The Asian media naturally showed a strong interest in this year’s American

The Asian media naturally showed a strong interest in this year’s American presidential election and asked what it meant for their country and for Asia. When Indonesian bloggers, journalists and scholars viewed it from an Indonesian perspective, usually they asked what the US could offer for the Middle East (i.e., Palestinian independence) and for the Asian region (i.e. compared to China).

Strangely, the Asian media failed to cover Asians who happened to be American citizens or residents. Voice of America’s programs, aired on several channels, were the best option for Indonesians to see Indonesian-Americans who voted, while many Indonesian students in the US saw it from an outsider perspective and related the election to what Indonesia could learn or hopefully gain from the election. Sadly, it was difficult to get firsthand accounts from Indonesian-Americans on what they thought as Americans instead of what they thought as people with Indonesian backgrounds.

The US government and academics classify race in America into white, black, Hispanic, Native American (on the mainland and Alaska), Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander and Asian. Hispanics, or Latino Americans, are more about culture than race, since they can be racially white, black, Asian, or multiracial, but they were raised in Spanish or Portuguese speaking households. Notice also that there is no separate classification for Persian and Arab-Americans.

Asian-Americans are citizens and residents of the US who identify themselves as people from Asian backgrounds. “Asia” is a very wide concept — in Britain a British Asian refers to a British citizen with South Asian heritage (the majority of which are Indian), while in America it refers to every heritage ranging from Japanese to Afghani. Of course, an “Asian” in common parlance denotes someone with an East Asian background, such as Chinese. Chinese-Americans are the largest group, but their backgrounds are not only mainland Chinese, but also Taiwanese, Hong Konger, Filipino and even Indonesian.

Asian-Americans constitute 5 percent of Americans, but it is estimated that only half of them are American citizens and thus eligible to vote (before discounting those who are under 18). They are also not seen as significant minorities compared to African-Americans and Latin-Americans, who are more numerous. Asian-Americans also have mixed experiences of living in America and being Americans.

Watch enough television shows and movies and one can see that they can be absent, or just extras, or portraying unpleasant characters such as criminals or snobs. On the other hand, Asian-Americans are the richest race in the US and their children shine in schools and universities. They are much less likely to go to prison than any other race.

Politically and socially, Asian-Americans are seen to be on “one team” with white Americans, while black Americans and Latinos are on “the other team”. In the duality of American politics, this means that whites and Asians are seen as Republicans, while blacks and Hispanics as Democrats. While Asians can be as conservative on family values just like Hispanics, they are as keener as whites (in modern America this is also a wide classification ranging from Jewish Americans to Irish Americans) in supporting the free market, tough law enforcement and wars abroad. Asians prefer to socialize with whites than with blacks or Latinos. Both whites and Asians are against positive discrimination on campus, where their places could be taken to fill quotas of black and Hispanic students. In the 2007/2008 presidential campaign, many Democrat volunteers assumed that Asians disliked Barack Obama and forgot the fact that he grew up in an Asian country and has an Asian step-family (although many Asian-Americans also do not know that Indonesia is an Asian country, due to the very low number of Indonesian-Americans).

During the 2011/2012 campaign, both Republican and Democratic parties did not seriously attempt to court Asian-Americans, and even the Republican Party produced some advertisements attacking China using Asian-Americans portrayed as Chinese citizens — with the worst ones employing racial stereotypes.

By the end of the campaign, while everyone knew that African-Americans would overwhelmingly vote for Obama, nobody was sure who the majority of white Americans would vote for. Hispanics seemed to be 50-50, and nobody counted the Asians — campaigners did not contact Asian households and areas, even in the last minutes of the campaign.

And so Americans went to the polls with voting instructions written in English, Spanish, Chinese and Korean. After the analysis was complete, the result was shocking — after blacks, Asians were the ones who voted overwhelmingly for Obama. According to CNN, The New York Times and Bloomberg, 73 percent of Asian-Americans voted for Barack Obama, compared to 71 percent of Latinos. This is despite the fact that two Asian-American governors are Republicans — Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Nikki Haley of South Carolina. In California, only 47 percent of whites picked Obama, but 79 percent of Asians did, even more than Hispanics. In Virginia, a crucial swing state, two out of three Asian voters chose Obama. Overall, more whites in several states including California, Pennsylvania and Ohio voted for Romney, but Asians took different stances and the majority of them believed in Obama.

Since early this year, Mitt Romney wanted to concentrate on the economy. Unfortunately, the Republican Party has been too embedded on moral and religious issues, presenting itself as a very white party without any serious attempt to woo non-white voters who are not devout Christians. Some Asian-Americans are conservative Christians, but the rest are not and they are not comfortable with a Republican Party that seems to be hostile toward Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and the non-religious.

The first Obama administration was tough on immigrants and many bright Asian graduates knew they could not secure a job and residency in America, so chose to go home or somewhere easier like Canada or Chile. But it seems that many Asian-Americans were not sure they could get better acknowledgement, credit and advantages under a Romney presidency.

Now that white Americans consist of less than 75 percent of the population — a fact should be remembered by anyone who thinks that the US is a white-only country. The small Asian population tilted the balance in Obama’s favor, breaking the presumptions that it was apolitical, it was trying hard “to become white”, and was not important. Jewish and African-Americans were “accepted” as Americans through active and great struggles. Maybe Asian-Americans have also begun that fight.

http://www2.thejakartapost.com/news/2012/12/17/asian-americans-help-obama-s-reelection.html