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Title: Asians Against White Supremacy Author: Jalan Journal Date: 21st September 2008 Language: en Topics: racism, white supremacy, Asia, US, anti-racism Source: Retrieved on July 26, 2009 from https://web.archive.org/web/20090726172643/http://jalanjournal.org/2008/09/asians-against-white-supremacy/
In the United States, racist views of Asian- Americans are promiscuous
and self-contradictory. On the one hand, we are told that we are model
minorities, hard working citizens living out the classic American story
of immigration and upward mobility. On the other hand, we are painted as
perpetual foreigners, never quite American even after multiple
generations of citizenship. On the one hand, we are supposed to be
passive, docile, and submissive, while on the other hand they fear we
are the yellow peril, a rising, ruthless, and aggressive empire that
will someday destroy the white race.
The fact that these stereotypes are so contradictory show their
ludicrousness. Racists project their own fears, anxieties, desires, and
aspirations onto us in order to suppress our self-government and make us
into who they want us to be, even if what they want us to be makes no
sense. But racist fears, anxieties, desires and aspirations are not
simply the product of individual ill will â they are shaped by powerful
institutions. For example the U.S. military reproduces stereotypes of
Asians as an aggressive, brainwashed Mongolian horde in order to raise
support for their base expansion projects aimed at containing Chinese
military power. Without U.S. military interests in Asia, this stereotype
could have died out but instead it is growing.
Thatâs why liberal strategies of âanti-racismâ will not liberate us.
Liberals encourage white people to question their stereotypes as part of
confronting their âprivilege.â They do not attempt to abolish the
institutions like military bases that produce and reproduce these
stereotypes to keep us subordinated. This editorial will examine the
historic political, economic, and social origins of anti-Asian racism.
Our goal is not to enlighten anyoneâs consciousness but rather to expose
the institutions that oppress us so we know who our enemies are and what
we need to smash.
and empire
In general, we can say that our enemies are the forces of white
supremacy â any institutions and practices that have the effect of
elevating white people over people of color (including Asians) by
subordinating and suppressing our attempts to be self-governing.
In particular, there are two interlocking systems of white supremacy
that shape the terrain of Asian American life and struggle. The first
consists of the social relations formed by the colonial settlement of
North America and the founding of the United States out of colonial
settler states. It is the result of land stolen from American Indians
and Chicano/as, the enslavement of Blacks, and the extreme exploitation
of âfreeâ Black, Indigenous, European, and Asian migrant labor. As a
shorthand, we will call all of this âsettlerismâ.[1]
Settlerism has created a legacy of terror, violence, and racial
hierarchy which Asian Americans have had to navigate. From the moment we
arrived as workers in the Wild Wild West we found ourselves facing down
the barrels of guns originally pointed at Blacks and American Indians.
Later, we found ourselves victims of a Jim-Crow-style legal system. It
is only more recently that we have been championed as the âmodel
minorityâ, a supposed solution to the âproblemâ of militant Black
resistance to 500 years of settler terror. The racist rationale that
created such an identification for Asian Americans is further explored
below, as well as in other articles.
The second system of white supremacy is related to settlerism but is
more global. It consists of the social relations formed through the
expansion of U.S. imperialism in Asia through military conquest (the
colonization of the Philippines, the partition of Korea, the Vietnam
War, etc.) and the domination of American multinational corporations,
the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank over Asian
economies. U.S. Empire built off of earlier forms of European
imperialism in Asia even as it modified them. Like them, it enforced the
fiction of a white Western civilization reforming Asian barbarism.
The experience of Asian Americans has been shaped by the fact that those
who rule over us here in the U.S. also subjugated the countries we or
our families came from. The architects of U.S. Empire in Asia created a
whole string of lies about Asians being backwards, ignorant, weak, and
undemocratic in order to justify this subjugation. These lies have been
applied to us as well, preventing us from assimilating and becoming
white like the formerly non-white immigrant groups from Europe did.
In response many Asian Americans have chosen to be consistent and
principled internationalists â we have known that our situation here
will not improve unless people of color abroad defeat U.S. Empire.
