Fred Ho is a Chinese American social activist. A renowned baritone saxophonist, composer, and bandleader, he founded the Afro Asian Music Ensemble in 1982.

Bill V. Mullen is Director of American Studies and Professor of English at Purdue University. He is the author of Afro-Orientalism.

AFRO ASIA

Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections between African Americans and Asian Americans

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2008 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4258-8

Contents

Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………1PART I THE AFRICAN AND ASIAN DIASPORAS IN THE WEST: 1800-1950…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………20Fred Ho Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen: The Roots to the Black-Asian Conflict………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..30Lisa Yun Chinese Freedom Fighters in Cuba: From Bondage to Liberation, 1847-1898…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………55PART II FROM BANDUNG TO THE BLACK PANTHERS: NATIONAL LIBERATION, THE THIRD WORLD, MAO, AND MALCOLM………………………………………………………………………………………………..91Mao Zedong Statement Supporting the Afro-American in Their Just Struggle Against Racial Discrimination by U.S. Imperialism, August 8, 1963……………………………………………………………..94Mao Zedong Statement by Mao Tse-Tung, Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, in Support of the Afro-American Struggle Against Violent Repression, April 16, 1968…………………97Robin D. G. Kelley and Betsy Esch Black Like Mao: Red China and Black Revolution…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………155Fred Ho The Inspiration of Mao and the Chinese Revolution on the Black Liberation Movement and the Asian Movement on the East Coast……………………………………………………………………165Diane C. Fujino The Black Liberation Movement and Japanese American Activism: The Radical Activism of Richard Aoki and Yuri Kochiyama…………………………………………………………………..198PART III AFRO/ASIAN ARTS: CATALYSTS, COLLABORATIONS, AND THE COLTRANE AESTHETIC…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………217Ishmael Reed The Yellow and the Black……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….220Cheryl Higashida Not Just a “Special Issue”: Gender, Sexuality, and Post-1965 Afro Asian Coalition Building in the Yardbird Reader and This Bridge Called My Back…………………………………………256Fred Ho Bill Cole: African American Musician of the Asian Double Reeds………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….265Kim Hewitt Martial Arts Is Nothing if Not Cool: Speculations on the Intersection between Martial Arts and African American Expressive Culture…………………………………………………………..285royal hartigan with Fred Ho The American Drum Set: Black Musicians and Chinese Opera along the Mississippi River…………………………………………………………………………………….291Ron Wheeler with David Kaufman Is Kung Fu Racist?…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….295PART IV AFRO/ASIA EXPRESSIVE WRITING……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….321David Mura and Alexs Pate Secret Colors and the Possibilities of Coalition: An African American-Asian American Collaboration………………………………………………………………………….354Kalamu ya Salaam We Don’t Stand a Chinaman’s Chance Unless We Create a Revolution………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..359Lisa Yun El Chino…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………363Ishle Park Samchun in the Grocery Store……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..365Maya Almachar Santos Self-Rebolusyon, April 1998……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..369JoYin C Shih Chyna and Me………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….376Everett Hoagland All That………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….379Contributors………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………383

Chapter One

Fred Ho

Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen: The Roots to the Black-Asian Conflict

When my Afro Asian Music Ensemble’s debut Soul-note recording was released in late 1985-early 1986, Martin Johnson, a young African American journalist, wrote a feature on me in the City Sun. After the feature was published, a reader named Yusef Salaam wrote a letter to the paper noting the political comments I had made about “jazz”; he took exception, however, to my use of the term “Afro” in the title of my band. To him, an “Afro” was a hairdo; he preferred that I use the phrase “African-Asian.”

It was not until much later, in a 1990 feature on me by Esther Iverem, an African American arts writer for New York Newsday, that I publicly clarified my use of the term “Afro Asian” as inspired by and taken from the “Afro Asian Unity Conference” of Bandung of the mid-1950s. This was the initial summit meeting of leaders from the newly independent nation-states and anticolonial movements of Africa and Asia that included Julius Nyerere, Chou En-lai, Kwame Nkrumah, and Nehru, among others. The conference gave birth to the Non-Aligned Movement or “Third World” (not “third” as in lesser than first or second, but as an alternative to the two major power blocs of the West/Europe-United States and the East/Soviet bloc).

I had begun my ensemble to express musically a vision of unity between the cultural-socio-political struggles of African Americans (the originators and innovators of “jazz”) and Asian Americans. Since my teen-age years, the Black Power movement (particularly the leading ideas of Malcolm X) and the Black Arts movement (especially the poetry of Baraka, Sanchez, Scott-Heron, and the Last Poets, and the music of Mingus, Coltrane, Shepp, Parker, Ellington, and Cal Massey) greatly inspired my social consciousness and identity as a Chinese American (to understand that I, as an Asian in America, suffered as a victim of white racism and the need to wage a comprehensive struggle to end this systematic oppression).

