AMagazine: Inside Asian America - Brief Article

Asian American teenagers who transform cars imported from Asia into low-riding hot rods with gold rims and powerful sound systems are often racially profiled by police, write Hua Hsu and Diana H. Yoon in the June/July issue of aMagazine: Inside Asian America. In "Driving While Asian," the authors write that, 20 years ago, Asian American youth, especially on the West Coast, began fixing up Mazdas and Hondas as a way to assert their identities. One young man they interviewed explains, "It's almost like an Immigrant coming here, defeating all the odds and making it on his own. You take a Civic and make it as fast as a Mustang. It's that underdog theory--that you can do it just as well." Although "a lack of data collection has made It fairly difficult to track trends among young drivers," Hsu and Yoon write, police often pull over these cars for no reason. "Today's youth of color are under surveillance by a law enforcement establishment that sees FUBU clothing, Adidas sneakers or spoken slang as potential markers of gang activity. One doesn't have to mobilize too much distrust against cops to see how a Civic with fancy rims or a modified exhaust could serve as circumstantial evidence of a driver's criminality."

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