Others have bought into U.S. empire, claiming they are the âgoodâ
Asians, unlike those âbadâ Asians over there who are prone to terrorism,
fanaticism, Communism, or Islam. And of course US Empire has exported
aspects of North American settlerist ideology to Asia, which is why so
many of our aunties and uncles over there are scared of Black Americans
even though they have never met any.
In order to understand Asian American struggles we need to keep both of
these systems of white supremacy in our headlights. We canât adopt the
all-too-common view that race in America is a simple binary of white
over Black. Social relations in the U.S. are deeply shaped by U.S.
imperialism in Asia, our peoplesâ resistance to it, and our own
struggles here in North America. But at the same time, we canât pretend
weâre in a national liberation struggle somewhere in Asia where we are
the majority â we are in the Western Hemisphere where our lives are
forged in the Black-indigenous-white crucible and we need to seek our
allies and define our enemies within this context.
To do so, we will consider the origins and contemporary manifestations
of four forms of anti-Asian racism: the backwards worker myth, the
perpetual foreigner myth, the model minority myth, and the myth of the
yellow peril.
The fundamental forms of anti-Asian racism emerged because of labor
competition between Asian workers and white workers who viewed Asians as
backwards and submissive.
To understand why this happened we need to look at a key moment in the
formation of both settlerism and imperialism: the late 1800s and early
1900s, when Asian Americans first began to arrive in large numbers as
miners, farmers, workers, and rebels. At this time the U.S. was going
through the industrial revolution, unleashing forces of capitalist
accumulation with a voracious appetite for land, resources, and labor.
To fulfill this appetite, soldiers and settlers were moving westward
looting and plundering American Indian and Chicano lands at a breakneck
pace. The wealth they wrenched from their genocidal drive to the Pacific
was delivered, dripping in blood, as the down-payment for the new
factories, plants, and shipyards that formed the bedrock of emerging
U.S. imperial power in Latin America and Asia.
All of this involved mobilizing and exploiting human labor at an
unprecedented scale. American settlerist mythology describes the
conquest of the West as a something led by individualistic small
property owners â farmers, cowboys, merchants, prospectors, etc.â who
supposedly represent the soul of American democracy. But digging
goldmines, boring through mountains to build transcontinental railroads,
and similar enterprises required a level of organization that rugged
individualists alone could not accomplish and capital that only large
corporations and the federal government could provide. Soon enough big
companies shunted aside the pioneers and hired mass gangs of workers at
the lowest wages they could possibly impose. This was the birth day of
the America we know today, where our dreams are of cowboy glory and our
day jobs are full of monotonous toil under the watch of bureaucrats.
The corporations were looking for workers who could be compelled to
accept slave-like wages and conditions without revolt. They turned to
two sources. The first consisted of European immigrant workers from the
east coast who had found themselves thrown into unemployment and poverty
through economic crisis. The second consisted of former Asian farmers
dislocated by the European and U.S. imperialism that was ravaging their
homes (e.g. the Opium War and the genocidal Philippine-American war).
But neither of these groups proved to be a well-disciplined or docile
workforce, and it turned out that the only way to neutralize them was to
pit the former against the latter.
The European immigrants were lured west with dreams of becoming
self-made men- owning property and eventually becoming capitalists.
Their dream was a mirage; they were sorely disappointed and were
seething with anger. Those who had established small businesses were
getting out-competed by the big corporations. And new unskilled workers
who arrived from east coast slums found dangerous, low paying jobs their
only option.
White supremacist politicians, craft union bureaucrats, businessmen, and
many white skilled workers joined together to make Asian workers
scapegoats for these frustrations; the Chinese community, which was the
largest Asian ethnic group at the time, became their primary victim.
They deflected the anger of small proprietors away from the big
corporations and against their Chinese workers, arguing that the
corporationsâ reliance on cheap Chinese labor gave them an unfair
advantage over smaller businesses. They also claimed that âcivilizedâ
white Americans should not have to compete in a labor market with
âbackwardsâ and âweakâ âOrientals.â This allowed the skilled white
workers and their craft unions to deflect the demands of unskilled
European laborers for training and entry into the trades. The unskilled
workers were told Chinese immigrants, not the corrupt and elitist craft
unions and bosses were to blame for their plight. All of this allowed
expanding US capitalism to solidify control over the workforce,
neutralizing potential trouble from the unskilled white workers by
co-opting them into white supremacy and neutralizing the Chinese workers
by subjecting them to vigilante terror.
