Introduction to Asian American Studies: Race and War
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In our first class, we talked about racial groupings as the stacking and sorting of people into different categories, and the White Love reading really exemplifies this concept. American colonizers had an incredibly patronizing and racist view of the Filipinos, and they tried to use the census as a tool to exhaustively keep track of and categorize the native islanders. The punchcards were meant to reduce a person’s identity into just a single slip of paper and it turned people into objects to be controlled and organized. The ultimate goal was to determine if the Filipinos were worthy of America’s tutelage in order to turn them into a homogeneous group of English speakers rather than the “savages” they were.
This idea of registering people as a method of control is also seen in Impossible Subjects when a 1940 law required the fingerprinting and yearly registration of all aliens living in the United States. This policy was framed as a defense program meant to ensure national security against “subversive activities.” This comprehensive list of aliens also reduces people into objects or numbers to be accounted for. Rather than viewing non-citizens as individuals, the US government simply saw them as potential insurgents and invasive measures were required to ensure control over them.
I think the theme you’re picking up on, of quantifying/grouping people in order to exert control over them, has been and will continue to be an important one in answering the question of how to define and understand race and war. The connections between race and war were pretty explicit in the Rafael reading, starting from the American portrayal of Filipino history as waves of “superior” races invading and conquering the islands from “inferior” races. This view positioned American paternalism as an inevitable step in forward in the history of the Philippines. On a less literal level, Rafael’s description of the census made me think of the punchcards and “specimen” photographs as weapons in a figurative war. The census as a weapon did not destroy physical bodies, but it tore individuals apart into compartmentalized identities; it did not invade any new land, but it surveyed the racial landscape of the population and shaped it into a hierarchy. In this figurative war, the Filipinos fought back, and their weapons were the nationalist plays that challenged the colonizing forces and made bold claims of an ultimate national victory.
With regards to the Ngai reading, Henry also alludes to the war-like mentality of viewing non-citizens as “potential insurgents,” but the relationships between race and war seem less clear in this reading. I’m curious to know what other people think about race and war in Impossible Subjects, and how it might change as we read more and hear more of Ngai’s argument.
The American federal government has played a crucial role in manufacturing the material consequences of racial socialization. In this week’s readings, it was shown how each of the three branches of federal government: executive, legislative, and judicial, were integral components of the racialization of colonized peoples, immigrants, and ethnic minorities. Vicente Rafael in “White Love,” discusses how the executive branch’s decision to conduct a census was used as a colonial tool for quantitative demarcation and the identity erasure of Filipino colonial subjects. Rafael juxtaposes the impersonal taxonomies of the census with an analysis of nationalist plays to advance a narrative of agency within Filipino individuals. This dialectical analysis during the epoch of U.S. colonization of the Philippines nuances our understanding of imperialistic paternalism and native resistance. Mae Ngai focuses her study on “impossible subjects” or illegal aliens that make it difficult for state authorities and legislators to disaggregate between “citizens, lawfully resident migrants, and illegal aliens,” (Ngai, 4). This unsolvable problem has resulted in the institution, reform, and continuously shifting notions of citizenship and legislation along a “hierarchy of desirability,” (Ngai, 7). She draws a connection from restrictive immigration policy to the “making” and “unmaking” of illegal aliens (Ngai, 57). Lastly, Nayan Shah’s complex examination of jurisprudence sodomy cases between adult men and adolescent boys shows how all three branches worked in symbiosis in order to create a system of over-policing and surveillance of spatial borderlands (immigrant ethnic enclaves) and minority bodies (Asian males).
One of the aspects of the readings that most interested me was the analysis of gender in both contexts, especially the Rafael and Shah readings. Rafael talked about gender in the context of seditionist nationalist plays in Filipino culture. He identified how certain characters always took male or female parts, such as the motherland-female or the patriot-male. Rafael credits this to the Filipino understanding of kin rather than a stratified gender hierarchy. Shah talks about gender in the context of statutory rape laws, which were originally heightened to protect young girls from older men. In the situation of same-sex migrant worker relationships, often those younger partners that were more feminized escaped blame as accomplices. Both of these perceptions of gender enforce a view of women as more passive and gentle than the action-taking men. I think that this is an interesting insight into race and war because it shows how transectionality is largely disregarded in contexts of heightened racial clashes. I think that movements often tend to focus on one inequality or another because they think that tackling more than one is too big of a task. I suppose it remains to be seen whether or not this is a true perception. Ngai talks about gender less, but some of the concepts are implicit in her discussion of the family dynamic of immigration and deportation.
