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America today continues to defend its image as a global democracy that opens doors to all nations and ethnicities. Many Americans continue to believe in the equal opportunity stereotype, or the stereotype continues to live on its own, with the tacit consent of the majority. In practice, however, America is one of the most hostile countries towards immigrants. Hostility is present in the social perception of non-white immigrants in both formal and informal situations. Hatred also manifests at the legislative level in the laws prohibiting entry for individuals from certain countries or acts restricting citizenship rights for immigrants. There is a reference in the video to the historical fact of the resettlement of the Japanese after the attack on Pearl Harbor and the 1965 Immigration Act as brilliant examples of such hostility (“Dine with Hasan Minhaj”). This paper aims to discuss what people from the majority cultural background can do to reduce or counteract prejudice, discrimination, and violence against minoritized groups.
The Founding Fathers were Europeans, and then the descendants of these first Americans continued to consider themselves full-fledged residents of the country and openly showed distrust or hostility towards immigrants. On the one hand, it is natural for human beings to express skepticism toward strangers. On the other hand, this natural inclination began to be very quickly exploited in social relations between Americans when the white inhabitants of the country began to unite against a new common enemy – representatives of other races, including African and Asian Americans.
Of course, the reason for the hostility is not the advantage of the “true first Americans.” The first reason is the inhumanly difficult working conditions and overestimated requirements and expectations that were presented to workers. Such conditions did not facilitate the unification of people around shared values. The only matter was the ability to survive and to do it – possess money. The second reason, more characteristic of the 20th and 21st centuries, is the exploitation by politicians (and all other people who seek power) of this absence of a true, unifying ideology, which would be based on the joy of giving, not on the pleasure of taking. In other words, the United States as a state does not have an actual ideology, and this is the fundamental reason for the long-standing, ingrained racism that is still relevant today.
The video provides answers to the question of which stereotypes are most painful for Asian and Pacific Americans (APIs). One answer is a white-supremacist bias when people are asked, “So where are you really from? Where are your ancestors, your parents from?” (“Dine with Hasan Minhaj”). Considering that most of the APIs were born in the USA, like their parents or grandparents, it is a shame that because of their appearance because of their race, white Americans are constantly excluding them from the American community. Of course, this will not solve the global problem of ideology, but white Americans could be less complacent and remember that all races have pride and can feel hurt.
The video host says, “We are all representatives of the same race – the human race” (“Dine with Hasan Minhaj”). And this is indeed true because it is strange to think that a person of a different race is fundamentally different in some way in terms of psychology or the emotional world just because their genes were formed under the influence of other geographical and weather factors. Of course, people are inclined to perceive the world as something mythical, magic, and not devoid of room for absurdity, in which there is nothing wrong. But in the most difficult conditions of social interaction, in a country like the United States, anyone should sincerely respect the rights of other people. Such respect does not require reasons rooted in tribal ethics like common military victories or common genetic heritage. For consideration, it is enough to be aware of oneself as a person, not deprived of individual opinion or vision of the world.
Work Cited
“Dine with Hasan Minhaj, Eugene Lee Yang, and Michelle Kwan: Recipe For Change.” YouTube, uploaded by Jubilee, 2021, Web.
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