Crossing Race and Nationality: The Racial Formation of Asian
Americans, 1852-1965
by Bob Wing
http://www.monthlyreview.org/1205wing.htm


The U.S. immigration reform of 1965 produced a tremendous influx of
immigrants and refugees from Asia and Latin America that has
dramatically altered U.S. race relations. Latinos now outnumber
African Americans. It is clearer than ever that race relations in
the United States are not limited to the central black/white axis.
In fact this has always been true: Indian wars were central to the
history of this country since its origins and race relations in the
West have always centered on the interactions between whites and
natives, Mexicans, and Asians. The "new thinking" about race
relations as multipolar is overdue.

However, one cannot simply replace the black/white model with one
that merely adds other groups. The reason is that other groups of
color have faced discrimination that is quite different both in form
and content than that which has characterized black/white relations.
The history of many peoples and regions, as well as distinct issues
of nationality oppression—U.S. settler colonialism, Indian wars,
U.S. foreign relations and foreign policy, immigration, citizenship,
the U.S.-Mexico War, language, reservations, treaties, sovereignty
issues, etc.—must be analyzed and woven into a considerably more
complicated new framework.

In this light, Asian-American history is important because it was
precedent-setting in the racialization of nationality and the
incorporation of nationality into U.S. race relations. The racial
formation of Asian Americans was a key moment in defining the color
line among immigrants, extending whiteness to European immigrants,
and targeting non-white immigrants for racial oppression. Thus
nativism was largely overshadowed by white nativism, and it became
an important new form of racism.

This development resonates powerfully today in the discrimination
faced by the millions of immigrants from the global South over the
past forty years, while white European immigrants face virtually
none. And lately the Bush administration has formed a new link
between war, racism, and attacks on immigrants in his "permanent war
on terrorism at home and abroad." While Asian Americans were this
country's first "aliens ineligible to citizenship," today Arab
Americans are its most prominent racialized enemy aliens.1

Background

By the time the first Asians began to come to these shores in any
numbers (the Chinese in 1852), basic patterns of U.S. race relations
had been set by more than two centuries of Negro slavery and Indian
wars. However, those patterns were under attack, and the soon to be
fought Civil War would mark a new departure that would fundamentally
affect the plight of Chinese in the United States as the century
progressed.

Reduced to its fundamental dynamics, what had emerged was an
entrenched system of white supremacy and black oppression centered
on, but not limited to, slavery. The African slave trade was a
product of European colonialism of African nationalities, but within
each slaveholding country, different racial formations were
developed, according to particular conditions.

In recent years it has become a progressive mantra that racial
categories are "socially constructed," but it is often forgotten
that they only achieve full structural and systemic power when they
are legally defined and enforced by state power.2 In what became the
United States, the plethora of both European and African
nationalities very early on was subsumed by a legally defined and
state sanctioned system of racial categories.

In this unprecedented new system, famously hostile European
nationalities (e.g., English, Irish, Germans, and French) were
united as whites, and the numerous African nationalities, together
with all those who seemed to exhibit the slightest perceptible trace
of African ancestry, were categorized as Negro, thus with "no rights
that the white man is bound to respect."

This hypodescent (or "one drop") rule, firmly codified in statute by
1705, was meant to provide crystal clarity to the social status of
the numerous racially mixed offspring sired by white planters. This
was crucial since unlike other slave societies, the Southern
planters depended primarily upon slave reproduction (rather than the
African slave trade) to fill its slave supply and were also bound
and determined to prevent a substantial free group of mulattos to
blur the color line.3

Such a state enforced, polarized system of racial categories and
race relations was and is unique to the United States. Also unique
to the United States (as compared to other slaveholding countries)
was the exclusion of anti-slavery (and slaves) from the independence
struggle. Instead slaveholding Founding Fathers like George
Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison ensured that the new
country limited U.S. citizenship to whites only. The system of white
supremacy was thus extended to an exclusion of people of color from
the nationality and polity. Ripped from Africa and excluded from
U.S. citizenship, African Americans were rendered strangers in their
own homeland.

The pattern regarding Native Americans was much different. Native
Americans were only marginally incorporated into the emerging U.S.
society and racial system. Rather, they fought to retain what
territorial and political autonomy they could in their own
nations/tribes/territories in the face of recurrent Indian wars.
While they were defeated in most of those wars, they successfully
resisted incorporation into colonial or U.S. society proper. Thus,
it was oppressive relations between nations (specifically settler
colonialism), not racial oppression within U.S. society, that
predominated: wars, treaties, territorial fights, military/colonial
rule, tribal governments, a reservation system, redrawing of
boundaries, etc.

