During the 19th the United States received many new residents from China. Sometimes they came voluntarily; sometimes they were imported forcibly. The term “Shanghaied” originally described the forced stealing of Chinese men to come work in America. Many of them worked on the transcontinental railroad, built between 1863 and 1869. Ninety percent of the workers on the central Pacific track, for example, were Chinese.
After the railroad was completed, however, many Chinese went to work in industries in which they competed with white American workers, especially mining, and they became scapegoats for white unemployment. For some examples of anti-Asian propaganda, see our collection of “yellow peril” posters and cartoons.
Animosity towards the Chinese culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The Act meant that Chinese in America, most of whom were adult men, had little hope of reuniting with their families if they stayed in the U.S.; it also allowed the U.S. to deny re-entry if a Chinese person already in the U.S. left the country; and it excluded the Chinese in America from getting U.S. citizenship.
The Chinese Exclusion Act is an ugly moment in U.S. history that was supported by many Americans. But this support wasn’t universal. The political cartoon below attacks the Act. “No admittance to Chinamen,” it reads. But “communist nihilist-socialist fenian & hoodlum [are] welcome.” The punchline reads, sarcastically, “We must draw the line somewhere, you know.”
The Fenian, by the way, were Irish political groups, suggesting that the embrace of one minority group did not necessarily translate into the embrace of others. Or maybe the cartoon was meant to go the other way: “If we’re going to exclude the Chinese, let’s exclude others as well.”
UPDATE:Loki offered the following helpful correction to my description of the word “Shanghaid”:
A bit of disagreement: The verb to Shanghai someone was more often used with respect to the practice of crimps or other people to use force, intimidation or outright kidnapping to man merchant ships during the 18th century.
I’m not about to claim that there weren’t cases of people from Shanghai being forcibly relocated to the US to work on the railroad – but the term refers to one of the abuses of common sailors that was considered usual practice in the age of sail.
In 1989 Peggy McIntosh published an essay that is assigned in nearly every Sociology of Race and Ethnicity course in America. Titled White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, the essay included a list of things that white people, but not others in a white-dominated society, can count on. Here are a few:
I can avoid spending time with people whom I was trained to mistrust and who have learned to mistrust my kind or me.
If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live.
I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.
I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.
I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race.
Whether I use checks, credit cards or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance of financial reliability.
I thought of Peggy McIntosh when I saw this personal confession at PostSecret:
Please welcome Guest Blogger, Julian Abagond. Abagond is a middle-class, West Indian, New Yorker; he is also a computer programmer who enjoys ancient Greek. He writes whatever he wants at his blog. In the borrowed post below, he explains that the question is really “Why do Americans think that the Japanese draw themselves as white?” Enjoy.
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Why do the Japanese draw themselves as white? You see that especially in manga and anime.
As it turns out, that is an American opinion, not a Japanese one. The Japanese see anime characters as being Japanese. It is Americans who think they are white. Why? Because to them white is the Default Human Being.
If I draw a stick figure, most Americans will assume that it is a white man. Because to them that is the Default Human Being. For them to think it is a woman I have to add a dress or long hair; for Asian, I have to add slanted eyes; for black, I add kinky hair or brown skin. Etc.
The Other has to be marked. If there are no stereotyped markings of otherness, then white is assumed.
Americans apply this thinking to Japanese drawings. But to the Japanese the Default Human Being is Japanese! So they feel no need to make their characters “look Asian”. They just have to make them look like people and everyone in Japan will assume they are Japanese – no matter how improbable their physical appearance.
You see the same thing in America: After all, why do people think Marge Simpson is white? Look at her skin: it is yellow. Look at her hair: it is a blue Afro. But the Default Human Being thing is so strong that lacking other clear, stereotyped signs of being either black or Asian she defaults to white.
When you think about it there is nothing particularly white about how anime characters look:
huge round eyes – no one looks like that, not even white people (even though that style of drawing eyes does go back to Betty Boop).
yellow hair – but they also have blue hair and green hair and all the rest. Therefore hair colour is not about being true to life.
small noses – compared to the rest of the world whites have long noses that stick out.
white skin – but many Japanese have skin just as pale and white as most White Americans.
