How does it feel to be a solution?” It’s the question historian

How does it feel to be a solution?” It’s the question historian Vijay Prashad asked 13 years ago of model minorities in a slim volume of cultural criticism called The Karma of Brown Folk. The query is an inversion of W.E.B. DuBois’ entrée to The Souls of Black Folk: “How does it feel to be a problem?”

The answer to Prashad’s question among a growing group of Asian-Americans is that it’s time to be a bit more, as the liberal-arts-types would say, problematic. Once a conservative-friendly group of upwardly mobile new immigrants, young, educated Asian-Americans are now increasingly on the front lines of civil rights battles, working as activists and organizers, engaged in assorted leftist rabble-rousing for causes more often associated with blacks or Latinos than Asians.

Like 32-year-old Sheena Wadhawan, head of legal programs at CASA de Maryland, where she organizes on employment and immigration issues with mostly Latino communities.

“I sometimes forget I am a South Asian working with a predominantly Latino organization,” she says.

Wadhawan moved to North Dakota in the fourth grade, where she and her brother “suffered a lot of getting beat up and called ‘sand nigger’ and getting told to go back home,” she explains speedily. “Our friends were the other kids of color, the outcasts — Native American kids, foster kids.” Which meant Wadhawan fairly quickly identified more closely with the black and other brown kids: a connection that’s stuck around for her career.

Twenty-two years ago, 55 percent of Asian-Americans cast their vote for George H.W. Bush (Bill Clinton earned only 31 percent). But today Asian-Americans — who are the fastest-growing ethnic group in the U.S. — are not just overwhelmingly likely to vote Democrat, they’re also increasingly likely to identify as “people of color.” And that identification isn’t just about checking a box. For many, it’s about translating their personal experiences into something political and pan-racial.

Many are lawyers — like Jenny Yang, the new chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (and first Asian to hold the title), or Neal Katyal, former acting solicitor general, who made a name litigating civil liberties cases after 9/11.

Still others are social workers, labor organizers, police accountability advocates.

Lifelong New Yorker Helena Wong’s been an activist for 19 years with CAAAV, a group that organizes Asian-American communities. She just stepped down as the group’s director this year. “I’m the only one who’s graduated from college, out of five kids. … My parents are kind of like: ‘Why can’t you be a lawyer if you want to fight all these battles?’ ” No chance of that, for Wong. She’s a street-level organizer to the bones, she says.

http://www.ozy.com/fast-forward/asian-americans-joining-the-civil-rights-fight/33802.article