Race for Citizenship

Black Orientalism and Asian Uplift from Pre-Emancipation to Neoliberal America

Helen Heran Jun

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780814745014
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Helen Heran Jun explores how the history of U.S. citizenshiphas positioned Asian Americans and African Americans in interlocking socio-political relationships since the mid nineteenth century. Rejecting the conventional emphasis on ‘inter-racial prejudice,’ Jun demonstrates how a politics of inclusion has constituted a racial Other within Asian American and African American discourses of national identity.

Race for Citizenship examines three salient moments when African American and Asian American citizenship become acutely visible as related crises: the ‘Negro Problem’ and the ‘Yellow Question’ in the mid- to late 19th century; World War II-era questions around race, loyalty, and national identity in the context of internment and Jim Crow segregation; and post-Civil Rights discourses of disenfranchisement and national belonging under globalization. Taking up a range of cultural texts—the 19th century black press, the writings of black feminist Anna Julia Cooper, Asian American novels, African American and Asian American commercial film and documentary—Jun does not seek to document signs of cross-racial identification, but instead demonstrates how the logic of citizenship compels racialized subjects to produce developmental narratives of inclusion in the effort to achieve political, economic, and social incorporation. Race for Citizenship provides a new model of comparative race studies by situating contemporary questions of differential racial formations within a long genealogy of anti-racist discourse constrained by liberal notions of inclusion.

Part 1

Citizenship was an unfolding and highly contested political institution in mid-nineteenth-century America as contentious battles were being waged over the place of blacks, Native Americans, Chinese, and white ethnic immigrants. Although there were relatively few Chinese immigrants in the United States, recent studies have elaborated on the specific dynamic between the Chinese and Negro question in terms of how issues of race, labor, and citizenship revolved around a multivalent racial axis. Historians such as Najia Aairm-Heriot and Moon-Ho Jung have documented the ways in which the specter of Chinese “coolie” labor mediated national debates on free labor and citizenship. According to Jung, “Within the major social crises of the 1860s—battles over the legal, political, and social standing of slaves, masters, blacks, and whites in the United States—coolies represented a vexing anomaly whose contested status would reconstruct American identities after emancipation.”¹ Even though there was never any legal definition of what constituted a coolie, the imagining of an influx of unfree Asian labor excited antiblack fears of white workers and the capitalist fantasies of plantation growers. Related to national anxieties about black chattel slavery and emancipation, the racialization of Asian migrants as coolies functioned to reify the immigrant as “white” and the U.S. citizen as non-Asian.²

A dimension of the relational nature of black and Asian racialization is evident in the 1870 Naturalization Act, which was ratified to ensure that the alien status of Asian migrants would not be impacted by the Fourteenth Amendment (1868). The Fourteenth Amendment, generally regarded as overturning the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857, granted former slaves and all their descendants the rights of U.S. citizenship. Securing the legal status of blacks as U.S. citizens was a specific political implication of the Civil War and Radical Reconstruction that was discontinuous from the racialization of Asians as orientalized aliens. Therefore, the 1870 Naturalization Act acknowledged the shifting legal status of U.S. blacks after the Civil War while seeking to reinstantiate the exclusion of Asians from the national citizenry by specifying that only “white persons and persons of African descent” were eligible for naturalization. Although the Fourteenth Amendment was unable to fully interrupt the negation of citizenship for Asian immigrants, it recognized the citizenship status of “all persons born . . . in the United States” and therefore secured one possible condition for Asian American citizenship: birthright. Severe restrictions on the immigration of Asian women, combined with antimiscegenation laws, were designed to prevent reproduction and to preserve the disenfranchisement of Asian labor, making citizenship by birth a constrained possibility for persons of Asian ancestry.

The first two chapters of this book examine specific dimensions of national discourses of Asian alterity in the nineteenth-century black public sphere. I focus on how distinct yet related discourses of Chinese and black racial difference shaped the emerging parameters of U.S. citizenship and, subsequently, the terms of black political inclusion. In other words, if the specter of coolie labor and the anti-Chinese movement were indeed central to U.S. discourses of freedom and citizenship, how did this affect black claims to citizenship both before and after the Civil War? The black press and the public speeches by Anna Julia Cooper reveal how Western orientalism variously mediated discourses of black political inclusion. Nineteenth-century black citizenship is imagined with different horizons of possibility, and Anna Julia Cooper must reach for a more expansive definition as she constructs a model of modern black womanhood in the United States. As we will see, the gendered meanings of Orientalist discourses had different implications as black disenfranchisement emerged in starkly different terms for black men and women.

