The Asian American Movement

8. From Radical to Electoral Politics: The Asian American Odyssey for Empowerment

8 From Radical to Electoral Politics: The Asian American Odyssey for Empowerment You, as Asian Americans, have a special role to play in any effort to change our country's policies. For you have seen so much of the worst side of our history. -Jesse Jackson (1984) A sians in America have been a disenfranchised group throughout most of their history. As " aliens ineligible to citizenship," immigrants were denied the right to vote by the Naturalization Act of '79°, which stipulated that only " free white persons" could apply for naturalization, implicitly denying that privilege to people of color. After the Civil War, the laws were changed in 1870 to permit the naturalization of persons of African descent. The denial of the right of Asians to apply for U.S. citizenship was reaffirmed by the courts in such civil cases as Ozawa v. U.S. (1922), which stated that the privilege of naturalization extended only to white persons and persons of African origin. The only ones to escape the onus of " ineligibility" were persons of Asian ancestry born on American soil. In the course of opposing discriminatory laws , Chinese litigants established the important judicial principle that a person born in the United States of alien parents ineligible for citizenship was still an American citizen.! Eventually, Asian immigrants attained the right to become naturalized citizens . In 1943, Chinese became eligible for citizenship when Congress repealed Copyrighted Material 241 242 : Chapter 8 the Chinese exclusion acts as a goodwill gesture to China, a wartime ally. In 1946, Filipinos and Asian Indians were made eligible. Other Asians had to wait till [952 and the passage of the McCarran-Walter Immigration and Naturalization Act, which eliminated race as a bar to immigration and naturalization.2 With citizenship came the right to vote. But elected officials and private citizens seem still determined to deny Asian Americans the franchise through the use of "English-only elections, literacy tests, racial gerrymandering, and physical intimidation and violence." 3 For their part, Asian Americans have been reluctant to join either the Democratic or the Republican party, since neither served them well in the past. Even though the Democrats proclaim that theirs is the party of the disadvantaged and seek to give access to those excluded from power, and the Republicans point to their party's pre-Civil War origins in 1854 and early premise of freedom, civil rights, and opportunity for all ethnic and racial minorities, both have been guilty of anti-Asian attitudes and actions 4 As a result, most Asian Americans were politically apathetic during the immediate post-World War II era, limiting their activities to greying Democratic clubs that catered to established interests in Chinatowns and other Asian American communities and to national lobbying organizations like the Japanese American Citizens League. Few of them had political aspirations, and even fewer were elected to public office at any level 5 The notable exception was in Hawaii, where Asian Americans made up the majority of the population. Before World War II , Asians were active in local politics, and such men as Hiram Fong were elected to the territorial legislature ; after the war, their ranks were augmented by returning veterans like Spark Matsunaga and Daniel Inouye, of the 100th Battalion and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, respectively, who decided that they had earned the right to enter the political arena. Most of them joined a political coalition under the Democratic party that displaced the dominant European American oligarchy that had ruled the territory. When Hawaii became a state in 1959, Asian Americans were elected to both the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, where they have ably served their state and nation. Asian Americans on the mainland would also like to elect their own people to public office, but so far have had less success. With the passage of the Voting Rights Act (1965) and the politicization of the Asian American community during the 1960s, Asian Americans began to develop an interest in the problems and potential of the American political system. With their growing population Copyrighted Material From Radical to Electoral Politics : 243 and affluence during the 1970s, they became involved in electoral politics. A few mavericks were able to get elected: March Fong Eu became California's secretary of state in 1974; Norman Mineta and Robert Matsui won seats in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1974 and 1978, respectively; and S. I. Hayakawa...