What personally struck me the most was Ngai’s description of illegal immigrants: the impossible subjects. The whole history if illegal immigrants was fascinating, as well as the fact that the conversation surrounding illegal immigrants and deportation has been present in the United States for as long as it has. The stories Ngai tells of families being ripped apart because of inhumane deportation and sometimes perilous, sometimes breezy border crossing was the most surprising in that they seemed so relevant today but were actually happening nearly a century ago. What also struck me while reading the text was casual yet firm choice to list Chinese laborers when listing the excludable classes. We know from the Kim, Koshy and Chuh reading that Asian Americans were (and are) perpetual outsiders, aliens where were not granted the possibility of citizenship. The slow but present evolution of U.S. immigration was narrated, in the text, but as mentioned before, the relevance of the things that happened then to the current political climate is extremely timely, and makes one wonder about the future of immigration what will become of immigration of tomorrow.
I am particularly interested in how the three texts deal with the ways in which race and war directly and indirectly shape the realities of immigrants and migrants to the U.S. as well as subjects of U.S. colonialism. “White Love” by Vincente Rafael deals directly with the Filipino-American War (1899) and critically analyzes the ways in which U.S. colonialism in was rhetorically framed as an act of compassionate altruism, obscuring the violence and surveillance forced upon the native population. Rafael turns to he Census of the Philippine Islands (1903) as an example of the culmination of what he terms, “U.S. colonial desire” to establish knowledge, power, and surveillance; the project of the census not only makes possible the creation of categories of difference, but also serves as an instrument of power and dominance that prioritizes the “white gaze” of the colonizer. Similarly, in “Between ‘Oriental Depravity’ and ‘Natural Degenerates,’” Nayan Shah discusses how the state desire to protect “society and civilization,” is carried out via acts of discipline and vigilant police surveillance that seek to regulate “normative” masculinity and sexuality. Because sexuality can be materialized in the body, it can also be racialized and criminalized, as Shah shows in the various examples of court cases dealing with illegal acts of sodomy of the 1910s and 1920s. In order to protect state interests against the inclusion of “foreign” migrants, the portrayal of non-white immigrant men as sexually deviant predators (and therefore a threat to the security of the nation) was necessary. Sexual morality and normalcy had to be conflated with national identity so that the immoral sexuality and “degenerate nature” of the “foreigner” justified the exclusion of immigrants at large. Thus, sexuality was leveraged as a means of establishing racial difference.
I am also interested in Mae Ngai’s analysis of how race, immigration, and citizenship are historically and continually bound to one another and how the “illegal alien” embodies the contradiction of citizenship and national borders. Ngai describes how illegal immigrants are also members of ethno-racial communities, occupying the same spaces as those of their same ethno-racial groups, which are comprised of both “illegal” and legal immigrants. This type of “passing” makes for a sort of invisibility or indistinguishability between “illegal” and legal immigrants, which underscores the unintelligible nature of U.S. borders and immigration policies in general. At the same time, Ngai’s understanding of “alien citizenship,” points to the simultaneous process by which technically legal citizens of the U.S. remain continually excluded and racialized as “foreign” by cultural and institutional practices. The supposedly stable and fixed national border begins to break down as a site of contradiction and incoherence.
The three readings for this class seem to revolve around a common theme of assimilation (or lack thereof) built upon racial hierarchies. In the Ngai reading, this is shown through the differences how distinct racial groups were treated in regards to immigration. Not only were European and Canadian immigrants regarded are more assimilable than other minority groups during the beginning of institutionalized immigration in the United States, these groups were also allowed opportunities to become more assimilated and seen as an insider through the different immigrations policies and circumstances that allowed for them to gain these privileges. In White Love , Rafael discusses how the United States saw the people of the Philippines as having great potential for assimilation into Western culture of self-governance, but still distinguished Philippine people as inherently different from White Americans as the Philippine people were naturally and biologically inclined to mimic others unlike White Americans. In Shah’s writing, we see Asian Americans cast as perpetual foreigners because of their “inherent sexual immorality”, when in fact Shah argues that the judgment of sexually natural and sexually unnatural are determined by the reputation and social standing of the person.
