• printer friendly
• mail this article
• iPod format
• digg

Friday, 5/30/97 Asian-American movement continues living on HISTORY: Forum to relate past, present, future of a peoples' ongoing fight

By Stephanie Wang and Amy Luu Serve the People; Power to the People; People Unite!! When you take these political slogans and attach a face to them, odds are you wouldn't pick a yellow one. Why not? Since when has an Asian American become associated with complacency and self-interest? Did we never learn our history of struggle and resistance in the United States? Our ancestors in America were field hands, slave laborers and prisoners in concentration camps, excluded from the basic rights of citizenship. We have been drafted to fight in a war against our own brothers and sisters in Asia and evicted from low-income housing that service our elderly immigrants. This is our history in the United States, tainted with the spilled blood of our people. But it should not be about victims of an oppressive society; rather, it should be about Asian Pacific Islanders who have resisted oppression through individual thoughts and actions. We were not voiceless entities accepting the cultural, social and political upheavals of the '60s, the '70s, the '80s or now; rather, we built an Asian-American movement marked by resistance, collective struggle and liberation. When the United States government asked us to kill our own brothers and sisters in a racist Vietnam War fueled by self-interest, we struggled to understand our place in America. As Asian Americans, we did not urge to bring our brothers home, but rather stood in solidarity with the revolutionary struggles of the "yellow" people across the world. In another instance, our movement - in coalition with other progressive peoples - shook the ivory tower of academic institutions to bring about ethnic studies that spoke of our history and lives. And in a most fundamental way, this movement really sought to define our space and place as Asian Americans, through questions, ideological discussions and the liberation of minds. Today, this need for struggle against oppression may seem redundant to some. After 30 years of expanded immigration of the professional class, our Asian Pacific Islander communities have made great inroads into a society that has always resisted us with their racist and sexist institutions. Our increased access to quality education is one significant mark of this progress. There are Asian Pacific Islanders who have rooted themselves in middle-class lifestyles because of these expanded opportunities. However, they forget that many of us, the "model minorities," live in poverty. This complacency created from class stratification has also blurred our concept of our American past rooted in mass movement. Part of the legacy of the historical Asian-American movement is the reminder that the struggle continues and the mandate that we should learn from the past in building for the future. An upcoming forum on the Asian- American movement, titled "Learning from the Past and the Present for the Movement of the Future," will place our contemporary struggles and issues in this intergenerational context of mass movement. Our class, Asian American studies 197J, the Asian-American Movement, co-instructed by Steve Louie and Glenn Omatsu at UCLA, will host this forum in the hopes of raising the political consciousness of students and community members about present social and political issues. By linking the present struggle with the movement, we want to demonstrate this continuing legacy. The forum will be held on Saturday, May 31 from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. at UCLA's Kerckhoff Grand Salon. For more information, please contact Malcolm Kao at (310) 825-2974 or e-mail him at malcolmk@ucla.edu. Wang is a third-year history and Asian- American studies student. Luu is a second-year Asian-American studies student.

Comments

Post a comment