ASIAN AMERICAN STUDENTS IN THE 1960S: THE SOIL OF THE ASIAN AMERICAN MOVEMENT
For example, in 1960 Filipinos earned only 61 percent of the income of whites with comparable educations. Japanese and Chinese also earned less than their white counterparts, making 77 percent and 87 percent, respectively. Among the 107,366 Asian American college students on university campuses in 1970, Chinese and Japanese made up the vast majority, with over eight out of ten Asian American students being of either Japanese or Chinese American descent. These students arrived at campuses in tumult, as the nation was undergoing a political unrest over U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and a cultural revolution over race, sexuality, and the role of authority. The assassinations of President John Kennedy, presidential candidate Robert Kennedy, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. devastated the nation’s morale. Yet young people continued to rise up. Urban race riots in Harlem, Philadelphia, Watts, Newark, Chicago, and Baltimore—just to name a few—erupted over discrimination, high unemployment, and police brutality. The Black Power movement, led by various groups including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Nation of Islam, and the Black Panther Party, emerged in the latter half of the sixties. Coined by Black Panther leader Stokely Carmichael, the Black Power movement inspired racial pride and advocated for local community control, self-determination and economic development. At the same time, other social movements challenged the existing social order. At UC Berkeley, students engaged in civil disobedience over a university ban on political activity and initiated the Free Speech movement. The women’s liberation movement emerged in the late ‘60s as organizations formed to confront society’s sexism and to promote women’s equality. Likewise, activists organized the environmental movement to protect the earth, stop pollution, and clean-up toxic environmental hazards in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color. Each of these movements, as well as their militancy, informed the Asian American movement. In this movement, Asian Americans, who had individually become involved with the causes of the times, drew together to address their own racial status and identity. They confronted enduring stereotypes of the unassimilable heathen, the Yellow Peril, and the perpetual foreigner. This generation of students faced the model minority myth, that Asian American students were expected to be hard-working, studious, and quiet even in the face of discrimination. While many sought to assimilate to mainstream Anglo-American cultural norms, they soon recognized that they could not assimilate fully into the white mainstream. The other racial model for Asian Americans was the Black Power movement, which rejected American racism and promoted Black autonomy, racial pride, and community control. For those African American activists, the ideologies of self-determination and cultural nationalism became realized through militant organizations, a flowering of Black arts and expression, and a reclamation of indigenous and ethnic histories. Some of the subsequent Asian American organizations, such as the Red Guard, modeled themselves partially after the Black Panthers, while others were more connected to diasporic movements, such as the Union of Democratic Filipinos, which was also involved in opposing martial law in the Philippines.
Students involved in the Asian American movement challenged the existing white/Black dichotomy of U.S. race relations that rendered Asian Americans mostly invisible to the broader society. Being neither Black nor white, Asian American students became conscious of their marginalized status as unequal racial minorities. They came to embrace a pan-ethnic identity as Asian Americans to reject the connotations of the oft-used group term, “Oriental.” To be Oriental was to be traditional, objectified, and foreign. In contrast, the newly minted group identity of “Asian American,” signaled a political and cultural collectivity with new possibilities and shared aspirations. As a newly-formed group identity, Asian American consciousness was rooted in the communities from which they came. Actively seeking to reclaim their histories and to find their own voices, they sought out narratives from their ancestors and elders. They became engaged with their home neighborhoods, creating local programs to “serve the people” and to rally the masses. They also sought to forge solidarities across ethnicity, race, and national boundaries as they identified with other “Third World” peoples. This term recognized the exploitative relations in the global hierarchy where the least developed nations faced oppressive histories and conditions similar to historically marginalized communities in the U.S. Through the practice of supporting one another’s movements and struggles, Asian American students built a collective identity and common cause to address racial injustices. Additionally, Asian American students were deeply influenced by major international developments of the 1960s. The anti-war movement against U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia reached its apex on campuses in early 1968; the success of North Vietnam’s Tet offensive demonstrated that despite the onslaught of U.S. military might, the war could not be easily won. Asian American war protestors realized their paradoxical position. On one hand, they knew they were Americans, but they were being sent to fight an enemy that not only looked like them, but were in a subordinate position in the world order like they found themselves to be within boundaries of their own country.
Identifying themselves as part of the Third World, Asian Americans drew inspiration from the Bandung Conference held in Indonesia in 1955. This meeting of African and Asian nations, many who had just become independent from their colonized status, promoted international cooperation and independence from the United States and the Soviet Union—the First and Second World powers. The thought of Chairman Mao Tse-Tung of the People’s Republic 14 mountain movers of China, Ho Chi Minh of North Vietnam, and Che Guevara of Cuba, each of whom advanced Third World-ism, became another source of ideology for some in the Asian American movement. Students came to embrace their analysis that racial discrimination in the U.S. was a product of colonialism and imperialism, such that people of color and Third World peoples faced a common oppression from Western nations. So in this way, Asian American students in the 1960s responded to the twin evils of racism and imperialism. First, due to racism, Asian Americans found themselves marginalized since they were neither white nor Black. Furthermore, they were considered neither authentically American nor Asian. Often coming from ethnic enclaves, they recognized that their parents faced discrimination, segregation, and cultural stereotyping due to their race. Yet they continued to feel the pressure to discard their ethnic heritages and to assimilate into the white mainstream in order to pursue the American Dream. Second, in examining the wars in Southeast Asia, students came to question American intervention that violated the sovereignty of other nations for the sake of its national interests. And they opposed maintaining a long-term war that did not seem winnable. Instead of seeing other Asians as the enemy, students who joined the Asian American movement found solidarity with them in their common subjugation as Third World peoples, dominated by other Western nation-states and subject to exploitation by multinational corporations.