Asians and Black History Month

Just read this interesting article in the Advertising Age website by Bill Imada called, “Have Asian Americans Done Enough for the Black Community?”

It’s sad that I think the really obvious answer to this really is, no. Given the history of what I’ve seen, on how we treat black people as customers, as friends, as people to emulate and yet not really understand their histories and how they’ve paved the way for other minorities to fight for social and economic justice, and how Asians view blacks with so much hatred and fear because of how blacks have been portrayed in the media (like the infamous AsianWeek op-ed piece), I think that there should be more introspection into how we’ve been taught to fear and hate each other and learn how to respect each other and our histories and that we’re dealing with many of the same issues they are.

Yes, this is really painfully obvious, but sad that people need to write articles like Imada’s to make us see that we’ve got a long way to go…

(Flickr photo credit: yngrich)

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About Efren

Efren is a 30-something queer Filipino American guy living in San Francisco. In the past, he was a wanna-be academic even teaching in Asian American studies at San Francisco State, a wanna-be queer rights and HIV activist, and he used to "blog" when that meant spewing one's college student angst using a text editor on a terminal screen to write in a BBS or usenet back in the early 90s. For all his railing against the model minority myth, he's realized he's done something only a few people can claim--getting into UCSF twice, once for a PhD program in medical sociology which he left; and then for pharmacy school, where he'll be a member of the class of '13. He apologizes profusely for setting the bar unintentionally high for his cousins. blog twitter
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