Anti-Chinese propaganda from 1886 during the Chinese Exclusion Act Era.
MECHANICSVILLE, Va. (Oct. 6, 2023) — I grew up a mixed-race kid in the waning days of Jim Crow in Louisiana. The Vietnam War was raging. Anti-Asian sentiment ran high, and the racists I grew up around made no distinction between the Vietnamese we were fighting and any other East Asian group when it came to expressing their hate. I often heard my Asian brethren disparaged—in the early 1960s, being part Chinese was enough to get my mom and I threatened with death if my dad didn’t remove us from Louisiana.
We didn’t leave.
Fortunately for us, folks didn’t know about my mom’s and my African ancestry. (For that matter, we didn’t either as my great-grandmother did a great job of passing as something else.) If folks had known that we were black, too, they would have done more than threaten us—as they did when they shot up the home of a black family that tried to move into our neighborhood in the 1970s.
In fact, according to Louisiana law—twice confirmed as constitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court—I was legally black until 1983. If the state had known what folks in Dayton, Ohio, knew, the state could have and probably would have identified me as such in all public records. It didn’t matter that I could pass for only white (not that I would have wanted to). Notions such as the “one-drop rule” had so permeated our society and legal norms of the time that all that mattered to the state and society at large was the amount of racial “pollution” that made me less of a person that someone of solely European ancestry.[1]
Critical race theory seems to me as being sold by horrific conservatives to horrified conservatives as just another liberal conspiracy designed to make white people uncomfortable. But really, it is just a theoretical viewpoint that posits the following: 1) racism is the rule, not the exception; 2) because racism advances the interests of the dominant group, there is little incentive for members of that group to fight it; 3) that the concept of race is a social construct; 4) different minority groups experience racism in different ways and to different degrees (Delgado and Stefanic 2023, 8-11).
Racism was the rule in Louisiana where I grew up. It was so much a part of the environment that I absorbed some elements—and was (and am) appalled when some of those internalized prejudices pop up from the depths. It certainly advanced the interests of the dominant group. Whites terrorized minorities, chasing minorities to the margins of the economy and society while the white majority reaped the benefits of unchallenged political and economic power. While there may be biological differences among groups of humans, race itself is a social concept (Lawrence 2004). I can vouch for the differential experience of racism. At times, I feel as if I am not enough of any of my ancestral groups to be counted as a member in them. It can be frustrating to be treated as an outsider by one’s fellow outsiders.
Because of that outsider status, I grew up never feeling safe. The main threat and the main offender was the dominant group: whites. I grew up stuffing my anger at repeatedly hearing white people’s low opinion of folks with my other ancestries. Silence was preferable to a violently shortened existence. But, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve found it harder to keep silent, especially in these days of widespread “Make America Great Again” propaganda.
Langston Hughes put it more politely in his poem than I generally do. Here is a sample from his opening lines (Hughes 2023):
Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be. Let it be the pioneer on the plain Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
Hughes echoed the way I’ve felt for decades before I (belatedly but gratefully) discovered his poetry. He speaks for me when he says that “America never was America to me.” Some of my African ancestors—whose unfree labor made possible vast fortunes for the white ruling class—found “America” only by fleeing to Canada via the Underground Railroad. They formed part of a former slave community, Queens Bush, in what is now Peel Township, Ontario (Brown-Kubisch 2004).
But even there, the promise of equality was denied them when the white-led government of Canada, realizing the value of the land those former slave ancestors cleared by hand, set the price of the land so high that they could not afford it when the land was made available to purchase (Brown-Kubisch 2004). My African ancestors were forced to move on, eventually ending up back in the United States in Michigan. Some lived not far from where Malcolm Little, aka Malcolm X, grew up (and where his father died).
In 1960, my father and my mother could not have gotten legally married in many states—such as Louisiana—because of anti-miscegenation laws. My mother had two problems: 1) she was African American, but no one knew of that ancestry at the time; and 2) she was Chinese American, which people knew. Louisiana was one of fourteen U.S. states that prohibited marriages between whites and “Mongoloid” persons (Browning 1951). By Louisiana law, my parent’s marriage was “null and void” and “of no effect;” I was an illegitimate child; and my parents, if tried, could have been convicted of a felony (Browning 1951).