These themes of assimilation leave me pondering where Asian Americans stand in terms of “assimilation”. Drawing back upon the model minority myth, it seems as though Asian Americans are considered to be assimilated into White America in that now they are “out-whiting the whites.” However, Kim’s analysis of how Asian Americans are still viewed as perpetual outsiders questions this notion of whether Asian Americans have assimilated in American society or not. The questions I am left with are : Can Asian Americans be considered “assimilated”, even when they are continually seen as foreign/outsiders? What does assimilation mean, and what does that meaning entail?
Both the Ngai and Rafael readings address how state policy and categorization function as important racial projects that extend and even create racial hierarchies. In the case of Mexican illegal immigrants, Ngai describes how race “directed the reach” of possible immigration reform and controlled formation of racial policy. In the early-mid 20th century, different European immigrant groups were able to “unmake” their illegality through policy and “administrative” decisions. With these new rules, European immigrants who committed crime in the US were more “deserving” of citizenship than Mexican immigrants who lacked the right documents. In a similar vein, Rafael discusses US control in the Philippines and how they imposed a census with an arbitrary categorization of identities, establishing racial borders and hierarchies. By pencilling Filipinos into “five skin colors” and distinctions of “civilized” or “wild” mainly based on religion, these categorizations ignored the different histories and legacies of different Filipino groups. They established racial divides along Western ideals of lighter skin superiority.
Additionally, one specific part that stood out to me in the Ngai reading was this idea that undocumented immigrants are both unwelcome and welcome—considered indispensable to capitalist profit, but shunned by the state. This reminds me of Racial Capitalism and how throughout European civilization, capitalist systems have been built on exploited, non-native labor. Still, we try to forget about these laborers and try to draw borders to separate ourselves.
One underlying theory that Vincente Rafael seems to brush against repeatedly in “White Love” is Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony. Cultural hegemony is the societal dominance of a group or class that is maintained through manipulating mass consciousness into believing that (i) the current hierarchies of power are inevitable/ the status quo and that (ii) the interests of the ruling class are aligned with the interests of society as a whole. When Rafael writes, “the culmination of colonial rule, self-government, can be achieved only when the subject has learned to colonize itself,” he is employing Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony—self-rule cannot be separated from its colonial origins, because even a self-governing society is only so because of systems of logic established by the colonizing power that inherently bias that power. White love, then promises “civilization,” but at the cost of white hegemony — “the constant supervision of a sovereign master.” This same idea can help us understand the formation of the “illegal alien” in Mae Ngai’s work. Ngai lays out clearly through historical examples how cultural hegemony operates on racial axes. Abstract laws declaring certain immigrants as formally “illegal” categorize undocumented immigrants as criminals innately, justifying nativist discourse until “nativism succeeded in legislating restriction.” Thus, it becomes common-sense or status quo that undocumented immigrants were some sort of enemy to the wellbeing of the American people.
A common theme I saw in the readings this week was “morality” (and to a lesser extent, “criminalization”). In the Ngai reading, we saw how “criminal” behavior was broadly defined in terms of arbitrary “morality” by immigration officers and administrators when dealing with Mexican immigrants. In the Shah reading, we saw how criminalization of “unnatural” sexuality was used to reinforce Western conventions of masculinity (and femininity, since the two normative genders are dialectically opposed). Lastly, we saw in the Rafael reading how moral reformers used their doctrine to distinguish between “wild” (non-Christian) and “civilized (Christian) Filipinos. To me (and this maybe a somewhat obvious thought), the idea of “morality” is yet another angle from which oppressors can subordinate a group of people. Framing colonization and racism from a “moralistic” standpoint allows oppressors to both legalize oppression and frame this oppression within a “benevolent” mindset. Morality is yet another way the Westerners have imposed their culture on another, such that culture of the oppressed is only understood in reference to that of the oppressors. I also noted the idea of “homogenization” presented in the Rafael reading, and how diversity of language and culture is characterized by Westerners as “savage” or “uncivilized.”
Reading Rafael’s “White Love” reminded me a bit on the conversations we had earlier about ally politics. Here is a great (if you can call it that) example of when allyship is really just condescending. The entire tone of the quotes from the McKinley administration just feel incredibly gross, from the separating of classes in the Philippines into the civilized and wild (based mostly on religious leanings) to how Phillipinos were referred to as “little brown brothers,” the entire situation just oozes the sense of superiority rather than allyship.