Because I did not grow up in a community with many other Chinese Asian Americans, I looked to the revolutionary thought and cultural expression of members of the growing community of African American intellectuals and artists who came to teach in the colleges of the Amherst, Massachusetts, area in the early and mid-1970s (including Max Roach, Archie Shepp, Sonia Sanchez, Reggie Workman, and others). I immersed myself in the music, literature, and political activism of Black Power, finding analogous conditions and perspectives in the struggles of Asian Americans. Since those days, and having embarked on a career as a composer, a baritone saxophonist, and a bandleader, I have sought through the use of music to promote the solidarity of Asian Americans and African Americans, by forging what I have termed “an Afro Asian New American Multicultural Music.”

The highly media-sensationalized “Black-Korean” conflict of Brooklyn and other altercations between Asian small-business owners and African Americans in recent years have raised the question of how united are people of color. To the more politically conscious, the media preoccupation with conflicts and divisions among people of color seemed to exacerbate disunity rather than offer a perspective regarding the source of the problems. In these incidents, the media seemed to revel in pointing out that people of color could be racist toward one another without the active presence of white people. In Do the Right Thing, Spike Lee seemed to suggest that the Korean grocer would be the next target of the African American community’s anger and frustration. While Korean merchants had given hefty financial contributions to the electoral campaigns of Jesse Jackson and the successful mayoral bid of David Dinkins, African American political leadership in unifying and “healing” the conflicts has been minimal at best.

In my view, neither Asian Americans nor African Americans are to blame for the prejudices, ignorance, misunderstanding, and racism held against the other. In a white-racist, oppressive society, the victims of that racism and oppression can be expected to harbor the racist attitudes, xenophobia, and even self-hatred fostered by the segregation, Eurocentric education, and endemic powerlessness that fuel frustration, fear, and mistrust. What is needed from educators, activists, and intellectuals is dialogue and knowledge about each other’s experience and social history of oppression and struggle rather than convenient, evasive explanations of “cultural differences.” (The “cultural differences” thesis presumes that what is needed is greater “cultural sensitivity” and not political consciousness and organizing around common interests as peoples of color.)

The primary difference between people of African and Asian heritage in the United States is that the experience and historical process of slavery forged African Americans into a distinct nationality while Asian Americans are a composite of diverse minority nationalities: Chinese American, Japanese American, Korean American, Filipino American, Asian Indian, Cambodian, Hmong, Vietnamese, etc. Generations of slavery fused the diverse West African peoples brought to the Americas into one common people who no longer trace their ancestral origin to a specific West African people; the varying languages of Yoruba, Ibo, Wolof, etc. were replaced by the language of the slave master (English in the British colonies). Their identity, religion, music, and history were no longer any specific African tradition but became definitively African American. Thus, some contemporary African Americans, endeavoring to reclaim their African heritage, divest themselves of “slave names” such as Smith, Jones, Johnson, Washington, etc. for a range of self-identifications such as Xs to Islamic and other non-European adoptions.

Asian Americans are a plurality of nationalities that retain their ancestral family names and specific national cultural heritages including language, customs and traditions, as well as national histories. Chinese Americans are quite different from Japanese Americans, who are also quite different from the more than a dozen varying Asian/Pacific Islander minority nationalities in the United States. They are Wongs, Chins, Yamaguchis, Salvadores, Parks, etc. Obviously, the first generation of Asian peoples in America retain more of their ancestral identity, while subsequent generations growing up in the United States experience identity crises and cultural confusion.

Under slavery, African Americans held no illusions about their status in U.S. society. They were simply property, a condition maintained by total force for virtually two and a half centuries prior to the mid-nineteenth century. Asian immigration into the United States began in the mid-1800s and was the result of a combination of what social historians term “push/ pull” factors: “pushed” by the devastation of their ancestral homelands from crushing poverty, semicolonial penetration, government and social corruption, and varying types of cheap-labor recruitment (a semislavery or indentured servitude); “pulled” by hyped promises of America as the “Mountain of Gold” (the Chinese expression for the United States was literally that) and promises for opportunities to make a new and better life. Because of this combination of ambivalent, contradictory impulses, between the sojourner (who came to work with the idea of returning to Asia) and the immigrant (who came to stay) Asian Americans reflect ambivalent responses to their conditions in America, rooted to the question: Is America home? Immigration has prefigured as a critical and dominant characteristic in the Asian American experience.

In U.S. society, an individual is either white, black, or foreign. American racism has lumped its Latino, Asian, and even Native American groups into “other.” Even fourth-generation Asian Americans still face this condition of subtle racism when told to “go back to where you came from” or that they “speak good English,” as well as the not-so-subtle racism of being a target of racist violence.

Prior to the twentieth century, the concentration of African Americans was in the “black belt” region of the South. For Asian Americans (mostly Chinese until the 1900s), it was on the West Coast and in Hawaii. Even well into the twentieth century, there was little social intercourse or contact between these peoples, except for a small population of resettled Chinese laborers in the South that occurred as a short-lived experiment to replace slave labor. Two significant contrasts between African Americans and Asian Americans were evident in late-nineteenth-century U.S. society: the failure of Reconstruction for African Americans and the period of exclusion for the Chinese in America, which eventually extended to all Asian immigrants until well into the second half of this century.