Until the 1840s or so, European immigrants to the United States or
what became the United States had an inviting situation, although
not without discrimination arising from distinct languages,
citizenship, religions, and newcomer status. The Irish and other
European immigrants became white the day they landed on these
shores, but some were treated as "second class whites" for varying
periods of time.

The often neglected dialectical opposite of black oppression is
white supremacy and white privilege: the obverse of the enslavement
of blacks was the monopolization of political power, land, skilled
trades, and all other forms of rights, property, and privilege by
whites, including immigrants.4 Combined with the ready availability
of land opened up by the devastating Indian wars, until the end of
the nineteenth century the majority of whites avoided
proletarianization and instead became bourgeois or petit bourgeois
property holders of one kind or another.

Although in the colonial days many European immigrants started out
as indentured servants, the vast majority, or at least their
offspring, eventually settled into independent farming, independent
trades, small businesses, or better. It was not until the 1840s that
an industrial proletariat of any size began to develop. And
virtually all of this small proletariat was constituted by European
immigrants who, in turn, came to play a key role in the developing
trade unions and urban political machines, thus developing certain
levers of power to defend and expand their rights. By the time of
Chinese immigration in the 1850s, the United States was just
beginning to deal with massive immigration from Europe and sharp
ethnic/national conflict. Nativism had just been born.

Finally by way of background, the United States grabbed almost half
of Mexican territory through the U.S.–Mexico War of 1848 and thereby
expanded its own boundaries to the Pacific Ocean. The war
highlighted the harsh dynamic of settler colonialism that dominated
relations between whites and Mexicans in the Southwest in the
nineteenth century. Although the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that
ended the war guaranteed "all the rights of citizenship of the
United States" to Mexicans who chose to remain in the Southwest, in
practice it was routinely violated as white settlers used everything
from legal maneuvers to lynching to dispossess Mexicans of land and
power throughout the area.5

Phase 1: From Racially Coerced Labor Force to Exclusion

It was into the above situation that the early Chinese immigrants
unwittingly thrust themselves. The Gold Mountain had a racial cordon
and a developing ethnic/nationality one as well. The experience of
the Chinese in California in the nineteenth century was to break new
ground.

Contrary to the myth that the early Chinese were part of the odious
coolie labor trade that flourished between 1847 and 1874, most of
the early Chinese immigrants bought their tickets to the United
States on credit and were not contract laborers per se. Once they
paid off their debts, they were more or less free. And, owing to the
rather free-flowing, frontier character of Gold Rush-era California,
as well as the crying shortage of labor, racial constraints were not
nearly so entrenched or immediate as in the more settled parts of
the country.6

However, the shortage of labor and the grab for land and gold of
this period in California were also prime conditions for the
reproduction of racism. The white people of California, although
themselves new colonists to the area only recently conquered by war
from Mexico and many of them recent immigrants to the United States,
immediately asserted their presumed white right to these and all
other resources and/or positions of privilege over and above the
Native Americans, Californios, Mexicanos, Chinese, and other Latin
Americans who made up the California population at the time. And in
this, the full force of existing U.S. racial law and custom not
surprisingly backed them.*

The Making of `Aliens Ineligible to Citizenship'

Although California was an antislavery territory dominated by "free
soilers,"7 attempts to subordinate the Chinese came forthwith. But
determining the precise social status of the Chinese and their place
in U.S. society was neither automatic nor unanimous. Whites were
divided among themselves between those (mainly capitalists) who
desired easy access to cheap Chinese labor and those (mainly labor,
that is white labor) who wished them excluded from the country. They
were stymied by the fact that existing law covered only Negroes,
whites, and American Indians, not Asians of any sort, by the unusual
combination of foreignness and non-whiteness that the Chinese seemed
to present, and by the fact that white California's racial
conditions and concerns did not completely match those of the
federal government. These were conditions they had to sort through,
by means of political and ideological struggle, with tremendous,
though often overlooked, opposition from the Chinese themselves.8

It is this process that constitutes what is here referred to as
the "racing,"9 "racialization," or "racial formation"10 of the
Chinese into Asian Americans. This process eventually produced a
social category of a new type, one that was neither simply
national/ethnic nor strictly racial, but a combination of the two:
by the end of the nineteenth century, the Chinese were racialized
as "aliens (hence national) ineligible to citizenship (based on
race)."

