Black-Asian Divide: Lessons From History

In my previous blog, I shared raw, honest feelings of a few ethnic Chinese and Japanese email correspondents responding to earlier blogs on the black-on-Chinese-street-crime story in Oakland and San Francisco. Those feelings – angry about the black-on-Chinese crimes — represent a reality for some Chinese and Japanese Americans. It’s time for some historical context to this bewildering subject.

Given the respective histories of African-Americans and Chinese/Asian-Americans, there’s an irony about the current black-Chinese/Asian conflict.

Both African-Americans and Chinese/Asian-Americans have ugly American histories at the hands of white people and government – slavery and legal segregation in the American south for African-Americans; Chinese Exclusion Act and other discriminatory laws against Chinese/Asian-Americans.

One might think there would be sympathy and compassion for each other, but just knowing these respective painful histories won’t by itself bridge the black-Chinese/Asian divide.

For one thing, many African-Americans and Asian-Americans aren’t invested in the value and impact of those histories. Or they don’t know these histories – their own or the other’s — because the histories are not well taught at home, in schools or the marketplace of ideas.

Though there are incidental overlaps and countless black-yellow interactions, these really aren’t shared histories, except for the fact that The Man (white folks) had the power to keep blacks and yellows down, i.e., individualized and institutional racism, plain and simple.

Things began improving for both African-Americans and Chinese/Asian-Americans in the U.S. after World War II. The civil rights revolution of the 1960s — with brave black folks, progressive whites and pragmatic white politicians making it happen — eventually tore down the legal barriers that oppressed black people. This revolution, in turn, ignited liberation movements for Latinos, Asians, women, and gay people.

We were becoming a fairer, more equitable nation. Post-World War II America underwent profound changes, deeply affecting the economic, social, cultural, and political lives of African Americans – desegregation of schools, work places, neighborhoods; southern blacks moving north; expansion of the black middle- and upper classes; more African Americans winning political office.

The repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943 cleared the way for gradual integration of ghettoized Chinese-Americans and other Asian-Americans, much smaller in numbers than African-Americans. Liberalized immigration laws in 1965 and the end of the Vietnam War in 1975 greatly increased the Asian population in the U.S.

These demographic changes morphed into more close-in encounters between blacks and yellows. These interactions range widely from loving (more likely among the better educated and better off in middle-class or upscale urban neighborhoods) to hating (more likely among the lesser educated and poorer, stuck in grungy inner cities).

The black lower class in cities like Oakland and San Francisco hasn’t benefited much, if at all, from the civil rights gains of the black middle and upper classes. Children in the black lower class have far higher social and cultural mountains to climb. Indeed, our society as a whole doesn’t pay much, if any, attention to their predicament, which breeds angry, aimless youth looking for people to beat up and rob. A combination of fractures in lower-income black families and continuing, but more subtle, institutional racism continues to oppress many in this category.

Meanwhile, some Asian immigrants and refugees are trapped, too, in ethnic enclaves (Chinatown) by lower educational achievements, ignorance of the American history of their ethnic ancestors, and cultural and language limitations. They find a refuge in Chinatowns, which usually are cheek-by-jowl to poorer neighborhoods that have a disproportionately high black population.

Of course, it’s an overstatement to imply that all black-yellow interactions in struggling urban neighborhoods are contentious, tense, and unfriendly. Some, undoubtedly, are friendly and respectful. But the chances of cultural and linguistic universes colliding are always there, as we’ve seen in the high-profile black-on-Chinese street crimes in Oakland and San Francisco.

I’ve been mulling the metaphor of different universes lately. That is, even if we live, work, and play near each other but are of different racial, ethnic, cultural, religious, linguistic, generational, gender, and political persuasions, we can – and do — occupy different “universes” with different upbringings, experiences, and world views.

I do not mean all of us are separate “islands.” Many of us occupy the same “universe” despite obvious differences. But each of us resides internally in our own universe while we share externally the same time and space.

One of the major unanswerable questions related to the black-on-Chinese street crime saga is whether the black youth who allegedly assaulted and killed the two elderly Chinese men (one in Oakland, the other in San Francisco) targeted their victims because of their race. After all, these youth live in their own universe and, when desperate, look to express their anger through sometimes-violent anti-social behavior. They may think that older Chinese are easy targets or embrace hateful views of them. We don’t really know the definitive answer.

On the other side of this socially precarious ledger, some Chinese and Asian immigrants, fairly new to multicultural America, aren’t menacing to urban black youth, but they may have distorted and negative stereotypes of black people, distrusting them, not wanting to interact with them.

Please do not misunderstand: I am not saying that the Chinese victims provoked in any way the abhorrent behavior of the black youth by saying something racist or taunting them in any way. There has been absolutely no evidence or testimony to that effect.

What I am saying is that Chinese and Asian immigrants and refugees in and around struggling city neighborhoods also live in their own universe circumscribed by their cultural and educational and linguistic experiences and simply aren’t comfortable with others not of their circumstances.

So what can be done to alleviate the fears of Chinese living in neighborhoods near lower-income African Americans and to help those young black men who are victimizing elderly Chinese (and others) on the gritty streets of Oakland and San Francisco? Some thoughts on “solutions” soon at Crosscurrents from KALW News.

William Wong was born to Chinese immigrants and grew up in Oakland’s Chinatown. As a journalist, he has written for, among others, The Wall Street Journal, The Oakland Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The San Francisco Examiner. For one year, he was a regional commentator for The News Hour with Jim Lehrer on PBS. He is the author of Yellow Journalist: Dispatches from Asian America, and Images of America: Oakland’s Chinatown.