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MARC'S ANGLE - By all means, I should be a Democrat. I believe in the stated ideals of part of the Democratic platform: racial harmony, government intervention when needed, the breaking up of monopolies, the empowerment of blue collar and agricultural workers and the avoidance of costly overseas wars.
Wait. Everything I just said above is actually the Republican Party in 2024, under the Trump glow-up. And yes, it is a glow up. While the media continuously lies to us about the pulse of the country due to their Trump deranged reporting, my friends and business associates on the ground organically came on board, one person at a time over the last decade.
But I was ahead of the game back in the Bush years. In 2008, I would have been inclined to support Obama but something gave me great pause. It was purely visceral. It was a vision of American racial harmony, with a segregated twist. He alerted me to doing further research of Democrats and Republicans and I concluded that the issue of racial equality and harmony was being sold as a shallow commodity.
A tokenism that was taken way too far by the time we got to a Biden administration a full decade later, picking cabinet leaders and Supreme Court justices based on skin color and shallow attributes.
One that especially affected my industry, was Pete Buttigieg. Some of our biggest disasters in the last few years was under his watch: a supply chain crisis in LA port and the Bridge accident in Baltimore. Yet the media was so quick to shield him from any responsibility. What were his qualifications for that position? But it’s ok: he serves as a somewhat telegenic and articulate-ish token for shallow voters to get behind.
The mainstream media was shocked by the results but I’ve seen it on the ground. So many minorities are not necessarily voting or becoming Republicans, but they’ve certainly seen the blatant hypocrisy of Democrats. Not just the ones in power but the rank and file voters in their everyday life.
In my early adult life, I found so many more Republicans willing to extend their hand to help my parents, even going so far as to help with programs to feed the poor in the Philippines. But they weren’t making a big deal about it. It was just what they did as people who truly didn’t look at us by the color of our skin. And who had a genuine interest in different cultures. In the church community, we were united as different races to create an equality, collaborations and meaningful assimilation that resulted in true friendships.
I took offense at some liberal former friends in my young adulthood who seemed to be seeing me as some sort of token. But now our society is collectively waking up to what I saw two decades years ago. There comes a point when our shallow attributes (gender, race, sexual orientation) don’t define us and really don’t need that much discussion and coddling. In other words, this is a natural evolution, and we need to transcend our shallow attributes. Isn’t that what assimilation is? The way Italians are now considered white but a few decades ago they were seen as foreign.
Another example is Hispanic Americans on the Texas border actually consider themselves white and have seen the issues across the border to not feel offended when Republicans talk about the issue or make humor out of it. At the end of the day, we see ourselves as American and we are more focused on issues affecting our daily lives than attempts to divide us based on the aforementioned shallow attributes.
I have written much in the past about our post racial environment, mostly featured in my book “The Minority Retort”. Certainly, I felt this in California especially when I was a part of the winning effort to shoot down affirmative action in 2020, which was shot down in a landslide. Now the rest of the country is catching up and minorities are demanding to actually be treated like human beings deserving of equal opportunities to achieve, not token caricatures to be placated by welfare and preferential treatment depending on what is the current ethnic flavor of the month for Democrats to pander to.
(Marc Ang ([email protected]) is a Southern California based community organizer, the President of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance in Orange County and founder of Asian Industry B2B. He has a heart for promoting quality education, practical societal solutions, business-friendly legislation, charitable causes and law and order. Marc has made front page news on LA Times and New York Times for his activism and leadership in the SoCal Asian community. He is also the Vice President of the American Independence Party in California. Marc’s book “Minority Retort” was released in 2022 through Trinity Broadcast Network.)
