How does it feel to be a solution?\u201d 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’ entr\u00e9e to The Souls of Black Folk: \u201cHow does it feel to be a problem?\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI sometimes forget I am a South Asian working with a predominantly Latino organization,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Wadhawan moved to North Dakota in the fourth grade, where she and her brother \u201csuffered a lot of getting beat up and called \u2018sand nigger’ and getting told to go back home,\u201d she explains speedily. \u201cOur friends were the other kids of color, the outcasts \u2014 Native American kids, foster kids.\u201d Which meant Wadhawan fairly quickly identified more closely with the black and other brown kids: a connection that’s stuck around for her career.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 who are the fastest-growing ethnic group in the U.S. \u2014 are not just overwhelmingly likely to vote Democrat, they’re also increasingly likely to identify as \u201cpeople of color.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
Many are lawyers \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
Still others are social workers, labor organizers, police accountability advocates.<\/p>\n
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. \u201cI’m the only one who’s graduated from college, out of five kids. \u2026 My parents are kind of like: \u2018Why can’t you be a lawyer if you want to fight all these battles?’ \u201d No chance of that, for Wong. She’s a street-level organizer to the bones, she says.<\/p>\n
http:\/\/www.ozy.com\/fast-forward\/asian-americans-joining-the-civil-rights-fight\/33802.article<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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