Asian Americans Students & Affirmative Action

Asian Americans Students and Affirmative Action

There can be no question that Asian Americans have been subject to racial discrimination in the United States. Until only a generation ago, Asian Americans were essentially treated as second class citizens in American society. They were prohibited from becoming naturalized citizens, voting, and otherwise participating in politics. They were also regularly subjected to racially-motivated violence. For example, by one count, over three hundred Chinese were murdered as a result of racial violence in the West between 1860 and 1887. Asians also could not testify against, live next to, marry, or be educated alongside whites, and they could not own land. But perhaps most notoriously, more than 110,000 persons of Japanese descent, more than two-thirds of whom were American citizens, were interned without due process and with the approval of the United States Supreme Court following the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

Asian Americans Divided Over Affirmative Action

Still, Asian American students today are divided over the issue of affirmative action. While most Asian American civil rights and advocacy organizations strongly support affirmative action, about half of Asian American citizens, according to the little polling data available, identify themselves to be opposed to affirmative action policies. In particular some students believe that affirmative actions programs at colleges actually

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cent of the Hmong people from Laos, 67 percent of Laotians, and 34 percent of Vietnamese were impoverished in 1990, compared to 10 percent of all Americans and 14 percent of all Asian Americans, 21 percent of African Americans, and 23 percent of Hispanics. Even so, the federal government classifies Southeast Asian refugees as "Asian Americans" for research and funding purposes. "There's so little research on us, or we're lumped in with all other Asians, so people don't know the specific needs and contributions of our communities," complained Southeast Asia Resource Action Center (SEARAC) executive director Ka Ying Yang. SEARAC is an advocacy group in Washington, D.C. that estimates that more than 2.2 million Southeast Asians now live in the United States. This ethnic sub-group of Asian Americans is now the largest and fastest-growing refugee group in the United States. But this group does not fit any definition of the model minority. In fact, they demonstrate the same lingering problems of fragmented family structures and economic disadvantages demonstrated by other "problem minorities." Moreover, Southeast Asians may be suffering because of the decreased availability of services resulting from public policies based on

Category: Psychology - A