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Notes From
the Editors
The Chinese
Exclusion Act of 1882; Disassembled Wonder
by Denise Bergman
Natural History
and the Nature of History
by Richard York and Brett
Clark
The Glory and the Gutting: Steeler Nation
and the Humiliation of Pittsburgh
by Charles
McCollester
Labor, the State, and the Struggle for a
Democratic Zimbabwe
by Patrick Bond and
Richard Saunders
Bob
Wingwas part of the first wave of Asian-American activists in the late
1960s. He was founding editor of the antiwar newspaper, War Times,and of
the racial justice magazine, ColorLines, and is one of the national
leaders of United for Peace and Justice, a nationwide antiwar coalition of more
than 1,200 organizations. This article was edited and slightly updated from a
longer essay written in 1995.
*The history and racial formation of Asians in Hawaii had
certain similarities to that in the mainland, but is overall quite distinct.
This essay refers only to the mainland history.
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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.
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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).
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