정치학을 공부 중인 막내는 인종차별과 페미니즘, 자본주의 문제에 관심이 많고 졸업 뒤 “무슨 일을 할지 모르겠지만 사람들을 돕는 일을 하고 싶다”고 말한다.
윤씨 가족처럼 미국 사회에서 모범적이라는 ‘칭찬’을 받는 삶을 산다고, 아시안이 미국 사회의 완전한 구성원으로 ‘인정’받는다는 뜻은 아니다. 미국에서 태어나고 자란 시민권자인 다이애나는 중·고교 시절 인종차별과 성차별이 결합된 이중 차별 속에서 “늘 열받고 너무 화난” 사춘기를 보냈다. 백인 우월주의에 기반한 외모 희롱을 많이 받았지만 아시안에 대한 가장 상징적인 차별은 “영어 진짜 잘한다!”는 말이었다. 미국인인데 이방인으로 타자화하는, 칭찬을 가장한 모욕인 셈이다. 어린 마음에 “미국에서 태어나고 자랐는데 나는 왜 미국인이 아닌가 싶었고, 백인처럼 행동하고 싶어” 스스로 한국어를 내려놓았다. 윤씨는 “딸이 그런 마음으로 영어만 쓴 것을 뒤늦게 알고 마음이 미어졌다”고 말했다.
※ 이미지를 누르면 크게 볼 수 있습니다.
불평등 불만 억누르고 소수계끼리 갈등 부추겨
모범적 소수계라는 말에는 백인 중심 사회의 질서에 순응하고 노력해 성공한 2인자라는 의미가 내포돼 있다. 성공하지 못한 소수자가 불평등을 말할 때, 주류 사회는 성공한 소수계를 언급하며 ‘너희도 노력하라’고 억압하고, 이 때문에 소수계끼리의 갈등을 야기하기도 한다. 옌 장 등은 <아시안 아메리칸에 대한 증오범죄>(2021)에서 1992~2014년 데이터를 분석했는데, 아시안 증오범죄의 경우 흑인·라틴계에 대한 증오범죄와는 달리 가해자가 백인이 아닌 소수계인 경우가 많았다.
옌 장 등은 “아시아계 미국인들이 경제, 교육 및 기타 기회에서 성공했다고 가정하는 ‘모범적 소수자’ 고정관념은 다른 인종 구성원들에게 잠재적인 경쟁이나 위협을 야기한다”고 원인을 분석했다. 역으로 모범적 소수계 신화를 내재화한 소수자일수록 자신을 백인과 동일시하고 다른 소수계를 ‘인종차별’하는 모순적 상황이 빚어지기도 한다. 한인타운 노동자를 위해 일하는 윤은영씨는 “임금 착취를 당해 상담을 온 한인 노동자가 다른 소수계 노동자를 무시하거나 차별하는 발언을 서슴없이 하는 경우도 많다”며 답답함을 토로했다.
백인 주류 사회는 미국 사회의 구조적 책임을 소수계끼리의 이런 갈등에 전가하려 한다. 대표적으로 1992년 ‘사이구’(4·29, 로스앤젤레스 폭동)가 있다. 당시 흑인을 구타한 백인 경찰들이 무죄 판결을 받은 것을 기화로 폭동이 일어났고, 경찰과 주방위군이 백인 거주지 위주로 배치돼 무방비 상태였던 한인타운이 큰 피해를 입었다. 하지만 미 언론은 성공한 한인이 흑인을 냉대해 약탈의 대상이 됐다는 메시지를 쏟아냈다.
최근 미국 사회에서는 모범적인 아시안에 대한 역차별 논란이 다시 아시안과 흑인 간 갈등을 악화시킬 조짐도 보인다. 한국계 작가 제이 캐스피언 강은 <뉴욕 타임스 매거진>에 쓴 ‘우리는 이 폭력에 이름을 붙여야 한다’는 칼럼에서 샌프란시스코 최우수 공립 고교인 로웰의 사례를 들었다. 이 지역 교육위원회는 최근 로웰에서 학점에 기반한 입학사정을 중단할 것을 의결했다. 특정 인종에 치우치지 않는 형평성과 다양성 강화가 명분이지만, 결과적으로 성적이 우수한 아시안이 피해를 입게 되면서 근본적인 문제를 제기하고 나선 것이다. ‘왜 우리(아시안)는 길거리에서 우리를 공격하는 사람들(흑인)에게 혜택을 주기 위해 우리의 명문 학교 자리를 내줘야 하는가? 더 평등한 미국을 추구하는 것이 제로섬 게임이어야 하는가?’
