Vietnamese Americans

1. How has this group been racially identified? Stereotyped?

Vietnamese Americans have in addition been stereotyped as a "model minority"; that is, optimistic traits are utilised as a stereotype. Vietnamese Americans are observed as hardworking, conservatively inactive, studious, educated, fruitful, and inoffensive population who have raised their social standing through warrant and diligence. This tag is bestowed in show up to other racial stereotypes which usually accuse minorities of socially unwelcome traits: for instance indolence or lay-breaker tendencies. (Do, 47-84)

2. How has this group experienced prejudice or discrimination? Has it been a target of such behaviour? Have members targeted other ethnic groups?

Few of the Vietnamese Americans are categorised as Eurasians—persons of European and Asian descent. These Eurasians are descendants of ethnic Vietnamese and French settlers and combatants and at times Hoa as long as the French colonial interval (1883-1945) or as long as the First Indochina War (1946-1954).

Amerasians are descendants of an ethnic Vietnamese parent or a Hoa parent and an American parent, most regularly of White, Black or Hispanic background. The first extensive current inhabitants of Amerasian Vietnamese Americans were born to American employees (primarily soldiers men) as long as the Vietnam War (1961-1975). Many such offspring were disclaimed by their American parent and, in Vietnam, these fatherless offspring of foreign men were called con lai, implication "mixed race", or the pejorative b?i d?i, implication "the dirt particles of life." Many of these first current inhabitants of Amerasians, as well as their mothers, qualified noteworthy social and institutional discrimination both in Vietnam—where they were subject to refusal to accept of minimal civilised privileges like an training, the discrimination worsening following the American leaving in 1973—as well as by the United States government, which publically disheartened American soldiers employees from marrying Vietnamese nationals, and regularly turned down allegations to US citizenship lodged by Amerasians born in Vietnam whose mothers were not wedded to their American fathers. Such discrimination was usually even bigger for offspring of Black or Hispanic servicemen than for offspring of White fathers. (McKelvey, 10-20)

3. What role has institutional racism played in the history of this group? What economic and social effects have resulted?

In show up to first-generation Vietnamese Americans, some less old community activists embrace race-based multiculturalism as a salient political implement and as a way of appreciating American society. Community chiefs promptly find that socially delineated hyphenated Americanism carries constricted political salience, bestowed the deficiency of a ...