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Academic Version: Applying my personal experiences and academic research as a professor of Sociology and Asian American Studies to provide a more complete understanding of political, economic, and cultural issues and current events related to American race relations, and Asia/Asian America in particular.
Plain English: Trying to put my Ph.D. to good use.
In my ongoing series of interviews with Asian American scholars and their recently-published books and research that examine diverse aspects related to Asian and Asian American experiences, I am very happy to present an interview with my UMass Amherst colleague, Caroline Yang, Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Caroline’s new book is titled, The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery: The Chinese Worker and the Minstrel Form and focuses on the relationship between slavery, antiblackness, and Chinese workers in post-Civil War U.S society. The book’s description:
The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery: The Chinese Worker and the Minstrel Form by Caroline Yang
The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery explores how antiblack racism lived on through the figure of the Chinese worker in U.S. literature after emancipation. Drawing out the connections between this liminal figure and the formal aesthetics of blackface minstrelsy in literature of the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction eras, Caroline H. Yang reveals the ways antiblackness structured U.S. cultural production during a crucial moment of reconstructing and re-narrating U.S. empire after the Civil War.
Examining texts by major American writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Sui Sin Far, and Charles Chesnutt, Yang traces the intertwined histories of blackface minstrelsy and Chinese labor. Her bold rereading of these authors’ contradictory positions on race and labor sees the figure of the Chinese worker as both hiding and making visible the legacy of slavery and antiblackness. Ultimately, The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery shows how the Chinese worker manifests the inextricable links between U.S. literature, slavery, and empire, as well as the indispensable role of antiblackness as a cultural form in the United States.
In your Introduction, you describe how White society differentiated between freed Black people and Chinese laborers during Reconstruction. Can you summarize why Chinese laborers were seen as the bigger “problem” for White society?
Almost immediately after the first sizable group of Chinese workers arrived in the United States to work on the mines after the discovery of gold in California in 1848, they were compared to enslaved Black people in the South. And the question regarding them was, are they free or not? During slavery, the employment of Chinese workers was justified using the logic that they were free. But during Reconstruction, in the historical moment when the United States was faced with the question of how to rethink race and slavery in the redefinition of citizenship, the Chinese were said to be capable of being neither free nor American. This was because they were now thought to be not only “slaves” – and would usher the United States back to slavery – but also indelibly foreign and antithetical to everything that was American. The logic was contradictory: the Chinese were thought to be “voluntarily servile” but also stubbornly set in their differences (religious, cultural, political, and so forth), and their inability to assimilate was said to be an active choice. Because of this racial thinking, Chinese workers were seen as a threat not just to all American workers – white and Black – but to the entire foundation of the United States, which justified their expulsion.
In your last chapter, you describe several examples of Black artists performing in yellowface in the late 1800s/early 1900s. Were there any differences in terms of the cultural meanings of Black and white performances of yellowface during this time?
Absolutely! The simple answer is that Black and white performers had differing relationships to the history of slavery and the structure of white supremacy. The minstrel form – whether it’s blackface or yellowface – is inseparable from that structure. Blackface minstrelsy originated during slavery, with the earliest staged performances in the early nineteenth century. Even though some scholars have argued that blackface minstrelsy, especially in the earlier days, was not strictly antiblack, it’s hard to deny that it was a cultural form that was inseparable from the racial logic of slavery, which deemed Black people to be commodities. Blackface minstrelsy made possible ownership of commodified Blackness to all white people – as performers and participants – regardless of their class standing. It was wildly popular all across the United States, and it found a footing in California immediately after the gold rush in 1849. The white minstrels incorporated yellowface performances of the Chinese soon thereafter.
As part of blackface shows, these performances extended the logic of rightful white ownership and appropriation of non-whiteness. These shows and theaters were highly segregated, and Black people were prohibited from them until after the Civil War. After emancipation, Black artists formed their own minstrel troupes. They found that blackface minstrelsy was one of the only cultural performance arts open to them, so many of the most famous and celebrated Black performers from the late 1800s/early 1900s got their start as minstrel performers. And some of those artists donned yellowface and performed as Chinese characters. These performances were decidedly different from white people performing in yellowface, which continued the racial logic of slavery. Some Black artists and Black reviewers of them also insisted that the Black yellowface performers were superior in their craft to their white counterparts, driving home not just the idea that the Black and white performers were different but also the validation of Black performers as artists who were putting their talent to use albeit with a form that was inextricable from the inequalities and violence that structured their lives.
