Asian Americans
Dear Friend,
I wish you would come join, or even just sit in on a meeting with the Asian American Legal Foundation. It is not what you think I can assure you. We have discussions about what has happened to our people throughout history in schools where we were not allowed to attend schools or turned away because we were not a member of a particular group. "Patrick Wong, then fourteen years old, applied for admission to Lowell High School in 1994. He was rejected because his index score was below the minimum required for Chinese American applicants. However, his score was high enough that he would have been admitted to Lowell had he been a member of any other racial or ethnic group recognized in the consent decree. He was rejected at two other high schools because such schools had also accepted the maximum number of schoolchildren of Chinese descent. When he tried to apply to a fourth high school, a newly established academic high school, his mother was told that all spaces for Chinese Americans were “filled” even though spaces for applicants of other racial or ethnic groups were still available."http://www.asianamericanlegal.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=22&Itemid=34
We have discussions about the past. How we were not allowed to fish in some waters, or return home from a trip overseas. "In re Ah Chong, 2 F. 733 (C.C.D. Cal. 1880), the Court found that a law forbidding Chinese-Americans from fishing in California waters was unconstitutional. In re Tiburcio Parrott, 1 F. 481 (C.C.D. Cal. 1880), Chinese-Americans successfully challenged a provision of California’s 1879 Constitution that forbid corporations and municipalities from hiring "Chinese."" In the Supreme Court case of United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898), a Chinese American, born in San Francisco, had to petition the courts for the right to be allowed to return to America after a trip overseas....