In my 1994 book, Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture, I wrote: "We are a kindred people, African and Asian Americans. We share a history of migration, interaction and cultural sharing, and commerce and trade. We share a history of European colonization, de-colonization, and independence under neo-colonization and dependency. We share a history of oppression in the United States, successively serving as slaves and cheap labor, as peoples excluded and absorbed, as victims of mob rule and Jim Crow. We share a history of struggle for freedom and the democratization of America, of demands for equality and human dignity, of insistence on making real the promise that all men and women are created equal. We are a kindred people, forged in the fire of white supremacy and struggle…."
[Photo by Ana Lai] Prof. Okihiro told the audience that his talk is based on the revision of a chapter in his book: "Margins and Mainstreams".
That history, I maintained, provided the common ground upon which solidarities between African and Asian Americans were built, and I gave several examples of those unities. Among the first Japanese settlers in California in 1869 was Masumizu Kuninosuke who married an African American woman, had three daughters and a son, and operated a fish store in Sacramento for many years. Many African Americans opposed America's imperialist war in the Philippines on the basis of racial solidarity with the Filipinos as oppressed peoples. At the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, a Filipino band made sweet music under the baton of Walter Loving, an African American, and in San Francisco, Jean Ng, an African American married to a Chinese American, was buried in a Chinese cemetery. When management tried to displace African with Filipino Americans in 1925, the African American Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters welcomed Filipino Americans as members. Unlike the racist American Federation of Labor that excluded both African and Asian Americans, the Brotherhood reasoned, "We want our Filipino brothers to understand that it is necessary for them to join the Brotherhood in order to help secure conditions and wages which they too will benefit from." In 1927, Lemon Lee Sing, a sixty-eight-year-old Chinese laundryman in New York City, filed to adopt Firman Smith, an African American child he had found sleeping in a hallway. Sam Lee, a Chinese restaurant owner in Washington D.C., refused to fire one of his African American employees despite threats on his life, while in Chicago, in 1929, a Chinese restaurant was dynamited for serving African Americans. During World War II, amidst a racist war conducted in the Pacific and the mass detention of Japanese Americans at home, a majority of African Americans polled rejected discrimination against the Japanese.
[Photo by Ana Lai] Prof. Okihiro said that the interaction between Asians and Africansstarted since the flourishing of trade between China and Africa in the fifteenth century.
I wrote that chapter titled "Is Yellow Black or White?" for my book Margins and Mainstreams during a time when African and Asian American hostility appeared to have reached a boiling point, stoked by a press seemingly bent on diverting attention from white racism to hatreds among nonwhites. The 1992 devastation of Koreatown in Los Angeles followed on black boycotts of Korean businesses in New York City and Los Angeles, movies such as Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989), and Ice Cube's song "Black Korea" that warned that "you little chop-suey ass will be a target of the nationwide boycott" because "you can't turn the ghetto in Black Korea." The roots of conflict, I tried to say, went deeper than the manifestations of racialisms between African and Asian Americans, and there were grounds for making common cause in the mutual struggle for dignity and justice. But in that pursuit for solidarities, I glossed over the real differences that separated African from Asian Americans and thereby missed the opportunity to dissect the complex and oftentimes contrary subject positions they occupy in the U.S. social formation. I intend to begin to undertake that today, but limited to a focus on citizenship and community membership.
--- Still, even when in possession of U.S. citizenship, Asian Americans remain racialized as "perpetual foreigners" in the lexicon of the Supreme Court's "average man," and are thus permanent outsiders and problematic members of the American community. Old habits die hard. During the 1998 Winter Olympics, an internet news site carried the headline, "American Beats Kwan," referring to the American Michelle Kwan, an "LA (though not valley) girl" to the core. The "American" who beat her, of course, was Tara Lipinsky, whose surname wouldn't have conjured up the nationality "American" in another age or even the racialization, "white." And in déjà vu all over again in 2002, the Seattle Times sports headline proclaimed, "Hughes As Good As Gold: American Outshine Kwan, Slutskaya in Skating Surprise." When Asian American readers flooded the paper with their outrage, the editors apologized for having repeated the same error of four years earlier, explaining how their "disbelief turned to deep embarrassment" over their mistake. "Ironically," the paper noted, "one of the most memorable aspects of these Winter Olympics was the rich diversity of the U.S. athletes…."