At key junctures the U.S. state has defined racial groups and
dictated the race relations of which they are part. But it has done
so not in a vacuum, but in accordance with racialized socio-economic
and political struggles. The culmination of the process of
developing the racial category appropriate to the Chinese, not
surprisingly, paralleled and eventually settled the fight over
whether or not to exclude Chinese from entering the country and/or
attaining U.S. citizenship.

As the vast majority of the early Chinese headed for the gold mines,
California's first assertion of white supremacy against the Chinese
focused on control of the mines. In 1850, California passed the
Foreign Miners Tax. The letter of this tax was nativist and applied
to all foreigners. In practice it was mainly collected from the
Chinese in an attempt to drive them from the mines. This
contradiction undermined its usefulness as social policy or law.
Still, once the Hall case (more on this below) and common practice
made clear that the Chinese had no protection of any sort, they were
regularly victimized by white miners and extorted by tax collectors.

Another attempt to define the legal status of Chinese took racial,
not nativist, form. In late 1853, a "free white citizen" named
George Hall was convicted of murdering a Chinese man, but the next
year the California Supreme Court reversed the conviction on the
grounds that Hall had been "convicted upon the testimony of a
Chinese person."

The chief justice ruled that Indians had originated from Asia before
crossing the Bering Strait and that therefore the laws barring
testimony by Indians applied to the "whole of the Mongolian race,"
that Chinese were covered by the generic term "Black" and that the
court should not turn "loose upon the community" the Chinese "whose
mendacity is proverbial; a race of people whom nature has marked as
inferior, and who are incapable of progress or intellectual
development..." (People v. Hall). Here was convoluted American
racial logic attempting to grapple with the "racing" of a set of
people seen as entirely foreign. No concern whatsoever was evinced
for the Chinese murder victim. Again, the Chinese were stripped of
crucial constitutional rights, but the means for doing so were
inadequate and inconsistent.

Soon the revolutionary Reconstruction Congress passed the Fourteenth
Amendment followed by the Civil Rights Act of 1870. The act
expressly gave Chinese the right to testify in court and forbade the
imposition upon them of discriminatory "penalties, taxes, licenses
and exactions of every kind."11 In addition, the Burlingame Treaty
of 1868 between the United States and China guaranteed the right of
emigration between the two countries. Together, these hindered white
California's ability to institutionalize racially the social
position of the Chinese.

The original U.S. Constitution defined naturalization as available
only to "free, white persons," but the Civil Rights Act of 1870
finally extended the right of naturalization to "persons of African
nativity or descent." Congress debated Chinese naturalization in the
course of the Reconstruction era civil rights debates, but that
august body of white men declined to extend citizenship rights to
Asians. Asians were defined as "aliens ineligible to citizenship,"
which became the new racial-national legal category to exclude
Asians from entering the United States, owning land, etc.

By 1880, Reconstruction was defeated and the federal government
joined the anti-Chinese movement. It legalized Jim Crow, reversed
the Civil Rights Act, and negotiated a new treaty with China that
paved the way for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

In the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Alien Land Laws of the 1910s
(which deprived Asians of the right to own land), the U.S. racial
system also settled on its basic racial categorization of Chinese
and other Asians: that of being "aliens ineligible to U.S.
citizenship."

This definition applied only to Asians and became the perfect legal
grounds systematically to identify and discriminate against them, a
racial category of a distinctive type. This category was new in that
it incorporated a non-indigenous, non-white, non-black group into
the U.S. racial system. It was also new in that the terms "aliens"
and "naturalization rights" explicitly incorporated nationality as
well as "race" into it.

Racially Coerced Labor and Class Struggles

This racialization process was crucial to what I see as the first
phase of the Asian-American experience, that of a racially coerced
labor force. Asian Americans were systematically stripped of their
political, economic, cultural, and citizenship rights and thereby
condemned to be a vulnerable labor force that was made available to
white capital at a price much cheaper than white labor.