The prosecution of Richard and Mildren Loving exposed the thinking of the many who supported such laws. The trial judge, acting on a belief that his racism was both natural and right and echoing the beliefs of many of my friends who cited Biblical passages they claimed justified racial segregation, wrote:
“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.” [Loving v. Virginia 388 (US) 1]
Fortunately for my parents, they met on an Air Force Base in Massachusetts, a state that had no such laws, and married there. Vagueness in the Louisiana law may have protected them from prosecution somewhat (but not from threatening phone calls in the middle of the night.) Until the Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virginia in 1967, they could have presumably been ordered to leave Louisiana or face jail time, much as Richard and Mildred Loving were threatened with in Virginia.
My Chinese ancestors knew all about discrimination, too. With the passage of the Page Act of 1975 and the Chinese Exclusion Acts in 1882, the Chinese became the first group denied legal immigration to the United States (Abrams 2005):
Whereas, in the opinion of the Government of the United States the coming of Chinese laborers to this country endangers the good order of certain localities within the territory thereof: Therefore, be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That from and after the expiration of ninety days next after the passage of this act, and until the expiration of ten years next after the passage of this act, the coming of Chinese laborers to the United States be, and the same is hereby, suspended; and during such suspension it shall not be lawful for any Chinese laborer to come, or, having so come after the expiration of said ninety days, to remain within the United States. (U.S. Congress 1882)
My great-great grandfather, Yee Kim Wo, came to this country about the same time the Page Act was passed. My great-grandfather, Yee Jock Leong, was born in San Francisco in 1884, thus by birthright an American citizen. But, as a result of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, he was treated to detention and interrogation before being allowed entry back into the United States after trips to China. He has a pretty substantial Exclusion Act file, viewable to all, at the National Archives in San Bruno, California. The transcripts show he was treated like a criminal—all because he tried to return to the land of his birth. Few of European descent faced such scrutiny as the Chinese upon entering the United States.
Despite the documented persecution, many people still wonder why African Americans and other minorities are angry. They seem constitutionally incapable of understanding what people like Kimberly Jones and Angela Davis have to say. Both Jones and Davis expressed their anger with fire and eloquence. I express mine with just as much fire, with less eloquence and usually more profanity. Like Howard Beale, I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.
A few years ago, I ended what had been one of my oldest friendships, one that went back to preschool. This friend had a noticeable tendency to do what he needed to do to align himself with those at the top of the social heap. One of the ways he did it was by humor, which was fine.
But another way he did it was to sidle up to the bullies and join them in their persecution of the kids who weren’t cool enough to qualify for the group. He was like that in elementary school. He was like that in high school. Unfortunately, he was still like that when we were well into our 50s. He was politically conservative and, as long as the conservatives were getting away with their rampant oppression of minorities, he was happy.
I sure as hell wasn’t happy.
As I stated above, I can pass for white, but I identify with my Asian and African ancestors—and I’m never going to sell them out for a comfortable chameleonic existence among the dominant white in-group. In one of our arguments—it may have been about Black Lives Matter—I was defending the “out” group and he said, “But you’re white!”
Sure, my skin is lighter toned, and I certainly have a majority European ancestry, but I feel the presence of and embrace all my ancestral threads. I have clear documentation of white oppression of my non-white ancestors (especially that nice, thick Chinese Exclusion Act dossier on my Chinese great-grandfather).
When I see all that my non-white ancestors had to endure at the hands of the white majority, I see much of what critical race theorists have tried to expose, especially widespread racism and little incentive of the dominant group to correct it. Worse, I see the dominant group all-too-often portraying itself as the victim. America has fallen far short of its ideals that “all men (and women) are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
I agree with Langston Hughes. America has yet to be America to me. It got close, but in the MAGA era, it seems to be slipping farther and farther away.
Editor’s Note: This piece was originally written for an American literature class at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College on Oct. 6, 2023.
Brown-Kubisch, Linda. 2004. The Queen’s Bush Settlement: Black Pioneers 1839-1865. Toronto: Natural Heritage Books.
Browning, James R. 1951. “Anti-Miscegenation Laws in the United States.” Duke Bar Journal 1 (1): 26-41. https://doi.org/10.2307/1370809. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1370809.
Delgado, Richard, and Jean Stefancic. 2023. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. Fourth ed. New York: New York University Press.
Lawrence, D.M. 2004. “A rational basis for race.” The Lancet 364: 1845-1846.
Warren, Earl, and Supreme Court of the United States. 1967. “Loving et ux. v. Virginia.” United States Reports 388: 1-13. https://www.loc.gov/item/usrep388001/.
[1] When I wrote this, I had no idea that Donald Trump, in an interview with a conservative media outlet this week, said that undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.”
