Asian Americans will help define country’s future

SAN DIEGO — These are complicated times for America, and particularly hard days for Asian Americans.

Ditto for Latinos. The black-and-white paradigm is so 1900s. The dynamic that will define America in the 21st Century is Asian and Latino.

Who better to help me sort through all this than someone who has a foothold in both worlds: an Asian Latino. When

I was growing up in Central

California, alongside Filipinos, the concept wasn’t so strange.

And so I reached out to a

Filipino friend who affectionately calls me “Kuya.” I’m told it means “older brother” in Tagalog.

Jose Antonio Vargas is perhaps America’s most famous undocumented immigrant. He is also a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author, filmmaker and the co-founder of the nonprofit Define American. Recently, he even had an elementary school in Northern California named after him.

Vargas’ upcoming book — his second from a major publisher — is about what it’s like to live in a country that thinks it’s still black-and-white, when it’s really not, and what it’s like when you don’t check either box.

Oh yeah, Vargas and his Kuya were due for a talk. What better time? May is Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month, which provides an opportunity to showcase the contributions of Asians and Pacific Islanders in the United States.

This year, the occasion takes on extra significance because this community — a community of Americans — is under attack. According to the reporting forum Stop AAPI Hate, there have been, over the past year, nearly 3,800 attacks on Asians — ranging from harassment to outright assaults.

In one of the most recent examples, the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) Hate Crime Task Force is investigating a recent assault on two Asian women in Manhattan. They were berated by a stranger for wearing masks before one of them was hit in the head with a hammer.

The racial breakdown of the 2020 Census will soon be out, and the figures will probably confirm what many Americans already suspect: The United States is gradually but undeniably becoming more Asian.

Asians now make up 6% of the U.S. population, according to recent Census estimates. But for the last decade — and the one before that — they also represented the fastest growing racial or ethnic minority in the country. In fact, the population of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders grew by 46% from 2000 to 2010, according to the Census Bureau. That was the largest increase of any major racial group during that period.

A decade from now, don’t be surprised if Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders make up a full 10% of the U.S. population.

Vargas and I both live in California. According to Census estimates, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders make up 16% of the population of the country’s most populous state. By 2030, that figure is likely to be 20%.

A Chinese curse says, “May you live in interesting times.” I asked Vargas what he makes of these interesting times.

“I think we have been so focused on the Black and white confrontation that we’re not realizing that there’s all these other confrontations that are not centered on Black versus white,” he said.

Part analyst and part inventor, Vargas has a mind with no borders.

“I’m thinking a lot about the working class right now,” he said. “To me, this is an opportunity for a working-class coalition. I think it’s so important because it binds all of us together, the working class — Black people, white people, Latin people, Asian people.”

As for California, Vargas is not yet convinced that there is an Asian-Latino coalition to be had here. It’s a story that he thinks the media are totally missing because they’re stuck on black-and-white.

“Our newsrooms are not doing enough to cover this,” he said. “If demography should really dictate narrative, then what’s mainstream in California are Latinos and Asians, right? Where are those conversations? We need to be talking about anti-Asian sentiment in the Latino community, and mind you, anti-Latino sentiments within the Asian community.”

As Vargas points out, Americans’ historical amnesia extends to Asians.

“I think the narrative of Asians being the other, the foreigner, right, is so cemented in people’s psyche that we forget that Asian people’s history in this country goes back centuries,” he said.

My friend is right, of course. Every subset of the Asian community — Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Vietnamese, Hmong, etc. — has contributed mightily to the United States.

Asians are not perpetual foreigners. They aren’t even new to America. They’re woven into the fabric of America.