Although the lower wages and substandard living conditions the
Chinese were forced to accept certainly increased the profits of
white capitalists, there was much more significance to the racially
coerced labor force than short-term "superprofits." In fact, turning
the Chinese into a racially coerced labor force was a fundamental
condition for the development of capitalism in California. At that
time, labor was so scarce and land so plentiful that free people had
better alternatives than to become wage slaves. As with slavery and
sharecropping in the U.S. South, coercing people of color into
serving as labor was central to the primitive accumulation and the
early accumulation of capital in California; they were barred from
owning land and forced to become the labor counterpart to (white)
capital in mining, railroads, agriculture, and factories, which
propelled California's booming economy and helped forge the first
continent-wide national economy.

But it wasn't only the white capitalists who benefited. The racial
cordoning of Asians also enabled non-capitalist whites to monopolize
small businesses, independent trades and farms, and privileged
positions within the workforce, not to speak of land, education, and
political power. This is what Harry Chang called the racially
differentiated process of proletarianization.

Unfortunately, even this was not good enough for white labor.
Through their trade unions and political organizations, they were
actually the loudest and most organized voices demanding the
complete expulsion and exclusion of the Chinese from the United
States. However, a careful look at the "white workers" who led the
anti-Chinese movement reveals that the most organized and vocal
section were actually independent craftsmen or highly paid skilled
workers, not regular wage workers, who in the nineteenth and early
twentieth century commonly joined the same skilled craft unions and
indeed dominated the U.S. trade union movement until the 1930s.

These white independent producers and craftsmen did not compete with
the Chinese for factory or field jobs. What they feared was that
factory based capitalist industry or agribusiness, basing itself on
semi-free Chinese labor, would successfully displace their small
businesses or farms, independent trades, or highly paid skilled
labor jobs: in short, that their small-scale petit bourgeois
production and trades would be undermined by capitalist enterprises
and they themselves might be proletarianized. Thus the status of
Chinese labor became a significant issue in the class struggle
between small, independent producers (miners, artisans, and farmers)
and large-scale capitalist enterprises.12

At the same time most unskilled white workers also joined the
crusade to exclude the Chinese in order to increase their own
employment opportunities and to fulfill their own concepts of white
supremacy.13 The widespread participation, indeed leadership, of
white workers in the movement to exclude the Chinese points to the
folly of theories that would constrict racism to the oppression of
workers of color by white capitalists. It shows that, to the
contrary, white labor is often not just a simple description of the
color of some workers, but a social category reflecting the fact
that white workers and their unions have all too often expressly
fought for the interests of white workers as against both white
capitalists (some of whom may have preferred having cheap,
exploitable Chinese labor ready-to-hand) and against workers of
color.

Rather than fight white capital for equality and build solidarity
among all workers, white labor demanded the exclusion of Chinese
labor from the country to advance the condition of white workers at
their expense. Here we had a classical racist trade union tradition:
white workers (skilled and unskilled) banding together in unions and
political organizations in the name of "Americanism" and "free
(white) labor" to defend their privileges over non-white workers.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was a culmination of the attempt
to create a cross-class, nationwide white consensus to define
legally the Chinese place in U.S. life, thereby forcing the country
to come to grips with how to handle the intersection of race and
nationality. For the first time in U.S. history, a group was
excluded from immigrating by (white) immigrants and former
immigrants themselves. On one hand, the act was clearly based on
nationality, as it excluded a group from immigrating to this
country. On the other hand, it was clearly racial: it excluded the
Chinese specifically because they were not white. Once verging on 20
percent of California's population, the ensuing anti-Chinese riots
and Exclusion Act drove most Chinese laborers out of the country and
prevented their reentry.

In the fifty years to follow, the U.S. forced every Asian
nationality to follow virtually the same pattern as the Chinese,
albeit in truncated form. At first, a significant wave would be
allowed entry to serve as racially coerced, cheap labor, especially
for California agriculture, then the group would be excluded. The
1917 Immigration Act denied Asian Indians entry. Despite the rising
power of the Japanese in the Pacific, Japanese nationals were
excluded from the United States by the Immigration Act of 1924 which
barred the entry of "aliens ineligible to citizenship." By
extension, this act also served to exclude Koreans, as the Japanese
colonial administration in Korea applied it to them.

At first, the Filipinos could not be excluded due to the fact that
the Philippines was a U.S. "territory" (read colony) and its people
were thereby "wards," sometimes called "nationals" of the United
States. Consequently, they were legally neither "citizens"
nor "aliens." Ironically, this was resolved by the Tydings-McDuffie
Act of 1935, which simultaneously granted "Commonwealth" status with
promises of eventual independence in 1946 to the Philippines and
immediately cut Filipino immigration to the United States to fifty
persons per year.

