Situating Asian Americans in the Political Discourse on Affirmative Action

It was interesting how Michael Omi and Dana Takagi phrased how Americans view the issues of race and what seems to be important when talking about race issues. Basically, people tend to think and see things in shades of black and while, in that people tend to see things through the black vs. white perspective. Calling it the “black/white paradigm,” Omi and Takagi proposed that race issues of other ethnic minorities in the United States have often been cast in the background of the ongoing black versus white problem in history, in that people always relate racial issues to this model of looking at races. I found this interesting because this explains why so often in American history that the issues of African Americans always overshadowed the problems of other racial minorities, such as Chinese Americans and Mexican Americans. Some examples of this happening were the Los Angeles Riots and the Civil Rights Movements, both of which were started by the issues of African Americans but essentially encompassed the issues of all ethnic minorities, which is often forgotten among people. How can we as a people move away from this view of looking at racial minorities, in terms of relating other minorities to the black versus white paradigm?

Timothy Huynh

Section A01