ASIAN AMERICANS

ASIAN AMERICANS

The fastest growing minorities in the United States and (especially) Canada in recent decades are Asians, although their immigration history goes back to

77 A Cognitive Psychology of Mass Communication

the large numbers of Chinese brought over to work the railroads in the American West in the 1800s. Japanese emigrated to the United States, as well as to Brazil and elsewhere in large numbers, in the early 20th century. Japanese American U.S. citizens (but not German Americans) on the West Coast were rounded up and put into concentration camps during World War

II. Although the official justification was national security, the decision has more recently been attributed to racism. Koreans and Filipinos are coming to America in increasing numbers, some as spouses of U.S. military formerly stationed there. Vietnamese and other southeast Asians came in large numbers following the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. There are also a substantial number of South Asian Americans, from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Afghanistan, as well as Iranian refugees from the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Like the Native Americans, there is a long history of media stereotyping of Asians in movies, such as Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan, characters often played, incidentally, by White actors (Iiyama & Kitano, 1982). On television there have been few Asian Americans. The old Kung Fu series had the Asian lead played by European American David Carradine. The 1970s and 1980s saw some improvement, with the addition of some minor Asian characters in shows like Hawaii Five-O (1968–1980) and M*A*S*H (1972–1983), although they were often villains or in stereotyped occupations like Chinese running a laundry or restaurant (Mok, 1998).

Often the villains of choice on entertainment TV follow news events. After the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, Chinese officials from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) were frequent villains on action- adventure shows. During waves of U.S. concern about Japanese commercial power and ascendancy, Japanese businessmen were portrayed as buying up America in a sort of “yellow scare.” Newspaper stories about Asian immigration show headlines like “Asian invasion” or “containing Japan” (Funabiki, 1992). Parallels are drawn between Japanese economic ascendancy and its earlier World War II militarism. As with African Americans, some very tired, old stereotypes live on in children’s cartoons in video anthologies. For example, in 1995, MGM-UA Home Video pulled a 1944 World War II-era Bugs Bunny cartoon where Bugs hands out bombs concealed in ice-cream cones to a crowd of Japanese people as he says, “Here you go Bowlegs, here you go Monkey-face, here you go, Slant Eyes, everybody gets one.” Prior to the withdrawal, about 800 copies had been sold in the 1990s! (What’s Up, Doc?, 1995)

Nevertheless, overall, Asian Americans are probably portrayed more positively than most other minorities on U.S. media. In fact, there is one positive stereotype that is increasingly troubling to some Asian Americans: the model minority image of the group that succeeds academically, commercially, and socially. Sometimes this perceived success image is used

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to ignore problems that the group has or to criticize other minorities for doing less well and thus seeming lazy. Such treatment engenders deep feelings. For example, in the 1992 Los Angeles race riots, some of the major targets of angry African American looters and arsonists were Korean American businesses. For a while, the University of California system and others set an Asian quota, a limit on the number of Asian American students that could be admitted.