Thus the Chinese experience in the nineteenth century produced a new
racial category—"aliens ineligible to citizenship"—and a new form of
racism—exclusion—which would be applied to virtually all of the
Asian nationalities that were to immigrate to the United States
until after the Second World War. It fundamentally structured the
social and political rights of peoples of Asian descent once here
until the 1960s. It was this common history of being considered
racially inferior and not assimilable that forged the distinct (and
often mutually hostile) Asian nationalities into a new panethnic
racial group: Asian Americans.

Phase 2: Exclusion and the Racial/Ethnic Enclaves

However, exclusion was not only an immigration restriction. It
became a unique form of racism that also socially defined the
situation of the remaining Asians inside the country, as well as
those who managed to slip through after exclusion until 1965. Unlike
blacks who were economically integrated into the center of the U.S.
economy (albeit in extremely oppressive ways) and the Native
Americans who mainly remained outside U.S. society as a whole, the
Chinese, and then the other Asian groups in somewhat different
degrees, were excluded from the mainstreams of U.S. society and
instead confined to ethnic enclaves. The Asian ethnic enclaves thus
were also products of both racial and nationality discrimination.

The Structure of Dual Domination

One of the prime results of Asian exclusion was the development of
what L. Ling-chi Wang calls "the structure of dual domination." What
this extremely useful concept refers to is that the ruling circles
of not only the United States but also of China, Japan, Korea, and
the Philippines developed fairly elaborate political, economic, and
social institutions to dominate and control their respective
emigrants in the United States; Asians in the United States were
oppressed both by U.S. and homeland elites.

To varying degrees, the home countries of many European immigrants
to the United States also tried to influence their emigrants. But
the special conditions of exclusion facing Asians produced a unique
racist isolation within the U.S. structure and simultaneously
rendered these isolated communities subject to customs, laws,
organizations, and institutions from the home countries.

In fact, the two structures were mutually reinforcing. The home
countries' main aim was to retain the political, economic, and
cultural loyalty of their overseas communities, while the principal
interest of the United States was to retain its racially oppressive,
especially exclusionary, policies and occasional access to cheap
Asian labor, predominately in agriculture. Thus, the United States
was usually happy to stay out of the internal workings of the Asian
communities so long as they stayed within bounds of its broader
dictates.

Home-country elites also took advantage of the racist isolation of
Asians in America to extend their influence and control over these
communities. For example, excluded from participation in almost all
American institutions, traditions, and organizations, the Chinese
community was rife with district, family, and clan associations, as
well as secret societies, schools, public festivals and rituals, and
China-based political organizations.

At the apex of this pyramid, the Chinese Benevolent Association (in
some places known as the Six Companies) ruled over the Chinese-
American communities. The Six Companies, in turn, was an instrument
of the Kuomintang (China's Nationalist Party) which, as an ally of
the United States against the Chinese Communists, was given almost
free reign over the overseas Chinese up to and including regular
violations of the Constitutional rights of those who it perceived
opposed them.14

To one degree or another, all the Asian communities in the United
States were faced with a "dual structure of domination" in which a
homeland government or political party was allowed by the United
States to be its junior partner and overseer with a great range of
powers to develop and enforce the interests both of U.S. racism and
overseas loyalty. These dual structures were especially strong
during the exclusion/enclave period, and only in the current phase
of Asian-American history are they being broken down. Dual
domination, like exclusion, is a unique combination of racial and
national oppression.

Exclusion, Enclaves, and the Class Composition of Asians

Exclusion also had a major impact on the gender and class
compositions of the Asian communities, which continues to resonate
today.

First of all, since the vast majority of the first immigrants of
each of the Asian nationalities were male laborers who left their
families behind, exclusion tended to freeze in place the
overwhelming male composition of these communities and stunted the
growth of a U.S.-born Asian population.

Second, anti-Asian hostility and riots, combined with exclusion,
forced the Asian peoples to band together into Japantowns,
Chinatowns, and Manilatowns where the prevailing conditions promoted
a large class of small entrepreneurs (merchants, farmers, labor
contractors, restaurateurs, etc.) and the political and social power
of that class over the workers. As regards the Chinese, for example,
prior to exclusion the majority lived in agricultural areas where,
by Sucheng Chan's calculations, the business and labor-contracting
elite seldom exceeded 15 percent of the community. Exclusion
virtually eliminated Chinese laborers in small western towns and
left only a smattering of Chinese restaurant or laundry owners. And
it drove the majority together into Chinese enclaves within the
cities where entrepreneurs and professionals constituted some 40
percent.15

Third, the exclusion acts banned Asian laborers, but allowed
merchants, students, and their wives or families to enter the United
States, thus further distorting the class composition of the
communities.