In hypothetical terms, in the late 1800s, if the Chinese were allowed to become U.S. citizens and if Reconstruction had been expanded, do you think that freed Black people and Chinese workers would have been able to form some kind of minority coalition that would have strengthened both of their efforts at achieving racial equality?
This is such an interesting question. What would the United States look like today if there hadn’t been a Chinese Exclusion Act and if Reconstruction had lasted throughout the late nineteenth century? I’m guessing that the two things would have provoked extreme and violent white resistance, foremost in the West and the South. Would the Chinese and African Americans have banded together in response? Given the nineteenth-century understanding of race as biology and the belief in a racial hierarchy, I think a vigilant practice of a transformative, counter-dominant thinking that resisted the hierarchization of one group over another and formed a coalition would have been difficult, but not impossible.
In terms of how Asians and Asian Americans are treated in U.S. society today, what are some ways that anti-Asian and antiblack racisms operate separately, and in conjunction with each other?
The historical notion of Asians as perpetual foreigners persists today, and the outdated way of thinking about race along a black-white binary makes it seem that racist acts toward Asians are not racist at all. Some people may think that the current rampant anti-Asian racism due to the COVID-19 pandemic is simply an isolated reaction because the virus is associated with China, but it’s part of a longer history of anti-Asian racism in the United States (just as the Japanese American internment during WWII was not just wartime hysteria but part of a string of established legal sanctions against Japanese Americans on the West Coast well before the war). The message is that Asians are threats to the “American” (i.e. white people’s) enjoyment of the bounty of the United States because as foreigners, they inherently don’t have the right to access it. This racist idea is different from antiblackness, which stems from slavery and the devaluation of Black lives, which was the law of the land and was not overhauled during Reconstruction. Antiblackness deems that Black people inherently cannot be equals. Asians could be, but as outsiders, they don’t have the right. In this twisted logic, anti-Asian racism is a recognition of humanity. The racist sees the Asian person as an agent capable of action or threat, and there is some sort of assumed agency behind the Asian face (she is spreading the virus, she is loyal to China, etc.), which needs to be eradicated. But antiblackness annihilates Black humanity, as Black people are terrorized and killed simply for being.
How do you think blackface minstrelsy and Asian orientalism have evolved through the years and where do they stand today in the 21st century?
My book talks about how blackface minstrelsy was the most popular cultural form in the nineteenth-century United States, and that frenzied white enjoyment and appropriation of Blackness did not die down in the twentieth century but got incorporated into other forms like vaudeville shows, cartoons, movies, sitcoms, and so forth. In fact, we see its afterlife all around us today. There is a legion of white comedians who have donned blackface for “laughs”: Jimmy Fallon, Billy Crystal, Jimmy Kimmel, Sarah Silverman, and on and on. Politicians have done the same, and not just for humor, either. In these acts, we see how white supremacy is perpetuated through performances that get normalized as supposedly funny or harmless.
Some white people are finally starting to understand that blackface minstrelsy is racist, but I think we still have a long way to go before they see the real terror of donning blackface, which would involve truly understanding what slavery was and what it means to be white in this country. The idea that whiteness gives license to white people to be racist can be seen when it comes to Orientalist ways of thinking as well – that Asians are indelibly foreign and antithetical to anything “Western” or American – which also continue to persist in the twenty-first century United States, often with impunity. A recent example that comes to mind is the portrayal of Bruce Lee in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. In an overwhelmingly white movie with an obvious allusion to the 1984 film Once Upon a Time in America in the title, Lee is depicted as an arrogant blowhard who gets his comeuppance when he is beaten by Brad Pitt’s character. His brief insertion in the film only serves to justify his violent ejection, underscoring the idea that his non-whiteness has no place in an “American” past.
What are the chances that the Black and Asian American communities can forge closer ties and deeper racial solidarity going forward? What are the biggest obstacles standing in the way of achieving this goal?
