8Asians | An Asian American collaborative blog

In the discussions of racism and its impact in the United States, people often commonly refer to the racial relationships between White and Black Americans. In history textbooks, we study in depth the discriminatory practices and laws perpetrated by Whites and Blacks through slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration. In modern political debates, we speak of reparations and affirmative actions to equal the glaring disparities between these two races. It’s easy to focus on the obvious forms of inequality between them, but in doing so, we tend to forget how racism impacts other minority races in America. Today, we may not think of Asian Americans as being discriminated against or being treated unfairly by American society – after all, we Asians have the highest rates of education, the highest household income, and tend to live very affluent lives in the US, even compared to White Americans. Asians have become what is known as the “model minority”, a term given to us to illustrate how historically oppressed minorities can “pull themselves up by the bootstraps” and achieve educational and financial success if they choose to do so. This term is often weaponized against other minorities, particularly Black and Hispanic groups, as a way of proving how anyone can make it in America, regardless of their historical background. I will first explore the theories of racism by DuBois, Itzigsohn & Brown, and Fields & Fields; demonstrate how these terms apply and affect Asian Americans throughout US history; and explore how modern Asians are caught between the model minority myth and xenophobic rhetoric.

Firstly, we must analyze the theories surrounding race and how they impact oppressed demographics. Sociologists Itzigsohn & Brown, in their book, The Sociology of W.E.B. DuBois: Racialized Modernity and the Global Color Line, explain DuBois’s theory of racialized modernity as a critique of how modernity, a generally progressive term used to refer to the contemporary historical period, is tied to colonialism and its related racial division. During DuBois’s life, from 1868-1963, he witnessed colonialism in Africa, the invention of whiteness, and the global oppression of entire societies based on racial lines. It is along these racial lines that White colonizers were able to subject their will and power over the other races they invented and oppressed, among them Asians and Asian Americans.

DuBois coined the term “racialized subjectivity” to refer to how people understand and feel about themselves through a racialized perspective, often perpetrated by White people. The color line, “the division of people according to racial classifications,” is the centerpiece of how racism is enacted upon marginalized groups. By dividing people based on race, and applying stereotypes or expectations onto those races, White people are able to subject them to inhumane treatment while justifying their actions; Black people were viewed as inherently inferior and needing the guidance of the White man to civilize them, which acted as justification for centuries of slavery. For Asian Americans, White people depicted them as savages, rat eaters, and living in crowded and dirty conditions that warranted them second-class citizenship in the US, if they even got to become a citizen at the time. This justified multiple acts of violence and massacres in Asian communities, as well as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Denis Kearney, a labor leader in California, utilized these racist sentiments to portray his support for the Exclusion Act – “These cheap slaves fill every place. Their dress is scant and cheap. Their food is rice from China. They hedge twenty in a room, ten by ten. They are wipped curs, abject in docility, mean, contemptible and obedient in all things.” Here, it is exemplified how the color line, which divides people based on race and applies inaccurate stereotypes through a White man’s perspective, allows racism to be put into action through policy based on these classifications. Though African Americans and Freed Blacks at the time faced tremendous inequality and discrimination, Asian Americans faced none the better.

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