Asians make up over a third of the population of D10, so while the candidate forums so far have skewed heavily toward the concerns of the African-American community, Blacks make up a smaller 28% of the population in the district. Fifteen candidates in the D10 race are African-American, with only Duqué and Tran holding down the Asian fort and Moss, Enea, Weber, and Kelly the only Caucasians. It'd be nice in future elections to see greater representation from the Chinese-American community, and if anything, greater engagement of this growing population needs to be done by our next supervisor to encourage our next generation of Chinese-American leaders. One thing that comes to mind here is that the Chinese community tends to skew a little more conservative, so Progressives may need to watch their backs - Jackson's move to engage this community is a smart one.
It's a shame, really, that I haven't seen more Asian voters attending the forums, and although campaign materials are often printed in other languages, including Chinese, I worry that candidates are not reaching out to the Chinese community as much as they ought to. Hopefully the candidates will all be in attendance at next week's Visitacion Valley Community Center forum, cosponsored by the Chinese American Voter Education Committee, and will make a showing at Sunday's Portola Festival - No Folsom St Fair for any of you, I'm afraid!!
The article makes a very common mistake when it comes to the percentage of “Asians” in D10. 30% ‘Asian’ does not mean 30% Chinese. ‘Asian’ is a catch all term that does not delineate based upon nationality. This is from wikipedia in the context of the census:
ReplyDelete"Asian. A person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and Vietnam. …”
So I would agree that ‘Asians’ of Chinese decent makes up the largest portion of the D10 ‘Asian’ population, but don’t discount the other nationalities. Vis Valley in particular has a large Filipino population.
Sorry, I should have been clearer. The 1/3 Asian that I mention is from the California Urban Issues Project numbers from a 2003 survey of households in D10. It distinguishes "Asians" (32.7%) from "Pacific Islanders", who make up 2.7%, for a total of 35.4% API. True that it doesn't break out the more distinct populations of Chinese, Filipino, etc. from one another. Perhaps instead of pining for greater Chinese-American representation on the D10 candidates list, I should have said API-American so as to include all and not to appear to discount those other than Chinese.
ReplyDeleteThe numbers I used in writing this are from http://www.cuipsf.org/images/FE/chain174siteType8/site133/client/Resource%20Guide%20District%2010.pdf