Connecting the Chicano movement and the Black Freedom movement in my mind was very easy: both faced segregation and similar types of adversity. I concluded that the United States has had an amazingly flawed method of rectifying its civil rights injustices for the past sixty years, and that someone with the ability to fix the system should have done so. Ethnic crimes were linked with the need of the ruling whites to be either superior to someone, or to maintain their income from the oppressed. Yet I have since realised that there are many other forms of hatred, and the Asian American movement is not only fighting against the conviction Asians are inferior, but also against the fear they may be equal, and therefore pose a threat to the white community.
So far every movement we have studied has involved an ethnic group that was needed and/or welcomed in their oppressed state by the ruling power (the exception is women, and I believe women are needed everywhere for obvious reasons). Black slaves were brought to America, and the Native Americans were abundant when the white ruling class was established. Neither Africans nor Chicanos threaten America's white class on a fundamental level, yet something differs for Asian Americans: I discovered this while reading Race, Rights, and the Asian American Experience. Obvious examples of this can be seen when looking at the wars America has fought in the past half a century. World War II involved the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbour, the 1950's saw the beginning of the Korean War, and the 1960's saw the war in Vietnam. The three successive wars involved Asia, with no clear resolution to the latter two. Every generation alive at the time was affected, and I honestly believe it created a new passion for hate against anyone of Asian descent- the text exemplifies this when it discusses how Asian Americans were placed in guarded camps during W.W.II. .
Another threat is that of the immigrant worker: as Race, Rights, and the Asian American Experience points out, Asian families are strongly tied to traditions of hard work and success: something that causes extreme jealousy in the mind of a replaced white worker.
