Asian American's Group History Related To Prejudice And Discrimination

Asian American's Group History Related To Prejudice And Discrimination
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Asian American's Group History Related To Prejudice And Discrimination
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Racially-motivated attacks on the Asian Americans over the recent past have sparked a debate on the group’s history related to prejudice and discrimination. Pointing to the Chinese Exclusion Act of the 1882, Thi Dieu (2021) has argued that the recent anti-Asian violence in Atlanta that led to the death of six Asian women in March 2021 was in part due to historical injustices that date back to 19th century. Nguyen Thi Dieu, a history associate professor at the College of Liberal Arts gives more examples about the link between the increasing wave of violence and how Asian Americans have historically been mistreated. These aspects include the attaches by the Ku Klux Klan against the Vietnamese between 1979 and 1981 in Texas, the beating and killing of a Chinese American, Vincent Chin in 1982 following accusations that he had “stolen” work from Americans” and the 9/11-related reactions against South Asians regardless of creed. Asian Americans face serious legal, political, and economic challenges largely due to discrimination. The political attacks on the Chinese following the announcement by the former President Donald Trump that the coronavirus was prepared in a Chinese lab has led to the vandalization of many Asian businesses. Judy Chu, the Californian Congresswoman reported in late March 2020 that there were about 100 hate crimes against the group daily (Strochlic, 2020). Besides the Chinese Exclusion Act, Asian Americans have suffered legal challenges such as the Japanese internment during the Second World War and historians have reported that the harassment and political rhetoric against the group reflects the time when racism was at its peak in the history of the United States. The World Health Organization outrightly warns individuals and institutions against linking infections to specific location in a bid to prevent backlash and stigma (Strochlic, 2020). However, Asian Americans have recently been blamed for the cause of the pandemic.
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While Asian American immigrants have brought a positive impact in many countries they have adopted, many have expressed mixed reactions about their experiences while living in the United States and other nations (AsiaSociety, 2018). In their book, “Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation”, David Eng, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Shinhee Han, a psychotherapist, have described the experiences of Asian Americans as feeling lost, alienated, and in waywardness. Eng and Han have felt that the Asian American students often express themselves in the clinic and classroom as if they are of little concern than others, and therefore, decide not to seek counseling services. These experiences led to the two authors to conclude that a popular Korean-American student had to commit suicide due to depression (Hsu, 2019). Students at universities and other Asian Americans continue to face depression despite their increasing levels of assimilation in the United States. Hsu (2019) reports that
“there many Asian-American students at Columbia, but Eng and Han had noticed that these students often spoke, in the classroom and at the clinic, of feeling invisible.”
The group still feels invisible and as Niccum (2021) notes not every immigrant is willing to throw their ethnic culture, and if they do, the mainstream society may not readily welcome their decision, particularly those immigrants of color. Despite this observation, the Pew Research Center has indicated that the Asian American population almost doubled from 2000 to 2019 and their numbers of expected to more than 46 million by in the next three decades (Budiman & Ruiz, 2021). Therefore, the group still continues to be diverse and growing in population in the United States.
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Compared to non-Hispanic whites, Asian Americans have lower health outcomes. According to Mui et al (2017) that compared health outcomes among the non-Hispanic white men and others from the Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean and other Asian Americans, Vietnamese reported poor health outcomes while Filipino, Korean, and other Asian Americans were more likely to suffer from diabetes than white Americans. Prejudice and racism has largely affected the group’s health outcomes, especially during the time of the Covid-19 pandemic where there have been reports of more than 100 hate crimes daily against the Asian Americans. In 2020, social media platforms and other media outlets had misleading headlines such as “China kids stay home” and “Chinese virus pandemonium” which affected many Asian Americans socially and their health (Croucher et al., 2020). However, despite the challenges of prejudice, the introduction of Affordable Care Act, the number of uninsured Asian Americans has dropped since 2010 as shown in Fig 1 below.
Fig 1 Numbers of uninsured Asian Americans have dropped since 2010 (Asian & Pacific Islander American Health Forum, 2021)
Nevertheless, there are notable disp...