 Welcome to Global Connections at the ThinkTech live streaming network series. I'm your host, Grace Chang, and today we have with us on our program is Professor Frank Wu of the University of California Hastings College of Law. Welcome, Frank. It's great to have you here today. It's great to be here with you, Grace. Okay. Frank is the author of numerous publications on race and law in the United States including Yellow, Race in America, Beyond Black and White. And so today we're going to be talking about this topic, race in the United States and how it's changing, what we can expect. Some of your thoughts and hypothesis on this topic, so I'll let you take it away on maybe giving us an overview. Sure. So we, within our lifetimes, you and me and the viewers, will undergo a transformation here in the United States. It's never before been done by any human society on the face of the globe anywhere in recorded history. It's simply this. We will cease as a nation, as a society, to have one single identifiable racial majority in the overall population. So that's never happened before, but it's already started to happen and you can see it right here in Hawaii. You can see it in California on many of our college campuses. It's driven by many factors. Migration is one of them. Birth rates are another. Mixed marriages too. And this presents us with a choice, a dilemma. Will we embrace this with hope? Will we look at this and say, this changing face of America, what it means to be a real American, to look American, is a cause for joy, celebration. It's the American dream come true, this idea of the city upon a hill that beckons as an experiment in self-governance, the world over. Or will we fear it? Will we be anxious? Will people be uncomfortable about the loss of privilege and position? Will they feel displaced when they wake up and suddenly all around them, instead of it looking like the 1950s version of Main Street, USA, it looks like Honolulu? I mean, the US has always been ethnically diverse and I think this is something that we didn't notice and we don't represent that clearly. But now, as you're saying, the demographic change, it's pretty imminent that we don't have a particular minority in the near future. Do you think that we are moving in the right direction as far as which path we're going to take as far as reacting to this? Absolutely. I'm an optimist. I'm a believer in the American dream. And we have these great ideals, unlike any other nation. We've celebrated this idea. It doesn't matter who you are. It doesn't matter what language your grandparents spoke, what faith they practiced, what occupation they had. If you believe in this set of ideals, the civic culture that we have, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, due process, you can come here. You can become an equal, a member of the body politic. You can vote, you can even run for office. You can aspire to the highest office of the land and you can participate. That's a great idea and we've incrementally moved toward that. So at the founding of the nation, there was slavery. The Civil War changed that. The Constitution was amended, the 13th, 14th, 15th Amendments abolished slavery and said, if you're African American and if you were a person born in the United States, you were a citizen of the U.S. So that was one step. But we sometimes take steps backward. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act. It closed the doors. And the language that was used then was racist. Now, I don't mean by contemporary standards where I'm interpreting. I mean, if you go and look, people just said, we don't like Chinese. So, non-Chinese people, some of them, immigrants themselves. So one of the leaders of this movement had come from Ireland, Dennis Kearney. Kearney Street in San Francisco is named for him. So he was a foreigner, but he didn't like Chinese specifically. I wish he was okay with, but if you were Chinese, he didn't want you here. So Congress closed the door and then about 20 years later, 25 years later, there was a nativist movement. And it again was explicit. They didn't hide what they thought, what they felt. They said they wanted to preserve old stock America, meaning white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestants. So it's not just that they didn't like people of color. They didn't like you if you were Italian. They didn't like you if you were Catholic or Jewish. They didn't like you if you were swarthy. So back then, the conception of race also was different. People actually spoke about the Chinese race, the Japanese race, the Italian race, the German race. They viewed what we would call today an ethnicity as a racial group. So a law was passed in the 19 teens that set the quotas. So in addition to the exclusion of Chinese, which was extended to all Asianics for a period of time, the U.S. had something called the Asiatic Bard Zone. You couldn't come here if you were from the zones, almost all of Asia, except with a tiny, tiny quota. But in addition to that, the rules were for all the other countries, European countries, there was a quota and it was based on the proportion of that ethnicity inside the U.S. at the time the act was passed. That wasn't abolished until 1965. And in 1965, it was part of the civil rights movement and John F. Kennedy had been killed. And he had proposed this idea, so it was in part an honor in his memory. A Congress passed a new law that essentially opened the doors, not entirely fair even today, but it opened the doors to a much greater extent and to a much greater extent than any other nation. And that is what has brought us here today. It's not just Hawaii, it's not just people have come to places you never would have expected. So it's not just Hawaii. If you look at the Asian population, and Asian Americans are now the fastest growing racial minority group in the U.S. The metro area where they've grown by percentage the most, Las Vegas. Las Vegas