These anti-Chinese campaigns were a key moment in the construction of
that bloody line between white and nonwhite in America. Part of the
logic of settlerism was the deputization of rank and file white workers
into a vigilante force that could aid the state in dispossessing and
murdering American Indians and Chicanos. This logic was extended against
Asians as bands of armed vigilantes attacked Chinese folks and drove
them out of gold mines, orchards, and small towns across the West.
Between 1850 and 1906, Chinatowns burned to the ground and thousands of
Chinese were killed, forced into prostitution, or marched to railroad
cars and driven out, sometimes along the very tracks they and built. It
was a campaign of wholesale ethnic cleansing.
Eventually, this vigilante force was legalized in the form of a whole
complex of Jim-crow-style legislation that forbade Asians from owning
land, testifying against white men in court and attending public
schools, etc. It all culminated in the passing of the Chinese Exclusion
Act which attempted to prevent any further Chinese immigration.
Early Filipino- Americans faced similar conditions. For example, there
were anti-Filipino riots against Filipinos in Yakima and Wenatchee
valleys in Washington, and Filipinos were driven out of Yakima in 1928.
Japanese Americans also faced segregation from public schools and were
attacked by racist mobs in San Francisco in 1907.
The ideologues leading these campaigns justified them by describing
Asian workers as docile, dirty, backwards, and undemocratic. They were
painted as conformist, traditional people unfit for a world of hearty
American pioneer individualism. Many of these stereotypes remain today.
(Of course, in cases where they had managed to set up their own
businesses or farms, the script was flipped and Asians were portrayed as
uppity, cunning devils who must have some trick up their sleeve).
In reality, the white workers were just as dirty, poor and miserable as
Asian American workers, but they were bamboozled into hugging the chains
of their own wretchedness rather than fighting back against their real
enemies. They were the ones who succumbed to the manipulations of
anti-democratic ideologues and if anyone was swept mindlessly into mob
conformity it was them. They were tricked into siding with their bosses
and decadent, conservative craft unions rather than joining with Asian
workers who could have been their natural allies in building a more
democratic America.
Of course, this is not to say that all classes of Asian Americans were
automatically democratic. Emerging elites in Asian American communities
also exploited our peoples ruthlessly. For example, Chinese workers were
oppressed by powerful businessmen and labor brokers such as the Chinese
Six Companies on the West Coast. These cartels collaborated with white
supremacists to deliver coolie workers under slave-like conditions to
American corporations. They worked with other Chinese elites that
controlled political dissent in Chinese communities and maintained
highly patriarchal and semi-feudal patronage networks backed up by
thugs.
But despite these restraints, Asian American workers proved themselves
to be anything but backwards and naturally slavish. They lived the
classic American experience of being thrown into a rootless, violent new
context and improvising strategies of survival and resistance. During
the anti-Chinese pogroms, Chinese Americans organized boycotts,
lawsuits, popular militias for armed self-defense, appeals to China for
arms, and mass civil disobedience against attempts to get them to wear
photo ID cards.
At times, Asian American workers found solidarity with Euro-American,
Chicano, Black, and Native American workers in the IWW, a radical union
that fought the bosses and the racist and corrupt American Federation of
Labor. Japanese workers organized alongside Mexican workers in Oxnard
CA, and Japanese-led labor organizing and strikes on Hawaiian sugar
plantations attempted to break down the divide-and conquer management
system that allocated wages based on ethnicity to create resentment
between different Asian groups. Pioneering Filippino activists such as
Philip Vera Cruz and Carlos Bulosan also organized alongside Arab and
Latino farm workers to create the strong United Farmworkers Union in the
1960s. Enduring much physical and economic duress, the farmworkers
managed to go on strike and organized a four-year long grape boycott to
push for higher wages and better working conditions.