I think the murder of George Floyd in May of this year, as well as numerous other Black lives that have been lost at the hand of the police and vigilantes, has made people realize the specific nature of antiblackness that is incomparable to other racisms. It’s been heartening to see Asian American activists and writers speaking out against and focusing on antiblackness as an Asian American issue. The deeply structural antiblack racism, which we see in stark numbers during the COVID-19 pandemic, deems that Black lives do not matter, and there are those who are only too eager to enforce that racism. Those people ardently believe in the current power structure and think the system is working. But there are also (self-proclaimed) non-racists who also believe the system is working. So I think the challenge is to recognize some of our deeply ingrained ideas about the United States, such as U.S. capitalism and its false tenet of meritocracy and U.S. nationalism that turns a blind eye to the colonialist and imperialist violence committed by the United States at home and abroad.
If you’re the nostalgic type, you might be interested to read the following posts from July of years past:
2010: Harmony and Community in Yosemite An interaction in Yosemite shows how a pine cone can act as a powerful symbol of cross-racial and -national unity.
2009: Reflections on a Multiracial Buddhist Retreat One of my most controversial posts — In an otherwise refreshing and renewing multiracial Buddhist family retreat, two incidents with racial overtones highlight unconscious racial dynamics still present in American society.
2007: New Forms of Assimilation Identifying an inclusive form of assimilation among Latinos and Asians in 21st century U.S. society.
2006: The State of Asian American Politics A new study describes the emerging political power of Asian Americans, both as political representatives and as a political constituency group.
2004: Jumping the Gun Racial paranoia fed by terrorist fears leads to a sad case of racial profiling.
2003: Abercombie & Fitch in Trouble Again Retailer Abercrombie & Fitch shows its true (White) colors once more as it’s accused of discriminating against people of color — again.
To commemorate and celebrate the contributions to our nation made by people of African descent, American historian Carter G. Woodson established Black History Week. The first celebration occurred on Feb. 12, 1926. For many years, the second week of February was set aside for this celebration to coincide with the birthdays of abolitionist/editor Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. In 1976, as part of the nation’s bicentennial, the week was expanded into Black History Month. Each year, U.S. presidents proclaim February as National African-American History Month.
41.8 million
As of July 1, 2009, the estimated population of black residents in the United States, including those of more than one race. They made up 13.6 percent of the total U.S. population. This figure represents an increase of more than a half-million residents from one year earlier.
38%
Percentage of Mississippi’s population that was black in 2009. Although New York had the largest number of blacks of any state, Mississippi had the largest share of blacks in its total population. Blacks also made up more than a quarter of the population in Louisiana (33%), Georgia (31%), Maryland (31%), South Carolina (29%) and Alabama (27%). They comprised 55% of the population in the District of Columbia.
19%
Percentage of blacks 25 and older who had a bachelor’s degree or higher in 2009.
11.5 million
Among blacks 25 and older, the number who had an advanced degree in 2009 (e.g., master’s, doctorate, medical or law). A decade earlier, in 1999, about 900,000 blacks had this level of education.
2.5 million
Number of black college students in fall 2008. This was roughly double the corresponding number from 25 years earlier.
55%
Turnout rate in the 2008 presidential election for the 18- to 24-year-old citizen black population, an 8 percent increase from 2004. Blacks had the highest turnout rate in this age group.
65%
Turnout rate among black citizens in the 2008 presidential election, up about 5 percentage points from 2004. Looking at voter turnout by race and Hispanic origin, non-Hispanic whites and blacks had the highest turnout levels.
$32,584
The annual median income of single-race black households in 2009, a decline of 4.4 percent (in 2009 constant dollars) from 2008.
28%
The percentage of single-race blacks 16 and older who worked in management, professional and related occupations.
$137.4 billion
Receipts for black-owned businesses in 2007, up 55.1 percent from 2002. The number of black-owned businesses totaled 1.9 million in 2007, up 60.5 percent.
As part of this blog’s mission of making academic research and data more easily accessible, understandable, and applicable to a wider audience and to practical, everyday social issues, I highlight new sociological books about Asian Americans and other racial/ethnic groups as I hear about them. A book’s inclusion is for informational purposes only and does not necessarily mean a full endorsement of its complete contents.
As we prepare to close May as Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, the following recently released books describe a wide and interesting range of experiences, contributions, and legacies that are part of Asian American heritage, and how this heritage fits into the larger American mainstream.