is now an Asian immigrant city. You wouldn't imagine that. And when you look at the entire U.S., the region that has experienced the heaviest growth in percentage terms, because they started at a lower level, is the deep south. So you can go places where they had never seen someone with this color of skin, this texture of hair, the shape of eyes as you and me 25 years ago, where suddenly in the blink of an eye, they're ethnic neighborhoods. It's astonishing. The world changes at such a pace. This is accompanied by something else, though. And that's the ascendancy of Asia, the rise of China. People have real doubts now. Will the U.S. maintain its dominant superpower role? And there are many people from China, many people here in the U.S. who wonder, is China going to surpass the U.S. either as an economy or as a market for consumer goods? Sometimes people say to me, well, if that happens, you'll be all set, because you're of Chinese descent, to which I say, not quite. It's going to be disastrous for me if that happens. It would mean every bet my family has made for three generations turns out to be wrong. My grandparents left mainland China for Taiwan. My parents left Taiwan for the U.S. They arrived here more than 50 years ago. And then I'm an assimilated American. When I last visited Beijing just a few months ago, a more senior colleague who I was traveling with, also Chinese descent, scolded me a little bit. He said, you really need to be careful. You don't want to come across as just some kid from Detroit. Which is where I grew up. And I thought to myself, yeah, I've made a mistake here, because I am a kid from Detroit. Whenever I visit China, I look around and realize, my mother was right. I should have paid attention in Chinese school. Because if China is a Senate, so this is what I explained to my white American friends, if they go to China and they can say, shisha, people fall all over themselves. Oh, you speak Chinese. That's great. If I open my mouth and say something to Mandarin, they shake their heads. You should be ashamed of yourself. Your Mandarin is really not very good. What kind of accent is that anyway? So the world has changed all around us. China has risen. And because of technology, something has happened. It used to be you had to be elite to be able to maintain connections across the Pacific Ocean. Now with the Internet, you can be working class, and you can still be on WeChat, which is the Chinese version of Facebook and Twitter. And you can still be plugged into the same community. You can keep all the same friends. You can have the same social circle, even without a physical critical mass here in Honolulu or San Francisco or Las Vegas. You're still part of a global transnational culture. So all this has changed, but my grandparents left, my parents left, and I assimilated. And that's true here in Hawaii too. When you think of local Asians, they're not the same as tourist Asians. Their behavior is different. The way they move, the language they speak, some of the foods are similar, right? They're comfort foods we have in common. But so much of what here in the US we think of as Chinese food is not really Chinese food. You can't get fortune cookies in China. Fortune cookies are Chinese American, and so many dishes that people on the mainland think of as Asian are actually Hawaiian, Span, Musubi, California rolls. They're things that are invented, either in Hawaii or California, that are unknown in China or Japan. And there's a mixing going on here that's unprecedented in human history. Yeah, and I think when we talk about this changing demographic that we're seeing in the US, we're not just talking about groups that are really homogenous within themselves. That's the interesting thing. We all have a history. Hawaii is a good example where we have had a longer history of a strong representation of people of Asian descent here for a very long time, but we have different layers of waves of people arriving. That's absolutely right. And so there's a huge difference between, for example, the Japanese who are agricultural workers who toiled in the fields, on the one hand, and the Japanese who arrived as expats in the 1980s as investors, as temporary residents. Both of Japanese descent, but by the 1980s, the Japanese Hawaiian population, the descendants of those who had worked in the fields as laborers, as farmhands, they were Sansei, third generation. They were Americanized. They were Hawaiian. And yes, they had something in common, but often they didn't even have language in common. They didn't have faith in common because they had converted. But there's always been a back and forth. So this is an anniversary of Sanyet Sen's birth. And some people know this. Sanyet Sen spent significant time here in Hawaii. He was converted to Christianity. He went to schools here. He went to Iolani. And then he acquired ideas here because he lived with his brother that he took back to China. So in a way that I believe we should celebrate everything that happened in China that he was responsible for, his ideas, had American roots. They were adapted and changed, translated, if you will. Yeah, I mean, this is not like societies that were sealed off for a very long time. But now we just see it more intensified, the ability for exchange of ideas and for this kind of communication. I think that's something we hope to see more of, you think? It depends. I think it's great because this is what propels society forward. And we're even more open here. Okay, well, thank you very much, Frank. We're going to take a short break right here. So you're watching Global Connection at the ThinkTech Live Streaming Network series. I'm Grace Chang, your host with Frank Wu. And stay tuned and come back in a minute. Welcome to HSU in Vivo. Looking forward to see you next month on October 13, Thursday at 11 o'clock. Aloha, my name is Danilia, D-A-N-E-L-I-A. And I'm the other half of the duo, John