The smashing of Reconstruction by what Du Bois noted as an alliance between northern finance capital and southern agrarian interests thwarted the possibility of genuine emancipation for the African American people. Furthermore, without “40 acres and a mule”-the granting to African Americans basic capital through ownership of land and basic means of production-African American economic (as well as political) empowerment was restricted and suffocated. While a tiny African American middle class (petite bourgeoisie) did emerge under segregation, it was not until the great migrations of World Wars I and II to northern industrial urban centers did African Americans achieve some measure of social mobility and economic advancement. Indeed, the proletarianization of the African American masses, with increasing presence and activity in the burgeoning labor movements and trade unions, was probably the chief means of economic advancement. African Americans joined the ranks of trade union workers in steel, auto, municipal, and public-sector employment. African American economic life, though having a distinct segregated market, increasingly became part and parcel of the general functioning of the U.S. capitalist, industrial, and urban economy.

This was not the case for Asian Americans. The anti-Asian and “Yellow Peril” racist movements of the late nineteenth century were in large part led by the white labor movement, culminating in the series of Exclusion Acts passed by Congress that halted Asian immigration to the United States with the exception of members of the merchant class and students. Heretofore, the majority of Asian laborers were unmarried young men. The few Chinese women in the mainland United States invariably were prostitutes. The halting of immigration made it impossible for the wives or families of these male laborers to join them. Thus, these single Chinese male workers were condemned to an enforced existence as a bachelor society, unable to find love and to procreate. Such a move was tantamount to genocide, and as a consequence the Chinese population in the United States severely declined from 1890 until the mid-1960s.

The ghettoization of the Chinese, from a rural/farming-based existence to Chinatown’s urban, isolated communities, led to the formation of the ubiquitous Chinese restaurant and laundry trade-employment in which the Chinese would not find themselves in competition with hostile white labor. The Chinese and other Asian laborers were effectively denied proletarianization in being confined to marginal small business economic activity and dispersed to West Coast cities such as San Francisco (which were not industrial centers). Since their days as workers on the transcontinental railroad, the Chinese have tried their hand at every possible kind of work, only to be scapegoated and targeted by hostile white labor. They were eventually excluded from virtually all forms of economic activity except for a small handful of occupations. By World War II, however, African Americans had become a significant presence in key industries and unions.

As noted above, the merchant class of Asian immigrants was one that was not excluded. Trade between Asia and the United States made for the presence of a merchant entrepreneurial class in the various Asian communities scattered across America. These merchants ran the social-political-economic life of these communities through clan-based merchant associations. The Asian continent was penetrated by European colonization to varying extents (from total colonization as in the case of India to total independence as in Japan, which made for Japan’s undisturbed development into an independent industrial capitalist power by the twentieth century, whereas most of the non-European world had its economic course of history dominated and disrupted by the West). Africa, in contrast, was thoroughly colonized; its very borders were redrawn and parceled out to European powers. Asian merchants, on the one hand, serviced a unique Asian American market in these ghetto, urban, isolated communities (the demand for Asian foods and other cultural-based products; sharing a common language); on the other hand, import-export trade influenced relations with mainstream American economic and political life-the silk trade, for example, was big business until the development of nylon.

African Americans had no African merchant class that maintained a distinctive connection to Africa. Both African Americans and Asian Americans have been greatly influenced by the geo-political changes in Africa and Asia, respectively. As Malcolm X so forcefully made the connection: “There was a time in this country when they used to use the expression about Chinese, ‘He doesn’t have a Chinaman’s chance.’ … You don’t hear that saying nowadays … Just as a strong China has produced a respected Chinaman, a strong Africa will produce a respected Black man anywhere that Black man goes on this earth.” Middle-class Asian Americans grew in part due to the influx of merchants and educated classes. African American mobility was largely a result of unionism and industrial urban concentration.

The greatest changes and progress for both groups occurred during the 1960s. Asian immigration restrictions were finally removed in 1965 by the liberalization of the Immigration and Naturalizations Quota, restoring Asian entries to the same number as other groups. Much of this change occurred in the context of the civil rights movement, led by African Americans. The byproducts of the African American civil rights and Black Power movements benefited most of America. A college-educated, professional African American middle class grew dramatically. Asian families could now immigrate to the United States. They brought a lifetime of savings as start-up investment capital, though most continued to labor in Asian ghetto-based industries such as restaurant, garment, and service occupations.

In the past decade, Asian immigration to the United States has been the largest of any group-doubling the Asian American population. Much of this immigration has been to the urban centers, with an extensive diversity of economic and educational backgrounds, national origins, notably including large numbers of Filipinos (the fast-growing Asian/Pacific group), other Southeast Asians, and Koreans). These new immigrants commonly settle in areas bordering on longtime African American or Latino ghettos. Many use their savings to start small businesses because they are unable to find jobs commensurate with their education or training. Thus, it is not uncommon to find Korean engineers and technicians who, unable to find work in these areas, invest a pool of savings in order to start a grocery or dry-cleaning business, in which they work long hours and employ several family members.

(Continues…)

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