These moments of resistance are often overlooked chapters in the
struggle for democracy and anti-racism in the U.S. They offer important
lessons for us today where the American dream is once again dissolving
into unemployment, economic crisis, dislocation, and faceless
bureaucracy. Once again, right-wing populist/ white supremacist
politicians and militias are emerging to blame all of this on immigrant
workers. Latinos are the primary targets for now, and for reasons we
explain below Asian Americans could also be targeted in the future. We
can look to this early Asian American resistance for insight into how we
can fight back today.
Despite these heroic struggles, Asian American workers and principled
multiracial labor organizations were numerically outnumbered.
Eventually, Asian Americans were barred from many industries and forced
to live in ghettoes (Chinatowns, Manillatowns, little Tokoyos etc).
Although Asian Americans used these communities to build networks of
mutual aid and protection from white supremacy, this ghettoization
limited their ability to impact broader American politics through
multiracial labor struggles and cultural production.
This is partly the material basis for the myth that Asian Americans are
perpetual foreigners. Having ethnically cleansed and concentrated Asian
American populations, white supremacists turned around and argued that
Asians liked to keep to themselves, that we are just visitors or
squatters here who are loyal to our homelands and not to America. They
see our cultures as strange and exotic, fundamentally incompatible with
American democracy.
This perpetual foreigner myth was reinforced by the machinery of U.S.
Empire, which was expanding into Asia. To justify its conquests, the
imperialists argued that Asians had an exotic, decadent, and outdated
civilization that needed to be supplanted by Western modernity. Rudyard
Kiplingâs notorious poem the âWhite Manâs Burdenâ was about this
conquest, and it described Filipinos as ungrateful heathens, âhalf
devil, half child.â He is only one of many examples. These views of
Asians as an exotic and backwards civilization were applied to Asian
Americans as well, and our ongoing segregation has been justified over
and over again with the excuse that we will never be able to participate
fully in American civic life.
The perpetual foreigner myth reached a crescendo during World War II
when the U.S. government portrayed the entire Japanese â American
community as a ticking suicide bomb ready to go off in support of Japan.
They rounded up thousands of Japanese families and put them in
concentration camps. The perpetual foreigner myth is still alive today
as neoconservative pundits portray South and Southeast Asian- American
Muslims as a fifth column ready to pollute America with Jihadi terror,
vampirish patriarchy, and religious fanaticism. Of course, some Asian
Americans buy into this malicious propaganda by arguing that those other
Asians, not us good suck ups, are the real, perpetual enemy aliens. The
notorious Michelle Malkin who wrote the book, âIn Defense of Internment:
The case for âRacial Profilingâ in World War II and the War on Terrorâ
is one such example.
This perpetual foreigner myth is gendered: white supremacist efforts to
define Asians as strange and exotic are often fought over the bodies of
Asian women. Before the Western colonists arrived, Asian societies had a
wide diversity of gendered institutions from the rigid patriarchy of
imperial Chinese Confucianism to the relatively matriarchal norms of
Southeast Asia and southern India.Yet everywhere they went, these
colonists set out to create reflections of their own patriarchal
societies. In Burma, British colonialists found themselves interacting
with powerful women leaders. They argued that the equality or even
dominance women enjoyed there was a mark of Burmese societyâs barbarism.
They eagerly tried to âcivilizeâ these âexoticâ women by training
Burmese men to dominate them.
Ironically, in the 20^(th) century the imperialists flipped their
script. Now they like to portray Asian societies as strange and
backwards because of their supposedly more âtraditionalâ patriarchy. We
are constantly exposed to images of veiled Pakistani or Afghani women
and the neoconservatives would have us believe that the war on terror is
being fought to liberate these women from the grips of Islamic
repression. What they never mention is that the U.S. has often supported
the most patriarchal despots in Asia from Park Chung Hee in Korea to the
Northern Alliance in Afghanistan.
While the US military is busy âliberatingâ Asian women, its soldiers and
sailors stationed at the military bases in Asia sometimes rape local
women and get away with it under Status of Forces agreements reminiscent
of colonial concessions. Prostitution, sex tourism, and human
trafficking rings from Thailand to the Philippines have sprung up to
provide ârest and relaxationâ to US soldiers and tropical getaways for
US businessmen. Associated advertising and pornography outfits turn this
material reality into the myth of the hyper-sexual exotic Asian woman.
