The Rising Tide of Color

Race, State Violence, and Radical Movements across the Pacific

Moon-Ho Jung, Moon-Ho Jung

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780295805030
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi afroamericani

The Rising Tide of Color challenges familiar narratives of race in American history that all too often present the U.S. state as a benevolent force in struggles against white supremacy, especially in the South. Featuring a wide range of scholars specializing in American history and ethnic studies, this powerful collection of essays highlights historical moments and movements on the Pacific Coast and across the Pacific to reveal a different story of race and politics. From labor and anticolonial activists around World War I and multiracial campaigns by anarchists and communists in the 1930s to the policing of race and sexuality after World War II and transpacific movements against the Vietnam War, The Rising Tide of Color brings to light histories of race, state violence, and radical movements that continue to shape our world in the twenty-first century.

PART ONE

Framing Race, State Violence, and Radical Movements

Introduction

Opening Salvo

MOON-HO JUNG

Now this here's for those who choose fights

Whose fruits might never not ripen until after their life.

It's not right how they martyr our leaders

And target our children,

Disrespect our sisters

And wonder why we're militant.

Peace to my third world equivalent,

Even if I can't fight beside you

I write what I can

To get our fam in other lands to understand your pain,

’Cause your beef is mine and we're one and the same.

And I know about this privilege,

But if you're from where I'm from

Then you know a bigger burden comes with it.

And that's what I carry when you see me on a hustle,

I'm talking as a walking document of our struggle.

……………………………….

Right now I want to thank God for being me,

My soul won't rest until the colony is free.

1896 revolution incomplete,

Silence is defeat, my solution is to speak.

Resurrect the legacy of martyrs I beseech,

Time to choose a side, it's the mighty vs. the meek.

My big brother Free brought the word from the East,

We're the bullet in the middle of the belly of the beast.

—BLUE SCHOLARS, “Opening Salvo,” Bayani (2007)

ON THE EVENING OF MAY 14, 2011, AN OVERFLOWING CROWD GATHERED at the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience in Seattle to attend a screening of Aoki, a film about Richard Aoki, an Asian American Black Panther. Ben Wang and Mike Cheng, the filmmakers, were there. Mike Tagawa, a fellow Asian American Black Panther, was there. The screening, in fact, served as an informal reunion of former Panthers and fellow travelers, many of them clad proudly in their signature black leather jackets and berets. There were a lot of hugs, lots of genuine affection and camaraderie. When the lights went out and Aoki's image first appeared on the screen, the audience hollered and applauded, bestowing on the prominent (and, until recently, relatively unknown) Black Panther much love and respect. It was a beautiful scene.

Richard Aoki (1938–2009) grew up in a world shaped by race, state violence, and radical movements. When he was three years old, he and his family were driven out of the segregated neighborhoods of West Oakland and Berkeley, California, and incarcerated at the Tanforan Race Track and then in a concentration camp in Topaz, Utah. In the barren landscape of Utah, Aoki learned early on the contradictions of race and nation. His excitement over being picked to play George Washington in a school pageant dissipated when his father responded not with paternal pride but with violent rage. “I'll never forget that lesson: I should not think in terms of George Washington, this was not my country,” he recalled. “In fact, ‘my country’ put me in this camp.” In his household, he added, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was “the devil incarnate,” the president responsible for the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans.¹ A moment of repression was simultaneously a radicalizing moment of new possibilities of seeing and engaging the world.

Aoki's personal journey, however, proved not so straightforward to the left. When he passed away in March 2009, caused most immediately by a self-inflicted gunshot wound in the context of a longer series of medical afflictions and complications, Aoki meticulously kept two uniforms hanging in his closet: a Black Panther leather jacket (with a “Free Huey” button) and a US Army uniform (with an American flag). At the end of a public memorial service two months later, filled with remembrances by radical activists, US Army color guards honored Aoki with the displaying and folding of an American flag, as “Taps” played in the background. How could a Third World revolutionary embrace the Stars and Stripes, which represents for many, especially Third World peoples, the most potent emblem of empire and militarism in the twenty-first century?² Such ironies and contradictions are not easy to comprehend, but they were no less lived and remembered.

Aoki's personal story took a dramatic turn in August 2012, when journalist Seth Rosenfeld publicly alleged that Aoki had worked as an informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Rosenfeld's charges, made on the eve of a publicity drive for his new book, Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power, appeared to be self-serving, particularly with insinuations that his documentary evidence could not sustain. Rosenfeld's article, for example, strongly implied that Aoki had worked with the FBI to arm the Panthers and that his actions had “contributed to fatal confrontations between the Panthers and the police.” Refutations and recriminations followed quickly and widely, generating media and activist attention for Rosenfeld and his book, though not in ways that he might have anticipated or appreciated. In another startling twist, weeks later Rosenfeld followed with a newly released FBI file, Aoki's informant file, which seemed to demonstrate more conclusively that Aoki had indeed worked as an informant.³ In the aftermath of these revelations, Aoki's image most likely would no longer be received with unreserved warmth and reverence.