Thus, the Chinatowns, Manilatowns, and Japantowns that emerged were
not so much the products of "natural" social forces as the distorted
outgrowth of immigration and naturalization policies that
discriminated against Chinese as a people in general and against
specific classes among them in particular.

For reasons that no one has satisfactorily explained, Filipinos were
neither enclaved nor did they develop an entrepreneurial class on
the scale of the Chinese or Japanese. Instead, many Filipinos
remained migrant farm workers for agribusiness on the West Coast.
Their enclaves tended to be in agricultural areas and their urban
communities tended to be adjuncts to or merged with Chinatowns. The
situation of the Filipinos thus remained that of the first phase:
racially coerced labor for agricultural capital.

The Japanese also remained a disproportionately agricultural folk
until their racist internment during the Second World War, but they
were only briefly forced into the role of cheap labor. Japanese in
California were soon able to carve out niches as farmers and
shopkeepers. The Japanese also formed sizable urban Japantowns in
Los Angeles and San Francisco with class characteristics similar to
the Chinatowns.

While this Japanese economic advance is often attributed to the
strategy of ethnic enterprise and ethnic solidarity,16 the Japanese
were also the lucky recipients of a major piece of historical
happenstance.

Just as the Japanese were arriving in the United States, the
development of irrigation in California opened the way for intensive
agriculture and a shift from grain to fruit and vegetable
production. Between 1879 and 1909, the value of crops from intensive
agriculture skyrocketed from just 4 percent to 50 percent of all
crops grown in California. This transformation occurred under a
market stimulus created by two key technological achievements of the
period—the completion of the national railroad lines and the
invention of the refrigerated car. Consequently, for the first time
perishable fruit and vegetables from California could be sold almost
anywhere in the United States.17

Japanese farmers were able to capitalize on these developments. As
early as 1910 they produced 70 percent of California's strawberries,
and by 1940 they grew 95 percent of fresh snap beans, 67 percent of
fresh tomatoes, and 95 percent of the celery. In 1900, California's
Japanese farmers owned or leased twenty-nine farms totaling 4,698
acres; five years later the acreage jumped to 61,858; and by 1910 it
reached 194,742 acres. Even the California Alien Land Law of 1913,
which prohibited "aliens ineligible to citizenship" from owning land
or leasing it for more than three years failed to stem this trend.
By 1920 Japanese farmers owned or leased 458,056 acres.18 Despite
protests from Japan, a U.S. ally in the First World War, a
California initiative passed in 1920 closed the loopholes in the
1913 act, and Japanese landholdings dropped dramatically.19

Small entrepreneurs (and later, their often college-educated
children) were only one side of the coin. On the other side were the
majority of Asians who were workers, but workers in extremely
oppressive conditions. They were largely excluded from jobs with
mainstream white employers and the government by racist laws and
practices, and by the lack of English-speaking skills. Thus, they
had little choice but to work for Asian employers as menial laborers
in restaurants, garment factories and other sweatshops, laundries,
farms, and grocery and dry goods stores. These employers were not
only non-union, they paid extremely poor wages and provided awful
working conditions based not on the standard of American business,
but on a standard unique to their captive ethnic labor force.

In short, the period of exclusion which lasted until the change in
immigration laws in 1965 produced ethnic Asian enclaves. These were
stratified between an unusually large merchant/business class tied
to conservative or reactionary home governments and backed by
the "dual structure of domination" and workers who were isolated in
these enclaves or agricultural areas, stripped of their rights by
the combined power of U.S. racism and home-country dictatorships.
The latter were forced to work almost exclusively for compatriot
businessmen under working and pay conditions that bore no
resemblance to that of the mainstream of the U.S. working class.

The Consciousness of Asian Americans

From their first days on these shores, Asian Americans fought
against the discrimination they faced. Strikes, slowdowns, and legal
actions were common. It is little known, for example, that Filipino
farm workers actually initiated the famous grape boycott of the
1960s, which was then joined by Mexican workers and tremendously
amplified under the leadership of Cesar Chavez. Most of these
struggles were fought on a nationality or class basis.