While some white supremacists claim they are coming to Asia to liberate
its women, others appeal to the patriarchy of American capitalism and
attempt to pimp out Asian women as supposedly traditional, docile,
unliberated peasants who will make good sweatshop workers, mail order
brides, and prostitutes. This logic has helped build an Asian underclass
inside the U.S. When these women resist and sabotage their bossesâ
efforts they are subjected to assault or are detained and deported.
Today this underclass is rendered invisible and this history of Asian
American working class resistance is suppressed. Both inside and outside
our communities, Asian Americans are now portrayed as middle class,
upwardly mobile, hard working techies. Our classmates assume we are
naturally smart and politicians assume we are naturally conservative.
These new stereotypes also have a dark history behind them. In 1965, the
US was facing pressures from the civil rights movement at home and the
cold war abroad. In an attempt to improve its poor image as the worldâs
greatest racist, the U.S. government relaxed some of itâs explicitly
race-based immigration laws and began to allow more Asian immigrants to
come over.
Unlike at the turn of the century when they needed cheap workers, in the
60s the U.S. capitalists faced a crisis of overproduction and
unemployment due to massive automation of U.S. factories. However they
did have a large demand for trained technicians, scientists, and
engineers who could help run and update this automated machinery, and
they were competing with the USSR for scientific talent to promote
military supremacy. Given this context, the 1965 immigration act only
allowed in the educated, skilled Asians and continued to bar unskilled
Asian workers. This also contributed to a brain drain in Asian countries
that now lost the skilled doctors and scientists who had received state
subsidized training for their capabilities.
This arrangement proved useful to the ideologues of white supremacy.
They began to argue that Asians were a âmodel minorityâ because they had
supposedly pulled themselves up by their bootstraps through education
and hard work. The disproportionate number of Asian technicians and
professionals who had arrived at the US through the stateâs capitalist
immigration policies, was ahistorically attributed to Asian values of
hard work and family. The implication here is that other minorities are
problem minorities â that Latinos and especially Blacks remain poor
because of their supposedly inferior culture, laziness, or lack of
intelligence, and not 500 years of settlerism, slavery, Jim Crow, and
discrimination. At a time when the Black Power movement was shaking up
American society and galvanizing young working class Asian Americans to
side with Blacks in the struggle against white supremacy, this emerging
model minority myth was deployed to divide Asians from Blacks and
delegitimize the Black revolt.
The model minority myth is destructive not only because it sets us
against other people of color but also because it erases our own
legacies of working class struggle. By presenting Asian Americans as
inherently middle class it obscures the key histories outlined above,
denying us democratic and anti-racist sheroes and organizational
precedents from our own communities. It also renders invisible the
significant and growing Asian American working class today. From
undocumented Chinese and Filipino workers to Cambodian, Vietnamese, and
Laotian refugees from the terror of the US war in their homelands, this
myth leaves out some of the most important and dynamic Asian American
communities- the very folks who are a waging key struggles today against
police brutality, homeland security raids, and deportation orders.
The model minority myth could not have lasted if it were simply a white
racist fantasy propagated by media portrayals of Asians. It was
solidified because upwardly mobile middle class leaders in some of our
own communities have bought into it. As soon as possible they moved out
of the ghetto and into the suburbs and they tried to train their kids to
fear and pity other people of color. Many of our parents continue to buy
into this myth because in their eyes it jives with some of their own
chauvinistic thinking about essential âAsianâ values of hard work and
family discipline (expressed through very American and very capitalist
reinterpretation of Confucianism, Hinduism, etc.). For them being the
model minority also means maintaining patriarchy, regulating their kidsâ
sexuality, and keeping them away from the more dynamic (and less white!)
aspects of American culture such as hip hop. It is the task of our
generation to break this middle-class stronghold that has dominated
Asian Americans today.
In this sense, our struggles against the model minority myth today are
not just struggles against the white supremacist media and immigration
systems; they are also struggles for womenâsâ liberation, workersâ self
management, sexual and gender freedom, and antiracism in our own
communities. As more Asian workers begin to immigrate and as our
generation of young Asian Americans begin to identify more with other
people of color, the model minority myth could be shaken up.
