Asian American Community and Erasure
- nunezv
- Feb 21, 2021
- 1 min read
I think the article “Occult Racism: The making of race in the Hmong hunter incident” by Louisa Schein and Va-Megn Thaj clearly depicts and explores the double erasure the Hmong community faces. The authors explain that Hmong people, and other South Asian Communities, are grouped into a general. This causes a sense of alienation and erasure, “You’re with people who you kind of identify with, but they can’t identify with you because you’re not Chinese or Japanese; you’re a Hmong person“ (426). Moreover, since the discussion about race in the United States is thought as black/white and the Asian community is classified as model minority the Asian American communities are left outside of important conversation about racism.
This is an interesting point because in the documentary “Asian Americans” we can see this double erasure. They explore the history around Japanese and Chinese American communities, but leave South Asian communities just as brief background information. What does it mean to call a program “Asian Americans” but not talk about all the communities that are under that category?
One of the structural problems of this documentary is that PBS only authorized 5 hours for the entire program even though the producers wanted more than double that. The producers argued that they couldnt do the topic justice with that amount of time and I tend to agree, especially since PBS allowed more time for documentories covering the subject of baseball.
I agree that not given time to South Asian communities was a big oversight. It is really significant because Hmong people are one of the largest Asian minorities in the midwest. It's especially bad because groups like the Hmong are already under erasure, so them not being included in this documentary is really problematic.