Do Asians Need Their Sharpton?

A friend of mine forward a bunch of articles related to a series of incidents stemming from racial tension at a public high school in South Philadelphia where Asian students, many of whom are recent immigrants, were beaten by groups of black students. He had asked me to consider posting it as a future blog topic, and I understand why this caught his attention.

The accounts are disturbing to say the least, with reports emerging of Asian students feeling unsafe due to security guards turning a blind eye and a principal who apparently has ducked the press, refusing to comment or explain why she inexplicably ended practices that seemed to be ameliorating tensions, including keeping non-English-speaking students of a separate floor away from native English speakers of all races. A number of Asian community members have rallied to support these students and have stepped up to build bridges between the community and the school district to find solution, and even Asian advocacy board member and school district parent who astutely stated at one meeting, "a lot of these attacks felt by the students are racially motivated. What's wrong is to deny it" or hope it goes away. Their efforts should be applauded, but the question arises - do Asians need their Sharpton?

This questions always comes to my mind whenever a crime against an Asian is murdered in cold blood, but somehow race is inexplicably ignored as a factor. Take for example last year's killing of Columbia graduate student Minghui Yu, who was chased into traffic in killed by a teen after the killer boasted to a friend, "Look what I do to this one." Earlier this year, a couple of black men killed media account executive David Kao while hunting for "Chinese men who appeared to be drunk". In both of these cases, the district attorney declined to try either of these as hate crimes. Are you kidding me?

The argument for an Asian Al Sharpton is that an "Asian Al" would never let that happen without major public and political repercussions. We'd see organized boycotts, demonstrations and just about every political threat being made public. The counter argument for an "Asian Al" is that for all of it's feel-good bluster, how effective is it, really? Does subtle and downplayed diplomacy at the community and local level, in truth, get more results and build more lasting progress than the polarizing firebrand? Do Asians need both? Is there a viable strategy of "good cop, bad cop" where we have our radical national firebrand balanced by more collaborative local advocates doing grassroots work?

Having been involved in the Asian diversity movement, I've heard many theories why the emergence of the "Asian Al" hasn't happened yet. They range from "the Asian population is too racially, socioeconomically and politically scattered to be pigeon-holed into a single person's (or group of people's) representation" to a more cynical (but I think somewhat accurate) "large pockets of Asian-Americans are quite successful and doing just fine, thank you - why would they want to rock the boat?" Or put another way, change is happening slowly, but surely; respect isn't earned by demonstrations or grandstanding, but by an increasing upwardly-mobile and wealthy (and thus influential) demographic.

Maybe the latter is true (I'm not so sure it is), but stories like the ones above still make me seethe.