L ast Friday, Bay Area news station KTVU reported that the pilots of Asiana flight 214, which crashed in San Francisco last week, were named "Sum Ting Wong," "Wi Tu Lo," "Ho Lee Fuk," and "Bang Ding Ow." Despite being off-color racist jokes about Asian names and the crash itself, the station read these names on the air without any apparent realization that they were incorrect. KTVU has since apologized for its reporting, saying that the National Transportation Safety Board confirmed the names to the station. The NTSB in turn blamed an unnamed intern. Asiana Airlines responded to the incident by threatening to sue both the NTSB and KTVU. As of Monday, the airline had decided to drop the suit against the NTSB but proceed with the one against KTVU. However, this entire incident highlights a continued problem with frequently accepted racism against Asian-Americans in the United States.
In the same weekend that the George Zimmerman verdict inflamed many commenters' objections to the "stand your ground" law in Florida, this incident of blatant racism has been more or less ignored by the general public. The only people I have seen discuss this incident have been a handful of my high school Asian-American friends. To general audiences, the KTVU incident seems to be nothing more than an amusing mess-up by a local news outlet. When I talked to a friend about this over the weekend, he laughed and noted nothing more than the "stupidity" of the station's staff and neglected, or failed, to observe and take issue with the obvious racism that the incident illustrated.
Racism against Asian-Americans is often ignored by both the general public and Asian-Americans themselves. Growing up, even in the largely tolerant and multicultural Pacific Northwest, I often saw children with Asian first names become the subjects of racialized taunts. This was particularly true for children whose names sounded vaguely like onomatopoeia. They would often hear their names chanted along with sounds like "ding," "dong," or "ring" due to their names' similarities to these sounds. To be fair, children can be cruel to each other. But looking back now, I wonder why I cannot remember ever seeing a single teacher intervene in these situations, whereas I can clearly recall a number of cases where children who called each other names were reprimanded by their teachers if such incidents occurred in front of them.
Discrimination against Asian-Americans based on their names doesn't end in elementary school either. When I applied to college, I was advised multiple times not to check the "Asian" box on the application due to perceptions among the Asian community that doing so would hurt my chances of admission to my top choice schools. For the record, I did check the box, but only because my personal essay focused on experiences that I had in China with family, and so it was already obvious from my application that I was of Asian heritage. At a session on the topic of Asian-American admissions at the 2012 meeting of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, "Almost all the hands in the room shot up when panelists asked the audience if they thought Asian American students were held to a higher standard in the college admissions process." Whether or not this is strictly true is debatable, but it is certainly true that many Asians perceived their changes of elite college admission as being drastically reduced by their racial origins.
Part of the solution is to increase Asian-Americans' visibility and activity in the political sphere. Whereas other minority communities in the United States, particularly the African-American and Hispanic communities, are considered politically important to both national parties, and their political and community organizations are strong enough to wield influence in local and national politics, the Asian-American political community is weak to non-existent in most of the United States, with the exception of a few major heavily Asian-American population centers.
The Asian-American community's collective failure to capitalize upon its potential to become a political constituency worth the major parties' consideration is perhaps one of the community's biggest failings, and one of the factors that contribute to the collective silence that falls upon racialized incidents against the community, such as KTVU's "coverage" of the Asiana investigation. While increasing the Asian-American community's political clout is not a direct solution to the problem of racism and discrimination against its members, it is certainly a step in the right direction as far as giving Asian-Americans greater voice in political and social matters is concerned.