The collective term “Asian American” comprises more than twenty distinct nationalities and ethnic groups, and today there are more than 12 million Asian Pacific Americans living in the United States. In this all-new collection of fascinating interviews with students, lawyers, engineers, politicians, stay-at-home moms, and activists, Joann Faung Jean Lee again draws upon her great skill and sensitivity as a journalist to reveal a rich mosaic of Asian American identities.
We hear a range of voices: Dale Minami recounts his historic involvement in a landmark legal case that changed the way America understands the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II; Ruby Chow remembers how she used her position as a beloved restaurateur to launch a successful campaign for county councilwoman in Seattle, Washington; and Daniel Jung speaks of the complexities of African American and Korean relations in Los Angeles, where his father owned a liquor store when Daniel was a teenager in the 1990s.
Candid and compelling, the interviews reveal intimate and often conflicting thoughts about Asian American identities, immigration, family, relationships, and educational and professional achievement.
Encyclopedia of Asian American Issues Today is the first major reference work focused on the full expanse of contemporary Asian American experiences in the United States. Drawing on over two decades of research, it takes an unprecedented look at the major issues confronting the Asian American community as a whole, and the specific ethnic identities within that community — from established groups such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Americans to newer groups such as Cambodian and Hmong Americans.
Across two volumes, Encyclopedia of Asian American Issues Today offers 110 entries on the current state of affairs, controversies, successes, and outlooks for future for Asian Americans. The set is divided into 11 thematic sections including diversity and demographics; education; health; identity; immigrants, refugees, and citizenship; law; media; politics; war; work and economy; youth, family, and the aged. Contributors include leading experts in the fields of Asian American studies, education, public health, political science, law, economics, and psychology.
Los Angeles has attracted intense attention as a “world city” characterized by multiculturalism and globalization. Yet, little is known about the historical transformation of a place whose leaders proudly proclaimed themselves white supremacists less than a century ago. In The Shifting Grounds of Race, Scott Kurashige highlights the role African Americans and Japanese Americans played in the social and political struggles that remade twentieth-century Los Angeles.
Linking paradigmatic events like Japanese American internment and the Black civil rights movement, Kurashige transcends the usual “black/white” dichotomy to explore the multiethnic dimensions of segregation and integration. Racism and sprawl shaped the dominant image of Los Angeles as a “white city.” But they simultaneously fostered a shared oppositional consciousness among Black and Japanese Americans living as neighbors within diverse urban communities.
Kurashige demonstrates why African Americans and Japanese Americans joined forces in the battle against discrimination and why the trajectories of the two groups diverged. Connecting local developments to national and international concerns, he reveals how critical shifts in postwar politics were shaped by a multiracial discourse that promoted the acceptance of Japanese Americans as a “model minority” while binding African Americans to the social ills underlying the 1965 Watts Rebellion. Multicultural Los Angeles ultimately encompassed both the new prosperity arising from transpacific commerce and the enduring problem of race and class divisions.
This extraordinarily ambitious book adds new depth and complexity to our understanding of the “urban crisis” and offers a window into America’s multiethnic future.
Arkansas, 1943. The Deep South during the heart of Jim Crow-era segregation. A Japanese-American person boards a bus, and immediately is faced with a dilemma. Not white. Not black. Where to sit?
By elucidating the experience of interstitial ethnic groups such as Mexican, Asian, and Native Americans—groups that are held to be neither black nor white — Leslie Bow explores how the color line accommodated — or refused to accommodate — “other” ethnicities within a binary racial system. Analyzing pre- and post-1954 American literature, film, autobiography, government documents, ethnography, photographs, and popular culture, Bow investigates the ways in which racially “in-between” people and communities were brought to heel within the South’s prevailing cultural logic, while locating the interstitial as a site of cultural anxiety and negotiation.
Spanning the pre- to the post- segregation eras, Partly Colored traces the compelling history of “third race” individuals in the U.S. South, and in the process forces us to contend with the multiracial panorama that constitutes American culture and history.
Kang explores cultural citizenship and immigrant community identity development in the International District (ID) of Seattle, WA. She investigates the particular social, political, and historical contexts within which a “multi-ethnic Asian American community” identity arose.
