Boston Broadside Op-Ed "From Asian Registry to Race and Ethnicity Quagmire"

Since MA H.3361 was introduced, it has met with fierce opposition.  Now the MA bill originally targeting Asian Americans has been changed to target all MA residents.  In this Op-Ed titled "From Asian Registry to Race and Ethnicity Quagmire", published in Boston Broadside, I argued against such legislation or any form of racial profiling. Welcome your thoughts and comments. 

From Asian Registry to Race and Ethnicity Quagmire

About a year ago, State Rep. Tackey Chan proposed the Asian Data Disaggregation Act (H.3361) which blatantly requires “all state agencies, quasi-state agencies, entities created by state statute and sub-divisions of state agencies” to identify Asian Americans, and only Asian Americans, based on their national origin or ancestry.  Disaggregation means separating something into its component parts.  This senseless bill will essentially create an Asian Registry.

After half a dozen of protests, an overwhelming number of emails and calls from indignant constituents, and a long grueling hearing packed with six hundred opponents, a Joint Committee on State Administration and Regulatory Oversight voted on Feb. 7 to replace the current bill with new legislation which would be determined by "establish[ing] a special commission to study the feasibility and impact of directing state agencies to collect disaggregated demographic data for all ethnic and racial groups, as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau.”  The commission would submit its recommendations to the Legislature by Dec. 31, 2018.  In a statement, Rep. Chan announced he was “thrilled” with the committee’s decision to “move H.3361 forward”.

Although collecting demographic data for all racial and ethnic groups may avoid the thorny question of “Why Asians only” and hence the contentious issue of violating constitutional equal protection law, it will nonetheless cause many other problems.

First and foremost, our government’s attempt to divide ethnic groups based on national origin is detrimental to the fight against institutional and societal racism.  For instance, the U.S. Census only has one box for White or Black as a category while Asians are disaggregated into Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Vietnamese, Korean, etc.  In addition, our country has a shameful history of racial discrimination and xenophobia, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the Japanese-American internment during WWII, and even today, the hidden Asian quota in many top American colleges and universities which reminds us of the Jewish quota in 1920s.

Beyond the problem of racial profiling, racial and ethnic classification has always been controversial. In sociology, the term of “race” refers to biological, genetic and physical differences while “ethnicity” describes shared culture or national origin or ancestry.  One challenge is both racial and ethnic identities have changed throughout history and could still change.  Furthermore, the inconsistency in racial and ethnic categorization leads to more confusion.  What’s in practice at local, state, and federal level is demographers want to force certain categories onto individuals regardless of self-identity.  For someone of Chinese heritage who was born in the U.S. and doesn’t speak a word of Chinese, there is a “Chinese” box for this person to check simply because of national origin of ancestry.

But why no box for “American”?  If there is truly a common set of values, perspectives, distinctions and culture which set apart Americans from the rest of the world, why don’t we all call ourselves Americans?

Instead, what we are witnessing is population segmentation based on the murky and dubious checkboxes of race, ethnicity, national origin or ancestry, and the rise of identity politics, Balkanization, and tribalism, which ultimately lead to a race and ethnicity quagmire.

President Theodore Roosevelt once warned, “The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.”

While each of us should be proud of our heritage, it’s more important we focus on our shared destiny, shared citizenship, common values, beliefs, principles, and ideals, which triumph over any ideological divisions we might have.  E pluribus unum - Out of many, One.  Or we will become “a tangle of squabbling nationalities.”  The Massachusetts state legislature must stop the divisive and harmful ethnic profiling based on national origin once and for all. ⧫