1

The Press for Inclusion

Nineteenth-Century Black Citizenship
and the Anti-Chinese Movement

But now observe the practical superiority of slavery over Chinese immigration, as an impelling force for good. Slavery compelled the heathen to give up idolatry, and they did it. The Chinese have no such compulsion and they do not do it. . . . Slavery compelled the adoption of Christian forms of worship, resulting in universal Christianization. The Chinese have no such influence tending to their conversion, and rarely—one or two in a thousand—become Christian. . . . Slavery took the heathens and by force made them Americans in feeling, tastes, habits, language, sympathy, religion and spirit; first fitting them for citizenship, and then giving them the vote. The Chinese feel no such force, but remaining in character and life the same as they were in Old China, unprepared for citizenship and adverse in spirit to our institutions.

—Rev. Blakeslee, Special Report to the Senate on Chinese Immigration (1878)

In his testimony before the Senate in 1878, a white minister argues for Chinese exclusion, his Orientalist construction of the Chinese alien generating its contrasting Other in the figure of the properly developed, black, Christianized, former slave.¹What is most disturbing about Rev. S. V. Blakeslee’s otherwise predictable discourse of the unassimilable Oriental is his representation of chattel slavery as a necessary civilizing institution that “successfully” transforms African heathens into modern American citizens. Twenty years later, Supreme Court Justice John M. Harlan also constructed a black/Chinese racial tandem in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) when he challenged the Court’s majority ruling by constructing the Chinese immigrant as the negative instance of national belonging:

There is a race so different from our own that we do not permit those belonging to it to become citizens of the United States. . . . But by the statute in question, a Chinaman can ride in the same passenger coach with white citizens of the United States, while citizens of the black race in Louisiana, many of whom perhaps risked their lives for the preservation of the Union, who are entitled by law, to participate in the political control of the state and nation, who are not excluded, by law or by reason of their race, from public stations of any kind, and who have all the legal rights that belong to white citizens, are yet to be declared criminals, liable to imprisonment, if they ride in a public coach occupied by citizens of the white race.²

In Harlan’s attempt to dramatize the injustice of Jim Crow segregation, he constructs imagined privileges unfairly enjoyed by Chinese aliens to illustrate what was being wrongfully denied to black citizens.³ That is, Harlan’s rhetoric used Orientalist difference to assimilate U.S. blacks into a universalizing American national identity.

Both Blakeslee’s and Harlan’s statements surprisingly suggest that in the late nineteenth century, the juxtaposition of Chinese immigrants and U.S. blacks could somehow generate a naturalized, commonsensical recognition of the deeply American character of black domestic subjects.⁴

This discourse of provisional black inclusion/Chinese exclusion is initially counterintuitive, given how today we often observe that in the nineteenth century, blacks and Chinese were represented as similarly loathsome, or degraded in terms of the “other,” that is, the “Negroization of the Chinese” or the “Asianization of blacks.” Of course, Harlan’s and Blakeslee’s public statements on race and citizenship spoke to radically different questions and motivations: one endorsing Chinese exclusion and the other opposing the legality of black/white racial segregation. The differences, however, behind such similar Orientalist figurations in these narratives of black domestication are even more suggestive of the significance of Chinese exclusion and American Orientalism in nineteenth-century discourses of black citizenship.

This chapter examines the nineteenth-century black press’s struggles for political inclusion in this dominant discursive context of racialized citizenship, in which the anti-Chinese movement defined the racial, cultural, and political boundaries of the United States. An analysis of black newspapers across the country reveals that Orientalist discourses of Asian cultural difference ambiguously facilitated the assimilation of black Americans to ideologies of political modernity and consolidated black identification as U.S. national subjects. Nineteenth-century discourses of “black Orientalism” can be best understood as a specific formation of racial uplift, generating narratives of black moral, political, and cultural development, which in turn reified the Orientalist logic of the anti-Chinese movement. My argument deemphasizes notions of black intentions, perceptions, or attitudes in order to foreground the narrative demands on U.S. black subjects to constitute their humanity and citizenship through racialized and gendered Enlightenment discourses of morality and rationality. In other words, this chapter looks at how the institution of citizenship produced an imperative for racialized subjects to tell particular stories about themselves and others in the struggle for inclusion. This focus suggests that racist or antiracist principles are not the most relevant terms for interpreting nineteenth-century black press representations of the Chinese; rather, the institution of citizenship is a narrow discursive field in which differentially racialized groups are forced to negotiate their exclusion in relation to others.