출신지역간 차이·‘대나무 천장’ 가릴 위험도
미 인구조사국이 지난해 6월 발표한 ‘2019년 센서스’를 보면, 미국 인구 3억2823명 중 백인이 60.1%, 히스패닉 18.5%, 흑인 13.4%, 아시안이 5.9%를 차지한다. 미 통계청이 발표한 2019년 자료를 보면, 아시아인 가구의 중위소득은 9만3759달러로, 7만1664달러인 백인보다 높고(일하는 세대원이 많기 때문), 흑인이나 라틴계에 비해서는 거의 두배나 많다. 아시아인 중 대학 졸업 이상 비율은 56%에 이르는데, 흑인(23%), 라틴계(18%)보다 높은 것은 물론 백인(37%)보다도 높다.
하지만 모범적인 아시안을 뒷받침하는 이런 피상적인 숫자는 어느 인종보다 다양한 인구 구성과 아시안 내부의 심한 불균형을 반영하지 못하는 ‘평균의 함정’이자 ‘신화’에 가깝다. 미 인구조사국에서 분류하는 아시안은 한국인·중국인·일본인 등 동아시아계, 인도·파키스탄 등 남아시아계, 필리핀·베트남·타이 등 동남아시아계를 모두 포괄한다. 출신 지역에 따라 언어와 문화가 다르고 소득과 교육 수준 등 사회경제적 현상도 천양지차다. 또 2018년 퓨리서치센터 보고서를 보면, 미국 전체로 볼 때 1970년 상위 10%의 소득은 하위 10%의 6.9배였으나, 2016년 8.7배로 심화됐다. 이에 비해 아시안의 상·하위 10% 소득 격차는 같은 기간 6.1배에서 10.7배로 더욱 악화됐다. 아시아계는 출신 국가에 따라 교육 편차도 크다. 동아시아계의 대학 졸업자는 50%를 넘는 반면, 동남아시아계는 15%도 되지 않는다.
더욱이 모범적 소수계라는 인식은 최상류층 대부분이 백인인 사회에서 ‘대나무 천장’(아시아 국적이나 아시아계 미국인의 고위직 상승을 막는 보이지 않는 장벽)에 갇힌 아시안의 현실을 제대로 보지 못하게 가로막는다. 가령 미 의회조사국 통계를 보면, 제117대 연방의회 의원(상원 100명, 하원 435명) 가운데, 아시안은 21명(3.9%)이다. 상원의원은 인도계 어머니를 둔 카멀라 해리스 부통령을 아시안으로 셈해도 3명뿐이다. 연방 하원의원 435명 중에서도 아시안은 한국계 4명을 포함해 19명에 그친다. 연방 상·하원 의원 수는 흑인(11%)이나 히스패닉(10%)보다 적을 뿐 아니라 인구 비율(6%)을 고려해도 과도하게 적다.
‘스톱 헤이트’ 확산…큰 변화 멀었지만 공통 자각 일깨워
지난해 흑인 남성 조지 플로이드가 백인 경찰의 무릎에 8분46초간 목이 짓눌려 숨진 뒤 ‘흑인 목숨도 소중하다’(Black Lives Matter) 운동이 불붙었다. 미국 사회는 비무장 흑인을 향한 공권력의 ‘살기’에 충격받았고, 1960년대 흑인 민권운동 이후 가장 큰 ‘대오각성’을 이끌어냈다는 평가가 나온다. 마찬가지로 지난해 코로나19 확산 이후 아시안에 대한 증오범죄 영상이 잇따라 공개되고, 아시아 마사지 업소 연쇄 총격살해 사건까지 더해지면서 미국 사회가 술렁였다. ‘아시안에 대한 증오를 멈춰라’(Stop Asian Hate) 운동이 확산됐고, 상·하원을 모두 통과한 아시안에 대한 증오범죄 방지법은 조 바이든 대통령의 서명을 거쳐 발효될 것으로 전망된다.
다만 아시안 커뮤니티에서도 이 운동과 법안의 한계를 지적한다. 데버라 최는 “‘흑인 목숨도 소중하다’와 달리 ‘아시안 혐오를 멈춰라’ 운동은 지향점과 해결책을 제시하지 못한다”고 봤다. 그는 “애틀랜타 총격 사건을 보면, 아시아 여성에 대한 미국 사회의 인식에 문제가 있음을 알 수 있다”며 “경찰력과 처벌을 강화하는 것이 답이 될 수는 없다”고 지적했다.
이와 관련해 장성관 미주한인유권자연대(KAGC) 사무차장은 <한겨레>에 “모범적 소수계 신화, 즉 모범 시민이라는 오해 때문에 아시안 아메리칸은 전문직 종사자로 높은 수준의 소득을 누리고, 근면하고, 불평하지 않고, 시키는 대로 잘 따른다는 인식이 있다”고 설명했다. 이어 “그렇기 때문에 제도적으로도, 직장 등 조직에서도, 또 일상에서도 ‘아시안 아메리칸은 공격당해도 보복이 없을 것’이라는 생각이 있고, 최근 급증한 아시아계 대상 증오범죄의 이유에도 이런 생각이 큰 비중을 차지할 것”이라고 덧붙였다. 이런 근본적인 인식의 문제를 증오범죄 처벌 강화 같은 표피적인 해결책만으로 해소하기 어렵다는 뜻이다.