Besides, that is not how the Japanese draw white or even Chinese people. The otherness of foreigners is clearly marked by physical stereotypes – just as Americans do with people of colour. In anime White Americans are stereotyped as having yellow hair, blue eyes and a long or big nose:
Gone are the big round eyes and the strange hair colours. Because those things have nothing to do with whiteness.
Note that the Japanese drop the markings of otherness if the action is set in a foreign land, like China or America. In that case the characters are drawn in the regular anime style. Because for that story the Default Human Being is understood.
Some Americans, even some scholars, will argue against this view of anime. They want to think the Japanese worship America or worship whiteness and use anime to prove it. But they seem to be driven more by their own racism and nationalism than anything else.
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All images are from Google images; Abagond retains no rights.
Please welcome Guest Blogger, Caroline Heldman, PhD. Heldman is an Associate Professor of Politics at Occidental College. The week after Hurricane Katrina, Dr. Helman drove to New Orleans to assist with rescue and relief efforts. She later co-founded the New Orleans Women’s Shelter and continues to work on rebuilding efforts in the Lower Ninth Ward. Below is a post, excerpted from a much longer update on the Katrina tragedy, about the Agliers massacre.
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Trigger warning: racial violence and racist language.
A disturbing picture of racial slaughter emerges in the days following Katrina, at the hands of private residents and police officers. Racially-motivated murders were carried out in Algiers Point, a predominately white enclave nestled in mostly black Algiers, not far from Gretna. This part of the city is connected to the rest of New Orleans by bridge and ferry only, and it did not experience flooding. After the storm, a band of 15 to 30 white men formed a loose militia targeting anyone whom they deemed “didn’t belong” in their predominately white neighborhood (Thompson, 2008). They blocked off streets with downed trees, stockpiled weapons, and ran patrols.
At least eleven black men were shot, although some locals expect that the actual number is much higher. On July 16, 2010, Roland Bourgeois was charged with shooting three black men in Algiers in the days following Katrina (McCarthy, 2010). He allegedly came back to the militia home base with a bloody baseball cap from Ronald Herrington, a man he shot, and told a witness that “Anything coming up this street darker than a paper bag is getting shot.”
To date, this is the only arrest of militia members, but the FBI is investigating the situation and will likely make more arrests given that two Danish filmmakers interviewed multiple residents who admitted shooting black people. In “Welcome to New Orleans,” militia member Wayne Janak smiles at the camera: “It was great! It was like pheasant season in South Dakota. If it moved, you shot it.” A woman nearby adds “He understands the N-word now… In this neighborhood, we take care of our own.” Many of the victims reported that militia members called them racial epithets during attacks, and a family member of militia members reports that her uncle and cousins considered it a “free-for-all—white against black,” and her cousin was happy they were “shooting niggers.”
Malik Rahim, a long-time Algiers resident and activist who co-founded Common Ground Relief after the storm, took me on a tour of bodies in his neighborhood a week or so after the storm. I only made it through one viewing – a bloated body of a man under a piece of cardboard with a gunshot wound to his back. I assumed that this death was being investigated, but should have known otherwise given that the state had essentially sanctioned these actions with a “shoot to kill” order that allowed civilians to make their own assessments of who should live or die.
One of Many New Orleans Vigilante T-Shirts Slogans:
Please welcome Guest Blogger, Benjamin Eleanor Adam. Adam is a graduate student at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he studies the American history of gender and sexuality. Benjamin also teaches courses in Women’s and Gender Studies at Hunter College which focus on intersectional approaches to thinking about race, class, disability, gender, and sexuality. Benjamin casually blogs about these issues at Thinking Makes it So.
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The following are all of the immediately visible images representing modern humans (as distinct from either earlier human species or animals) from the 10 separate stories NPR published this July and August as part of the series titled How Evolution Gave Us The Human Edge.
In case you missed the obvious, this is just one recent example of a long history of discourse relating whiteness and humanity which has its roots in racial science and ethical justifications of colonialism, slavery, and genocide (google it or something). I would argue that it matters in these contexts more than just the general vast overrepresentation of whites in the media and as allegedly race-neutral “humans” because the context here is one explicitly about defining what is human, what separates humans from animals, and about evolution as a civilizing process.
By presenting whites as the quintessential humans who possess the bodies and behaviors taken to be deeply meaningful human traits, whites justified, and continue to justify white supremacy. This is what white privilege looks like (pun fully intended): being constantly told by experts that you and people like you represent the height of evolution and everything that it means to be that incredible piece of work that is man. (irony fully intended).
