Understanding Racial Tensions: Insights from "Asian Americans"
School
Long Beach City College**We aren't endorsed by this school
Course
HIST ETHST
Subject
Sociology
Date
Dec 11, 2024
Pages
4
Uploaded by ConstableDog3465
Grayson 1Deron GraysonDr. FrankEthnic Studies 111 December, 2024Video Analysis “Asian Americans”In the film “Asian Americans”, it educates you about the discrimination and unfairness immigrant and non-immigrant Asians had to deal with when living in the U.S., the racial tensionsbetween korean americans and african americans, and the exploitation of asian immigrants and their young ones. The film starts to focus on a court case, named the Vincent Chin Case. This case was about how Ronald Evans and Michael Nitz attacked an Asian American, Chin, and ended up killing him outside of a bar with a baseball bat. The reason why Evans and Nitz attacked Chin was because they convinced themselves that Chin was the owner of a popular Japanese car company, which put a lot of American car companies out of business. After going to court and pleading guilty, they were originally facing 15 years in prison, but ended up getting sentenced to three years probation and a $3,000 fine. Halfway in the film, it cuts to the rising tensions between Korean Americans and African Americans because of the way the media was depicting each other. Korean store owners would often raise the prices of their goods whenever ablack person came to shop. One time, a Korean store owner was charging a 15 year old black girl$4.75 for an orange juice. The black girl's name was Latasha. Latasha started fighting the owner at which the owner pulled out a gun. Latasha started to walk away but as soon as she was walking away the owner shot her in the back of the head and killed her. This then started riots in Korean owned stores causing around 2,000 stores burned down in the riots. The ways we can understand the enduring legacy of the three E’s of Race/Racism through Asian American
Grayson 2experiences highlighted in this film is by allowing people to get away with exterminating an Asian American and only having to pay a fine, being excluding Asian Americans by the police not helping them when they needed it, and by exploiting Asian Americans hiring immigrants to do piece work. The role that the media plays in bolstering Racism and Racial Tensions as seen through the Asian American experiences is by instigating feuds and starting problems.The ways we can understand the enduring legacy of the three E’s of Race/Racism through Asian American experiences highlighted in this film is by allowing people to get away with exterminating an Asian American and only having to pay a fine, being excluding Asian Americans by the police not helping them when they needed it, and by exploiting Asian Americans hiring immigrants to do piece work. Evidence of allowing people to kill Asian Americans and getting off easy would be through looking at murder cases and looking at the court decisions. “In 1982, you can kill an Asian American and get off paying $3,000.” (ASIAN AMERICANS 2020). Evidence of Asian Amercians being excluded can be seen through other minorities fighting against them instead of with them in this battle of racism. “Instead of being seen as part of the multiracial coalition, it’s suddenly Korean Americans were seen as just like those racist LA cops who beat up Rodney King” (ASIAN AMERICANS 2020). You can also seethis during the riots, when the police wouldn’t go help save Korean owned businesses. “The police were not coming to protect any of the Korean owned stores” (ASIAN AMERICANS 2020). Finally, some examples of exploitation in the Asian American community, would be how young asian americans and asian immigrants were being exploited to work heavily to make company products. “Some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley were using Asian immigrant workers to do piecework at home. We ended up doing a nine month investigation into pieceworkin silicon valley. We were looking at violations that included child labor and minimum wage
Grayson 3violations” (ASIAN AMERICANS 2020). These are the ways we can understand the enduring legacy of the three E’s of Race/Racism through Asian American experiences highlighted in this film.The role that the media plays in bolstering Racism and Racial Tensions as seen through the Asian American experiences is by instigating feuds and starting problems. Throughout the film, there are multiple scenes where the media is brought up igniting the drama and problems that started between Korean Americans and African Americans. In local newspapers, there are multiple articles and sections bringing up how African Amercians were the cause of all the assaults, robberies, and shootings. When the Korean Americans read this in the newspaper, they grew anxious because of this. “In the Korean Community, there's anxiety because there was a lot of news about assaults, robberies, and shootings that were being reported in language news” (ASIAN AMERICANS 2020). Since they were growing anxious of African Americans, whenever there was an African American shopping in a Korean owned shop, the Korean owners would often be “rude and racist” to African American customers. “If you read the LA Times Metro section, all you read about when it came to Koreans was, how rude they were and how racist they were” (ASIAN AMERICANS 2020). After news reporters and local newspapers noticed these tensions growing between Korean Americans and African americans. They would try to play it off as if the tensions weren’t there or as if they were starting to simmer down. “Media is trying to play off Asian and Black tensions” (ASIAN AMERICANS 2020).In conclusion, the film educates you on many problems Asian Americans had to endure when first immigrating to the United States. They experienced major injustice, racial discrimination against other minorities, and heavy exploitation by major or rising companies. While this was all going down, the media would ignite the flames between African Americans
Grayson 4and Asian Americans, who also tried to play it off. These are the ways we can understand the enduring legacy of the three E’s of Race/Racism through Asian American experiences highlighted in this film is by allowing people to get away with exterminating an Asian American and only having to pay a fine, being excluding Asian Americans by the police not helping them when they needed it, and by exploiting Asian Americans hiring immigrants to do piece work. Finally, the role that the media plays in bolstering Racism and Racial Tensions as seen through the Asian American experiences is by instigating feuds and starting problems.