It was not until the late 1960s that a common racial/panethnic
identity took hold among Asian Americans. Several facts contributed
to this delay: different Asian nationalities immigrated in different
historical periods, they rarely lived or worked in the same
geographical areas, most were immigrants until the 1960s, and their
native languages were unintelligible to each other. Thus there was
no amalgamation of the Asian nationalities as their had been, say,
among the different African ethnicities under slavery (and that took
many generations). Although Asians in the United States fell victim
to the same racial laws and customs and followed the same racialized
patterns, the predominant consciousness remained ethnic/national,
not panethnic or racial.

The development of Asian-American consciousness took place in the
1960s when, for the first time, the majority of Asians in this
country were U.S. born. It was an explicitly political consciousness
influenced by the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of that
era. And it was cemented for many by the murderous racist
dehumanization of Asians exhibited by the U.S. government, press,
and armed forces during the Vietnam War.

To be Asian American was not a simple recognition that one had roots
in Asia; it meant to reject the passive racist stereotype embodied
in the white-imposed term "Oriental" and to embrace an active stance
against war and racism. The people of color movements of the 1960s
led to the rejection of the term "Negro" in favor of "Black"
or "Afro-American"; it produced the new concepts of "La Raza"
and "Chicano"; and it gave rise to "Asian American."

Unbeknownst to many people, including many movement people, the
Asian-American movement of the late 1960s and 1970s was of mass
proportions and dramatically transformed the political (and
personal) consciousness and institutional infrastructure of the
different Asian-American communities. In addition, influenced by the
powerful Vietnamese, Chinese, and Korean communist parties of the
time, many Asian-American activists turned to Marxism and became a
major presence in the U.S. communist and socialist movements of the
period.20

However, neither racism nor racial consciousness among Asians has
ever supplanted either the consciousness or the reality of
nationality. Indeed, the tremendous increase in immigration since
1965 has reproduced an overriding foreign-born majority among Asians
residing in the United States and has further strengthened
national/ethnic consciousness. Still, Asian-American consciousness
is far from extinguished; it retains both ideological power and
institutional expression in the many Asian-American progressive
organizations that thrive today and will undoubtedly increase and
find new expressions as the nativity of Asian Americans changes in
the decades to come. The intersection of race and nationality among
Asians is an ongoing formation, subjectively and objectively.

Afterword

The racialization of nationality was a critical event in U.S.
history that has shaped today's social formation and even impacted
its foreign policy. It was extended, with different particularities,
to millions of Latino and Caribbean immigrants, and now Arabs, South
Asians, and Africans, in addition to East Asians—all of whom are in
its throes. And as the United States acceded to superpower status in
the course of the twentieth century, this racialization also took on
a potent international dimension in the innumerable racist U.S.
interventions in the third world. Today's "war on terrorism" is,
among other things, also a war on racialized immigrants as the
Patriot Act and other new laws treat them as suspected enemy
combatants simply because of their race and nationality.

Of course the intersection of race and nationality is not static.
The racial formation of Asian Americans (not to speak of many
others) since the Immigration Reform of 1965 has been very different
than the pre-1965 period. The civil rights achievements of the 1960s
and 1970s, the structural change of U.S. capitalism to what is
sometimes called "post-industrial society," the immigration reform
of 1965, and globalization have reshaped the Asian-American
communities and their status in U.S. society. Just as the system of
legalized discrimination, disenfranchisement, and segregation of
blacks has been overthrown, so the categories of "aliens ineligible
to citizenship" and "exclusion" have been cast aside. Because of
their educational level, Asian Americans, along with white women,
were probably the main beneficiaries of affirmative action.

Immigration reform has enabled the Asian-American population to
explode from only about one million in 1965—mostly Chinese,
Japanese, and Filipinos—to something like 13 million, emanating from
numerous Asian countries today. Consequently, the majority of Asian
Americans today have no family connection to Asian-American history
prior to 1980.

Still, the provisions of the 1965 immigration act and subsequent
legislation have reinforced the class trends set in motion by
exclusion. These laws allow Asian immigrants to enter this country
primarily based on their family connections to the
disproportionately merchant/professional population already here
(family reunification) or based on their unique technical or
professional skills. Consequently the highly educated and middle-
class section of the Asian-American population has been reproduced
on a bigger scale. At the same time, many of those entering based on
family reunification are workers with few resources and limited
English-speaking skills, so the numbers of isolated sweatshop
workers in Asian enclaves have also grown.

