Marginalization of Minorities in the U.S. System

2026-10-15 · Ho Chanh Nghia

Originally written June 2021. “Last year” means 2020; “former President Trump” is as of that date.

More than 22 million Asian Americans live in this country, close to 7 percent of the population, and we are the fastest-growing racial or ethnic group of eligible voters.¹²³ Yet history and myth still mark us as outsiders.⁴ This essay traces that history, shows how the pandemic revived it, explains why pressure alone has not ended racism, and argues that we must build our own strength and stand with other minorities.

A long history

We came in the 19th century for work, fortune, and opportunity. As our numbers grew, white Americans feared we would take their jobs, and they cast us as perpetual foreigners to be controlled and tamed.⁵ The law followed the fear. The Page Act of 1875 and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 closed the door.⁶ Citizenship was reserved for white persons and, after 1870, persons of African descent, so Asian immigrants could not naturalize.⁷ California’s 1913 Alien Land Law barred “aliens ineligible for citizenship” from buying land, and other states copied it.⁸ California voided marriages between white persons and “Mongolians” until 1948.⁹ In 1854 the California Supreme Court threw out a murder conviction because it rested on the testimony of Chinese witnesses.¹⁰

The pattern never ended. After September 11, 2001, Sikhs and South Asian Americans were among the targets of more than 800 incidents of violence, threats, vandalism, and arson that federal authorities investigated.¹¹ During SARS in 2003, fear and stigma fell hardest on Asian American communities, as some Americans grew suspicious of anyone who looked Asian.¹² We succeeded anyway, though never without controversy.¹³

The pandemic

COVID-19 brought it all back. From March 19 to August 5, 2020, alone, Stop AAPI Hate received 2,583 reports of anti-Asian discrimination.¹⁴ By the end of February 2021 the count was 3,795, mostly verbal harassment, with physical assault about 11 percent.¹⁵ In 16 of the largest U.S. cities, police-reported anti-Asian hate crimes rose nearly 150 percent in 2020, even as hate crimes overall fell.¹⁶ Our children were bullied at school and blamed for the virus; in more than half of the youth incidents reported in 2020, harassers used anti-Chinese language.¹⁷ Former President Trump called the coronavirus the “China virus” and “kung flu.”¹⁸ I believe his words fed the hate.

Then, on March 16, 2021, a gunman killed eight people at three Atlanta-area spas. Six were women of Asian descent.¹⁹

Our community is traumatized. A Vietnamese man in Garden Grove, California, told VnExpress that he no longer dared go out without his children, afraid someone would knock him down or stab him to death simply because he was Asian.²⁰ Many of us live with that fear. Some younger Asian Americans have left for Asia, citing racism among their reasons.²¹ The rest of us are asking what our place in this country is.

All this came as the world watched what Black Americans endure almost daily. After the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Eric Garner, and others, Asian Americans raised their voices for Black Lives Matter.²² Our leaders understand that there will be no justice in America until systemic racism is confronted.

Protect ourselves

If we cannot count on others to protect us, we must protect ourselves. Whatever this nation can do, we should be able to do as individuals. To defend ourselves, our families, and our interests, we must build our own military, political, and media power.

Asian Americans are buying more firearms, though one gun-shop owner in Arcadia, California, noted that interest was soaring among “basically everybody.”²³ In a National Shooting Sports Foundation survey last year, retailers estimated a nearly 43 percent rise in sales to Asian customers in the first half of 2020. The same survey estimated 52 percent for White customers and 58 percent for Black customers.²⁴

Washington has noticed. On February 26, 2021, Acting Deputy Attorney General John Carlin said the “horrific attacks on Asian Americans across the country” have “no place in our society,” and that the Justice Department is “committed to putting a stop to it.”²⁵ Words are welcome. Protection is better.

Why pressure alone fails

Racism is gaining ground despite decades of anti-bias activism. Research reported in The New Republic suggests that once racial bias and hateful ideology take root in the brain, they can be difficult, if not impossible, to undo.²⁶ Millions of dollars have gone into high-profile anti-bias programs at companies and police departments, with little evidence that they work.²⁷ Worse, anti-bias education has bred a resentment of its own, against white people for their privilege, because victims of racism, too, can need someone to hate.²⁸

In my view, the root of race-related violence in America is white supremacy, which grew out of the old doctrine of scientific racism and served to justify colonialism.

Push people and they push back. No one likes being told how to think or feel, which helps explain the constant backlash from white supremacists.²⁹ And nearly all organized anti-racism work runs from the top down: the racists at the top are told to change, while the targets at the bottom are asked only to report their grievances to the authorities.³⁰

Can we end racism by pressuring racists alone? Not likely. Few people believe they are biased, and people can justify almost any belief, however irrational.³¹ Society must still expose racism, denounce it, and punish crimes against people of other races. But the virus of racism does not care where you stand in the hierarchy. It infects us all.³²

What Asian American leaders must demand

We are too often left out. Diversity panels rightly focus on the injustice facing Black communities, but rarely on AAPIs.³³ Asian American leaders must stand at the center of the work to end systemic racism:³⁴

• Bring Asian Americans into every diversity, equity, and inclusion discussion. We are diverse, and we are the fastest-growing major racial or ethnic group in the country.³⁵

• Retire the “model minority” myth. It hides poverty: one in four Mongolian and Burmese Americans lived below the poverty line in 2019.³⁶

• Recognize that AAPIs also face systemic racism, discrimination, racial profiling, and injustice.

• Learn the root causes of racism and the historical inequities that have held AAPIs back, so that history does not repeat itself.

Racial justice belongs in foreign policy, too. In March 2021, the White House called confronting systemic racism and strengthening democracy at home “a critical part” of its foreign policy vision.³⁷ It must stay that way.

One people

From the first laborers of the 19th century to the pandemic, we have been treated as perpetual foreigners, and pressuring racists has not changed that. Whatever our politics, race, or ethnicity, we must not stand alone. We must build alliances with other minorities, reach across national and ethnic lines, and become louder and more visible. We must unite as one people, as one nation.

Below the notes: Discussion, in their own words, a dialogue assembled from the words of Jefferson, Lincoln and Franklin.

Notes