Differential Racializations

Although Orientalism has been discussed primarily in the historical context of European colonialism, the discursive production of a foreign, premodern, alien Oriental in opposition to a rational, modern Western subject also has been operative in the United States, albeit in different ways.⁵ In the context of mid-nineteenth-century America, Orientalism constitutes an Oriental other through exclusionary U.S. immigration policies and the regulation of Asian labor through the institution of citizenship.⁶ Historian John Tchen points out that before the 1850s, there was another Orientalist formation not organized solely around immigration.⁷ Instead, during this earlier period, increased trade with China and a growing port culture situated the Chinese as an exotic, curious spectacle for consumption in the emergent industry of urban popular entertainment.⁸ Broadly, then, we can understand nineteenth-century American Orientalism as a discursive formation that was determined by and determining of U.S. economic and political engagements with East Asia and the Pacific and that provided the ideological structure for producing and managing Asian racial difference in the United States. These processes, which involve instances of Asian incorporation (as circus exhibits, as coolie labor, as a U.S. colony) and instances of Asian exclusion (from immigration, citizenship, and U.S. national culture), define an American genealogy of Asian racialization producing the Oriental as alien to the United States.⁹

My objective is not to write an overview of the various forms through which American Orientalism manifests throughout U.S. history but to isolate particular instances of how Orientalism emerges to mediate black racialization. I refer to this contradictory process of negotiation as black Orientalism in an effort to capture the critical dilemma that the struggle for black citizenship (or black political modernity) embodies. We can see the contours of this contradiction, for instance, in Blakeslee’s observation that slavery “did wonderfully elevate the slave and prepare him for citizenship,” with the “one exception” that “it legally denied human rights to the slave.”¹⁰ This paradox, in which the systematic dehumanization of racialized populations is the condition for their entry into the “civilized world” to become modern subjects of democratic freedom, is the contradiction endemic to the project of modernity itself.¹¹ Therefore, in the struggle to challenge their conditions of exploitation and oppression, racialized subjects must negotiate these epistemological contradictions structuring modern institutions and liberal narratives of freedom and liberation. Put another way, racially excluded populations must somehow manage to reconcile their liberatory aspirations promised by enlightenment and civilization, with their brutalization narrated as a historically necessary process of development.¹²

Black Orientalism, as I am using the concept, is in no way an accusatory or reductive condemnation that seeks to chastise black individuals or institutions for being imperialist, racist, or Orientalist. Black Orientalism is a heterogeneous and historically variable discourse in which the contradictions of black citizenship engage with the logic of American Orientalism. Instead of a singular meaning or manifestation, black Orientalism encompasses a range of black imaginings of Asia that are in fact negotiations with the limits, failures, and disappointments of black citizenship.¹³ This includes, for example, W. E. B. Du Bois’s fascination with China as a utopic site of revolutionary possibility, black admiration for Japanese empire during World War II, and even signifiers of the “Orient” in hip-hop culture.¹⁴ In these instances, one can see that the dichotomous otherness of the “Orient” is precisely what makes it so appealing to dis-identified black subjects attempting to imagine liberatory possibilities, identifications, and historical futures in spaces that have been defined as not the United States or defined in opposition to the West.

In the nineteenth century, black Orientalism emerges from the historical conditions of black racialization and the Chinese exclusion movement as a heterogeneous discourse of black citizenship and national identity. To pursue a broader critique of citizenship, this chapter analyzes what might be considered more mainstream, liberal discourses of black national identity rather than often-cited oppositional positions taken by figures such as Frederick Douglass, a well-known and highly vocal opponent of the anti-Chinese movement since the 1850s. As I demonstrate in the following section, liberal black discourses on citizenship and immigration are in themselves highly complex negotiations that cannot be simplistically regarded as unfortunate and “prejudicial” black attitudes toward the Chinese. Comparative race scholarship may miss important opportunities to carefully examine liberal discourses of racialized citizenship owing to a teleological investment in “interracial solidarity,” a notion that relies heavily on the premise of identification. The following analysis of the nineteenth-century black press considers black Orientalism as a form of cultural politics that does not illuminate the ideological limits or shortcomings of those who engaged in it but reveals the various contradictions of citizenship and modern subjecthood that it ultimately failed to resolve for black national identity.

The Heathen Chinese

Black press representations of Chinese difference engaged with American Orientalist ideologies that in the mid-nineteenth century manifested at the national level as the anti-Chinese movement. Anti-Chinese political agitation emerged in the mid-1850s along the West Coast, fueled by competing white immigrant workers who racially defined free labor in antagonism to blacks and Chinese.¹⁵ Initially a regional and class-based formation, anti-Chinese legislation became part of the national political platform that culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first and only time a specific ethnic group was legally barred from immigrating to the United States. White labor, clergymen, and nativists generally constructed Chinese immigrants as an invasive yellow peril that posed a grave moral and economic threat to the survival of the white working man and the American family: “Can we compete with a barbarous race, devoid of energy and careless of the State’s weal? Sunk in their own debasement, h...