Citizens of Asian America
Citizens of Asian America: Democracy and Race during the Cold War
CINDY I-FEN CHENG
Copyright Date: 2013
Published by: NYU Press
Pages: 285
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qg35j
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Citizens of Asian America
Book Description:

During the Cold War, Soviet propaganda highlighted U.S. racism in order to undermine the credibility of U.S. democracy. In response, incorporating racial and ethnic minorities in order to affirm that America worked to ensure the rights of all and was superior to communist countries became a national imperative. In Citizens of Asian America, Cindy I-Fen Cheng explores how Asian Americans figured in this effort to shape the credibility of American democracy, even while the perceived foreignness of Asian Americans cast them as likely alien subversives whose activities needed monitoring following the communist revolution in China and the outbreak of the Korean War. While histories of international politics and U.S. race relations during the Cold War have largely overlooked the significance of Asian Americans, Cheng challenges the black-white focus of the existing historiography. She highlights how Asian Americans made use of the government's desire to be leader of the free world by advocating for civil rights reforms, such as housing integration, increased professional opportunities, and freedom from political persecution.Further, Cheng examines the liberalization of immigration policies, which worked not only to increase the civil rights of Asian Americans but also to improve the nation's ties with Asian countries, providing an opportunity for the U.S. government to broadcast, on a global scale, the freedom and opportunity that American society could offer.Cindy I-Fen Chengis Associate Professor of History and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin - Madison.In theNation of Newcomersseries

eISBN: 978-0-8147-7084-9
Subjects: History
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  1. Front Matter
    Front Matter (pp. i-iv)
  2. Table of Contents
    Table of Contents (pp. v-vi)
  3. List of Illustrations
    List of Illustrations (pp. vii-viii)
  4. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (pp. ix-xii)
  5. Introduction: Asian American Racial Formation and the Image of American Democracy
    Introduction: Asian American Racial Formation and the Image of American Democracy (pp. 1-20)

    Shortly after World War II ended, the President’s Committee on Civil Rights released its 1947 report entitledTo Secure These Rights, which dedicated a section to discussing the injustice of Japanese internment. It noted that not since the days of slavery had the nation witnessed such a wholesale displacement and incarceration of a group of people. The committee worried about the implications of Japanese internment for the future of American civil rights and advised the federal government to explore other means to ensure national security that did not entail mass accusations based on national heritage.¹ Besides detailing the injustice of...

  6. CHAPTER 1 Legislating Nonwhite Crossings into White Suburbia
    CHAPTER 1 Legislating Nonwhite Crossings into White Suburbia (pp. 21-56)

    Just two days after Tommy Amer moved into his newly purchased home in South Los Angeles, his neighbors stopped by to inform him that they had filed an injunction against him. The petition before the Los Angeles Superior Court demanded that Amer be removed from the premises of his home. As Amer recounted many years later, his neighbors emphasized that the filing of the injunction was nothing personal; they merely acted to protect their property values from diminishing with the residence of an Asian American in their suburban tract. While Amer was aware that the home he purchased in 1946...

  7. CHAPTER 2 Living in the Suburbs, Becoming Americans
    CHAPTER 2 Living in the Suburbs, Becoming Americans (pp. 57-84)

    Postwar suburbanization is often portrayed as a process that spatially reified racial divisions in society, where the separations that manifested in the built environment expanded on the privilege of whites. As the historian Eric Avila has explained, postwar suburbanization, as a course of white flight, fortified racial segregation by building whites-only neighborhoods that kept at bay the racialized underclass.¹ The lines that were drawn importantly set the stage for what the historians Scott Kurashige and Shana Bernstein described as the rise of an interracial activism that strove to break down the color divide. But as Avila also took note of...

  8. CHAPTER 3 Asian American Firsts and the Progress toward Racial Integration
    CHAPTER 3 Asian American Firsts and the Progress toward Racial Integration (pp. 85-116)

    Jennie Lee earned the distinction of being the first Chinese and one of the first women to be a certified armynavy welder at the Douglas Aircraft Company.¹ During World War II, Lee’s accomplishment was featured in newspapers throughout the greater Los Angeles area, as it captured the values and aspirations that the nation sought to promote. As a female welder, Lee personified the popular wartime propaganda about Rosie the Riveter, who fulfilled her patriotic duty by daring to work in a trade that was previously restricted to men. As Lee was also noted for being a Chinese Rosie, her participation...

  9. CHAPTER 4 McCarran Act Persecutions and the Fight for Alien Rights
    CHAPTER 4 McCarran Act Persecutions and the Fight for Alien Rights (pp. 117-148)

    When David Hyun and Diamond Kimm were arrested as part of a nationwide sweep of aliens suspected of subversive activities after the 1950 McCarran Act went into effect, their detention illustrated how the outbreak of the Korean War intensified the nation’s fear of an internal communist subversion that threatened to overthrow the government from within. The rise of anticommunist hysteria in the United States not only prompted the federal government to enact measures such as the 1950 McCarran Act for the purpose of monitoring the nation’s political activities, it also led federal agents to identify the foreign-born, especially those from...

  10. CHAPTER 5 Advancing Racial Equality and Internationalism through Immigration Reform
    CHAPTER 5 Advancing Racial Equality and Internationalism through Immigration Reform (pp. 149-190)

    Writing just six months after the communist revolution in China, the historian Gerald T. White argued for immigration reform that would make the treatment of Chinese equal to that of other groups in the United States as a way to better relations with Asia. In an article penned for theFar Eastern Survey, he acknowledged that many deemed the liberalization of immigration policy toward the Chinese “inadvisable,” given how the Chinese government had become communist. But White asserted that it was precisely that event that prompted him to call for the repeal of discriminatory measures against the Chinese.¹ White considered...

  11. Conclusion: Cold War America and the Appeal to See Past Race
    Conclusion: Cold War America and the Appeal to See Past Race (pp. 191-208)

    On the day that President Lyndon B. Johnson was to sign the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act into law, he addressed the nation to convey the historic significance of the occasion.¹ He reminded the nation of how its founding members pledged their lives and fortunes to fight for something bigger than political independence and the elimination of foreign rule. He contended that they battled for freedom, justice, and personal liberty. Their legacy, Johnson asserted, has continued to live on as people from far corners of the world still looked to these patriots for inspiration in their struggles for freedom and...

  12. NOTES
    NOTES (pp. 209-246)
  13. BIBLIOGRAPHY
    BIBLIOGRAPHY (pp. 247-260)
  14. INDEX
    INDEX (pp. 261-272)
  15. ABOUT THE AUTHOR
    ABOUT THE AUTHOR (pp. 273-273)