Michele Bachmann says 1924 immigration law that banned Japanese from U.S. “worked very, very well”

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Michele BachmannReally? During Monday night’s Tea Party debate among the Republican presidential candidates, Michele Bachmann noted that U.S. immigration law was just fine until the mid-1960s when Congress made it possible for Asians to enter the country after decades of being excluded. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 finally opened the door to people like my mom’s family for the first time since the Asian Exclusion Act and National Origins Act, both passed in 1924 as part of a package of immigration laws designed specifically to give preferential treatment to European immigrants.

It was great for Bachmann, who describes herself as coming from a “family of Norwegian Lutheran Democrats.”

It’s simply ignorant for a presidential candidate who claims to want to represent everyone in this huge and diverse country, to suggest publicly that people who are not like herself shouldn’t have had the opportunity to achieve the mythic American Dream. She blames the 1965 bill for leading to the immigration ills of today, and said outright during the debate that “The immigration system in the United States worked very, very well up until the mid-1960s when liberal members of Congress changed the immigration laws.”

It’s amazing how many misguided, misinformed and ignorant things Bachmann blithely says. Although the spectacle of her campaign is entertaining in a way, I hope her run doesn’t last all the way past the primaries.

Half-Arab, half-Jewish woman & two Indian passengers profiled on flight on 9/11, arrested

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Shoshana HebshiThis is disturbing, because in these paranoid and too often hate-filled times, racial profiling is easier than ever to slip into: On Sunday, 9/11, Soshana Hebshi, a self-described “half-Arab, half-Jewish housewife” from Ohio was flying home on a Frontier flight from San Diego that made a stop in Denver. She figured fewer people would be flying on 9/11 and since security was sure to be high, she could feel safe even on the anniversary of the 2001 attacks.

Unfortunately, she ended up being a victim of the atmosphere of fear that has hovered over the U.S. since 2001.

A passenger on the flight told an attendant that Hebshi and the two dark-skinned men sitting in her row (who happened to be Asian Indian) looked “suspicious.” That was enough to warrant an all-out show of force upon landing in Detroit, where her seatmates lived, when the pilot announced that passengers needed to stay seated as the plane was diverted away from the terminal.

Hebshi — who’s a graduate journalism student — wrote an eloquent, detailed account of the ordeal on her “Stories from the Heartland” blog. The story was also covered by the Associated Press.

When the plane landed in Detroit and she looked out her window seat and saw flashing lights, she began doing what journalists do. She started tweeting:

Stuck on a plane at Detroit airport…cops everywhere

A little concerned about this situation. Plane moved away from terminal surrounded by cops. Crew is mum. Passengers can’t get up.

Cops in uniform and plainclothes in a huddle in rear of plane.

I see stairs coming our way…yay!

Majorly armed cops coming aboard

That’s when she found out the SWAT team was on board to arrest her and the two Indian men (who didn’t know each other before the flight).
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Fox apologizes for racist Pac-12 sports video stereotyping Asian students at USC

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Major props to University of Colorado ethnic studies professor Daryl Maeda for calling out the Fox Network for a racist video “report” that has since been pulled from the Fox website. The video shows comedian Bob Oschack, who’s identified as a “Investigative Reporter” and holds a Fox Sports microphone, interviewing Asian students on the campus of the University of Southern California, about Colorado and Utah joining the Pac-12 conference this fall.

It’s impossible to know how many people Oschack interviewed and didn’t include in the video, but the way it’s edited it looks like he only approached Asian students who are immigrants (they all have accents of varying thickness), and didn’t include any Asian Americans or non-Asian students. What’s with that?

As Maeda points out in an article in the Boulder Daily Camera: “This is demeaning to millions of Asian Americans who have put down deep roots in the United States, claim English as their language and root vigorously for their favorite sports teams.”

Instead, the report reinforces the idea that Asians are perpetual foreigners in America, especially when Oschack (whose ancestors presumably were European foreigners themselves just a few generations back) mocks these students accents and pronunciation.

The sole point of the segment appears to be to make fun of USC’s Asian students, who don’t seem to know or care about football,sports, the Pac-12, Colorado or Utah. It’s hard to deny that the video is about race, not sports.

Boo to Fox and to this lowbrow comic and his stupid, racist sense of humor. The network apologized through a spokesman and yanked the video from the Fox website, but I think they should punish Oschack — and the chain of command above him that approved this report and put it on the site.

Kudos too, to 7News and TheDenverChannel.com for picking up this story.

As Maeda wrote in an email to me, “It’s 2011, man. 2011!” Sigh.

UPDATE Sept. 8:

I have to give Fox News credit. The network’s apology was a sincere one that accepted responsibility for the inappropriate video, not a “non-apology apology,” where a company normally apologizes if something they ran offended you. And late yesterday, Fox simply canceled the “College Experiment” show that aired the offensive report.

AWESOME: Cool video mashup of “One Love” & Ue O Muite Arukou” (“Sukiyaki” to some) by Tohoku musicians

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I find this magically powerful. It’s a sweet rendition of one of my all-time favorite songs (and one I was just playing last night on the guitar). And it’s also an expression of hope, community and rebirth from musicians in the Tohoku region of NE Japan, set amidst the cleaned-up but still devastated area hammered by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

Being stereotyped out of ignorance isn’t as bad as flat-out racism, but…

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I faced an awkward racial situation a few days ago and let it pass, but then posted about it on Facebook and found it struck a nerve with a lot of my Facebook community. It resulted in a spirited conversation, and not just with Asian Americans. My takeaway is that sometimes, stereotypes and racial assumptions arise from mere ignorance, not utter racism and hate. But it can be just as irritating in 2011 to hear someone innocently treat you as a foreigner as it can to face the uglier stuff that’s still out there.

Here’s what I posted:

Even in my local supermarket, I’m reminded that “post-racial” America isn’t past its attachment to stereotypes: I went to the customer service desk at King Soopers (a Kroger chain in Colorado, store #36) and asked if they still carry the Cento brand of white clam sauce.

The clerk looked at me and immediately said, “Well, if we do it should be in the Oriental aisle.” I glared at her and said “Uh, well, I’m making linguini with clam sauce.”

It turned out they don’t carry the Cento brand while the store is undergoing a lot of construction (it’ll be the chain’s first “superstore” in the metro Denver area, with clothes, furniture — the kind of stuff you’d expect in a Super Target, or Walmart) so I went to another nearby King Soopers store and got the clam sauce.

I like our store and many of the employees so I’ll keep shopping there, but this left a sour taste in my mouth. An Oriental sour taste, I suppose.

I don’t think the woman was racist, and I don’t think there was any ill-will behind her assumptions. She looked up at me, saw I was Asian, and her brain processed a bunch of split-second information before it processed my (perfect, accent-free English) question about clam sauce. Hell, maybe she thought I said “oyster sauce” and she knows Asian cooking and really was referring me to the correct aisle… for oyster sauce.

But mostly, I think she made an assumption from my face without hearing what I said. It was a kneejerk response to send me to the aisle that would have the food of “my people.”

I gave her more information to clarify my request:
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