Despite all of this though, I had trouble reconciling my thoughts on the use of a census as a “test” of order. While the idea of even “testing” a people or a country that you’re colonizing is obviously demeaning, I still fully see why, if the U.S. wanted to get a quantitative sense of the country’s ability to organize something incredibly complex and comprehensive, a census would be the tool to get this sense. Perhaps the tone in conducting it was incredibly flawed, but is the actual act flawed as well? Are there any other examples (not just in the U.S. but in other places in the world) where taking a census successfully did indeed convey something to be proud of?
Class Reflection:
Throughout the class discussion, and the film: The Crucible of War: The Spanish American War, notions of sex and gender resonated with me most strongly. In class, we discussed the how the Ngai reading showed that for White America, a very specific patriarchal, white, family was a building block of a good nation. The emphasis on man being the head of the household was made very clear through the reading, showing us that gender roles can serve to either normalize or alienize certain groups. The Shah reading concentrated specifically on how sexuality can be used as a proxy for racism. In the Rafael reading, we discussed the paternalistic relationship between the United States (being the father) and the Philippines (being the child). The film: The Crucible of War tied in these themes of gender and sexuality in multiple ways. One such way was how before the war, Cuba was displayed a a damsel in distress, and the U.S. as her knight in shining armor. Additionally, during and after the war, the women (in what would later be colonies of the United States) were portrayed as tropical, exotic women; it oversimplifies and erases important parts of their identities. These discussions and this film have made me more curious about the relationship between gender, sex, and racism.
Vincent’s point about the census is an important one to consider since it is not immediately apparent that a census is inherently racist or demeaning. However, in the context of the Rafael reading and the discussion we had last class, it seems clear that the motives of the US government in imposing the census on the Philippines were not entirely pure. A census can be a valuable tool for allocating resources to the underserved and analyzing segregation and racial divisions in a country, but this was obviously not the case in the Philippines. There, the census was used as a tool to reduce human beings into mere categories. The US government was clearly not interested in utilizing the census for social betterment, especially considering that it only really paid attention to Christian Filipinos. The rest of the island’s inhabitants received a much “simpler more abbreviated series [of census questions] since they were deemed wild (that is, non-Christian)”. This preferential treatment immediately reveals that the census in the Philippines was not based on equal representation. However, this does not show that all censuses are inherently flawed or racist. I personally believe that they can be properly used for social good.
Reflection:
I left class still unable to form a coherent answer to the question of “what is war?” and after watching Crucible of Empire, a film all about a specific war, the Spanish-American War, I began to only feel confident in the assertion that war is in many ways a production that also produces, especially given the elements of public spectacle and sensationalism involved in the coverage of the Spanish-American War, as well as the convoluted justifications crafted by generals and congress. As shown in the film, war also contains the potential to produce unity and differentiation against an enemy “other” and plays a critical role in the formation of masculinity, not just as it pertains to individuals who enlist in war efforts, but also the masculinity of the nation-state at large. After reading Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s text from this week’s readings, I would consider war to be not just a production, but specifically a “production of power through violence.” I also found it bitterly ironic how the general American sentiment prior to the Spanish-American War was one of sympathy towards Cuba’s position as a Spanish-ruled colony. Though the U.S. appeared to be in support of Cuban liberation from Spain, the “support” was not of Cuban independence exclusively, but rather out of military interest in acquiring Cuba.
Class Reflection:
One of the things that struck me when reading the Gilmore reading was how much it tied in to some of the readings and discussion from last week. In class, we mentioned the rise of the term ‘Progressive’ and how the perception that many people have of progressives being liberal, open-minded, and fair is flawed. When it originally rose, progressivism was a way of maintaining the white power structure and allowed legal mechanisms to reinforce racial divisions, as we talked about in class. Gilmore talks about how progressivism later became a cause to increase the amount of prisons and the number of incarcerations. It strikes me how positive connotations can help reinforce a harmful concept.
Another connection that I saw in the Gilmore reading was our class discussion of policing and communities. Growing up in a predominantly white and middle class neighborhood, I was always taught to respect and implicitly trust police; I never doubted that people who went to prison were criminals. The Gilmore reading especially enforced to me how much incarceration is used as a weapon against groups, which I think is indicative of the extent to which racism is alive in our societal subconscious.