The essays collected here do not address Aoki directly, but his complicated life and afterlife point to this collection's overriding premise and theme: that race, state violence, and radical movements have formed a critical dynamic and dialectic in the shaping of US history. These essays were first presented at a conference, Race, Radicalism, and Repression on the Pacific coast and Beyond, organized and hosted by the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest at the University of Washington. (The screening of Aoki marked the conference's closing session.) The conference sought in part to center in the study of race and politics the Pacific coast, a region of the United States that generally receives little to no notice in scholarly and nonscholarly conversations on race. Yet we know that radical movements embracing and demanding racial justice—from the Industrial Workers of the World and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union to the Black Panthers and the Third World Liberation Front strikes—have figured prominently in the history of the “left coast” of the United States. These movements, integral elements of what reactionary Lothrop Stoddard branded long ago as “the rising tide of color,” have also generated violent responses, particularly state repression, that reverberated across the United States and around the world.⁴ Our collection is a preliminary attempt to make sense of that wider history of race, state violence, and radical movements across the Pacific.

BEYOND THE NATIONAL REDEMPTION OF RACE

In his widely celebrated speech on race in March 2008, then presidential candidate Barack Obama seemed to portend a new kind of politician, a figure capable of speaking about race honestly and critically. Less than a minute into the speech, however, it became clear that there would be nothing revolutionary uttered that day. After an introductory paean to America's Founding Fathers, Obama turned to “this nation's original sin of slavery.” “Of course,” he added quickly, “the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution—a Constitution that had at i[t]s very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.” The person delivering the speech might have looked and sounded different, but his underlying message was the same. In racial matters, the United States was fundamentally about racial exclusion (the past) and national inclusion (the future), a promise supposedly inscribed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.⁵

Obama was echoing a familiar refrain in American history and politics. The United States, and the US state in particular, has been depicted and perceived preponderantly as a neutral or benevolent force in matters of race. Beginning with Reconstruction—and perhaps even earlier with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, as Obama invoked—and culminating in the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965), the US state has seemingly stepped forward to advance and sanctify the nation's supposed commitment to racial equality and racial justice. The federal government finally mustered a national resolve to defeat racism once and for all, to force desegregation on a recalcitrant South, so the story goes. That historical depiction, in turn, has been essential to making the US state appear nonracial and even antiracist from the nation's founding. It is like the pervasive image of Martin Luther King, Jr., in American culture today, frozen in time, speaking before the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 of a dream “deeply rooted in the American dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed.”⁶

It is a highly seductive image of the United States and of King, but it is fatally flawed and horribly distorted. King's critique ran much deeper, firmly rooted in a black radical tradition. On April 4, 1967, for example, he broke his public silence on the Vietnam War and received an avalanche of personal attacks in response. Linking domestic and foreign policies, and noting the irony that black and white soldiers were dying together in Southeast Asia while being disallowed from living and learning together in the United States, King said that he had to tell the truth. “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government,” he said. Speaking as a “citizen of the world,” King recalled a larger sense of history, “beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism.” “I speak for those whose land is being laid [to] waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted,” he stated. “I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam.”⁷ For King, to struggle for racial justice meant embracing a sense of belonging beyond the nation-state and confronting the repressive machinations of that state.

How might predominant understandings of race, resistance, and the US state look different if approached from King's insights and from a decidedly Pacific framework? The essays collected herein wrestle with that central question through a variety of histories, geographies, and methods. Addressing disparate political, social, and cultural movements spanning the North American continent and across the Pacific Ocean, they begin to shed light on the breadth and complexity of radical politics in the twentieth century, a politics that often critiqued and appealed to conventional notions of race, gender, sexuality, class, and citizenship. Before I introduce the essays in greater detail, I first offer a brief genealogy of race, freedom, and state violence in the nineteenth century that might serve as a historical preface to the collection.

