Asian Americans Complain About Stereotyping

A confederation of Asian American groups Thursday accused some of the country’s most powerful institutions of unfairly “scapegoating” all Asian Americans as suspicious and guilty in the campaign-finance controversy under investigation here.

“Members of the Congress, the nation’s major political parties, public officials and the news media have acted irresponsibly and carelessly to the allegations of wrongdoing by scapegoating and stereotyping Asian Pacific Americans and immigrants,” the group said in a complaint filed with the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

“A climate of racial tension towards Asian Pacific Americans has been aggravated,” added the complaint, filed by 12 groups and three individuals.

At the core of the complaint is the feeling among Asian Americans that they have not been accepted as Americans.

“We are fed up with the scapegoating that our community has endured over the past 100 years, but more recently over the last several years,” said Daphne Kwok, executive director of the Organization of Chinese Americans, one of the groups.

“We’re still not seen as Americans. … We may already be third-, fourth-, fifth-generation Americans, but simply because of the way we look, because of our last names we are assumed to be foreign. That’s one of the major hurts.”

The complaint comes as the Senate, House and Justice Department investigate allegations of illegal contributions in the 1996 campaign.

The controversy is dominated by Asian and Asian American names for two main reasons: The Senate is investigating allegations that the Chinese government had a secret plan to influence the U.S. election, and a majority of the questionable contributions were raised by John Huang, a Democratic fund-raiser who concentrated on raising money from the Asian American community.

Edward Chen, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union who filed the complaint, said it there is an “all-too-common pattern of treating Asian Americans as foreigners. It’s guilt by association.” If the civil rights commission, an advisory group, agrees to investigate the complaint, it could issue a report on its findings. The Asian American groups hope such a report would help rally public support. Among the complaints:

The Democratic National Committee “interrogated” Asian American contributors about their citizenship and personal finances, threatening to release their names to the news media if they did not cooperate;

Members of Congress from both parties have proposed campaign-reform laws that would limit or prohibit contributions from legal permanent residents;

The news media have focused their coverage of the campaign-finance controversy on Asian and Asian-American contributions, largely ignoring illegal or suspect contributions from other foreign sources.

Also, the complaint lists several offensive remarks made by prominent politicians. In one, former presidential candidate H. Ross Perot mentioned the names of Asian Americans caught up in the scandal and complained that “we haven’t found any American names.” In another, Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga., said the illegal contributions revealed so far were just “the tip of the egg roll.”