School conferences were a revelation to a mother of a middle-school daughter who had been adopted from Guatemala, but even more of a revelation to her teachers. The girl had reported that the teachers never called on her class. The mother sent a note to the homeroom teacher which was never answered. The mother said that the teachers were surprised to have anyone show up at the girl’s scheduled conference time at all—let alone a white professional woman. The teachers had apparently assumed that the girl was an illegal immigrant who didn’t speak English. (For another blog on racism in the public schools, see Ed’s story here.)
Anti-immigrant sentiment focuses largely on Latin Americans at the moment, but I worry that children adopted from Asia will suffer too, and perhaps also older children adopted from Eastern Europe and Africa—although they may look like many native-born Americans, older children may have an accent that reveals their birth elsewhere. A discussion board contains the story of a ten-year-old boy, adopted from Korea. A woman begin screaming at him at a bus stop: “You foreigners are what’s wrong with this country!” In my own neighborhood, an eight-year-old adoptee from Ethiopia had several girls at school tell her to “go back where she came from”.
The Los Angeles riots of 1992, whose immediate trigger was the acquittal of the white police officers whose treatment of the African-American Rodney King was caught on videotape, have been called “America’s first multiracial riots”, involving not only African-American and Euro-Americans but also Latinos and Asians.
A word from “the other side of the story”(or one of the other sides):before the riots an African-American teen had been shot by a Korean woman shopowner. The dispute was reportedly over whether Harlins had paid for a bottle of orange juice. Although the shopowner was convicted of manslaughter, a white judge didn’t sentence her to any jail time, saying she wasn’t a threat to the community.
In his book: Orientals: Asian-Americans in Popular Culture, Robert G. Lee, Associate Professor of American Civilization at Brown University points out that anti-Asian crime had been substantially growing before the 1992 riots:
“Since the beginning of the 1980s, racially motivated hate crimes against had been growing in every part of the country. In New York City, hate crimes against Asian Americans rose by an astounding 680 % between 1985 and 1990. Between 1989 and 1990 alone, hate crime against Asian Americans more than doubled, and subway crime against African Americans rose by 206%. ….several well-publicized, racially motivated murders during the 1980s and 1990 are an indicator of an alarming rise in hate crimes and violence against Asian-Americans. Asians of every ethnicity have been its victims; Americans of every other ethnicity are among the assailants…… In Los Angeles in the two years before the riots, 25 Korean-American shopkeepers were killed by non-Korean assailants.”
(A note on Lee’s title: The term Oriental is considered offensive to many Asians and Asian-Americans. “Orientals are rugs, not people,” said one college student. The author isn’t endorsing the term but critiquing media images throughout American history which have portrayed Asians as irreversibly “other”.)
Although I remain basically an optimist, I do worry that the poor economy will bring out the worst in people. Some years ago a Chinese-American man was murdered in Detroit by two laid-off auto workers who thought he was Japanese. Our kids adopted from China and Korea will also be vulnerable in this way. The sizeable number of kids adopted from India and Thailand may also be vulnerable to those threatened by the growing number of Indian immigrants working at high-technology and engineering jobs and to those angered by the outsourcing of jobs to India.
I’ll continue this train of thought in upcoming blogs.
Please see these related blogs:
Backlash Against Korean Adoptees/Families?
Group Apologies and Ethnic Shame?–No Thanks
Group Apologies and Ethnic Shame Part Two: Can We Understand Each Other?