코로나19 팬데믹 이후 급증한 아시안 증오범죄로 인해 미국 사회에서 아시안 차별이 전례 없는 주목을 받고 있다. 흑인 민권운동 같은 거대한 변화의 흐름에 대한 전망은 아직 요원하지만, 적어도 이제껏 ‘콩가루’처럼 흩어져 있던 ‘아시안 아메리칸’들의 공통된 자각을 일깨운 것만은 분명해 보인다. 제이 캐스피언 강은 칼럼에서 아시안들이 헤쳐 모인 위챗이나 카카오톡 같은 메시지앱에서 “‘우리 사람들이 거리에서 공격받고 죽는데 왜 아무도 신경 쓰지 않는가?’” 같은 핵심 질문이 공유되기 시작했다고 언급했다.
대만계인 존 양 아시안아메리칸정의진흥협회(AAJC) 회장은 <한겨레>와 한 인터뷰에서 “아시아계 미국인 사회는 방대한 다양성이 있지만, 권력·미디어·정부에서 ‘보이지 않는 존재’라는 공통의 싸움을 하고 있고, 영원한 국외자라는 도전 또한 공유하고 있다”며 “진정으로 정치적 힘으로 받아들여지려면 힘을 합쳐야 한다”고 말했다. 박정선 교수는 “특히 아시아계 2·3세대는 1세대에 비해 언어·문화적 차이가 적은 편이고, 사회정의와 공평성을 추구하는 성향이 강하기 때문에 다른 인종과의 연대감이 높은 것은 긍정적”이라고 기대했다.
로스앤젤레스/이철호 통신원, 워싱턴/황준범 특파원 jaybee@hani.co.kr
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신고 꺼리고 입증 어려워…드러난 아시안 증오범죄 ‘빙산의 일각’
아시안 내부·소수 인종간 연대부터 한걸음씩
Asian Americans Are Still Caught in the Trap of the ‘Model Minority’ Stereotype. And It Creates Inequality for All
A musician and a girl in Topaz Internment Camp in Utah, July 1945
Apic/Getty Images
IDEAS
BY VIET THANH NGUYEN
UPDATED: JUNE 26, 2020
Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. His novel The Sympathizer won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as five other awards. His new novel The Committed is out March 3.
The face of Tou Thao haunts me. The Hmong-American police officer stood with his back turned to Derek Chauvin, his partner, as Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds and murdered him.
In the video that I saw, Tou Thao is in the foreground and Chauvin is partly visible in the background, George Floyd’s head pressed to the ground. Bystanders beg Tou Thao to do something, because George Floyd was not moving, and as he himself said, he could not breathe.
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The face of Tou Thao is like mine and not like mine, although the face of George Floyd is like mine and not like mine too. Racism makes us focus on the differences in our faces rather than our similarities, and in the alchemical experiment of the U.S., racial difference mixes with labor exploitation to produce an explosive mix of profit and atrocity. In response to endemic American racism, those of us who have been racially stigmatized cohere around our racial difference. We take what white people hate about us, and we convert stigmata into pride, community and power. So it is that Tou Thao and I are “Asian Americans,” because we are both “Asian,” which is better than being an “Oriental” or a “gook.” If being an Oriental gets us mocked and being a gook can get us killed, being an Asian American might save us. Our strength in numbers, in solidarity across our many differences of language, ethnicity, culture, religion, national ancestry and more, is the basis of being Asian American.
But in another reality, Tou Thao is Hmong and I am Vietnamese. He was a police officer and I am a professor. Does our being Asian bring us together across these ethnic and class divides? Does our being Southeast Asian, both our communities brought here by an American war in our countries, mean we see the world in the same way? Did Tou Thao experience the anti-Asian racism that makes us all Asian, whether we want to be or not?
Let me go back in time to a time being repeated today. Even if I no longer remember how old I was when I saw these words, I have never forgotten them: Another American driven out of business by the Vietnamese. Perhaps I was 12 or 13. It was the early 1980s, and someone had written them on a sign in a store window not far from my parents’ store. The sign confused me, for while I had been born in Vietnam, I had grown up in Pennsylvania and California, and had absorbed all kinds of Americana: the Mayflower and the Pilgrims; cowboys and Indians; Audie Murphy and John Wayne; George Washington and Betsy Ross; the Pledge of Allegiance; the Declaration of Independence; the guarantee of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; all the fantasy and folklore of the American Dream.
Two immigration officers interrogate Chinese immigrants suspected of being Communists or deserting seamen at Ellis Island.
Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Part of that dream was being against communism and for capitalism, which suited my parents perfectly. They had been born poor to rural families, and without much formal schooling and using only their ingenuity and hard work, had become successful merchants. They fled communist Vietnam in 1975, after losing all of their property and most of their fortune. What they carried with them–including some gold and money sewn into the hems of their clothes–they used to buy a house next to the freeway in San Jose and to open the second Vietnamese grocery store there, in 1978. In a burst of optimism and nostalgia, they named their store the New Saigon.
