Keeping Current

By: Stephanie WilliamsHelen Zia traces the evolution of Asian Americans from a politically impotent ethnic group into a mature and influential voice in her new book, “Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People.” The 48-year-old daughter of Chinese immigrants uses her personal journey as activist and writer to chronicle the transformation. “Our demographics and achievements, trials and tribulations, tell a compelling story of a people who come together from markedly different backgrounds, without a common language or culture,” Zia writes. “Many have braved unspeakable horrors to join in this multiracial democracy.”

Zia, a journalist and former contributing editor of Ms. Magazine, recalls the tragic 1982 murder of Chinese American Vincent Chin by two white auto workers in recession-plagued Detroit. Chin was beaten to death with a baseball bat by the men, and it later was revealed that they mistook him for Japanese and blamed Japan for the auto industry’s woes. Detroit’s small Asian community was shocked when the two men, who pleaded guilty, received fines and probation—but no prison time—for the murder. “I felt distraught, betrayed—and furious,” writes Zia, who lived in Detroit at the time. “The probationary sentences seem to echo the familiar taunt, ‘a Chinaman’s chance,’ that grim reminder of the days when whites lynched Chinese with impunity.”

The incident pushed race and civil rights to the forefront for many Asian Americans. “The growing prominence of the case gave Asian Americans our first direct entry on a national level into the white-black race dynamic,” Zia writes. But she also discovered among whites and others, “a nagging doubt, that Asian Americans had no legitimate place in discussions of racism because we hadn’t really suffered any.”

The Chin case also helped Asian Americans overcome the fear that “organizing over race might make us seem like troublemakers, as African Americans were often perceived,” Zia writes. “After a century of seeking acceptance by distancing from one another, Asian Americans were coming together to assert their right to be American.”

“Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People,” is published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in New York City.


A census provision that allows inmates to be counted as part of the populations of the towns and counties where they are incarcerated has rural communities scrambling to get their “prisoner share”of $2 trillion in federal funds, writes Tracy Huling on the May 10 MotherJones Web site. “As rural communities gain inmates, they harvest federal cash and political clout,” making them ripe for federal anti-poverty funds, she writes. But Huling also cautions: “The big losers will be urban communities of color. Half of all U.S. prisoners are African American and one-sixth are Latino,” plucked from inner-city neighborhoods in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and other cities.


Stephen Kantrowitz’s new book, “Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy,” offers a “rich and insightful dissection of the rise of American racism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,” writes Charles B. Dew in the May 21 issue of The New York Times Book Review. Benjamin R. Tillman, former South Carolina governor and United States senator, positioned himself as a leader of white men in the post-Civil War South, writes Kantrowitz, a professor of American history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Dew concludes that Tillman “left a powerful and tenacious legacy … a witches’ brew of bare-knuckled, no-holds-barred racism.”


Former Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley emerges as a man “darkly obsessed with power and race” in the new book, “American Pharaoh, Mayor Richard J. Daley: His Battle for Chicago and the Nation,” writes senior editor Geoffrey Johnson in the May issue of Chicago magazine. “If you want to tell the story of America, telling the story of Chicago is a good way to do that. And the life of Richard J. Daley cut a swath through one of the city’s richest times,” the book’s co-author, Elizabeth Taylor, literary and Sunday magazine editor at the Chicago Tribune, tells Johnson. Adds co-author Adam Cohen, a senior writer for Time magazine: “He was a pharaoh in the sense of being a great leader—and he was a great builder, as the pharaohs were. But the other side of the pharaoh is that he did his part by segregating the city.”

In response to the public’s perception that Daley was a racist, Cohen tells Johnson, “‘Racist’ is such a strong word. … I think a better way to look at it is to ask, Was Daley at the forefront of racial issues, or was he slowly dragging at the rear? And I’d say he was very much dragging at the rear. Daley fought integration tooth and nail, not only residentially with housing projects, but with the schools.”

Of Daley’s legacy, Cohen says: “There’s a sense in which he is the Wizard of Oz, the man behind the curtain. When you pull the curtain away, he’s just this guy from Bridgeport.”


The difference between white supremacy and racism often gets glossed over in everyday usage, longtime organizer Jerome Scott tells Colorlines magazine in its Summer 2000 issue. “‘White supremacy’ indicates more of a structural phenomenon than ‘racism,’” says Scott, the director of Atlanta’s Project South, a leadership development and research organization. Racism conjures up individual’s negative attitudes about one another, Scott tells the magazine. “But the real deal, I think, is ‘white supremacy,’ because it’s an institutionalized thing with long historical roots that goes beyond individual bad attitudes and shapes the development of the policies and cultures of institutions.”