We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation by Jeff Chang Page A

allowed any immigrant who had lived there for a year to become naturalized. There were no restrictions on who could be a citizen. Exclusion was for other countries, like the United States.
    Your high school teacher Mr. Lee taught you that Chinese people had built civilizations while Europeans were still messing around in loincloths. (He was also the school disciplinarian, so you got to know each other well.) But your folks didn’t rule anything. They harvested rice and taro and watercress. They fought in boxing rings, delivered restaurant supplies, cooked for soldiers, fixed and maintained American military equipment. They gave their neighbors fruit from their land. They bartered in the markets for meat. They died by runaway plow or intended bullet, their hearts gave out or the water took them. They survived overseers, bosses, gangs, each other.
    Hawai’i’s statehood campaign emerged at the same time as the Southern civil rights movement. In 1959, they were given a choice to vote to make Hawai’i a state. Two generations before, they had not been given a ballot but the threat of bullets. But they chose to vote for it. Many Locals saw statehood as a culmination of a nonviolent revolution against haole minority rule, offering some as-yet-nameless reward. Not everyone did, though, especially Hawaiians who knew what had been taken.
    You were born into the generation after that vote, around the time that Asian Americans announced themselves in San Francisco and Los Angeles and Boston and New York. It was long before “Asian American” had been reduced to a demographic category. Back then the term was still a courageous provocation, like a black leather jacket or a brown beret.
    On the continent, these angry young ones—most of them third-generation descendants of working-class East Asians—had invested in a Third World identity. They looked to anticolonial uprisings in Asia and Africa for inspiration. They spoke of revolution. They organized youths in Chinatown and Little Tokyo. They sold Mao’s Little Red Book to the Black Panthers. They thought of Hawai’i the way some thought of the South or Aztlán, as a place where the answers were.
    In 1980, Governor George Ariyoshi, the first Local Japanese man to rise to the highest post in the state, had given a soaring speech. In it he said,
It was here, in our red soil and black volcanic rock, that a new society was born. It was here that many from other societies gathered in disparate ways to start a new life and form a new society. It was here that sons and daughters of these early immigrants learned their lessons of tolerance and understanding and Americanism. It was here that they learned the verity that all men are truly created equal.… It was here that hard work and application were rewarded. This is the lesson of Hawai’i, and it is one that increasingly is being learned by the world. 1
    You didn’t know yet of these words, but in the islands these ideas were natural as salt-soaked trade winds. As you became Asian American, you figured that you had an advantage over all your friends born on the continent, even those who had come from countries where whites were also a minority.
    Your peers in college were struggling to figure out who they were. They had been especially hobbled by the violence of negation, external and internal, everyday and irruptive. Some of them had never met another Asian apart from their parents. Some of them had never really known white people, growing up in what the professors called “ethnic enclaves.” All this was unfamiliar to you. But you were there with them in Asian American Studies 20A, everyone trying to figure out what they had in common with the person sitting next to them. Together you were going to learn how to be Asian American.
    There was an instability at the heart of Asian Americanness. Panethnicity, you learned, was a creation of the state—a provocation turned census category. The state had been blunt and overbroad. It