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Asian American heritage month should be a time of celebrating, not to be forgotten
The Advocate
It may surprise you that May is heritage month for Americans with the background of the most populous race in the world. Yet they make up one of the smaller minorities in the United States, but with one of the higher average earning incomes in this country.
May is Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month. This encompasses Americans with ancestry from the Asian continent and Pacific Islands, including Polynesia, and is one of the broadest celebrations of culture in terms of heritage months.
The most populous Asian ethnicities in the U.S. in order are: Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese, according to the 2009 American Community Survey. Each of the ethnicities, including the numerous other Southeast Asian and Pacific Islander countries, are vastly different in terms of culture, language and history.
May was chosen because it was the month the first Japanese immigrants arrived in the U.S. back on May 7, 1843. And the transcontinental railroad, built mostly by Chinese immigrants, was finished May 10, 1869, according to the Asian Pacific American Heritage website. Initially it was only a week long celebration at the beginning of May, but after 12 years, President George H.W. Bush extended it to a month-long celebration in 1992.
As an Asian born and raised in suburban Oregon where the percentage of Asians is 3.7 percent, I can safely say I am pretty white-washed. In all honesty, I am more comfortable in a room full of white people than in a room full of Asians. But don't let the small population fool you; Asians are a pretty prominent group both within the United States, and on the global scale.
Asians make up 4.42 percent and Pacific Islanders make up 0.18 percent of the U.S. population according to the CIA factbook. Median household income for Asians was reported to be $64,308 in 2010, which compares to $54,620 for Whites, $37,759 for Hispanics, $32,068 for Blacks, and an overall median of $49,445, according to the U.S. census.
Maybe that correlates to the high percentage of Asian college graduates. 52.4 percent of Asians over the age of 25, just over half, have at least a 4-year degree. That is compared to 30.3 percent for Whites, 19.8 percent for Blacks, 13.9 percent for Hispanics, and 29.9 percent overall in the U.S. according to the 2010 census.
At one point in my research on Google, there was a spike in the search terms "I am extremely terrified of Chinese people." So please be clear, by no means am I trying to scare you, dear readers. I just wanted to bring up this interesting tidbit that you may never have thought of consciously in your daily lives. To me, this shows the success that Asians have had in the U.S., despite discrimination and other setbacks. It shows that the U.S. does have social mobility even for minorities that have immigrated to America.
However, it is certainly disappointing to see the lack of Asian-Pacific American Heritage month in school, around Gresham, or even around Portland. I did not even know about my heritage month until I saw it on Wikipedia when I was reading up about different heritage months for an article I wrote a while back.
There is by no means a lack of culture to celebrate. In fact, the month incorporates many of the richest traditions, arts, music, and food in the world, with most of the various Asian nations having a history dating back thousands of years. There's very little reason to not have school-wide or community-wide events to celebrate the Asian American heritage. I think it is especially important in a community like Gresham, where Asians are often overlooked or whitewashed like me.
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