Asian-Americans Still Stereotyped

Universities, politicians and the media continue to distort images of Asian-Americans by portraying them as outsiders and "model minorities," a noted Berkeley ethnic studies professor said at a Harvard Foundation forum last night.

Speaking to about 40 people in the Lowell House Junior Common Room, Ronald Takaki of the University of California at Berkeley stressed how images of Asian-Americans today are inaccurate when they focus completely on the minority's immigrant past.

Takaki, author of Strangers From a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans appeared as the second of three speakers invited this fall by the Harvard Foundation to speak on racial and ethnic relations.

Attitudes towards Asian-Americans as unwelcome outsiders have persisted since the earliest days of the United States, Takaki said.

Since the 1790s, the U.S. has imposed severe restrictions on immigrants, culminating in the 1920s in the so-called Exclusion Laws targeted largely against Asians. These restrictions were not lifted completely until the mid-1960s. Asians began settling America in the early 1800s and some have lived in the U.S. for several generations.

Immigration restrictions "reflected the founding father's view of America as a homogeneous society," Takaki said. Many Americans continue to assume that all Asians are recent citizens of the U.S., he said. "Students and faculty still ask you "How long have you been in the country?" he said.

Another common misperception is that of Asian-Americans as "model minorities," the scholar said.

"Asian-Americans are like an invisible minority group unless they are being held up as model minorities for the Blacks," said Takaki. The stereotype "pits us against Blacks and Latinos and other minorities," he said.

Takaki blamed the media, absence of an Asian-American political voice and academia for perpetuating images of minorities as aliens.

"Instead of riding horses, [Asian-Americans] ride Honda motorcycles" on television, he said. Takaki went on to describe the minority as "a people who did not write presidential addresses."

"Our own professors, people who write books about American society" are also partly to blame, added Takaki, who said that cultural misrepresentation in America stems from the universities.

Takaki, who heads the graduate ethnic studies program at Berkeley, said university curriculums underrepresent ethnic diversity. "We want to see our literature, our history and our culture in our curriculum," Takaki said.