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Tackling bias in U.S. society, media
Renowned journalist explains challenge of growing diversity
By Joe Nguyen
nguyejos@mscd.edu

Photo by Andrew Bisset • abisset1@mscd.edu Asian-American journalist Helen Zia spoke on March 8 at the Tivoli Turnhalle, where she addressed the issue of cultural understanding.

Acclaimed Asian-American journalist Helen Zia addressed America’s growing diversity and the challenges of different cultures understanding one another March 8 in the Tivoli Turnhalle.

The former executive editor of Ms. Magazine gave an hour-long lecture titled “From Minority to Majority, Invisible to Envisioning: Margin Notes on Diversity Challenges and Other Evils.” She said that today, one in three Americans is a person of color and one in nine is an immigrant.

“Who can really imagine the day when everybody in America is a minority?” she asked.

She said there’s a struggle to acknowledge the differences between cultures and that we’re living in a time when we’re asked to look for people who are not like us.

“You’re always being asked to look for the people who don’t belong,” Zia said. “Look for anybody who is different.”

According to her, the majority of the information we learn from other cultures is from television and movies.

“When people who see somebody who looks like me, they automatically think ‘foreigner’ or ‘can’t speak English,’” she said. “Or they might think ‘gook’ or ‘subservient, passive geisha.’”

Growing up in New Jersey, Zia said she was raised in a time when there weren’t many people of Asian descent living in the United States.

“I had to listen to people who would come up all the time speaking that weird gibberish that goes something like ‘ching-chong, ah-so,’” she said.

“It’s not a language, by the way, no matter what Rosie O’Donnell says,” she added, referring to comments made by O’Donnell on The View.

She said that a big problem the Asian-American community faces is the perpetual foreigner stereotype. This is the assumption that individuals who are Asian, or look Asian, are not from the United States.

“Often people, not meaning ill, will come up and say that question that so many immigrants … and every Asian-American has heard thousands and thousands of times, and that is, ‘Where are you from?’” she said. “And that’s only slightly better than what a lot of multiracial and transracial adoptees hear, and that is, ‘What are you?’”

Zia said she has turned that same question around on people and the answer would often be, “Oh, my people? My people are from America.”

She said that as a journalist, she went after stories that were missing in history, or MIH. An MIH is a fact that has not been passed on through generations and thus, forgotten. When she discovers something new, she said she is both angered and saddened.

“If we knew a little bit more about ourselves and the people we interact with … it would really make a difference in our American democracy,” she said.

Jordan Bair, a Metro junior who was in attendance, said the MIH was her favorite part of Zia’s speech.

“I think that we talk a lot about the oppression of minorities, but we talk so much about the general things that happen in minority groups … it’s important that we embrace that also,” Bair said.