Newman. We are the co-hosts of Keys to Success, which is live on ThinkTech Live Streaming Network series weekly on Thursdays at 11 a.m. Aloha. Aloha. Aloha, I'm Kaui Lucas, host of Hawaii is My Mainland. Every Friday here on ThinkTech Hawaii. I also have a blog of the same name at kauilucas.com where you can see all of my past shows. Join me this Friday and every Friday at 3 p.m. Aloha. Hi, I'm Stan Energyman. And I want you to be here every Friday. Noon! ThinkTechHawaii.com. Watch the show. Be there. I'll pay you to full weight. Welcome back to Global Connections. I'm your host, Grace Cheng. And we're hosting Frank Wu today at our program talking about the changing face of America, Hawaii is the future. So, Frank, your book title is Yellow, Race in America Beyond Black and White. And we tend to think of race in black and white terms. And we've been talking a bit about Asian-Americans in this program. Is that a strong composition in our American future? Or do we see other ethnic groups represented? I wrote the book to try to change dialogue. It makes just two points. As a law professor, it took me 400 pages to make two points. But the first is that race is not literally black and white. We often try to divide the whole population, just two boxes. And there are so many who are Latino, who are Arab, who are Asian, who have mixed ancestry. And they have a lineage that dates back in this nation to a time before it was a nation. There are people of native ancestry whose lands these were, they belonged to, other peoples who were displaced, conquered, and that's a grievous wrong that we have and technology owned up to. So, my point was very simple. It doesn't matter who you are. In other words, this isn't about ethnic pride on my part. It's not about Asians or Asian-Americans. It doesn't matter whether you're liberal or conservative, so this is not about politics. It doesn't matter what sort of academic discipline you're in. My point was, if you want a picture of the world that's accurate, it includes so many colors, complexions, and you see that so clearly here in Hawaii, everyone here knows far better than I do, that when you look at the family photo on the mantle, you see every group represented at every generation and Hawaiians have reappropriated a term that was once derogatory, hapa for mixed for half. And it's now to be embraced. It's now a new normal. So the margins have created their own mainstream. That was my first point. Race is not just black and white. And if we're going to talk seriously, if we're going to have good public policy, we should recognize that, that this is just complicated. The second point is race is not figuratively, metaphorically, symbolically black and white. What I mean by that is we like to tell ourselves a story about race. It's a story of progress. It's triumphalist. It's a positive, uplifting story. And that story is there were problems. Those problems were in the past. They were in the deep south. And we've overcome. We've become better. This is a story about villains on the one hand and victims on the other hand. So the villains are slave owners, slave traders. They're the Ku Klux Klan. They're skinheads. They're people who are vicious. Bigots just open through and through. They say they're in favor of segregation yesterday, today, tomorrow, segregation forever. The victims are faceless, nameless, passive. They're not agents of their own destiny. They have violence visited on their bodies and the whole community. And I always try to be clear. Don't get me wrong. There are villains. There are victims. But this story is not just about the past. It's not just about the south. It's about today. It's about the north. It's about the west. It's even about Hawaii. Hawaii has a history that until statehood or just before statehood, Hawaii was a plantation economy dominated by a handful of white-owned companies in which people of color were second class. And that's just the history. It's not people today may not want to remember it, but that's the truth. And then as people return from World War II, in particular Japanese Americans, Japanese Americans who had fought for the United States, they were not interned in Hawaii as they were on the mainland, but Japanese Americans who had had a subordinate status then been enlisted as soldiers given their lives or seen their family and friends give their lives and women too joined the service, came back after World War II and they were empowered and there was a political revolution here. So back to the main point, it's that race is not just clear-cut cases. So there are villains and there are victims and I'm dedicated to fighting the villains and helping the victims, but there are also cases that are about structures, patterns of conduct that are about what psychologists call implicit bias. It's the images rattling around in my head in yours. I'm guilty too when I walk down the street and I stereotype who might be a thug, who might be dangerous. Sometimes you can't help it and then you catch yourself. You realize with embarrassment, well, I just stereotyped someone when I crossed the other side, I shouldn't have done that. That person could be for all we know and honors students at HPU, right? So in talking about race, what I'm trying to do is get us to be more nuanced, to be more attentive to the subtleties, to the details, to the moment when someone says, where are you really from? As if to say you can't be an American or my, you speak English so well. Because they're shocked. My reply is, gee, thanks, so do you. And all of this is happening in a place that has these great ideals. So everything I say as an American, as a believer in the American dream, I wouldn't be here if America hadn't opened its doors and welcomed my parents as students on scholarships. But I'm not a guest. I'm not temporary. I'm not transient. I was born here. This is my home and is where I intend to stay and I will stand up and speak out and