When suitably inspired I will write something, maybe about a breaking story in science, maybe about my career as a scientist (specifically, a biogeographer). I may wage war against the forces of ignorance from the dubious bully pulpit of this blog. Or I may just tell some war story from my past in which I should have ended up dead as a result of my own stupidity.
Let America Be America Again: A Personal Reflection and Critical Race Theoretical Rant
Posted by AbyssWriter on 10/06/23 • Categorized as African American Literature,Commentary,Literary Criticism,Race,Segregation
MECHANICSVILLE, Va. (Oct. 6, 2023) — I grew up a mixed-race kid in the waning days of Jim Crow in Louisiana. The Vietnam War was raging. Anti-Asian sentiment ran high, and the racists I grew up around made no distinction between the Vietnamese we were fighting and any other East Asian group when it came to expressing their hate. I often heard my Asian brethren disparaged—in the early 1960s, being part Chinese was enough to get my mom and I threatened with death if my dad didn’t remove us from Louisiana.
We didn’t leave.
Fortunately for us, folks didn’t know about my mom’s and my African ancestry. (For that matter, we didn’t either as my great-grandmother did a great job of passing as something else.) If folks had known that we were black, too, they would have done more than threaten us—as they did when they shot up the home of a black family that tried to move into our neighborhood in the 1970s.
In fact, according to Louisiana law—twice confirmed as constitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court—I was legally black until 1983. If the state had known what folks in Dayton, Ohio, knew, the state could have and probably would have identified me as such in all public records. It didn’t matter that I could pass for only white (not that I would have wanted to). Notions such as the “one-drop rule” had so permeated our society and legal norms of the time that all that mattered to the state and society at large was the amount of racial “pollution” that made me less of a person that someone of solely European ancestry.[1]
Critical race theory seems to me as being sold by horrific conservatives to horrified conservatives as just another liberal conspiracy designed to make white people uncomfortable. But really, it is just a theoretical viewpoint that posits the following: 1) racism is the rule, not the exception; 2) because racism advances the interests of the dominant group, there is little incentive for members of that group to fight it; 3) that the concept of race is a social construct; 4) different minority groups experience racism in different ways and to different degrees (Delgado and Stefanic 2023, 8-11).
Racism was the rule in Louisiana where I grew up. It was so much a part of the environment that I absorbed some elements—and was (and am) appalled when some of those internalized prejudices pop up from the depths. It certainly advanced the interests of the dominant group. Whites terrorized minorities, chasing minorities to the margins of the economy and society while the white majority reaped the benefits of unchallenged political and economic power. While there may be biological differences among groups of humans, race itself is a social concept (Lawrence 2004). I can vouch for the differential experience of racism. At times, I feel as if I am not enough of any of my ancestral groups to be counted as a member in them. It can be frustrating to be treated as an outsider by one’s fellow outsiders.
Because of that outsider status, I grew up never feeling safe. The main threat and the main offender was the dominant group: whites. I grew up stuffing my anger at repeatedly hearing white people’s low opinion of folks with my other ancestries. Silence was preferable to a violently shortened existence. But, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve found it harder to keep silent, especially in these days of widespread “Make America Great Again” propaganda.
Langston Hughes put it more politely in his poem than I generally do. Here is a sample from his opening lines (Hughes 2023):
Hughes echoed the way I’ve felt for decades before I (belatedly but gratefully) discovered his poetry. He speaks for me when he says that “America never was America to me.” Some of my African ancestors—whose unfree labor made possible vast fortunes for the white ruling class—found “America” only by fleeing to Canada via the Underground Railroad. They formed part of a former slave community, Queens Bush, in what is now Peel Township, Ontario (Brown-Kubisch 2004).
But even there, the promise of equality was denied them when the white-led government of Canada, realizing the value of the land those former slave ancestors cleared by hand, set the price of the land so high that they could not afford it when the land was made available to purchase (Brown-Kubisch 2004). My African ancestors were forced to move on, eventually ending up back in the United States in Michigan. Some lived not far from where Malcolm Little, aka Malcolm X, grew up (and where his father died).
In 1960, my father and my mother could not have gotten legally married in many states—such as Louisiana—because of anti-miscegenation laws. My mother had two problems: 1) she was African American, but no one knew of that ancestry at the time; and 2) she was Chinese American, which people knew. Louisiana was one of fourteen U.S. states that prohibited marriages between whites and “Mongoloid” persons (Browning 1951). By Louisiana law, my parent’s marriage was “null and void” and “of no effect;” I was an illegitimate child; and my parents, if tried, could have been convicted of a felony (Browning 1951).
