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Post details: George Allen's Political Blind Spot
George Allen's Political Blind Spot
Some communities are effectively in a political blind spot, where not only their speech, but the very existence of their voice, is obscured and marginalized. They have difficulty finding an audience, not only because audience preferences are dominated by mainstream perspectives, but also because any potentially receptive listeners wouldn't know of the communities' perspectives or even think to look for them. Such communities cannot benefit from the Web's low entry barriers and search costs. If no one knows you're speaking, no one will look you up on Google, and certainly no one is going to link to your site, even if many people might actually be inclined to do so.
For the most part, Asian Americans exist in a political blind spot. Widely misperceived as perpetual foreigners, Asian Americans are rarely recognized as active and legitimate participants in the American political process and contributors to American political discourse. As a result, politicians courting the Asian American community don't seem to engage in any kind of research or reflection on Asian American perspectives, as they invariably would when appealing to other interest groups.
The recent incident in which Sen. George Allen referred to a Virginia-born, Indian American campaign worker as "Macaca" and welcomed him to America might have provided an opportunity for Asian Americans to raise public awareness of the perpetual foreigner stereotype. Allen's subsequent letter of apology, however, shows just how deeply voiceless Asian Americans are on this and other political issues.
In the days following the incident, the Allen campaign's damage-control operation went into overdrive, and Allen was fully motivated to engage and learn from the Indian American community. To Allen's credit, he scheduled meetings with community leaders and offered a direct apology, instead of the more common non-apology (e.g., "We're sorry if anyone was offended, because that was not our intention."). He clearly understood the seriousness of the political problem he had created for himself.
But Allen's apology letter, issued Monday, shows that he learned little from those meetings about why his comments were problematic. Surely any meeting with Indian American leaders to address the "Macaca" and "Welcome to America" comments should have focused on the racialized misperception of Indian Americans as perpetual foreigners, and the broader public policy problems this raises for Indian Americans who seek full and equal participation in American society. Despite this, Allen's letter specifically cites only one issue that he understands to be of interest to the Indian American community -- America's foreign relations with India:
I was very touched last week when many of the outstanding leaders in the Indian-American community, who I have known and worked with for years, took time to meet with me and to offer their thoughts and concerns. I pledged to them that I would continue working with them in the future just as I have in the past for strengthening U.S.-India relations.
In conflating the concerns of the Indian American community about an American political campaign with the state of U.S. foreign policy toward the nation of India, Allen repeats the very same error for which he is attempting to apologize.
This is a common error, and a bipartisan one. John Kerry's 2004 campaign Web site had a page ostensibly devoted to courting the Asian American community, but which focused almost entirely on the senator's record of leadership on U.S. foreign policy toward Asia.
When you're so voiceless that others have no idea that you have anything to say, they'll inevitably end up speaking for you.
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Over-simplifying massively: Asian-Americans didn't come into the United States in the same way that Europeans did.
More specifically: most European immigrant groups were also considered "perpetual foreigners" and often racially inferior for some time after their mass migrations to the US began. The way that many of these communities got past this - and the way they addressed the issues important to their communities - was by becoming integral parts of the (East Coast, and Chicago) big city machines in the 19th and early 20th C. If you could deliver votes for whomever was in power, you were okay by them.
Contrast that to immigration patterns of Asian Americans. The first large group - Chinese - were long denied full citizenship and so were unable to engage in the same way. But they were also mostly in California - whose politics function quite differently (and in many ways separately) than the East Coast. The latter was also true of Japanese immigrants. And with most other Asian American populations - in the case of S.R. Siddarth, South Asian - they have had an entirely different immigrant experience in another way, in that many arrived already in the middle class, and that while there are medium- and large-sized communities across much of the country, almost nowhere do they make up a large enough political constituency to be as pivotal as previous groups were. And, to top it all off - the era of machine politics is long dead.
So because Asian American immigrants have had a very different immigrant experience than the Europeans who preceeded them - and because that immigrant experience is the one that Americans of European background recognize as the "correct" one - it's unsurprising that those Americans of European descent would fail to recognize Asian Americans as full citizens in the same way they would, say, Americans of Irish descent.
Clearly there's also some racism - conscious or otherwise - going on, fairly often, but the same was true of almost every immigrant European group, before they were "validated."
08/30/06 @ 15:23
09/17/06 @ 09:20 Leave a comment: