We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation by Jeff Chang Page B
Authors: Jeff Chang
lumped all kinds of people of Asian and Pacific Islander descent together. It created new margins—if you were Filipino, Pacific Islander, South Asian, or Southeast Asian, were you really Asian? In classes, students debated fiercely: Did identity always need to be shaped from above? How can the object become the subject? Asian American Studies needed to constitute Asian American culture as much as it needed to describe it.
In your arrogance, your fury for living born of Local pride, ignorance, and insecurity, you had it all figured out already. You thought maybe you didn’t even need the class, but for the fact that that’s where the girls were. Your swagger was a gift of birth. You and your folks put Tabasco sauce in your saimin and ate your BBQ mix plate with chopsticks. You spoke your own pidgin: the sentences were structured as if spoken in Japanese, rich with loanwords from Hawaiian, Portuguese, Cantonese. You were a cultural chameleon, had spent a lifetime training in adaptation and code switching. Some days you probably felt like you came from superior stock. You wanted everyone, especially your Asian American friends, to come visit Hawai’i, see the proof.
* * *
Governor Ariyoshi gave that famous speech in 1980, during a period in which his government had come under fire from Filipino, Native Hawaiian, and Samoan activists who claimed that the state had discriminated against them in employment and educational opportunities.
The state administration was run predominantly by Local Japanese, Nisei who had come through the public schools at the height of the territorial Americanization campaigns. After World War II, this generation joined the Democratic Party in large numbers, and became the vanguard of the multiracial working-class and nascent middle-class movements. This was where the idea of the Local had been forged—in multilingual labor meetings, on pidgin-chattering playgrounds, around luau tables, and at kanikapila jams. By the mid-1950s, the culturally Local majority—finding institutional expression in family associations, labor unions, the Democratic Party—had dislodged the haole Republican planter-oligarchy.
But two decades after statehood, Filipinos, Native Hawaiians, and Samoans were severely underrepresented in public jobs and disproportionately trapped in low-achieving public schools. Ariyoshi’s speech had been delivered partly as a retort to those ethnic groups. It was a warning to wait their turn, because in Hawai’i we valued peace over justice, a peace that was ethnic in nature, and American in conception.
Jonathan Okamura’s point was that Local identity had been forged in different circumstances than those that continental Asian Americans confronted. And the narrative of the Local—that the rest of the world was bigoted and racially divided, Hawai’i was the exception pointing to peace—blinded them to justice. How strong were these “lessons of tolerance,” to have left the islands still so stratified?
But to Asian Americans on the continent, the idea of an identity forged in struggle—in epic labor uprisings on the plantations and in the shipyards and a rich hybrid culture birthed in work camps and schoolyards—was a powerful metaphor for their struggle against white racism. Building Asian Americanness was a bottom-up project of unity in diversity. But also, what could be more “e pluribus unum” than people from all these ancient warring cultures figuring out how to get along on American soil?
Some have portrayed the Asian American narrative—you have too—as a heroic one. But even as you tell this story, you wonder at the impossibility of Asian Americanness. There has been no Middle Passage to shape it, no common colonizers’ language, except English, to express it. Sometimes you scroll through your Facebook page, and your Black or Chicano friends have posted a video or a quote or a news item of Black or Chicano folks doing something beautiful, ironic, or
In your arrogance, your fury for living born of Local pride, ignorance, and insecurity, you had it all figured out already. You thought maybe you didn’t even need the class, but for the fact that that’s where the girls were. Your swagger was a gift of birth. You and your folks put Tabasco sauce in your saimin and ate your BBQ mix plate with chopsticks. You spoke your own pidgin: the sentences were structured as if spoken in Japanese, rich with loanwords from Hawaiian, Portuguese, Cantonese. You were a cultural chameleon, had spent a lifetime training in adaptation and code switching. Some days you probably felt like you came from superior stock. You wanted everyone, especially your Asian American friends, to come visit Hawai’i, see the proof.
* * *
Governor Ariyoshi gave that famous speech in 1980, during a period in which his government had come under fire from Filipino, Native Hawaiian, and Samoan activists who claimed that the state had discriminated against them in employment and educational opportunities.
The state administration was run predominantly by Local Japanese, Nisei who had come through the public schools at the height of the territorial Americanization campaigns. After World War II, this generation joined the Democratic Party in large numbers, and became the vanguard of the multiracial working-class and nascent middle-class movements. This was where the idea of the Local had been forged—in multilingual labor meetings, on pidgin-chattering playgrounds, around luau tables, and at kanikapila jams. By the mid-1950s, the culturally Local majority—finding institutional expression in family associations, labor unions, the Democratic Party—had dislodged the haole Republican planter-oligarchy.
But two decades after statehood, Filipinos, Native Hawaiians, and Samoans were severely underrepresented in public jobs and disproportionately trapped in low-achieving public schools. Ariyoshi’s speech had been delivered partly as a retort to those ethnic groups. It was a warning to wait their turn, because in Hawai’i we valued peace over justice, a peace that was ethnic in nature, and American in conception.
Jonathan Okamura’s point was that Local identity had been forged in different circumstances than those that continental Asian Americans confronted. And the narrative of the Local—that the rest of the world was bigoted and racially divided, Hawai’i was the exception pointing to peace—blinded them to justice. How strong were these “lessons of tolerance,” to have left the islands still so stratified?
But to Asian Americans on the continent, the idea of an identity forged in struggle—in epic labor uprisings on the plantations and in the shipyards and a rich hybrid culture birthed in work camps and schoolyards—was a powerful metaphor for their struggle against white racism. Building Asian Americanness was a bottom-up project of unity in diversity. But also, what could be more “e pluribus unum” than people from all these ancient warring cultures figuring out how to get along on American soil?
Some have portrayed the Asian American narrative—you have too—as a heroic one. But even as you tell this story, you wonder at the impossibility of Asian Americanness. There has been no Middle Passage to shape it, no common colonizers’ language, except English, to express it. Sometimes you scroll through your Facebook page, and your Black or Chicano friends have posted a video or a quote or a news item of Black or Chicano folks doing something beautiful, ironic, or