I am now older than my parents were when they had to begin their lives anew in this country, with only a little English. What they did looms in my memory as a nearly unimaginable feat. In the age of coronavirus, I am uncertain how to sew a mask and worry about shopping for groceries. Survivors of war, my parents fought to live again as aliens in a strange land, learning to read mortgage documents in another language, enrolling my brother and me in school, taking driver’s-license examinations. But there was no manual telling them how to buy a store that was not advertised as for sale. They called strangers and navigated bureaucracy in order to find the owners and persuade them to sell, all while suffering from the trauma of having lost their country and leaving almost all their relatives behind. By the time my parents bought the store, my mother’s mother had died in Vietnam. The news nearly broke her.
Somehow the person who wrote this sign saw people like my mother and my father as less than human, as an enemy. This is why I am not surprised by the rising tide of anti-Asian racism in this country. Sickened, yes, to hear of a woman splashed with acid on her doorstep; a man and his son slashed by a knife-wielding assailant at a Sam’s Club; numerous people being called the “Chinese virus” or the “chink virus” or told to go to China, even if they are not of Chinese descent; people being spat on for being Asian; people afraid to leave their homes, not only because of the pandemic but also out of fear of being verbally or physically assaulted, or just looked at askance. Cataloging these incidents, the poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong wrote, “We don’t have coronavirus. We are coronavirus.”
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Looking back, I can remember the low-level racism of my youth, the stupid jokes told by my Catholic-school classmates, like “Is your last name Nam?” and “Did you carry an AK-47 in the war?” as well as more obscene ones. I wonder: Did Tou Thao hear these kinds of jokes in Minnesota? What did he think of Fong Lee, Hmong American, 19 years old, shot eight times, four in the back, by Minneapolis police officer Jason Andersen in 2006? Andersen was acquitted by an all-white jury.
A classroom composed of Chinese children in New York, 1900
Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone/Getty Images
Confronted with anti-Asian racism from white people, the Hmong who came to the U.S. as refugees in the 1970s and 1980s were often resettled in diverse urban areas, some in dominantly Black communities where they also confronted racism. “Stories abounded within our community of battery, robberies and intimidations by our Black neighbors,” Yia Vue wrote recently. “Hmong people live side by side with their African-American neighbors in poorer sections of town, with generations of misunderstanding and stereotypes still strongly entrenched on both sides.” Yet when Fong Lee was killed, Black activists rallied to his cause. “They were the loudest voices for us,” Lee’s sister Shoua said. “They didn’t ask to show up. They just showed up.”
Unlike the engineers and doctors who mostly came from Hong Kong, Taiwan, China and India–the model minority in the American imagination–many Hmong refugees arrived from a rural life in Laos devastated by war. Traumatized, they were resettled into the midst of poverty and a complicated history of racial oppression of which they had little awareness. Even the Hmong who condemn Tou Thao and argue for solidarity with Black Lives Matter insist that they should not be seen through the lens of the model-minority experience, should not be subject to liberal Asian-American guilt and hand-wringing over Tou Thao as a symbol of complicity. Christian minister Ashley Gaozong Bauer, of Hmong descent, writes, “We’ve had to share in the collective shame of the model minority, but when have Asian Americans shared in the pain and suffering of the Hmong refugee narrative and threats of deportation?”
Like the Hmong, the Vietnamese like myself suffered from war, and some are threatened by deportation now. Unlike many of the Hmong, a good number of Vietnamese refugees became, deliberately or otherwise, a part of the model minority, including myself. The low-level racism I experienced happened in elite environments. By the time I entered my mostly white, exclusive, private high school, the message was clear to me and the few of us who were of Asian descent. Most of us gathered every day in a corner of the campus and called ourselves, with a laugh, or maybe a wince, “the Asian invasion.” But if that was a joke we made at our own expense, it was also a prophecy, for when I returned to campus a couple of years ago to give a lecture on race to the assembled student body, some 1,600 young men, I realized that if we had not quite taken over, there were many more of us almost 30 years later. No longer the threat of the Asian invasion, we were, instead, the model minority: the desirable classmate, the favored neighbor, the nonthreatening kind of person of color.
Or were we? A couple of Asian-American students talked to me afterward and said they still felt it. The vibe. The feeling of being foreign, especially if they were, or were perceived to be, Muslim, or brown, or Middle Eastern. The vibe. Racism is not just the physical assault. I have never been physically assaulted because of my appearance. But I had been assaulted by the racism of the airwaves, the ching-chong jokes of radio shock jocks, the villainous or comical japs and chinks and gooks of American war movies and comedies. Like many Asian Americans, I learned to feel a sense of shame over the things that supposedly made us foreign: our food, our language, our haircuts, our fashion, our smell, our parents.
