To the Editor:

In addressing the cancellation of the show by the band Viet Cong, we as scholars and teachers of Asian American studies wish to shed light on why, for some, this was not a benign matter. We hope to shift the tone and substance of discussion toward listening to and learning from one another, even in the face of disagreement over a highly charged issue.

For many, the Vietnam War brings to mind things like geopolitics, the antiwar movement, the ordeal of young GIs and films like Apocalypse Now. In the popular imagination, the Viet Cong — a communist organization that fought against the United States and its client regime in South Vietnam — registers variously as elusive enemies, courageous anti-imperialists, or — in the case of the band — something that sounds “cool.”

In Asian American history, the Vietnam War has other meanings. The casualties do not merely revolve around the approximately 58,000 American lives lost but also the millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians who perished (about 4 million by some estimates). Racism is also one of the war’s legacies. Many Asian Americans, for instance, developed critiques of the U.S.’s involvement and behavior of its military as inherently chauvinistic and came to identify with the Vietnamese people as fellow “gooks.”

The Vietnam War and Asian American history are, moreover, linked by the immigration of Southeast Asians from 1975 onward. In the last quarter of the 20th century, about 1 million people from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia entered the U.S. as refugees. Vietnamese Americans now number over 1.5 million. Canada’s Vietnamese population numbers just over 150,000. Their settlement, adjustment and contributions to life in North America are among the war’s reverberations.

Political and provocative band names are punk clichés, and no group has a proprietary claim over “Viet Cong.” While we might ascribe the band’s naming and remarks about it to innocuous ignorance, we find it harder to brush aside the tradition of racial appropriation that Viet Cong’s white members take for granted. In telling the origin story of their name, a member recalled his bandmate “shooting his bass like a gun,” to which he said, “All you need is a rice paddy hat and it would be so Viet Cong.” Acknowledging the complaints their name has generated, the bass player said that as Canadians, they had nothing to do with the war and then noted that the grievances came from “Vietnamese immigrants,” “Vietnamese Canadians” and “Vietnamese Americans,” eliciting giggles and a shrug.

Such blitheness, when experienced repeatedly, can be deeply alienating. This might be difficult to grasp, as Vietnamese Americans — and Asian Americans generally — hold a paradoxical place in the racial landscape where they are simultaneously “successful” and invisible. To illustrate, in 2014 the Bureau of Labor Statistics released numbers showing that Asian American women were closer to closing the gender wage gap than white women. But also last year, a field experiment on college faculty responsiveness to student requests for help revealed that Asian students elicited the lowest response rates, a bias that even surprised the researchers. This alienation is amplified for many Asian Americans when they are complimented on their “good English” and are constantly asked, “Where are you from?” More to the point, they inhabit a cultural system where stereotypes like the hapless nerd, kung-fu master and exotic, sexualized woman are the only signifiers of their existence. Frustration over these noxious representations are magnified when someone not from the community appropriates an aspect of Asian culture to appear edgy, reinforcing a schema where Asian cultural objects are valorized while people of Asian descent are reduced to crude stereotypes.

As members of the campus community we uphold free speech and artistic expression, even — indeed especially — when that speech or expression may be controversial. But we additionally note that the ritual condemnation of “political correctness” in these matters can also stifle speech by delegitimizing minority voices as unworthy of consideration in the public sphere. Thus, the efforts to call attention to the issues raised by Viet Cong’s event, as well as the dialogue that ensued, should be recognized for demanding something more of us all.

–Rick Baldoz

Associate professor of Sociology

–Shelley Lee

Associate professor of History and Comparative American Studies

–Harrod Suarez

Assistant professor of English