Race, Rights, and the Asian American Experience

By Angelo N. Ancheta

Book Overview

In Race, Rights, and the Asian American Experience, Angelo N. Ancheta demonstrates how United States civil rights laws have been framed by a black-white model of race that typically ignores the experiences of other groups, including Asian Americans. When racial discourse is limited to antagonisms between black and white, Asian Americans often find themselves in a racial limbo, marginalized or unrecognized as full participants.

Ancheta examines legal and social theories of racial discrimination, ethnic differences in the Asian American population, nativism, citizenship, language, school desegregation, and affirmative action. In the revised edition of this influential book, Ancheta also covers post-9/11 anti-Asian sentiment and racial profiling. He analyzes recent legal cases involving political empowerment, language rights, human trafficking, immigrant rights, and affirmative action in higher education-many of which move the country farther away from the ideals of racial justice. On a more positive note, he reports on the progress Asian Americans have made in the corporate sector, politics, the military, entertainment, and academia.

A skillful mixture of legal theories, court cases, historical events, and personal insights, this revised edition brings fresh insights to U.S. civil rights from an Asian American perspective.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0813539021
• ISBN13: 9780813539027
• Release Date: October 2006
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Length: 207 Pages
• Weight: 1.14 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.1" x 9.0"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Excellent read

Why America Should See More than Black & White By Samuel R. CacasRace, Rights & The Asian American Experience By Angelo N. Ancheta, Rutgers University  Press:  1998, 224 pp, Hardcover.        While taking a civil rights class in law school during the late 1970s, I felt cheated by what I felt was a significant gap in the course and text material which almost exclusively focused on the achievements for and by African Americans.  As a very politically conscious Asian American in college, I knew that while immigrant groups like Asians were a very minuscule minority population-wise in this country, they had still made a significant contribution to the eradication of "Jim Crow" policies and other racial segregation laws.    And I would often expound on such contributions  during class.  For instance, the Yick Wo v. Hopkins case - in which a  Chinese American laundry owner in San Francisco successfully sued to  overturn a racially discriminatory city ordinance - has been cited in countless legal briefs and court cases involving the Fourteenth Amendment1s Equal Protection clause.  Or U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark which has long been the major legal precedent establishing birthright citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment.  While my civil rights teacher and fellow classmates were warm and respectful to my tendencies, I still felt the contributions of non-Black minority groups deserved to be covered more thoroughly in print. So reading civil rights lawyer Angelo Ancheta's "Race, Rights & The Asian American Experience" was a refreshing affirmation of my daily, righteous meanderings in that civil rights class.         Ancheta pulls no punches in citing his motivation for writing this ground-breaking text on civil rights and race relations.  In the book¹s preface, he relates his racial experiences growing up in San Francisco during the 1960s:  racist landlords that limited the sections of the city where his family could live, discriminatory employment practices which prevented ! his parents from the career they desired, and the endless anti-Asian racial taunts he endured throughout elementary and high school.  And even when such experiences receded as he grew older, Ancheta was still exposed to significant, though subtle, forms of racism such as law school classmates who marveled that Ancheta - a second generation, American-born Filipino American - could not understand Chinese or Japanese.     The book's bifurcated focus - how Asian Americans are affected by civil rights laws and how civil rights laws are affected by Asian Americans - forms the basis for why all Americans should read this book even if they are not of Asian descent.  If anything, they will come away with a more encompassing mind-set on civil rights that accommodates the racial experiences of the fastest-growing minority group in this country. A major polemic addressed throughout the book is the problem that civil rights protections available to Asian Americans are most often contingent upon th