What made these sentiments worse, Hong argues, was that we told ourselves these were “minor feelings.” How could we have anything valid to feel or say about race when we, as a model minority, were supposedly accepted by American society? At the same time, anti-Asian sentiment remained a reservoir of major feeling from which Americans could always draw in a time of crisis. Asian Americans still do not wield enough political power, or have enough cultural presence, to make many of our fellow Americans hesitate in deploying a racist idea. Our unimportance and our historical status as the perpetual foreigner in the U.S. is one reason the President and many others feel they can call COVID-19 the “Chinese virus” or the “kung flu.”
Japanese-American residents of Los Angeles wave a farewell to relatives and friends who are being deported to Japan in October 1941.
Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis/Getty Images
The basis of anti-Asian racism is that Asians belong in Asia, no matter how many generations we have actually lived in non-Asian countries, or what we might have done to prove our belonging to non-Asian countries if we were not born there. Pointing the finger at Asians in Asia, or Asians in non-Asian countries, has been a tried and true method of racism for a long time; in the U.S., it dates from the 19th century.
It was then that the U.S. imported thousands of Chinese workers to build the transcontinental railroad. When their usefulness was over, American politicians, journalists and business leaders demonized them racially to appease white workers who felt threatened by Chinese competition. The result was white mobs lynching Chinese migrants, driving them en masse out of towns and burning down Chinatowns. The climax of anti-Chinese feeling was the passage of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the first racially discriminatory immigration law in American history, which would turn Chinese entering the U.S. into the nation’s first illegal immigrant population. The Immigration and Naturalization Service was created, policing Chinese immigration and identifying Chinese who had come into the U.S. as “paper sons,” who claimed a fictive relation to the Chinese who had already managed to come into the country. As the political scientist Janelle Wong tells me, while “European immigrants were confronted with widespread hostility, they never faced the kind of legal racial restrictions on immigration and naturalization that Asian Americans experienced.”
American history has been marked by the cycle of big businesses relying on cheap Asian labor, which threatened the white working class, whose fears were stoked by race-baiting politicians and media, leading to catastrophic events like the Chinese Exclusion Act and the internment of Japanese Americans in 1942. The person who wrote that sign I remember seeing as a child, blaming the Vietnamese for destroying American businesses, was simply telling a story about the yellow peril that was always available for fearful Americans.
The reality was that downtown San Jose in the 1970s and 1980s was shabby, a run-down place where almost no one wanted to open new businesses, except for Vietnamese refugees. Today, Americans rely on China and other Asian countries for cheap commodities that help Americans live the American Dream, then turn around and blame the Chinese for the loss of American jobs or the rise of American vulnerability to economic competition.
It is easier to blame a foreign country or a minority, or even politicians who negotiate trade agreements, than to identify the real power: corporations and economic elites who shift jobs, maximize profit at the expense of workers and care nothing for working Americans. To acknowledge this reality is far too disturbing for many Americans, who resort to blaming Asians as a simpler answer. Asian Americans have not forgotten this anti-Asian history, and yet many have hoped that it was behind them. The slur of the “Chinese virus” has revealed how fragile our acceptance and inclusion was.
In the face of renewed attacks on our American belonging, the former presidential candidate Andrew Yang offered this solution: “We Asian Americans need to embrace and show our Americanness in ways we never have before … We should show without a shadow of a doubt that we are Americans who will do our part for our country in this time of need.” Many Asian Americans took offense at his call, which seemed to apologize for our Asian-American existence. Yang’s critics pointed out that Asian Americans have literally wrapped themselves in the American flag in times of anti-Asian crisis; have donated to white neighbors and fellow citizens in emergencies; and died for this country fighting in its wars. And is there anything more American than joining the police? Did Tou Thao think he was proving his belonging by becoming a cop?
None of these efforts have prevented the stubborn persistence of anti-Asian racism. Calling for more sacrifices simply reiterates the sense that Asian Americans are not American and must constantly prove an Americanness that should not need to be proven. Japanese Americans had to prove their Americanness during World War II by fighting against Germans and Japanese while their families were incarcerated, but German and Italian Americans never had to prove their Americanness to the same extent. German and Italian Americans were selectively imprisoned for suspected or actual disloyalty, while Japanese Americans were incarcerated en masse, their race marking them as un-American.
Asian Americans are caught between the perception that we are inevitably foreign and the temptation that we can be allied with white people in a country built on white supremacy. As a result, anti-Black (and anti-brown and anti-Native) racism runs deep in Asian-American communities. Immigrants and refugees, including Asian ones, know that we usually have to start low on the ladder of American success. But no matter how low down we are, we know that America allows us to stand on the shoulders of Black, brown and Native people. Throughout Asian-American history, Asian immigrants and their descendants have been offered the opportunity by both Black people and white people to choose sides in the Black-white racial divide, and we have far too often chosen the white side. Asian Americans, while actively critical of anti-Asian racism, have not always stood up against anti-Black racism. Frequently, we have gone along with the status quo and affiliated with white people.