The prosecution of Richard and Mildren Loving exposed the thinking of the many who supported such laws. The trial judge, acting on a belief that his racism was both natural and right and echoing the beliefs of many of my friends who cited Biblical passages they claimed justified racial segregation, wrote:
Fortunately for my parents, they met on an Air Force Base in Massachusetts, a state that had no such laws, and married there. Vagueness in the Louisiana law may have protected them from prosecution somewhat (but not from threatening phone calls in the middle of the night.) Until the Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virginia in 1967, they could have presumably been ordered to leave Louisiana or face jail time, much as Richard and Mildred Loving were threatened with in Virginia.
My Chinese ancestors knew all about discrimination, too. With the passage of the Page Act of 1975 and the Chinese Exclusion Acts in 1882, the Chinese became the first group denied legal immigration to the United States (Abrams 2005):
My great-great grandfather, Yee Kim Wo, came to this country about the same time the Page Act was passed. My great-grandfather, Yee Jock Leong, was born in San Francisco in 1884, thus by birthright an American citizen. But, as a result of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, he was treated to detention and interrogation before being allowed entry back into the United States after trips to China. He has a pretty substantial Exclusion Act file, viewable to all, at the National Archives in San Bruno, California. The transcripts show he was treated like a criminal—all because he tried to return to the land of his birth. Few of European descent faced such scrutiny as the Chinese upon entering the United States.
Despite the documented persecution, many people still wonder why African Americans and other minorities are angry. They seem constitutionally incapable of understanding what people like Kimberly Jones and Angela Davis have to say. Both Jones and Davis expressed their anger with fire and eloquence. I express mine with just as much fire, with less eloquence and usually more profanity. Like Howard Beale, I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.
A few years ago, I ended what had been one of my oldest friendships, one that went back to preschool. This friend had a noticeable tendency to do what he needed to do to align himself with those at the top of the social heap. One of the ways he did it was by humor, which was fine.
But another way he did it was to sidle up to the bullies and join them in their persecution of the kids who weren’t cool enough to qualify for the group. He was like that in elementary school. He was like that in high school. Unfortunately, he was still like that when we were well into our 50s. He was politically conservative and, as long as the conservatives were getting away with their rampant oppression of minorities, he was happy.
I sure as hell wasn’t happy.
As I stated above, I can pass for white, but I identify with my Asian and African ancestors—and I’m never going to sell them out for a comfortable chameleonic existence among the dominant white in-group. In one of our arguments—it may have been about Black Lives Matter—I was defending the “out” group and he said, “But you’re white!”
Sure, my skin is lighter toned, and I certainly have a majority European ancestry, but I feel the presence of and embrace all my ancestral threads. I have clear documentation of white oppression of my non-white ancestors (especially that nice, thick Chinese Exclusion Act dossier on my Chinese great-grandfather).
When I see all that my non-white ancestors had to endure at the hands of the white majority, I see much of what critical race theorists have tried to expose, especially widespread racism and little incentive of the dominant group to correct it. Worse, I see the dominant group all-too-often portraying itself as the victim. America has fallen far short of its ideals that “all men (and women) are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
I agree with Langston Hughes. America has yet to be America to me. It got close, but in the MAGA era, it seems to be slipping farther and farther away.
Editor’s Note: This piece was originally written for an American literature class at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College on Oct. 6, 2023.
References
Abrams, Kerry. 2005. “Polygamy, Prostitution, and the Federalization of Immigration Law.” Columbia Law Review 105 (3): 641-716. https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6520&context=faculty_scholarship.
Brown-Kubisch, Linda. 2004. The Queen’s Bush Settlement: Black Pioneers 1839-1865. Toronto: Natural Heritage Books.
Browning, James R. 1951. “Anti-Miscegenation Laws in the United States.” Duke Bar Journal 1 (1): 26-41. https://doi.org/10.2307/1370809. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1370809.
Delgado, Richard, and Jean Stefancic. 2023. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. Fourth ed. New York: New York University Press.
Hughes, Langston. 2023. “Let America Be America Again.” Poetry Foundation. Accessed Oct 3. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/147907/let-america-be-america-again.
Lawrence, D.M. 2004. “A rational basis for race.” The Lancet 364: 1845-1846.
Warren, Earl, and Supreme Court of the United States. 1967. “Loving et ux. v. Virginia.” United States Reports 388: 1-13. https://www.loc.gov/item/usrep388001/.
[1] When I wrote this, I had no idea that Donald Trump, in an interview with a conservative media outlet this week, said that undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.”
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