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Notes From
the Editors
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
Wing was 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 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).
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