The Japanese owner of this grocery store in Oakland, California displays a sign reminding pedestrians of his loyalties to America, and not Japan, in 1944.
Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG/Getty Images
And yet there have been vocal Asian Americans who have called for solidarity with Black people and other people of color, from the activist Yuri Kochiyama, who cradled a dying Malcolm X, to the activist Grace Lee Boggs, who settled in Detroit and engaged in serious, radical organizing and theorizing with her Black husband James Boggs. Kochiyama and Lee Boggs were far from the only Asian Americans who argued that Asian Americans should not stand alone or stand only for themselves. The very term Asian American, coined in the 1960s by Yuji Ichioka and Emma Gee and adopted by college student activists, was brought to national consciousness by a movement that was about more than just defending Asian Americans against racism and promoting an Asian-American identity.
Asian-American activists saw their movement as also being antiwar, anti-imperialism and anticapitalism. Taking inspiration from the 1955 Bandung Conference, a gathering of nonaligned African and Asian nations, and from Mao, they located themselves in an international struggle against colonialism with other colonized peoples. Mao also inspired radical African Americans, and the late 1960s in the U.S. was a moment when radical activists of all backgrounds saw themselves as part of a Third World movement that linked the uprisings of racial minorities with a global rebellion against capitalism, racism, colonialism and war.
The legacy of the Third World and Asian-American movements continues today among Asian-American activists and scholars, who have long argued that Asian Americans, because of their history of experiencing racism and labor exploitation, offer a radical potential for contesting the worst aspects of American society. But the more than 22 million Asian Americans, over 6% of the American population, have many different national and ethnic origins and ancestries and times of immigration or settlement. As a result, we often have divergent political viewpoints. Today’s Asian Americans are being offered two paths: the radical future imagined by the Asian-American movement, and the consumer model symbolized by drinking boba tea and listening to K-pop. While Asian Americans increasingly trend Democratic, we are far from all being radical.
What usually unifies Asian Americans and enrages us is anti-Asian racism and murder, beginning with the anti-Chinese violence and virulence of the 19th century and continuing through incidents like a white gunman killing five Vietnamese and Cambodian refugee children in a Stockton, Calif., school in 1989, and another white gunman killing six members of a Sikh gurdwara in Wisconsin in 2012. The murder of Vincent Chin, killed in 1982 by white Detroit autoworkers who mistook him for Japanese, remains a rallying cry. As do the Los Angeles riots, or uprisings, of 1992, when much of Koreatown was burned down by mostly Black and brown looters while the LAPD watched. Korean-American merchants suffered about half of the economic damage. Two Asian Americans were killed in the violence.
All of this is cause for mourning, remembrance and outrage, but so is something else: the 61 other people who died were not Asian, and the majority of them were Black or brown. Most of the more than 12,000 people who were arrested were also Black or brown. In short, Korean Americans suffered economic losses, as well as emotional and psychic damage, that would continue for years afterward. But they had property to lose, and they did not pay the price of their tenuous Americanness through the same loss of life or liberty as experienced by their Black and brown customers and neighbors.
Many Korean Americans were angry because they felt the city’s law-enforcement and political leadership had sacrificed them by preventing the unrest from reaching the whiter parts of the city, making Korean Americans bear the brunt of the long-simmering rage of Black and brown Angelenos over poverty, segregation and abusive police treatment. In the aftermath, Koreatown was rebuilt, although not all of the shopkeepers recovered their livelihoods. Some of the money that rebuilt Koreatown came, ironically, from South Korea, which had enjoyed a decades-long transformation into an economic powerhouse. South Korean capital, and eventually South Korean pop culture, especially cinema and K-pop, became cooler and more fashionable than the Korean immigrants who had left South Korea for the American Dream. Even if economic struggle still defined a good deal of Korean immigrant life, it was overshadowed by the overall American perception of Asian-American success, and by the new factor of Asian capital and competition.
This is what it means to be a model minority: to be invisible in most circumstances because we are doing what we are supposed to be doing, like my parents, until we become hypervisible because we are doing what we do too well, like the Korean shopkeepers. Then the model minority becomes the Asian invasion, and the Asian-American model minority, which had served to prove the success of capitalism, bears the blame when capitalism fails.
The National Guard at the Korean Pride Parade in Los Angeles on April 29, 1992 following the riots that swept the city after three of four police officers accused of the 1991 beating of Rodney King were cleared of all charges.
Ted Soqui—Corbis/Getty Images
Not to say that we bear the brunt of capitalism. Situated in the middle of America’s fraught racial relations, we receive, on the whole, more benefits from American capitalism than Black, brown or Indigenous peoples, even if many of us also experience poverty and marginalization. While some of us do die from police abuse, it does not happen on the same scale as that directed against Black, brown or Indigenous peoples. While we do experience segregation and racism and hostility, we are also more likely to live in integrated neighborhoods than Black or Indigenous people. To the extent that we experience advantage because of our race, we are also complicit in holding up a system that disadvantages Black, brown and Indigenous people because of their race.