The working-class section of Asian Americans has been expanded by
Southeast Asians who entered the United States not under immigration
law, but under refugee law after the failed U.S. wars of aggression
in Indochina. Although some of these refugees were from the defeated
elites, most of them were poor. The socio-economic profiles of
Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, and Hmong in the United States are
very similar to those of Native Americans, blacks, and Latinos.

Thus Asian Americans today have the highest median education and
household income levels but at the same time unusually high
percentages of Asians live in poverty and have minimal education.
The irony is that those Asian Americans who are said to make up the
so-called "model minority" achieved this status primarily due to the
class impacts of racist immigration laws and the civil rights
victories, not simply by "pulling themselves up by their own
bootstraps." Asian Americans have worked hard, but who hasn't? What
is more important is that immigration law and other forms of racism
have had the ironic effect of creating a community with an unusual
number of middle-class people.

Among the hard working are the millions of extremely poor Asian-
American workers who are often rendered invisible in the mythical
Asian success story. The many vibrant left and progressive Asian-
American organizations today tend to concentrate their organizing
efforts precisely among these immigrant workers, many of whom are
women. Class looms large in Asian-American politics.

After more than 400 years of racism sanctioned and enforced by the
state, the victories of the Civil Rights movement erased racial
categories from the official law of the land. This was a tremendous
victory. But many of the oppressive patterns and disparities set in
place by those centuries of official racism continue as major forces
in U.S. life, reproduced by enduring racialized cultural and
economic structures unless actively interrupted. Overtly racist laws
have been replaced by a plethora of covertly racial laws and
legislation, from the Patriot Act to mandatory sentencing to the
strict limits on desegregation and affirmative action, and
discriminatory immigration and refugee law. We have come a long way,
but there is a harsh road ahead. Unraveling the distinct dynamics of
race, nationality, class, and gender, as well as their complicated
intersections, will be critical to advancing racial justice in the
decades to come.

Notes

Bob Wing, "War, Racism and United Fronts Post 9-11," War Times,2002
Stanley Greenberg, Race and State in Capitalist Development (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1980); Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims
Become Killers (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001).
Edmund Morgan, American Freedom, American Slavery (New York: W. W.
Norton, 2003); Bob Wing, "On the Origins of Racism in the United
States: The Plantation System, the Development of Slavery and the
Production of Racial Categories in Seventeenth-Century Virginia,"
unpublished, 1975.
David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness (New York & London: Verso,
1991), and foreword to the second edition of The Rise and Fall of
the White Republic, by Alexander Saxton (New York & London: Verso,
2003.
Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines (Berkeley: University of
California, 1994); Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America (Upper Saddle
River, N.J.: Pearson Education, 1999).
Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991).
Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1995).
Lucy Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1995).
Neil Gotanda, "Critical Legal Studies, Critical Race Theory and
Asian American Studies," Amerasia Journal 21 (1995): 127–36.
Harry Chang, "Racial Formation and Class Formation," 1974; "Racism
and Racial Categories," 1973; "National Minorities and Racial
Minorities," 1973; "U.S. Slavery: A Capitalist Economic Form," 1974;
all unpublished.
Charles McClain & Laurene Wu, "The Chinese Contribution to the
Development of American law," in Sucheng Chan, ed., Entry Denied
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 3–24.
Edna Bonacich, "Asian Labor in the Development of California and
Hawaii," in Lucie Cheng & Edna Bonacich, eds., Labor Immigration
Under Capitalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984),
130–185.
Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1995)
Him Mark Lai, "The Kuomintang in Chinese American Communities Before
World War II," in Entry Denied, Sucheng Chan, ed. (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1994), 170–212.
Sucheng Chan, This Bittersweet Soil (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1986).
Edna Bonacich & John Modell, The Economic Basis of Ethnic Solidarity
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).
Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Distant Shore (New York: Penguin,
1989)
Takaki, Strangers from a Distant Shore; Yuji Ichioka, Issei (New
York: Free Press, 1990).
Keith Aoki, "No Right to Own: The Early Twentieth Century `Alien
Land Laws' as a Prelude to Internment," Boston College Law Review 37
(1998): 40.
Steve Louie & Glenn K. Omatsu, eds., Asian Americans: The Movement
and the Moment (Los Angeles: UCLA Asian American Studies Center
Press, 2001); Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air (New York & London:
Verso, 2002).