The international dimensions of the model minority myth follow the same
pattern, and exacerbates its harm. U.S. Empire has propped up the Asian
Tigers (South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan) as models for
other people of color nations to follow. And yet these supposed
capitalist success stories have faced restless working classes and
democratic challenges to their authoritarian governments. South Korean
workers and farmers militantly confronting the cops at
anti-globalization demonstrations should be enough to shatter the myth
of Asian docility and conservativism.
All of the myths discussed so far are built on the assumption that Asian
countries will remain subordinated to U.S. Empire. Even the Asian tigers
are junior partners. But the prospect of a growing Chinese empire
emerging as a direct rival to U.S. imperialism could significantly shake
up the relationship between Asian Americans and other Americans.
The rise of the Japanese Empire in the early 20^(th) century gives us a
precedent for understanding what might happen. At first the American
ruling class saw the Japanese Empire as a benign, progressive force that
could help modernize the rest of Asia and Japanese Americans were thus
seen in a positive light. But eventually, Japan began to approach parity
with the U.S. and the two empires began to compete for territory and
resources. At that point, the script was flipped and the Japanese were
portrayed as ruthless, cunning, diabolical aliens threatening to swarm
across the world and exterminate the white race. The propaganda of both
the Japanese and the U.S. armies turned the Pacific front into a race
war. In the U.S., this gave rise to the stereotypes of the âyellow
perilâ literature and films.
Today, while most American elites are content to cash in on cooperation
with Chinaâs dynamic capitalists, some factions of the U.S. ruling class
are beginning to promote a vision of China as the new yellow peril. They
recognize that China holds trillions of U.S. dollars in its state bank
and are startled by Chinese government efforts to wean its economy off
of production for the U.S. consumer market. They describe the Beijing
Olympics opening ceremony as a strange pageant of Asian conformism, as
an unleashing of the collective power of docile Asian workers who will
bow to a rising new Emperor, a new Oriental Despot. There is renewed
talk about the threat that Chinese people supposedly pose to Western
values.
What effect all of this will have on Asian Americans is yet to be seen.
Many of us, regardless of ethnicity, are mistaken for Chinese by white
folks who canât tell the difference between us. If the U.S. and China
begin a protracted inter-imperialist rivalry over energy, military, or
financial supremacy, this could re-awaken some of the old anti-Asian
elements of U.S. nationalism. The model minority myth could dissolve and
more direct and vicious forms of white supremacy could re-emerge. Faced
with angry American workers who have lost their jobs due to corporate
looting, politicians may try to divert this anger against Chinese
workers abroad and Asian American workers here, claiming we are
âstealingâ American jobs. This could lead to new attacks against Asian
Americans reminiscent of the killing of Vincent Chin who was beaten to
death in [year] by Detroit auto workers angry at Japanese competition.
Although unlikely in the near future, outright war with China could lead
to social chaos in both countries and the possibility of new internment
camps. We shouldnât be alarmist but it is crucial that Asian Americans
begin organizing now to prevent these potential catastrophes. We are in
a good position to make links between American workers and Asian workers
abroad, articulating our common interests and challenging the claims of
both Chinese and American elites to speak for our peoples.
As we have seen, anti-Asian racism is not simply the product of
individual ill will. The docile worker myth, the perpetual foreigner
myth, the model minority myth, and the myth of the yellow peril all have
to do with deep-rooted contradictions in American society. If we want to
break free of these oppressive myths then we need to confront these
contradictions head on, in solidarity with other Americans and with
folks struggling against U.S. empire abroad.
[1] The Asian American activist, J. Sakai, has used the concept of
âsettlerismâ to explain the structure of white supremacy and capitalism
in the U.S. Sakai argues that most white âworkersâ have been bought off
by the privileges they received from white supremacy and therefore are
not part of the working class. While we agree that the U.S. is a product
of a colonial settlement process, we recognize that in history some
white workers have rejected these privileges and sided with workers of
color against white supremacy and capitalism. We believe that such
breakthroughs are happening in lower frequencies today and can take form
in larger scales.