Given our tenuous place in American society, no wonder so many Asian Americans might want to prove their Americanness, or to dream of acceptance by a white-dominated society, or condemn Tou Thao as not one of “us.” But when Asian Americans speak of their vast collective, with origins from East to West Asia and South to Southeast Asia, who is the “we” that we use? The elite multiculturalism of colored faces in high places is a genteel politics of representation that focuses on assimilation. So long excluded from American life, marked as inassimilable aliens and perpetual foreigners, asked where we come from and complimented on our English, Asian immigrants and their descendants have sought passionately to make this country our own. But from the perspective of many Black, brown and Indigenous people, this country was built on their enslavement, their dispossession, their erasure, their forced migration, their imprisonment, their segregation, their abuse, their exploited labor and their colonization.
For many if not all Black, brown and Indigenous people, the American Dream is a farce as much as a tragedy. Multiculturalism may make us feel good, but it will not save the American Dream; reparations, economic redistribution, and defunding or abolishing the police might.
If Hmong experiences fit more closely with the failure of the American Dream, what does it mean for some Asian Americans to still want their piece of it? If we claim America, then we must claim all of America, its hope and its hypocrisy, its profit and its pain, its liberty and its losses, its imperfect union and its ongoing segregation.
To be Asian American is therefore paradoxical, for being Asian American is both necessary and insufficient. Being Asian American is necessary, the name and identity giving us something to organize around, allowing us to have more than “minor feelings.” I vividly remember becoming an Asian American in my sophomore year, when I transferred to UC Berkeley, stepped foot on the campus and was immediately struck by intellectual and political lightning. Through my Asian-American studies courses and my fellow student activists of the Asian American Political Alliance, I was no longer a faceless part of an “Asian invasion.” I was an Asian American. I had a face, a voice, a name, a movement, a history, a consciousness, a rage. That rage is a major feeling, compelling me to refuse a submissive politics of apology, which an uncritical acceptance of the American Dream demands.
But the rage that is at the heart of the Asian-American movement–a righteous rage, a wrath for justice, acknowledgment, redemption–has not been able to overcome the transformation of the movement into a diluted if empowering identity. In its most diluted form, Asian-American identity is also open to anti-Black racism, the acceptance of colonization, and the fueling of America’s perpetual-motion war machine, which Americans from across the Democratic and Republican parties accept as a part of the U.S.
Refugees from Vietnam descend a flight of stairs from an airplane in Oakland, California, April 1975
Ted Streshinsky—Corbis/Getty Images
My presence here in this country, and that of my parents, and a majority of Vietnamese and Hmong, is due to the so-called Vietnam War in Southeast Asia that the U.S. helped to wage. The war in Laos was called “the Secret War” because the CIA conducted it and kept it secret from the American people. In Laos, the Hmong were a stateless minority without a country to call their own, and CIA advisers promised the Hmong that if they fought along with them, the U.S. would take care of the Hmong in both victory and defeat, perhaps even helping them gain their own homeland. About 58,000 Hmong who fought with the Americans lost their lives, fighting communists and rescuing downed American pilots flying secret bombing missions over Laos. When the war ended, the CIA abandoned most of its Hmong allies, taking only a small number out of the country to Thailand. The ones who remained behind suffered persecution at the hands of their communist enemies.
This is why Tou Thao’s face haunts me. Not just because we may look alike in some superficial way as Asian Americans, but because he and I are here because of this American history of war. The war was a tragedy for us, as it was for the Black Americans who were sent to “guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem,” as Martin Luther King Jr. argued passionately in his 1967 speech “Beyond Vietnam.” In this radical speech, he condemns not just racism but capitalism, militarism, American imperialism and the American war machine, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” In another speech, he demands that we question our “whole society,” which means “ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation and the problem of war are all tied together.”
Little has changed. The U.S. is still a country built on war and for war. This is why “Vietnam,” meaning the Vietnam War, continues to haunt this country, stuck in a forever war. And this is why Tou Thao’s face haunts me. It is the face of someone who shares some of my history and has done the thing I fear to do when faced with injustice–nothing. Addressing Tou Thao, the poet Mai Der Vang, also Hmong, wrote in her poem “In the Year of Permutations”: “Go live with yourself after what you didn’t do.” Thao was “complicit in adding to the/ perpetration of power on a neck … Never truly to be accepted/ always a pawn.” While the life of a Hmong-American police officer descended from refugees is different from that of a stereotypical model-minority Chinese-American engineer or a Vietnamese-American writer like me, the moral choices remain the same. Solidarity or complicity. Rise against abusive power or stand with our back turned to the abuse of power. If we as Asian Americans choose the latter, we are indeed the model minority, and we deserve both its privileges and its perils.
