Posted on: Tuesday, August 5, 2003
Group counters anti-Asian hate crimes
By Vicki Viotti
Advertiser Staff Writer
Bill Kaneko, Hawai'i born and raised, was not used to this treatment. While pumping gas at a Denver service station, he and his wife were startled to hear someone in a car shout at them as they drove past.
They yelled an ethnic slur aimed at people of Chinese ancestry, he recalled.
"I know, it's minor compared to the kinds of hate crimes over racial discrimination that takes place on a regular basis," he said.
Kaneko, who is of Japanese ancestry, became accustomed to the relatively narrow experience most Mainlanders have with anyone of Asian and Pacific ancestry while living on the Mainland. APIs — as Asians and Pacific Islanders are often called in civil rights circles these days — enjoy a much lower "comfort level" in the other 49 states than they do in Hawai'i.
An examination of how the Asian-Pacific-American experience differs from that on the Mainland is one of the tasks facing the Organization of Chinese Americans in its national convention this week. Some of those leading the panel discussion, set for Saturday, have concluded that Hawai'i's recent arrivals from southeast Asia and the Pacific are the only ones facing barriers at all comparable with those Mainland Asian Americans encounter.
"I think discrimination still occurs ... but it now deals with more of the newer immigrants, and it can take place in the form of language discrimination," Kaneko said.
An estimated 2,000 people are expected to take part in the OCA convention, Thursday through Sunday at the Sheraton Waikiki Hotel. Roughly one-third to half of those will be registered conventioneers, but others will come from the local community, people drawn by the job fair and other highlight events.
At the helm of all the planning is OCA executive director Christine Chen who, at 31, is only a year older than the organization itself. At its inception the OCA was only the second national civil-rights organization for those of Asian ancestry, following behind the Japanese American Citizens League, Chen said.
The roster of national organizations has grown in the past decade to about a dozen. But as the vanguard Asian rights groups, the OCA and the JACL have lobbied both for their respective ethnic groups and more broadly on issues affecting Asians generally, Chen added.
Much of that advocacy work was accomplished in Hawai'i during the labor movements of the 1940s and 1950s.
That's when laws curbing the rights to organize were defeated and conditions improved for the largely Asian working class here, said Ah Quon McElrath, another of the Saturday panelists but best known in Hawai'i as an ILWU activist during that revolutionary era.
In addition, she said, the sons of Japanese immigrants were motivated by Japan's Pearl Harbor attack to enlist, and then after the war to reap the educational benefits of the GI Bill, McElrath said.
"It was possible for those young men to become doctors, lawyers and politicians," she said. "The nature of politics in the home country had a great effect on the numbers that came here and what happened to them.
"All of that combined to make life different here for Asians than it was on the Mainland."
In the rest of the country, working to counter the forces of race-based hate crimes has risen on the OCA agenda.
Chen said the most recent targets of discrimination are the South Asians — Indians, Pakistanis and others who are mistaken for Middle Easterners — who have felt the effect of post-Sept. 11 discrimination.
The group also has spoken out against disparaging images of Asians that appear in the popular media, she said, citing the Fox network's parody Japanese game show, "Banzai!" as the latest example.
And OCA is working to raise the profile of Asians and Pacific Islanders in general, by encouraging participation in the political process.
Reach Vicki Viotti at vviotti@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8053.
