MLK Day

On MLK day last week, we went out to Ocean Beach and had burritos to enjoy a gloriously warm day in San Franciso. In a group chat, my friends and I joked about how best to celebrate MLK day by enjoying a nice day. Jokes aside, it dawned on me that it was because of the Civil Rights Movement that Dr. King pushed forward that my family and I were here today. A brown family from India, first and second-generation American citizens, enjoying a beautiful day at the beach in San Franciso.

It's no secret that America has a long history of racism. From racism baked into the founding governing document to the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement, and the white supremacists that ransacked the US Capitol, we continue to grapple with defining "American."

There is another vein of racism in American history that revolves around immigration. In particular, by the mid-1920's it was virtually impossible to legally immigrate to the United States if you were Asian through the passages of the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Asian ExclusionAct, and the establishment of the Asiatic Barred Zone.

These acts stood with minor changes (and some improvements) for decades. It wasn't until after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that the Immigration Act of 1965 came to pass. The Immigration Act did away with the national quota system. The Civil Rights Movement brought about this change.

As said on the congressional floor:

"Mr. Chairman, I would consider the amendments to the Immigration and Nationality Act to be as important as the landmark legislation of this Congress relating to the Civil Rights Act. The central purpose of the administration's immigration bill is to once again undo discrimination and to revise the standards by which we choose potential Americans in order to be fairer to them and which will certainly be more beneficial to us." (Congressional Record, Aug. 25, 1965, p. 21765.)

A provision of the act provided preference to highly skilled workers. A highly selected set of people from India immigrated to America. Though the ethical basis for this sort of selection remains dubious, it led my family and many other highly educated Asians to settle here.

There is a vein of thinking in the Asian community that deeply buys into the model minority myth. It believes that we excel because we are just more motivated, less lazy, and more hungry to work hard to achieve what we have. The reality is that there was no level playing field; we were already higher up. And as the article above points out, "Whites love us because we're not black."

Many of us wouldn't even be here if it wasn't for the Civil Rights Movement that fought for the end of Jim Crow. Half a century earlier, the Asian American fight for citizenship helped solidify the reconstruction era fourteenth amendment that established the right to birthright citizenship. Our histories are interconnected, and our abilities to continue our pursuit of happiness in this country are interconnected.

So this MLK day, the time I spent sitting on a beach next to my wife, watching my daughter delight on the dunes, and listening to the waves rumbling as they hit the earth, I took a moment to recognize the privilege I have and the work so many did so I could be here.