Our challenge is to be both Asian American and to imagine a world beyond it, one in which being Asian American isn’t necessary. This is not a problem of assimilation or multiculturalism. This is a contradiction, inherited from the fundamental contradiction that ties the American body politic together, its aspiration toward equality for all, bound with its need to exploit the land and racially marked people, beginning from the very origins of American society and its conquest of Indigenous nations and importation of African slaves. The U.S. is an example of a successful project of colonization, only we do not call colonization by that name here. Instead, we call successful colonization “the American Dream.” This is why, as Mai Der Vang says, “the American Dream will not save us.”
“Asian Americans” should not exist in a land where everyone is equal, but because of racism’s persistence, and capitalism’s need for cheap, racialized labor, “Asian Americans” do indeed exist. The end of Asian Americans only happens with the end of racism and capitalism. Faced with this problem, Asian Americans can be a model of apology, trying to prove an Americanness that cannot be proved. Or we can be a model of justice and demand greater economic and social equality for us and for all Americans.
If we are dissatisfied with our country’s failures and limitations, revealed to us in stark clarity during the time of coronavirus, then now is our time to change our country for the better. If you think America is in trouble, blame shareholders, not immigrants; look at CEOs, not foreigners; resent corporations, not minorities; yell at politicians of both parties, not the weak, who have little in the way of power or wealth to share. Many Americans of all backgrounds understand this better now than they did in 1992. Then, angry protesters burned down Koreatown. Now, they peacefully surround the White House.
Demanding that the powerful and the wealthy share their power and their wealth is what will make America great. Until then, race will continue to divide us. To locate Tou Thao in the middle of a Black-Hmong divide, or a Black-Asian divide, as if race were the only problem and the only answer, obscures a fatal statistic: the national poverty rate was 15.1% in 2015, while the rate for African Americans was about 24.1% and for Hmong Americans 28.3%.
Youa Vang Lee speaks in front of thousands of people attending a memorial rally for George Floyd at the Minnesota State Capitol on May, 31, 2020.
Brooklynn Kascel—Polaris
The problem is race, and class, and war–a country almost always at war overseas that then pits its poor of all races and its exploited minorities against each other in a domestic war over scarce resources. So long as this crossbred system of white supremacy and capitalist exploitation remains in place, there will always be someone who will write that sign: Another American Driven Out of Business by [fill in the blank], because racism always offers the temptation to blame the weak rather than the powerful. The people who write these signs are engaging in the most dangerous kind of identity politics, the nationalist American kind, which, from the origins of this country, has been white and propertied. The police were created to defend the white, the propertied and their allies, and continue to do so. Black people know this all too well, many descended from people who were property.
My parents, as newcomers to America, learned this lesson most intimately. When they opened the New Saigon, they told me not to call the police if there was trouble. In Vietnam, the police were not to be trusted. The police were corrupt. But a few years later, when an armed (white) gunman burst into our house and pointed a gun in all our faces, and after my mother dashed by him and into the street and saved our lives, I called the police. The police officers who came were white and Latino. They were gentle and respectful with us. We owned property. We were the victims. And yet our status as people with property, as refugees fulfilling the American Dream, as good neighbors for white people, is always fragile, so long as that sign can always be hung.
But the people who would hang that sign misunderstand a basic fact of American life: America is built on the business of driving other businesses out of business. This is the life cycle of capitalism, one in which an (Asian) American Dream that is multicultural, transpacific and corporate fits perfectly well. My parents, natural capitalists, succeeded at this life cycle until they, in turn, were driven out of business. The city of San Jose, which had neglected downtown when my parents arrived, changed its approach with the rise of Silicon Valley. Realizing that downtown should reflect the image of a modern tech metropolis, the city used eminent domain to force my parents to sell their store. Across from where the New Saigon once stood now looms the brand-new city hall, which was supposed to face a brand-new symphony hall.
I love the idea that a symphony could have sprung from the refugee roots of the New Saigon, where my parents shed not only sweat but blood, having once been shot there on Christmas Eve. But for many years, all that stood on my parents’ property was a dismal parking lot. Eventually the city sold the property for many millions of dollars, and now a tower of expensive condominiums is being built on the site of my parents’ struggle for the American Dream. The symphony was never heard. This, too, is America.
So is this: the mother of Fong Lee, Youa Vang Lee, marching with Hmong 4 Black Lives on the Minnesota state capitol in the wake of George Floyd’s killing. “I have to be there,” she said. She spoke in Hmong, but her feelings could be understood without translation.
“The same happened to my son.”
Nguyen is a Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist and a University Professor at the University of Southern California
Correction, June 29, 2020
The original version of this story misstated the spelling of the last name of the police officer who killed Fong Lee. It is Andersen, not Anderson.
This appears in the July 06, 2020 issue of TIME.
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