Sharron Angle’s “I’m Asian” Claim

October 21, 2010

Jeff Yang writes in the San Francisco Chronicle:

The Republican candidate for Senate in Nevada claims to be the state’s first Asian American legislator. Wait, what?

This election year, we’ve witnessed some of the oddest political pronouncements on the nature of identity in recent memory.

There was Delaware Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell’s refudiation of her youthful flirtation with Wiccanism. (“I’m not a witch, I’m you.” Unless you’re a witch.)

There was Colorado Senate candidate Ken Buck’s declaration that homosexuality is just an addictive lifestyle choice, like alcoholism or smoking. (Gay people are just waiting for science to develop a patch!)

There was Ohio House candidate Rich Iott’s assurance that spending his weekends pretending to be a Nazi did not mean he admired Nazis (though he subsequently defended the murderous SS Wiking Panzer unit whose uniform he sported as courageous “fighters for their homeland … doing what they thought was right for their country”).

But last Friday, to use terms native to her state of Nevada, Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle raised the strangeness stakes beyond the reach of amateurs — effectively going all-in on the crazy.

You see, Isaac Barron, the faculty advisor of Rancho High School’s Hispanic Student Union, had invited Angle to address the group to explain her campaign’s use of starkly stereotypical images of young Latinos in their advertising. In a slate of recent attack spots, Angle had claimed that her Democratic opponent, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, favored “open borders” and “amnesty” for illegal aliens — actions that would allow insidiously perilous elements into the U.S. The commercials were illustrated with pictures of scowling, bandanna-clad men with dark complexions and footage of sinister figures sneaking around fences.

Attempting to soft-pedal the impact of the ads to a clearly hostile audience, Angle suggested that the students had “misinterpreted” them — that the images might not represent Latinos, and the border being discussed might not be the one between the U.S. and Mexico. “Our northern border is where the terrorists came through — that’s the most porous border that we have,” she told them.

The students were obviously skeptical that Angle’s primary immigration concern was the nonexistent boundary between Nevada and Canada, so the candidate chose to press the issue using a different tack — stating that, in our diverse country, it’s difficult to even tell races and ethnicities apart: “You know, I don’t know that all of you are Latino,” she said. “Some of you look a little more Asian to me. I don’t know that. What we know, what we know about ourselves, is that we are a melting pot in this country. My grandchildren are evidence of that” — her daughter-in-law is Latino — “and I’m evidence of that. I’ve been called the ‘first Asian legislator’ in our Nevada state assembly.”

An enterprising young member of the audience who’d been capturing cellphone video of Angle’s talk immediately uploaded footage of Angle’s weird self-assessment to the Web. A thunderous clacking could be heard as jaws across the nation dropped to the floor. The Asian American blogosphere unfurled a giant virtual banner bearing the letters W, T and F. And an already chaotic race, in which unqualified and deeply unusual state legislator Angle has been running mostly ahead of her high-profile opponent, Reid, was thrown into even further turmoil.

The top-of-mind question is simple: What exactly was Angle trying to imply by claiming some Latinos in her audience “looked more Asian,” and that she herself has been called Asian, despite having no discernable roots in Asia?

It’s a mindboggling claim. Veteran Las Vegas political reporter Joe Ralston, who broke the story, spoke for the entire Nevada state establishment when he remarked, “That last comment, about her being called the ‘first Asian legislator’? I have no idea what she is talking about.” And Angle has always been publicly celebratory of her European heritage, even writing a self-published book, “Prairie Fire,” about her first ancestors in this country — German immigrants and, presumably, legal ones.

The explanation Ralston later unearthed made things clearer, if not less weird. Apparently, an unknown reporter had once told Angle that she “looked Asian.” Which, by Angle’s logic, was enough to support her claims of being a racial pioneer. Read more.