WASHINGTON (AP) – Speaking on the floor of Georgia’s Senate Senate last week, Michelle Au implored her colleagues to “defend” the growing hatred of Asian Americans. during the pandemic. A day later, a gunman shook the Atlanta area killing eight people, including six women of Asian descent.
For Au, who joined the state Senate in January as the first American Asian woman, the attack was a heartbreaking validation. of their fears. He is also encouraging her and other Asian Americans to push for greater political influence in Washington and other centers of power.
“People in our communities are hungry for representations that look like them,” Au said in an interview. “I don’t think people can see problems if they haven’t experienced it in the past.”
There are at least 160 Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in 33 state legislatures across the country, according to the Asian Pacific American Institute of Congressional Studies. A large number of 51 people are in the Hawaiian legislature. And, of the 535 members of Congress, only 17 are of Asian or Pacific island origin, according to the Congressional Research Service. There are also three non-voting delegates who are Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.
President Joe Biden and his aides have been repeatedly pressured include Asian Americans in his cabinet, even during a private meeting with Senate Democrats Monday afternoon. Mr. Mazie Hirono, of Hawaii, and Tammy Duckworth, of Illinois, pushed Biden’s top advisers to expand the representation of Asian Americans in the administration.
Duckworth went a step further, telling the White House on Tuesday that he would oppose any proposed candidacy that would not bring diversity to the Biden administration, a move that could sink some, with a Senate split of 50 to 50.
“I’ve been talking to them for months and they’re still not aggressive,” he said. “I’ll be a no-brainer for everyone until they find out.”
Biden chose Katherine Tai, who is Taiwanese American, as his top commercial envoy. She was confirmed last week and became the only Asian American to hold a cabinet position in the new administration. Vivek Murthy, the son of Indian parents, is Biden’s candidate for general surgeon, a sub-cabinet position.
Many Asian Americans say feelings of political marginalization will take years to completely overcome. Last week, an emotional hearing in Congress put a national focus on the fight against racism among the community, but it is unlikely that important legislation will be reached to address it.
“I think symbolism and representation are important, but only to a point,” said Aarti Kohli, executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice. “The most important thing is to really get the job done.”
There are signs of change.
Kamala Harris, whose mother was born in India, is the first black woman of South Asian descent to become vice president.. More than 300 Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders ran in the 2020 election, according to the Asian Pacific American Institute of Congressional Studies.
There seems to be more to preparing campaigns for the future. Madalene Xuan-Trang Mielke, president and CEO of the group, said her organization recently conducted training for people interested in joining municipal and state legislative careers and had about 30 attendees. It also encourages community members to join local boards and commissions.
“We are experts on issues in a wide range of industries, and we should be a reflection of our democracy in making people like us and others part of any kind of public policy conversation,” Mielke said.
Asian Americans observe other major offices across the country.
In New York City, former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang is gaining attention (and campaign cash) in a mayoral candidacy. And in California, home to the nation’s largest Asian American community, elected officials urge Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom will appoint an Asian-born attorney general to succeed Xavier Becerra, who was elected Biden’s secretary of health and human services.
Still, Stop AAPI Hate, an activist group that formed as pandemic-related blackouts were gaining ground across the United States, had received nearly 4,000 self-reported incidents of bias or discrimination from the 50 states since last month. And nearly 3 in 10 American Asians said they had been subjected to racial insults or jokes since the coronavirus outbreak began, according to data from the Pew Research Center released last summer.
Janelle Wong, director of the University of Maryland’s Asian Studies program, has investigated how acts of discrimination can affect political participation. He said such incidents can sometimes alienate members of the affected community, but more often they increase political activity.
Wong pointed to the strict anti-immigrant laws of California, backed by Republicans, in the 1990s that helped mobilize Latinos to vote Democratic and turned the state into a fierce blue in a generation. Democrats hope a similar change has begun more recently in Arizona.
Wong said the Asian American population began to grow in the mid-1990s with the creation of the H1-B visa program, which made it easier for employers to hire immigrants in special professions. Many of these people have been in the country for more than twenty years and they, or second-generation immigrant families, are beginning to understand each other politically, registering to vote and voting at higher rates.
In the November election, 70% of Asian American voters supported Biden, according to AP VoteCast, a nationwide poll of the electorate. Asian Americans now represent the nation’s fastest-growing ethnic minority, accounting for nearly 5 percent of eligible voters in last year’s election, according to the Pew Research Center.
U.S. census data showed that the community had one of the largest increases in the voting rates of any group in the 2018 midterm elections compared to the 2014 averages, from an estimated 27% of eligible voters who voted in 2014 at 40% in 2018 But larger Asian American communities are still mostly concentrated in non-swing presidential states, meaning no political party has focused significant resources on voter outreach.
“There’s not the same incentive for parties to mobilize them, and it’s much harder because some resources are needed, a little attention to outreach and language is needed to understand Asian American issues as well,” Wong said. “All of these things contribute to lower rates of political participation among American Asians, but people, by mistake, I think, assume that Asian Asians are somehow less interested in U.S. civic life.”
This is evolving. Wong is aiming for state races in Virginia this year, where Asian American voters in the suburbs of Washington could have a decisive influence.
“People are much more reversed, especially because people in positions of power are constantly silencing our community,” said Michelle Chan, a Chinese voter from Malaysia and the United States in Alexandria, Virginia.
Kohli, of Asian American Advancing Justice, said the community could also change House districts in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Texas during the 2022 midterm elections.
Democratic Representative Grace Meng of New York, first vice president of the Asia-Pacific American Congress, said many Asian Americans have reacted to the shootings by trying to better protect themselves, giving to civic groups and even forming brigades to walk with seniors. in Asian majority neighborhoods or by distributing whistles to try to curb incidents of racism and violence. But he said greater political commitment was the next step.
“They literally teach us not to talk and not to swing the boat,” Meng said. “And so over the last year, it’s been a challenge to tell our generation of older generation Asian immigrants (Asian Americans who might even have been here for three decades) that now is the time to not to be invisible anymore, that they have had to speak “.
Nabilah Islam, a U.S. Democratic strategist and organizer from Bangladesh to Georgia, ran in Congress without success last year. He said he felt compelled to do so because, even though he had lived all his life in his district outside of Atlanta, “he never saw anyone who looked like me” campaigning.
“What makes a big difference is that activists from your own community show up,” Islam said. “For so long, we’ve had this top-down strategy where, frankly, you ask these white consultants to tell you how to organize your communities. But they have never visited these houses and talked to these families.
The Asian American and Pacific Islander community encompasses people from different backgrounds and cultures who often speak languages other than English. Organizers say they are working to better unify these different heritages as they interact with activists from other backgrounds, including African Americans and Latinos, and that the outpouring of public support after the shootings could facilitate those efforts.
“Asian Americans didn’t necessarily grow up with this defense vocabulary and how to fight for ourselves,” Meng said. Therefore, it was necessary to “learn this from other communities such as the black and Latin communities and walk beside them, witnessing their struggles.”
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Associated Press writers Emily Swanson and Lisa Mascaro in Washington contributed to this report.