embrace that as not just a right or responsibility. So what I'm talking about here is that as the world changes around us, we are constantly struggling to live up to the ideals that we proclaim. And sometimes when I listen to, when I read angry bloggers or listen to politicians running for office, I wonder if we even share the same ideals. Not everyone does. Some people would say, you are not an American. You cannot be. We don't trust you. Why? Because where you came from. Because of how you worship. Because of something about you that isn't about you. It's about an image, a stereotype that they have that's a generalization. So maybe someone of a similar ethnic background or similar faith did commit a crime or terrorist act. That person should be punished. But this guilt by association, that's what's troubling because it violates the ideals that we hold dear. Individuals that we write the scripts of our own lives are now bound by stereotypes and we should interact with each other in that way. That's what America stands for. That's what has made it great, this openness, this sense of reinvention. That's the American myth. Go West, young man, is about you travel west, you change your name, you learn a new occupation, and you become who you have imagined yourself to be. You talk about this problem of people assuming that you have all of these characteristics based on how you look. Part of that has to do with our national imagination. How different people are represented in the media in systematic ways. How we talk about the topic of race and identity. Can you talk a little bit about that? How do we need to adjust as far as how we talk about this issue? These images are all around us. So when the kid comes up to me on the street even today and does karate moves, they do that because when they go to the movie theater or they turn on the TV, now it is changing just a little bit over time, in the past decade, let's say. But it used to be, what was it someone like me was doing on TV? Breaking cinder blocks with their head, right? It's crouching tiger-hidden drag and it's Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and so when I walk by and they say, yo, what's up, Bruce? That is an illusion to an iconic figure, right? A martial arts superhero who died tragically, who's become a myth. And it should be something that we celebrate, right? He was a breakthrough box officer, yet it's a way of mocking both Bruce Lee and mocking every Asian American guy who happens to be walking down the street, who may or may not know karate and kung fu and so on. There's also a germ of truth, right? There's a germ of truth to many stereotypes and sometimes I wonder for Asians, for Asian immigrants, for Asian Americans, whether we live up to or down to the stereotype. So I'll give you an example of what I mean. The stereotype has changed. When I was a kid, the stereotype of Asians was polite, submissive, deferential, passive, docile, you know your place. Now the stereotype is rude, pushy, aggressive, nuvel, rich, busloads of tourists, just behaving badly at national parks and monuments or at high end stores. So the image has changed, but some of it has that germ of truth to it. So let's take the older stereotype of Asians that were polite and submissive and deferential. Well, you know, when I wanted to go to law school, to be a lawyer, my parents discouraged that because they didn't think Asians could or should be making a fuss. They told me, don't be controversial. We don't do that kind of thing. That's not for us. Maybe blacks protest, they march, they carry signs, they give speeches, they're angry. Not Asians, we don't fuss that way, right? And that was part of the culture that my parents came from. And I wouldn't be who I am were not for them, so I have the utmost respect. But I wrote a blog a few years ago entitled Everything My Asian Immigrant Parents Taught Me Turns Out to Be Wrong. It was right for them, it was right for their generation, for their era, it worked, right? But compare, so most East Asian cultures have a saying. There's a Japanese proverb, that's the clearest. It's the nail that sticks up is pounded down. Now, what's that about? That's about deference to authority to your elders, fidelity to tradition. There's a Chinese phrase, the loudest duck is shot first by the hunter. Same point, the point of these sayings is do not put yourself out there. Compare that to the American adage, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Different attitude, right? So even today, sometimes, I'll give a speech and I'll talk about legal issues, and afterwards someone will come up to me, they'll be Asian, and they don't want to file a lawsuit or make a fuss. They don't want to embarrass their boss, and I want to say, why not? Your boss is discriminating against you, of course you won't embarrass your boss. So the moral of the story is the time has come for us to stand up and speak out and take our place. Good point, yeah. Our culture is evolving and part of being American is very individualistic and having the freedom to express ourselves, but we see that we have many traditions behind us and the many people. So last question, do you think we talked about Hapa? Are we moving towards a Hapa future? It will be a Hapa nation. Sounds good. Thank you very much, Frank, for joining us today. So you have been watching Global Connections with me, your host, Grace Chang, and we've been talking to Frank Wu, Professor of Law at the University of California, Hastings College of Law. So see you next time, you can catch me here every Thursday at 1 p.m. Aloha. Thank you, Frank. Thanks. Yeah, it went fast. Yeah, it sure did. So that was live broadcast, so some people just saw it, just now. And then it goes up on YouTube. And it'll be on YouTube later today. Oh, go that fast. I'll send it out there real quick. So yeah, when Nick took your email, he'll send you the link. Okay, thank you. Then work out okay?