Beyond Black and White
BY KENNY TANEMURA,
Asian Week Magazine
Dec 02, 2005

In 2004, former AsianWeek columnist Frank H. Wu became the ninth dean of Wayne State University's Law School. Last year, the 38 year old was named one of the "Best Lawyers Under 40" by the National Asian Pacific Bar Association.

For 10 years prior, he taught at Howard University as the only Asian American on the faculty of a black American school. In 2002, he published his landmark book, Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White. In it, he explained his connection to Howard: "The necessary but not sufficient threshold is acknowledging that race operates in our lives, relentlessly and pervasively. Working in multiracial coalitions of equal members, united by shared principles, we can create communities that are diverse and just. Together, we can reinvent the Civil Rights movement. And that possibility is why I teach at Howard."

Wu applied his ideas about race beyond black and white most recently to the Chai Soua Vang case in Wisconsin. Wu gave talks at Marquette University and University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. "This is a complicated case," Wu says, "in which the perpetrator, not the victim, is Asian. All the headlines referred to Vang not by name, not as a husband, or truck driver, but they characterized him repeatedly as 'Hmong.' All the headlines said, 'Hmong shot at, killed white hunters.'"

Wu says Asian Americans are stereotyped as nerds, geeks, rocket scientists, maybe kung fu masters, but not as someone who hunts or shoots. "Vang may have been the first Asian American to have committed a hate crime. He may have remembered all the times he was taunted, but this time he was armed and was able to fight back. But we'll never know," Wu said.

Wu questions why few APAs stood up and spoke out on Vang's case, especially when he faced an all-white jury and overtly biased press reporting.

"African Americans have always had strong leaders, they insist they have a seat at the table. Maybe the time has come for Asian Americans to play the role of an outsized personality, bigger than life, someone who won't take no for an answer," Wu said.

"Asian Americans have to throw off the image that others have created for us, the script that they've written for us to follow," Wu said.

Douglas Kobayashi, a security enforcer at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in D.C., and former research assistant to Wu, remembers proofreading chapters of Yellow. "I got the sense that there was no Jesse Jackson to rally us together, but actually Frank might be that person," he said. "Frank is one of those leading voices."

Some say Wu may be Asian America's leading public intellectual, speaking on such venues as The Oprah Winfrey Show, CNN, NPR, The O'Reilly Factor and Fox Movie Channel.

"Other people like Helen Zia have made the issues public, but I think Frank is the most articulate. He can talk about identity issues to young people and take a heavy topic like race and make the audience relate to it," said Alice Mong, executive director of the Committee of 100.

"As a public figure, Frank's impact is not pinned to one policy," said UCLA law professor Jerry Kang. "He's been a trailblazer in showing how to break through glass ceilings and boxes." Kang was one of the co-authors on the pro-Affirmative Action paper, "Beyond Self-Interest."

"Frank's remarkable public speaking abilities ... has impacted public thinking on issues that influence Asian Americans, and he has altered the way the audience thinks about Asian Americans," added Kang.

But despite the national platform that his new position offers him, Wu says it was personal reasons that drove him to become the first person of color to be a dean at Wayne State University.

"I did this because I grew up in the city of Detroit. In 1967, the year I was born, there were race riots in Detroit, and the city has never been the same. I wanted to leave when the Vincent Chin incident happened. I thought that could have been me. So I went to San Francisco and D.C. I came back because I'm convinced the city is coming back, there's a growing Asian American population, the All-Star Game was played here. It's important to go to those places where we're not expected, where we have responsibilities," Wu said.

Wu says his next project is "to write a book about the Asian American community, about the Midwest, about the 1970s, [using] the Vincent Chin case to think about the context."

"I wasn't elected to be an Asian American spokesperson," Wu reflected, "but when you have a public position of public prominence, it's an opportunity to show that Asian Americans are articulate, that we're here to stay, and that we're stakeholders."