Music is a Choice!

In the United States, race has become a way to define and group people. Since racializations change according to the economic and political needs of the country, race can be viewed as a political technology. While it can be a way for communities to form and bond over shared histories and experiences, it can also cause separation between racial groups and create a sense of otherness.  As the political and economic landscape of the United States change, so do racializations and the cultural and group identities they create. Asian-American racializations change from “yellow peril” to efficient labor and the legal status of Asian immigrants evolve according to the economic and social demands of the United States.

Racial Formation

Michael Omi and Howard Winant claim “that in the United States, race is a master category” because of its fundamental role in shaping American politics and society (1986, 106). Race both affects and is affected by the evolution of American politics, economics, and culture. According to Lisa Lowe, “in the United States, not only class but also the historically sedimented particularities of race, national origin, locality, and embodiment remain largely invisible within the political sphere” (1996, 2). As racial minorities form, race can be understood as a way of “othering” and maintaining a class of power and, “because race is located on the body, it has proved a convenient means of rule” (Omi and Winant 2014, 247). The concept of “othering” through racialization has formed through a national identity born from settler colonialism. As white Europeans colonized and settled the United States, “masculine whiteness thus became central to settler identity, a status closely tied to ownership of property and political sovereignty” (Glenn 2015, 60). Although minorities are the victims of racial othering, they can also be recognized as contributing to the system that works against them because the “survival strategies and resistance to white supremacy are set by the system of white supremacy itself” (Smith 2016, 69).

Racial categories confine people to the racializations associated with that group and allow the racial majority to maintain its power while creating a sense of community based on racial identity. This contradiction can be understood by viewing race as “a concept that signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies,” because, while race is a social construct, it is also affected by visual similarities and differences made between human figures and the groupings made by these observations (Omi and Winant 1986, 110). Since race plays a significant role in one’s social and political experiences, a racial group will have shared experiences that can create a sense of community and support. Race in itself is not a harmful concept, however, it is the hierarchies that it creates that produce the harmful effects of “othering,” because “racial hierarchy and inequality are not simply the products of individual beliefs and attitudes but are built into American social structure and that whites have historically benefited from racial inequality” (Glenn 2015, 67). 

Asian Immigration and Citizenship

Immigration Policies and Chinese Laborers

The history of Asian immigration into the United States has been full of exclusionary policies and underpaid labor that has been looked down upon and condemned. Although their history has been subject to erasure, Asians were already present in America as working immigrants. Asian workers were deemed expendable and “for a long time, Asians in this country were not allowed to tell their stories, sometimes even to talk,” because rather than being viewed as humans, they were viewed as machines. Asian-Americans were viewed as machines as they were “only valued due to the lack of value assigned to their labor” (Ng 2020, 10). Politically, the allowance of Asian immigrants into the United States “operated within an economic context” as “Asian immigrants came here to meet demands for labor” (Takaki 1989, 13). When the economy demanded more cheap labor, Asian immigration policies were looser, and when the culturally white majority of the United States demanded that the economy only use already existing, white citizens and immigrants, Asian immigration policies became stricter. 

Asian-American laborers helped build the Transcontinental Railroad in the 1800s and filled positions deemed low class by the white American majority such as laundry workers, servants, and miners. These service jobs that Chinese men filled were considered to be “feminized” work, thus, “Chinese male immigrants could be said to occupy, before 1940, a ‘feminized’ position in relation to white male citizens” (Lowe 1996, 11). Chinese men were portrayed as “‘Chinamen’ doing ‘women’s work’,” effectively emasculating and belittling Chinese laborers (Glenn 2015, 66). These Asian immigrants were “‘pulled’ here by America’s demand for their labor,” however, as the demand decreased, policies preventing the immigration of new immigrants and the naturalized citizenship of current ones increased. Furthermore, white employers utilized “ethnic antagonism” in the form of a “dual-wage system (that paid) Asian laborers less than white workers and pitted the groups against each other in order to depress wages for both,” creating a fear that Asian immigrants are “stealing” jobs away from white Americans, increasing the cultural demand for harsher immigration restrictions (Takaki 1989, 13). 

While white European immigrants still suffered the challenges of immigrating and adapting to a foreign nation, many Asian immigrants were unable to truly become citizens both politically and culturally. As the political climate of America began to deem Asians as “aliens ineligible for citizenship,” the existing Asian immigrants began to be increasingly judged as foreigners. Asian-Americans were unable to feel truly American in the same way that white immigrants and citizens were, and, because they “brought Asian cultures rather than the traditions and ideas originating in the Greco-Roman world” and “had qualities they could not change or hide,” they were unable to physically or culturally assimilate (Takaki 1989, 13). As Lisa Lowe explains in Immigrant Acts, “this distance from the national culture constitutes Asian American culture as an alternative formation that produces cultural expressions materially and aesthetically at odds with the resolution of the citizen in the nation” (1996, 6). Compared to European immigrants, Asian immigrants were easy to physically recognize and racialize, and because “racializing certain groups as insufficiently human serves to justify subjecting them to oppression, subordination, and super-exploitation,” they were regarded as cheap and replaceable labor (Glenn 2015, 70).