After watching the first half of “Crucible of Empire” in class, I immediately saw emphasis on the “allure” of war, specifically for young American men, who saw war with Spain as an opportunity to reclaim for themselves the stories of war and “heroism” they’d heard from older generations. In this way, it seemed to me that this war, and perhaps all wars, was an extension of male will, which at its most primitive level is to fight and prove oneself in combat/competition. This idea was further emphasized later in the film, when it was noted that telling 18-19 year-old American men to hate the enemy naturally led to violence and cruelty on the part of American troops against Filipino civilians. I think this relates to the idea of “bodies” that came up in class, that oppressive systems such as the census in the Philippines was created to categorize and control human bodies, and in doing so, assert dominance over them. I think what “Crucible of Empire” starts to get at (and what the readings for March 12 elaborate on) is the violence directed at those bodies, especially with the example of American troops killing Filipino civilians for no reason, other than hatred of the “enemy.”
Class + Movie Reflection
In the readings and discussions last week as well as the film, one topic I am extremely interested in is the intersection of gender, racism, and war. We discussed in class this idea of colonialism being paternal and masculine as Rafael describes it as an “overwhelmingly masculine construction.” This idea is similarly reflected in the documentary when it shows political cartoons portraying Cuba as a damsel in distress and America as the savior. Support for the war was generated through nationalism and the promise of “revenge” for McKinley being “insulted” by the Spanish Ambassador and the destruction of the Maine. These ideas of defending pride, paired with an idea of a paternal, heroic instinct to help others, established the US in the war as a solely masculine figure. By the US ascribing itself the role of the white, masculine savior, it also emasculated and dehumanized the men in the countries they are attempting to save. Similarly, Shah describes the US’s view of immigrant men, whose masculinity they casted as “foreign and degenerate,” juxtaposed against American masculinity, which was supposedly pure and moral but used to initiate war and violence.
I was interested in a few particular different representations of war presented in Crucible of Empire: war as a means of easing class tensions within a given nation, war as a necessary measure in the process of becoming a world power, and war as heroic justice. The first, war as a means of easing class tensions, seemed slightly confusing/misleading to me before reading the Gilmore piece for this week on the transhistorical role of violence in maintaining white supremacy in the US. Just as lynching has always been a way of exercising and consolidating the power of the sovereign race, it seems natural to argue that going to war could be a vehicle for exercising and consolidating the imperial domination of the US. In this case, the violence of war was a consolidating force, easing class tensions in the process of forging a national imperial identity. This directly leads into the second representation of war as a necessary step in becoming a world power, which is in turn justified by the romanticization of war as a form of heroic justice.
As many people above have been saying, the documentary about the Spanish-American War helps us to define war by providing illustrations of its connections to masculinity, power and race. In addition to looking at how was portrayed and continuously produced during the Spanish-American War, I thought it was interesting to see where the production of war struggled to deal with contradictions. Specifically, as mentioned in the movie, African Americans occupied an uncertain and contradictory position during the war – some black men were eager to join in the war effort to prove their bravery, competence and patriotism, while others thought they had no business going off to fight for Cuban freedom when the fight for black freedom in America was still far from over. To add to these contradictions, black soldiers were still segregated into their own regiments, and some high-ranking officers in the army were former Confederate commanders. It was jarring to hear the story about white soldiers competing to shoot through the sleeve of a black child’s shirt, and later Roosevelt’s commentary about black soldiers accepting his command and showing a surprising ability to take initiative. Both these events illustrate the U.S.’s unpreparedness to reconcile the heroic, unifying ideals that calls to war rely on, and unheroic, divisive realities created by racism.
It was fascinating to start including war more explicitly into the ongoing conversation of the class and to explore the underlying themes of gender that seemed to connect the readings and the documentary we watched in class. The younger male generation’s urge to prove themselves through war and the portrayal of Cuba and the Philippines as damsels in distress were brought into the context of homophobia with associated with immigrant people of color. Personally, this called back themes that were present in the previous readings, particularly Prashad, where he talked about the 19th century American views of the ‘Orient’ and how it were gendered in a way that was associated with femininity and the ‘Occident’ was associated with masculinity.