Asian American movement

Although Asian Americans generally have been considered a monolith by the wider American society, a great deal of ethnic diversity exists among the various groups of people with Asian ancestry. Until the post–World War II era, Asian Americans had remained fragmented, partly because of the ethnic divisions among them and the animosities between many Asian countries, which the immigrants had brought with them. Their experiences in the United States often served to reinforce those divisions. Farmworkers and other laborers were often divided into work groups according to their ethnicities and were urged to compete with each other. Also, when public opinion turned against a specific group of Asian Americans (as it did against the Japanese Americans during the “yellow peril” campaign of the late 1800s), other Asian Americans (including Chinese Americans) did not defend their fellow Asian Americans, but instead asserted their separate identities in fear of becoming mistaken targets of the persecution.

In the 1960s, these diverse ethnic communities, which included Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, Korean Americans, and Filipino Americans, among others, began working together to make an impact on the educational, social, and political scenes of North America. This attempt at unity was the result of several factors. Barriers between the groups were diminished when second- and third-generation Asian Americans assumed leadership roles. Born in North America, they had become familiar with each other through schools and various social groups and did not share the inter-Asian animosities of the first generation. They also had not experienced the divisions between Asian American groups that occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In fact, the wider society’s tendency to lump all Asian Americans together forced them to associate with each other. During the Vietnam War (1957–1975), Asians and Asian Americans faced bias and hostility, whether they were of Vietnamese descent or not, and without regard to their actual political affiliations.

Initially, the Asian American organizations were college-based. One of the first was the Asian American Political Alliance, founded at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1968. Similar organizations were formed at other campuses, and by the mid-1970s, “Asian American” had become a familiar term. Asian American professionals began forming groups, including the Asian American Social Workers, and Asian American caucuses developed in national professional associations such as the American Public Health Association. Asian American studies became part of the curriculum on college campuses, which helped create an awareness of Asian Americans as a group. As a result, publications began treating Asian Americans as a unit. Their relatively small numbers and lack of agreement on issues have kept Asian Americans from gaining a great deal of political influence, but they ranked second behind Jewish Americans in political contributions.

Despite the Asian American movement's attempts at unity in the 1960s and 1970s, Filipino Americans, South Asian Americans, and Southeast Asian Americans reported being excluded from and marginalized within the Asian American community. This exclusion was present in Asian American studies departments, which focused on Asian Americans of East Asian descent, and in the US Census. Although people of Asian Indian descent have been in the United States since the late 1800s, the US Census categorized them as "Caucasian" until 1980, when it included the designation "Asian Indian" and identified Asian Indians as a minority within the larger category, "Asian." By 2000, the "Asian" category on the US Census included Bangladeshi, Nepalese, Pakistani, and Sri Lankan Americans. At around the same time, usage of the umbrella term "South Asian"—referring to these groups and Indian Americans, among others—was becoming more widespread.

Two incidents in the 1980s sparked Asian Americans to become an assertive political and social force. The first was the murder of Vincent Chin, a Chinese American, in 1982. His killers, who blamed the Japanese for the downturn in the automobile industry, mistook Chin for a Japanese national and bludgeoned him to death with a baseball bat. They were given light sentences and never spent a day in jail for their crimes. The second event was the discovery in the mid-1980s that the University of California, Berkeley, had instituted quotas that limited the number of Asian Americans admitted. After the Chin incident, Asian Americans formed the American Citizens for Justice, a watchdog group to prevent or rectify violence against Asian Americans.

In 1989, when five Southeast Asian elementary students were shot to death in Stockton, California, and Jim Ming Hai Loo, a Chinese American, was killed in Raleigh, North Carolina, an Asian American legal team and media people were there to see that justice was done. In addition, because of political influence exerted by Asian Americans, Japanese Americans who were incarcerated during World War II received some remuneration and recognition.

Other Asian American concerns have to do with the glass ceiling (Asian Americans not being promoted to upper-level positions for which they qualify), the Americanization of the younger generations (and accompanying loss of their culture), political and cultural representation, the Asian American model-minority myth, and intergroup relations in the inner city (such as between Korean American shop owners and African Americans).

In 2020 and 2021, Asian Americans experienced an increase in anti-Asian racist bigotry and violence. The increase was correlated with the emergence of the novel coronavirus in China in 2019, the subsequent global pandemic, first declared by the World Health Organization in March 2020, as well as what many considered to be then-US President Donald Trump's racist references to the virus. Stop AAPI Hate, a national coalition that tracks racially motivated hate crimes against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, reported in August 2021 that it had received more than 9,000 reports of anti-AAPI harassment, physical assault, shunning, and civil rights violations since March 2020. Although the global community moved past the pandemic, hate crimes against Asian Americans remained high. A survey released by the Stop AAPI Hate group found that 49 percent of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders surveyed reported they were victims of a hate crime in 2023.

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