The New Face of Civil Rights

By Kristi Nelson

His last words have been immortalized by Asian-Americans across the country. Shortly before Vincent Chin faded into unconsciousness -- after a Detroit auto worker had already assumed Chin was Japanese, blamed him for problems in the U.S. auto industry, then bludgeoned him with a baseball bat -- he managed to say, "This isn't fair." The 27-year-old Chinese man died four days later; one day before he was to be married. His attackers, two white men, were never sent to jail.

Chin’s death in 1982 at the hands of Ronald Ebens and Ebens’ stepson, who held Chin down during the beating, was a defining moment for Asian-Americans everywhere. The event marks what many believe to be the beginning of a new era of civil rights for Asian-Americans, the point where various Asian ethnic groups and organizations began to work together to respond to racism and fight for civil rights.

"It had reverberations throughout the country," said Aryani Ong, a staff lawyer for the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium, based in Washington, D.C. "That's what mobilized Asian Pacific Americans, they realized they needed to engage in community organizing and gain political clout through access to elected office."

Since then, the movement has been growing. Although not as visible to mainstream America as groups led by other minority groups, Asian-American civil rights and advocacy groups fight for many of the same ideals: protection against police brutality, access to quality education, fair wages, equal treatment under the law and adequate hate crime legislation.

"But it’s a different sense of movement than you would . . . consider civil

rights," said Naisy Dolar, director of the Chicago Commission on Human Relations’ Asian Affairs Advisory Council. "It’s a very different face. When people think of civil rights, they think of protests, movements. It’s more of a mobilization within the system. Sometimes that works, sometimes that doesn't work."

But, Dolar said, these groups and budding civil rights leaders are quickly learning the ropes out of necessity. According to the 1990 Census, the Asian/Pacific Islander population is the fastest growing minority group in the United States - a fact that is expected to be reinforced once the 2000 Census is tabulated. The population -- which includes more than 20 distinct nationalities and ethnic groups, including Chinese, Japanese, Cambodians, Samoans, Asian Indians and Pacific Islanders -- doubled between 1980 and 1990, from 3.7 million to 7.2 million. As the population has grown, so have reports of anti-Asian bias crimes.

FBI statistics show that the largest increase in hate crimes has been against Asian-Americans and gays. According to the Consortium’s 1998 Audit of Violence Against Asian Pacific Americans, there were 429 anti-Asian incidents reported in 1998 and 481 in 1997, compared to 335 in 1993. According to the audit, the FBI reported an overall drop in violent crimes, yet anti-Asian bias crimes continued to rise. The audit also found that - were information was available -- South Asians in particular were targeted in larger numbers in 1998 than in 1997 or 1996: there were 41 reports of incidents involving South Asians in 1998, two in 1997 and 22 in 1996.

Several recent anti-Asian incidents, as reported by the Consortium and the Southern Poverty Law Center, have gained attention in New York and across the country:

• In February, four Korean-American students at the State University of New York at Binghamton were attacked by three white members of the school’s wrestling team. One of the Korean students suffered a fractured skull and internal hemorrhaging. The incident was not originally reported as a bias crime, although law enforcement officials reported that anti-Asian slurs were used. The university’s Asian Student Union demanded the hiring of more Asian-American teachers and counselors.

• Joseph Ileto, 39, a Filipino-American postal carrier, was shot nine times in the chest last August in suburban Los Angeles. Buford Furrow, a reported member of the Aryan Nation, confessed to Ileto’s murder and to an earlier shooting rampage at the North Valley Jewish Community Center. Furrow told police that he killed Ileto because he looked Hispanic or Asian and because Ileto was a federal employee.

• In September 1998, 20-year-old Rishi Maharaj was beaten by three white men with baseball bats while walking with his cousins through South Ozone Park, Queens. As the men beat Maharaj, they shouted anti-Indian epithets and said, "This will never be a neighborhood until you leave."

Across the country, there have been other, less publicized attacks that Asian civil rights workers say prove just how pervasive anti-Asian and anti-immigrant sentiment has become. Like the racially charged beating of a Chinese restaurant owner in Hackensack last year; or the Woodside, Queens, incident in which two sisters, ages 20 and 26, were charged with attacking an Asian youth and yelling racial slurs. And more recently, the commander of a Queens police precinct was demoted after making racist jokes with other officers about his supervisor, the highest-ranking Asian-American in the police department.

These incidents have have helped bridge some of the gaps between the various Asian-American communities, Ong said, which have never been a completely united front. But in most cases, most of these issues barely register on Americans’ radar screens.

Betty Lee Sung, the former director of Asian Studies at the City University of New York, said she watches protests and rallies when people in other minority groups are victims of bias crimes or police brutality, "but when we get beat up and nobody does a thing."

