Quote:
Originally Posted by Acajack
I think it takes time for stereotypical imagery to catch up to the reality on the ground.
For example, except for San Francisco city proper, most people don't associate California with people of Asian origin, and yet they are quite a bit more numerous than African-Americans in that state. And have been for quite some time. I'd say most people would expect the state to have way more African-Americans than it does.
Likewise, Japanese-Brazilians have been in that country for many generations, and are a bit of a "surprise" demographic for many people around the world. The stereotype for Brazil is white people, black people and "pardo" people. Not really people who look Asian.
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The various Asian exclusion acts (for at least the US and Canada) must have done a lot to disassociate and stereotype Asian-looking people from the image of the New World (ironically despite the actually indigenous people of the new world sometimes looking Asian themselves) for a duration of time.
Though Asian North Americans had a presence on the west coast early at least to the 1800s with the Gold Rush and earlier times with Filipinos in New Spain for instance, there was a long "break" until post 1965 immigration had large numbers enough so that the time when images of post-war Americana were being formed, any group like them that wasn't represented in large numbers missed out.
I looked up percentage of African vs. Asian descent in California and it's interesting that California was one of the few places in the US to have Asian Americans having a larger share for much of its history (African American population was 1-2% in early California history from 1850 to the 1950s and rose a lot mostly due to the Great Migration from 5-8% in the latter half of the 20th century before dropping again, while Asian Americans, though the term was never coined back then, had a trend of being high in the late 1800s, probably because of the Gold Rush, Chinese railway workers, Japanese etc. even to 8-9%, but then continously dropping down in the single digit %s for decades due to immigration exclusion, not to go over 9% until a century later in the 1990s after replenished immigration). Of course elsewhere aside from west coast, African Americans were way more established than Asian Americans. The Asian American percentage of the US as a whole never rose above 0.2% until after the 1950s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histor..._United_States
I bet that a lot of peoples' perspectives of racial demographics of a certain generation come from the 1950s- 1990s which is the era of mass TV-- which is why Americans are seen as black and white mostly, with Hispanics occasionally and Asians or other groups like Arabs etc. as afterthoughts. It's different now with the younger generation and media made by say Youtubers etc.
The period 1950s to '90s must have been a major time when mass shared media became enough to depict Americans as diverse, for instance Black Americans gradually gaining respect and being represented, Italian Americans and other Ellis Island groups assimilating and being mainstream, groups like Puerto Ricans and Mexicans showing up on screen too, and images like those of Archie Bunker being portrayed as buffoonish seemingly as a reminder to people not to be prejudiced against these "other" Americans, but not quite early enough to capture some of the post 1960s diversity like many from the Caribbean, Asians, Arabs, until later (and too late to capture for instance some aspects of diversity before the 20th century like Native Americans of the frontier during the time of the old westerns, early Chinatowns etc. so those minorities are less, or rarely depicted than Blacks or Hispanics outside certain historical contexts).
There are obviously factors other than raw percentage why groups are represented at certain times. Otherwise, why did Asian North Americans suddenly become more represented in North American media (e.g. Crazy Rich Asians, Kim's convenience etc.) in the 2010s, and not say the 2000s or 1990s? It's not like raw numbers or proportional numbers of Asians jumped at this time over any of the other several years prior.
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