Beginning in the 1800s, “the American citizen has been defined over against the Asian immigrant legally, economically, and culturally,” placing Asian immigrants in an odd space as “these definitions have cast Asian immigrants both as persons and populations to be integrated into the national political sphere and as the contradictory, confusing, unintelligible elements to be marginalized and returned to their alien origins” (Lowe 1996, 2). The Page Act of 1875 is considered to be the first restrictive federal immigration law, banning the entry of Chinese female immigrants, preventing the formation of families, and effectively decreasing the likelihood of Chinese male immigrants staying in the United States and the subsequent generations that would have been produced. The Immigration Act of 1924 set up quotas for all immigrants, excluding Asian immigrants, who were not able to immigrate at all. This act introduced “the illegal alien as a new legal and political subject, whose inclusion within the nation was simultaneously a social reality and a legal impossibility” (Ngai 2004, 4). The Immigration Act of 1924 deemed Asians as ineligible for naturalized citizenship, thus deeming them as an unwanted racial group within the United States. 

Despite Asian-Americans’ contributions to the development of the United States, they were often restricted from obtaining citizenship since “in a political system constituted by the historical exclusion and labor of racialized groups, the promise of inclusion through citizenship and rights cannot resolve the material inequities of racialized exploitation” (Lowe 1996, 23). Those who were able to become American citizens, faced social ostracization because of how closely race was tied to the conception of citizenship. Asian-Americans were considered to be “persons who are American citizens by virtue of their birth in the US but who are also presumed to be foreign by mainstream American culture and at times, by the state,” making it difficult for immigrants to assimilate to American society. These “racial formations produced ‘alien citizens’,” complicating the position of Asian-Americans and Asian immigrants as somewhere between an American citizen and an unwanted outsider to this day. 

World War II and Japanese Incarceration

Already culturally outcasted by the 1930s, Asian-Americans began to face new racializations brought about during World War II. Executive Order 9066 of 1942 incarcerated Japanese-Americans in internment camps regardless of their citizenship status. Japanese-Americans faced a contradiction in their political freedoms because they were “nominally recognized as citizens and hence recruited into the U.S. military, yet were dispossessed of freedoms and properties explicitly granted to citizens,” and “officially condemned as ‘racial enemies’” (Lowe 1996, 8). Both socially and politically, there was the “implication that ‘they’, the Japanese North Americans, are the same as ‘they’, the nation of Japan,” equating racial identity to nationality in the case of Asian-Americans (Thiesmeyer 1995, 330). Rather than citizens of the United States, Asian-Americans were seen only in regards to their ethnic origin. 

The differences in the affects of racializations between European-Americans and Asian-Americans become obvious. As Ronald T. Takaki explains, “unlike German Americans and Italian Americans, Japanese Americans were incarcerated in internment camps by the federal government,” politically bolstering the racialized fears of the American public. Japanese-Americans faced the culmination of decades of racializations and social ostracization when they became the black sheeps of wartime America.The ways in which the media and political figures during World War II discussed the position of Japanese-Americans has “stylistic and lexical features [that] also include euphemism (used to mask a racist attitude) and its opposite, the lexicon of fear, which heightens racist attitudes” (Thiesmeyer 1995, 325). Therefore, by incarcerating Japanese-Americans and using language that portrays them as dangerous “enemy aliens,” the societal fears of the “yellow peril” were politically legitimized and it was established that within the United States, “race was a matter of blood, not formal citizenship” (Kim 1999, 116). In this way, Japanese-Americans, while legally citizens of the United States, were not socially considered American.

Changing Racialization in Modern Times

The Yellow Peril

The “yellow peril” ideology portrays Asian immigrants as an invasive and destructive force that threatens Western civilization. In the United States, the ideology gained popularity with the arrival of immigrant Chinese laborers in the 1800s. White American laborers viewed these immigrants as threatening replacements in the workforce and, “when the smallpox epidemic broke out in San Francisco in 1876, local health officials depicted Chinese immigrants as contagious diseases and Chinatown as the main site of urban decay” (Wu and Nguyen 2022, 1). 

