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"Ellen D. Wu"
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The color of success
The Color of Successtells of the astonishing transformation of Asians in the United States from the \"yellow peril\" to \"model minorities\"--peoples distinct from the white majority but lauded as well-assimilated, upwardly mobile, and exemplars of traditional family values--in the middle decades of the twentieth century. As Ellen Wu shows, liberals argued for the acceptance of these immigrant communities into the national fold, charging that the failure of America to live in accordance with its democratic ideals endangered the country's aspirations to world leadership.
Weaving together myriad perspectives, Wu provides an unprecedented view of racial reform and the contradictions of national belonging in the civil rights era. She highlights the contests for power and authority within Japanese and Chinese America alongside the designs of those external to these populations, including government officials, social scientists, journalists, and others. And she demonstrates that the invention of the model minority took place in multiple arenas, such as battles over zoot suiters leaving wartime internment camps, the juvenile delinquency panic of the 1950s, Hawaii statehood, and the African American freedom movement. Together, these illuminate the impact of foreign relations on the domestic racial order and how the nation accepted Asians as legitimate citizens while continuing to perceive them as indelible outsiders.
By charting the emergence of the model minority stereotype,The Color of Successreveals that this far-reaching, politically charged process continues to have profound implications for how Americans understand race, opportunity, and nationhood.
eBook
It's Time to Center War in U.S. Immigration History
War is central to U.S. immigration history. Yet too often that fact has been obscured by folktales that rhapsodize about the feel-good Ellis Island story: lured by the American Dream, strangers come to a promised land, put down roots, and triumph over adversity through industry, resolve, and pluck.
Journal Article
\Smoke and Mirrors\: Conditional Inclusion, Model Minorities, and the Pre-1965 Dismantling of Asian Exclusion
Hsu and Wu talk about Dalip Singh Saund who sets several precedents in American history. Most famously, the Punjab native defeated five opponents to gain election to the US House of Representatives in 1956. Twice re-elected to represent California's 29th Congressional district, he earned the distinction of being the first Sikh, Indian American, and Asian American to hold national office.
Journal Article
Race and Retail
Race has long shaped shopping experiences for many Americans. Retail exchanges and establishments have made headlines as flashpoints for conflict not only between blacks and whites, but also between whites, Mexicans, Asian Americans, and a wide variety of other ethnic groups, who have at times found themselves unwelcome at white-owned businesses.
Race and Retaildocuments the extent to which retail establishments, both past and present, have often catered to specific ethnic and racial groups. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the original essays collected here explore selling and buying practices of nonwhite populations around the world and the barriers that shape these habits, such as racial discrimination, food deserts, and gentrification. The contributors highlight more contemporary issues by raising questions about how race informs business owners' ideas about consumer demand, resulting in substandard quality and higher prices for minorities than in predominantly white neighborhoods. In a wide-ranging exploration of the subject, they also address revitalization and gentrification in South Korean and Latino neighborhoods in California, Arab and Turkish coffeehouses and hookah lounges in South Paterson, New Jersey, and tourist capoeira consumption in Brazil.
Race and Retaililluminates the complex play of forces at work in racialized retail markets and the everyday impact of those forces on minority consumers. The essays demonstrate how past practice remains in force in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.
eBook
“America's Chinese”: Anti-Communism, Citizenship, and Cultural Diplomacy during the Cold War
With the onset of the Cold War, the federal government became concerned with the impact that the status and treatment of Chinese Americans as a racial minority in American society had on perceptions of the United States among populations in the Asian Pacific. As a response, the State Department's cultural diplomacy campaigns targeting the Pacific Rim used Chinese Americans, including Betty Lee Sung (writer for the Voice of America) and Jade Snow Wong and Dong Kingman (artists who conducted lectures and exhibitions throughout Asia). By doing so, the government legitimated Chinese Americans' long-standing claims to full citizenship in new and powerful ways. But the terms on which Chinese Americans served as representatives of the nation and the state—as racial minorities and as “Overseas Chinese”—also worked to reproduce their racial otherness and mark them as “non-white” and foreign, thus compromising their gains in social standing.
Journal Article
Chinatown Offers Us a Lesson
Trouble punctuated two San Francisco Bay Area Chinese American youth gatherings in February 1949. The sudden appearance of a “gang” at a party hosted by San Mateo’s Chinese Youth Organization sparked a melee as the group forced its way into the crowd. President Frank Lee reported being assaulted at knifepoint. The uninvited visitors fled the scene before police arrived. Just days later, a second fight erupted at the Oakland Rollerland Rink.¹
The outbursts prompted a flood of responses from the ethnic community. TheChinese Presschided the instigators for “shatter[ing] in a day” the “goodwill” amassed by San Mateo’s Chinese
Book Chapter
Success Story, Japanese American Style
Since JACL’s inception, its leaders had intuitively grasped the intimate connection between knowledge and power. This correlation became especially clear during World War II and afterward, when the organization waged its campaign to rescue both Japanese American citizenship and the league’s own repute. Through the invention of the iconic Nisei soldier, JACL had shaped a new racial knowledge about its community. The convincing martial patriotism strategy had enabled JACL to tighten its hegemony over Nikkei. Still, JACL leaders did not feel totally secure in either regard. The anti-Japanese hostilities that had flared up in the tense moments of US-Japan postwar
Book Chapter
Leave Your Zoot Suits Behind
Some 275 young people converged at Chicago’s Ashland Auditorium on Saturday evening, November 20, 1943, to attend the Reminiscent Dance of Relocation Days. The soiree was billed as the area’s first large-scale public event exclusively catering to second-generation Japanese Americans. All were recent arrivals to the Midwest, having left the WRA’s internment camps as participants in the federal government’s resettlement program, and eager to reunite with old friends and forge new acquaintanceships. A palpable tension marred the highly anticipated affair, however, as Nisei zoot-suiters, commonly referred to as “pachuke” and “yogore,” appeared in droves. Noticing the “sneers on the faces
Book Chapter
How American Are We?
The experience of World War II could not have been more starkly different for Japanese and Chinese Americans. Configured as enemy aliens, Nikkei endured mass removal, internment, the effective nullification of their citizenship, and a coercive dispersal.¹ The Chinese, by contrast, enjoyed sounder social footing as a result of their real and presumed ties to China, the nation’s partner in the Pacific War against Japan. Thousands of Chinatown residents left the ethnic economy for the first time to take up arms and fill positions in the defense industry. Like never before, the prospect of attaining full acceptance and equality seemed
Book Chapter