She finds that the ID as a subject is produced and sustained not through a singular identity but through multiple and contingent discourses of history, contribution, and change. Similarly, it is constructed through a constant processes of engagement, contestation and negotiation between the community and the various larger social and political structures of society, as well as among community members. The results suggest that it may be possible for immigrant subjects to alter the discourses that constitute them by generating counter-discourses.
Understanding the history of Asians in America is key to understanding the development of America itself. Asian American Chronology: Chronologies of the American Mosaic presents the most influential events in Asian American history as well as key moments that have remained under the historical radar. This in-depth record covers events from the 18th century to the present day, including the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.
Entries, organized chronologically by category, allow readers to trace the development of Asian peoples and culture in the United States over time, including the role of Chinese labor in building railroads, the importation of Filipino slaves, labor strikes and civil rights issues, Japanese-American internment, women’s roles, literature, music, politics, and increased immigration in the mid-20th century.
In addition to these broad topics, the book also treats individual events from the Rock Springs Massacre to the Gold Rush to the current prevalence of Japanese players in Major League Baseball.
As we continue to commemorate February as Black/African American History Month, we should recognize that throughout American history, religion has played a very powerful and important role in the Black community. More recently, the issue of religion among African Americans became prominent news in this past election, evidenced by the controversy regarding Barack Obama’s association with Reverend Jeremiah Wright and how many gay/lesbians expressed resentment and anger toward the Black community for their overwhelming support of Proposition 8 that led to the reversal of same sex marriage in California.
Since these two events seem to be located at different ends of the political spectrum, this should prompt us to understand in more detail the characteristics and complexities of religion among African Americans. Toward that end, the Pew Research Center, Forum on Religion and Public Life, has released a new study entitled, “A Religious Portrait of African Americans.” Some excerpts:
African-Americans are markedly more religious on a variety of measures than the U.S. population as a whole, including level of affiliation with a religion, attendance at religious services, frequency of prayer and religion’s importance in life. . . . [N]early eight-in-ten African-Americans (79%) say religion is very important in their lives, compared with 56% among all U.S. adults. . . .
Compared with other groups, African-Americans express a high degree of comfort with religion’s role in politics. In fact, . . . African-Americans tend to closely resemble white evangelical Protestants on that score, with roughly six-in-ten among both groups saying that churches should express their views on social and political topics, and roughly half saying that there has been too little expression of faith and prayer by political leaders. . . .
According to Pew Research Center surveys conducted in the summer of 2008, nearly two-thirds of African-Americans (64%) say they oppose allowing gays and lesbians to marry legally, a significantly higher level of opposition than among whites (51%). . . .
Regardless of their religious background, African-Americans overwhelmingly support the Democratic Party. . . . Three-quarters of all African-Americans (76%) describe themselves as Democrats or say they lean toward the Democratic Party, while just 10% favor the Republicans. . . . This unity of partisanship among African-Americans carries over into the voting booth, where they have voted overwhelmingly for Democratic presidential candidates in recent elections (95% for Barack Obama in 2008 and 88% for John Kerry in 2004).
So on the surface, these findings about religion among African Americans may seem rather contradictory, at least from a political point of view. Specifically, it is understandable that African Americans tend to be more religious than the general population and as a direct result of that, they overwhelmingly oppose same sex marriage.
But with that in mind, how can it be that African Americans are also consistently and overwhelmingly Democratic in terms of political identification? In other words, how can a group be so strongly opposed to same sex marriage but at the same time, so strongly support the political party that tends to favor same sex marriage?
There is likely a variety of reasons for this apparent paradox, but my purpose here is not to delve into them in great detail, nor to explore the morality of the opinion among many African Americans in opposition to same sex marriage — other academics and commentators have much more expertise than me in that regard.
Instead, I would just point out that this phenomenon shows us that the African American community is not simplistic and unidimensional. Rather, it is quite complex and even at times, contradictory. In this sense, it is much like the White population, the Asian American population, the Latino population, and pretty much all kinds of human social groups.
That is, much of American society can be accurately categorized and predictable but on the other hand, much can also be quite contradictory and confusing at times as well. In either case, studies like this should prompt us to look beyond simple generalizations and instead, to recognize and examine the multiple dimensions of characteristics, experiences, and attitudes among African Americans or any other racial, ethnic, or cultural group in contemporary American society.