Asian-Americans are unable to remove themselves from their ethnic origins, exemplified during World War II, as in the United States, “Whites continued to view Japanese immigrants and their descendants as the enemy within, harbingers of the ‘yellow peril’ posed by Japan’s steady ascendance during the prewar period” (Kim 1999, 116). The distrust of Japanese-Americans was justified by claiming that “the Order is being issued either because espionage or sabotage are underway, or because there are persons capable of performing such acts within the US” (Thiesmeyer 1995, 326). Asian-Americans took up a complicated position in American society because “from WW2 onward, ‘Asia’ has emerged as a particularly complicated ‘double front’ of threat and encroachment for the US: on the one hand, Asian states have become prominent as external rivals in overseas imperial war and in the global economy, and on the other, Asian immigrants are still necessary racialized labor force within the domestic national economy” (Lowe 1996, 5). Due to “their ‘strangeness’ stands out more sharply as they settle down in new land” and “their experiences here, as they turned out in historical reality, were profoundly different from the experiences of European immigrants,” Asian-Americans were deemed an invasive group (Takaki 1989, 12). 

More recently, the Covid-19 pandemic has reignited the “yellow peril” ideology. The idea that Asian-Americans are the cause of the Covid-19 pandemic and a threat to public health is a manifestation of the belief that “regardless of whether they were born in the United States, Asians are loyal to other nations” and that “Asians, in this sense, are not truly ‘American,’ and therefore, cannot be trusted” (Nicholson Jr. 2021, 6). This also renewed and strengthened the belief that Chinese and other Asians have “‘unhygienic’ or ‘immoral’ eating practices,” therefore, making the dangerous and evil foreigners that are a threat to the culture of the United States (Nicholson Jr. 2021, 6). Despite Asian-Americans’ status as legal and cultural Americans, many were subject to racist remarks and hate crimes, born from the belief that they do not belong in America. Asian

The Model Minority

Asian-Americans have increasingly entered the technological workforce. They are favored as model minorities, yet, they still face racial discrimination because “despite high socioeconomic and academic achievement, Asian Americans are often seen as unfit for leadership roles, assumed to possess personality traits better suited to being individual contributors than people managers and business executives” (Chow 2023, 129). Asian workers are excluded from positions of power because they are believed to “suffer from ‘personality’ penalties during the hiring process, and lack the social networks that would enable successful hiring or advancement in ‘mainstream’ or white organizations” (Chow 2023, 130). The expectations of racial groups are a product of society’s racial hierarchies, and “racial hierarchy and inequality are not simply the products of individual beliefs and attitudes but are built into American social structure and that whites have historically benefited from racial inequality” (Glenn 2015, 67). The model minority myth seems to be a racialization tha benefits Asian-Americans, however, it continues America’s history of “othering” Asians as it “suggests that Asian Americans are too busy getting ahead and making money to worry about politics, thus echoing the old trope of Asian American apoliticalness,” and dismisses Asian-Americans as an outsider group that only serves as efficient and hard-working labor. 

This belief that Asians are nothing more than efficient and diligent workers separates them from the social climate of the United States because “The notion of ‘visibility’ which is frequently used by American writers clearly expresses the distinctive, differential value of this particular kind of social capital” (Bourdieu 1975, 26). At the same time, Asian-Americans are pitted against Black Americans with the idea that “Blacks have failed in American society due to their own deficiencies: after all, if Asian Americans can make it, why can’t Blacks?” (Kim 1999, 118). However, “the valorization of Asian Americans as a model minority who have made it on their own cultural steam only to be victimized by the “reverse discrimination” of race-conscious programs allows Whites […] to reassert their racial privilege while abiding by norms of colorblindness,” while Asian-Americans are left to deal with the consequences of being racialized as the privileged model minority (Kim 1999, 117). By deeming the model minority myth to be a “good racialization,” the White racial majority is able to justify racist beliefs and, by pitting racial minorities against each other, the idea that race no longer has an effect in society is perpetuated. 

The model minority myth is a modern interpretation of the robotic Asian. Asian-American workers are not valued as leaders or innovators, but rather efficient and diligent machines. In this way, “like a machine, Asian bodies are not inherently valued–only valued for their labor and their economic contributions” (Ng 2020, 11). Asian-Americans are considered to be successful in the workforce and school systems because of the perception that they only focus on working and turning in successful work. Rather than being valued for creative or revolutionary works, their labor is “reduced to merely being a means of production” (Ng 2020, 14). 

Conclusion

Asians are racialized according to the economic, political, and social needs of the United States. As the needs change, so do the legal and social statuses of Asian-Americans. During times of economic growth, Asian immigrants are racialized as hardworking and efficient machines, and in times of social, economic, or political turmoil, Asians are racialized as invasive and dangerous. Compared to European immigrants, Asian immigrants are physically distinguishable from the white majority and they bring a culture of different origins. Due to these obvious differences, Asians are easily racialized and “othered.”  In this way, race is a political technology.