RACE AND FREEDOM ACROSS THE PACIFIC (AND THE ATLANTIC)⁸

Securing and dominating commercial exchanges with the “Orient” had defined “America” and “Americans” since the late eighteenth century. Beginning in 1784, within months of the end of the Revolutionary War, American merchants competed and formed alliances with their erstwhile enemies, the British, and other European powers to “open up” China. “The trade with the East has always been the richest jewel in the diadem of commerce,” Thomas Hart Benton reminded his colleagues in the US Senate in 1846. The ultimate prize of continental expansion, he explained, was transpacific trade. “The van of the Caucasian race now top the Rocky Mountains, and spread down to the shores of the Pacific,” Benton exhorted. “In a few years a great population will grow up there, luminous with the accumulated lights of European and American civilization…. The sun of civilization must shine across the sea: socially and commercially, the van of the Caucasians, and the rear of the Mongolians, must intermix.” If his romantic vision did little to relieve the mounting frustration of American traders, diplomats, and missionaries in China, British military victories there accrued legal and commercial privileges for US delegates and citizens in 1844.⁹

While British guns led the attack on Chinese imperial authority, the United States scored a historic concession from Japan in 1854. Fresh from the US war with Mexico and the subsequent annexation of lands bordering the Pacific Ocean, secretary of state Daniel Webster dispatched commodore Matthew C. Perry to Edo (Tokyo) to realize a long-standing national hope—dating back at least to Andrew Jackson's presidency—of gaining access to Japanese ports and markets. Commanding four naval vessels, including two powered by steam, Perry entered Edo Bay in July 1853 and demanded a hearing with Japan's highest authorities. Reinforced by three additional warships, Perry returned seven months later and signed a treaty allowing US vessels to land in two Japanese ports and establishing a US consul in Japan. Although the Treaty of Kanagawa (Yokohama) failed to include a provision on foreign trade—Japanese authorities were very much aware of China's growing subjection to Western demands and products—it nonetheless marked a sea change in Japan's policies and politics. “The long doubtful attempt has been entirely successful,” the New York Times rejoiced, “and to the United States belongs…the honor of making the first international Treaty with Japan!” Bearing gifts and displaying military might, the United States had become a formidable champion of “free trade” across the Pacific.¹⁰

Imperial encounters and relations in Asia, in turn, profoundly affected the course of race, politics, and labor on the other side of the Pacific, for the “opening” of Asia encompassed the exchange of human bodies in addition to treaty rights and material goods. In the wake of the widening abolition of the slave trade and slavery, European and American shippers converged in southern China in the 1840s and 1850s to generate and to supply the demand for plantation workers in the Caribbean, especially Cuba. “There seems to be a rage at this time for speculating in Chinese…the trade, which gives enormous profits, is engaging the attention of the first commercial houses and largest capitalists of this city,” the US consul in Havana reported in 1855. “Chinese are coming in fast; and…these laborers are, on some plantations, treated no better and even worse than negro slaves.” And, to the consul's consternation, his countrymen dominated the trade from China. “For my part,” he wrote to his superiors, “I assure you that I regret very much to see vessels under our flag engaged in such a traffic.” The apotheosis of “free trade” in imperial discourse, as anthropologist Sidney W. Mintz has observed, emerged side by side with the gradual emancipation of enslaved labor and the simultaneous migration of indentured Asian labor.¹¹

Asian workers, I have argued elsewhere, embodied the hopes, fears, and contradictions of emancipation in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Originally introduced and justified as “free” improvements to enslaved labor, they also epitomized the backwardness of slavery, uniting proslavery and antislavery Americans in antebellum campaigns to denounce and prohibit what came to be known as the “coolie” trade. “What is the plain English of the whole system?” J. D. B. De Bow asked his southern brethren in 1859. “Is it not just this?—that the civilized and powerful races of the earth have discovered that the degraded, barbarous, and weak races, may be induced voluntarily to reduce themselves to a slavery more cruel than any that has yet disgraced the earth, and that humanity may compound with its conscience, by pleading that the act is one of free will?” Not to be outdone, US diplomats in China characterized the “coolie” trade as “irredeemable slavery under the form of freedom” that demanded US state intervention, both for humanity's sake and for the Chinese government's recognition of free trade's virtues. The racialization of Asian workers as “coolies” before the Civil War had the dual, imperial effect of rationalizing US slavery and its expansion southward and US diplomatic missions in China, Cuba, and beyond.¹²

The enjoined logics of free trade and free labor that posed Asia and Asian workers as antithetical and pivotal to both deepened during the Civil War and, in concert with military and political battles over slavery in the United States, increased the power of the federal government to define and advance freedom. Driven by years of horrifying accounts by US consuls in Chinese port cities, antislavery Republicans passed a major legislation against the “coolie” trade in February 1862. Although interpreting and enforcing the law would confound federal officials after the war, its sponsors emphasized the unequivocal need to suppress what they presented as a new slave tra...