[Photo by Ana Lai] Prof. Okihiro lamented that in the minds of the White majority, Black Peril has
led to Yellow Peril, and Brown Peril. He said that the binary pair of White and Black has
now evolved into White and Non-White.
Racializations of "American" as white and of Asian Americans as perpetual aliens might prompt momentary disbelief and deep embarrassment but they can hold even more dreadful consequences for those so classified. A minority in dissent to the Supreme Court's 1898 ruling on citizenship and birth held that Chinese Americans, despite U.S. citizenship, remained loyal to China and were tainted by their parents' dubious allegiance to the U.S. Likewise, the U.S. army general in charge of the West Coast's defense during the months following Pearl Harbor declared that "a Jap is a Jap," and "while many second and third generation Japanese born on United States soil possessed of United States citizenship, have become ‘Americanized,' the racial strains are undiluted. Yesterday's fingering of the nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee and today's racial profiling of Arab and West, Central, and South Asian Americans are contemporary manifestations of this perpetual foreigner syndrome, including its correlate, heightened especially during times of war or national crisis, the alien threat to the nation's well being and security. Of course, Asians bear an additional burden in the longstanding and pervasive notion of the "yellow peril" – the alien threat peculiar to Asians rendered as a racialized, gendered, and sexualized menace to the nation's purity and integrity.
--- Yellow perilism, of course, is alive and well in our time, along with racializations of Asian Americans as aliens and African Americans, as citizens but not equal members of the American community. Those significations install and sustain white privilege by strangely withholding and conferring "whiteness" upon African and Asian Americans and Latina/os when confronted with threats to its dominance. Asian Americans thus became "model minorities" and "whiter than whites" during the 1960's at the height of militant black revolt in America's cities, and Asian Americans (and light-skinned Latina/os and the middle-class African Americans) assumed a whiter cast when the U.S. Census in the year 2000 confirmed predictions of massive demographic shifts toward peoples of color who were, in an earlier time, considered to be "nonwhites." Whites might now be a numerical "racial" minority in Hawaii and California, but "whiteness" as an alliance of common ideology and interest – an "ethnicity" – might still prevail. And when confronting the "yellow peril" or the alien menace, Whites stand shoulder to shoulder with Blacks. I am thinking here, perhaps playfully, about movies such as Rising Sun (1993) and Men in Black (1997) in which the white hero and his black sidekick take on invasions by the alien menace and hence threatening other. Their differences dissolve and united they stand thanks to their common enemy.
[Photo by Ana Lai] The audience is consisted of faculty and students from different colleges within
New York City such as BMCC, Brooklyn, Hunter, Pace and Queens.
--- As I've argued in my book Common Ground: Re-imagining American History (2001), I see these sorts of convergences as necessary for the maintenance of binaries, in this instance the racialized binary of white and nonwhite, which constitute the matrix of power and its relations. And in this, my reconsideration of the solidarities between Asian and African Americans, I must admit to my single-mindedness in reaching a conclusion similar to my original proportion. I know that the racializations of African and Asian Americans differ within the U.S. racial formation, and I see those differences as crucial for the repression and exploitation of both Asian and African Americans. Citizenship and the positioning of Asians between black and white are keys sites of difference. Others include the changing of contrasting genderings and sexualizations of African and Asian Americans. There are constructed and imposed differences that distinguish Asian from African American.
But I also know that Asian Americans (and Latina/os) as third (and fourth) positions trouble the U.S. binaries of race, gender, and sexuality and are accordingly assimilated into the prevailing categories of white and nonwhite, man and woman, and heterosexual and homosexual. Those essentializing identities testify to the power of naming and classifying, but they also point to the fragility of a system that requires realignments and reiterations with the changing social relations. It is that realization that can inspire insurgencies and solidarities across the boundaries of race, gender, sexuality, and nation, and might yield a common ground upon which to work through our elegant differences.
Copyrighted by Gary Okihiro, 2002.
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