The media, Dolar said, often "fails to acknowledge the Asian community," when reporting hate crimes. Asian-American groups nationwide blame the media for ignoring other prominent anti-Asian hate crimes. In the Ileto case, for example, civil rights groups said the media were inconsistent - sometimes the murder was called a hate crime; other times reports made it sound as if Ileto were a generic victim -- in the wrong place at the wrong time.

For these reasons, Dolar said, people underestimate the problem of anti-Asian violence - or simply believe that anti-Asian crime does not exist.

"I don't want to blame it all on media," Dolar said. "Certainly, the community needs to make some noise."

Which is where the civil rights groups come in. The Consortium turned up the heat last August by holding a national press conference in Washington, D.C., to call attention to the deaths of Ileto, Naoki Kamijima and Won Joon Yoon. Kamijima, a Japanese American store owner, was killed at his Crystal Lake, Ill., store in April 1999. Won Joon Yoon, a Korean graduate student, was killed in Bloomington, Ind., last July by Benjamin Smith, who targeted blacks, Jews and Asians during a shooting rampage. The press conference kicked off similar events by Asian-American communities in cities across the country, especially Filipino American groups.

"This event was very significant for the Filipino-American community here in New York and nationwide," said Chris Punongbayan, a member of the New York City-based Filipino Civil Rights Advocates. "It was the first time, probably since the anti-Marcos movement in the 80s," that the Filipino community organized for a common cause, he said.

"I think it’s important that we build off that momentum," Punongbayan said.

"There’s plenty that still goes on . . .there’s a lot that we can do. What we’re hoping to do is make everyone aware that this hate crime can happen to anybody . . . anybody that isn’t white."

Groups agree that they have to keep their concerns in the public eye, but they face a number of cultural and institutional obstacles. First, they must get past a large underreporting problem, said Sung, who added that a variety of cultural barriers are to blame.

According to Sung, many recent immigrants are from countries where distrust in police and government is the norm. They maintain such sensibilities once they immigrate to the United States, and believe police will not bother to investigate their complaints. Leo Lee, president of the Manhattan chapter of Organization of Chinese Americans, said he has met people who believe that if they complain, they will be viewed as disruptive.

"Asian-Americans are very reticent to do anything about it when they are assaulted or when they are attacked or when bad things happen to them," Sung said. "I get very aggravated because nobody wants to do anything . . . we need a little time to get over the fear of dealing with the government, of not making waves."

Unless community-level organizations hear about them, Ong said, many incidents would not be reported at all. There are also language barriers among recent immigrants many states don’t even collect data on anti-Asian incidents, so they are hard to track.

"We’ve been engaging the Department of Justice, including the FBI, in discussions on how they can improve police training and how they can bring more priority to reporting of hate crime data and being involved in more community outreach," Ong said. "So that they can bridge that gap between law enforcement and the community . . . so that victims will feel comfortable with coming forward."

Most local activists said they realize other minority groups don’t always understand what Asian-Americans may have to complain about. People of other races often look at Asian-Americans and see the model-minority stereotype, activists say, that of smart children and successful business owners.

"That’s a dangerous myth that we have to dispel," Ong said. "There are more established Asian-American groups like the Japanese-Americans, Chinese-Americans and Korean-Americans, which society has viewed with financial and educational success. But what they’re overlooking are the newly arrived immigrants and the challenges that they face as immigrants. As immigrants they are targeted because of their ethnicity and race and national origin . . . they don’t have as strong a voice, and that’s why groups like us are trying to represent their voices. We are aware that they’re out there."

Chinese-American civil rights activist Steve Yip visits college campuses to speak to students about protests, rallies and events sponsored by local groups. He said he cannot explain why Asian-Americans don’t have prominent civil rights leaders - à la Al Sharpton -- but suggested someone from the younger generation could fit the bill.

At a recent anti-Asian violence panel at Columbia University, Yip tried to drum up participation for an Asian-American-organized rally against police brutality. The event was organized by Columbia sophomore LinYeeYuan, 19, said she is more than willing to take on the civil rights fight for her generation. She attends civil rights events across the city.

"I think kids of my generation, I think a lot of times we’re rather apathetic," Yuan said. She said she has noticed among other Asian-American students, especially those at Ivy League schools, an attitude that civil rights issues are for "the others," meaning blacks and Latinos. She was among them.

"I didn’t consider myself a student of color until this year," Yuan said. "I always thought they were students of color, but I was an Asian-American." Yuan said part of her change came from frequently being called "chink."

"My big issue is to organize students, especially students of color, to realize these things don’t just concern black students or Latino students or Asian-American students, these are things we all should be concerned with as people of color."

Yuan said she would like to see Asian-American groups form more alliances with black and Latino groups, and in the process become more outspoken. That, she said, is the future of the Asian-American civil rights movement.

"We’ve becoming more visible as well as a more vocal group," Yuan said. "We may not come out with an extreme form of a civil rights movement, but I do think we will stand out, in a positive way."