The last four images are from What Does It Mean To Be Human?, a slightly more diverse online exhibit from the Smithsonian linked from NPR. The main sidebar pictures, the iconic Michelangelo Creation of Adam pose, and the majority of the images are still of whites.
In Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality: Intimate Intersections, Forbidden Frontiers, Joane Nagel looks at how race/ethnicity, gender, and sexuality are often used to create new national identities and frame colonial expansion. In particular, White female sexuality, presented as modest and appropriate, was often contrasted with the sexuality of colonized women, who were often depicted as promiscuous or immodest. qout sent in an 1860s advertisement for Peter Lorillard Snuff & Tobacco that illustrates these differences.
According to An Empire of Plants: People and Plants that Changed the World, the ad drew on a purported Huron legend of a beautiful white spirit bringing them tobacco. There are a few interesting things going on here. We have the association of femininity with a benign nature; the women are surrounded by various animals (I can’t tell what they all are, but I think there’s a fox and a rabbit) who appear to pose no threat to the women or to one another. The background is lush and productive.
Racialized hierarchies are embedded in the personification of the “white spirit” as a White woman, descending from above to provide a precious gift to Native Americans, similar to imagery drawing on the idea of the “white man’s burden.” And as often occurred (particularly as we entered the Victorian Era), there is a willingness to put non-White women’s bodies more obviously on display than the bodies of White women. The White woman above is actually less clothed than the American Indian woman, yet her arm and the white cloth are strategically placed to hide her breasts and crotch (I can’t tell if we can just barely see her left nipple or if that’s shading). On the other hand, the Native American woman’s breasts are fully displayed. (This pattern continues; for instance, in Reading National Geographic, Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins discuss the way non-White women’s breasts are frequently displayed in the magazine while only recently have a few exceptions occurred where topless light-skinned women were included, all shot from behind rather than the front.)
So the ad provides a nice illustration of the intersection of race/ethnicity, gender (particularly ideas of feminine gentleness and innocence), sexuality, and marketing.
Presumably many of you have heard about the controversy that has arisen about a conversation between Laura Schlessinger (aka Dr. Laura) and a female African American caller. Corina C. sent in some links to posts on the topic. Trigger warning for harsh, racist language.
Here’s a recording of the conversation (found at Media Matters) in which Schlessinger responds to the caller’s concerns about comments from her White husband’s friends and relatives by suggesting she is “hypersensitive” and isn’t in a position to be concerned about comments she considered racist because “Turn on HBO, listen to a black comic, and all you hear is nigger, nigger, nigger”:
Selected parts of the transcript:
CALLER: I was a little caught back by the N-word that you spewed out, I have to be honest with you. But my point is, race relations –
SCHLESSINGER: Oh, then I guess you don’t watch HBO or listen to any black comedians.
…
SCHLESSINGER: Yeah. We’ve got a black man as president, and we have more complaining about racism than ever. I mean, I think that’s hilarious.
…
SCHLESSINGER: Chip on your shoulder. I can’t do much about that.
CALLER: It’s not like that.
SCHLESSINGER: Yeah. I think you have too much sensitivity –
CALLER: So it’s OK to say “nigger”?
SCHLESSINGER: — and not enough sense of humor.
…
SCHLESSINGER: …You know what? If you’re that hypersensitive about color and don’t have a sense of humor, don’t marry out of your race. If you’re going to marry out of your race, people are going to say, “OK, what do blacks think? What do whites think? What do Jews think? What do Catholics think?”…And what I just heard from Jade is a lot of what I hear from black-think — and it’s really distressting [sic] and disturbing. And to put it in its context, she said the N-word, and I said, on HBO, listening to black comics, you hear “nigger, nigger, nigger.” I didn’t call anybody a nigger. Nice try, Jade. Actually, sucky try. Need a sense of humor, sense of humor — and answer the question. When somebody says, “What do blacks think?” say, “This is what I think. This is what I read that if you take a poll the majority of blacks think this.” Answer the question and discuss the issue…Ah — hypersensitivity, OK, which is being bred by black activists. I really thought that once we had a black president, the attempt to demonize whites hating blacks would stop, but it seems to have grown, and I don’t get it.
There are a number of things going on here. In Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva discusses the various ways that Whites, in particular, downplay racial discrimination through a number of rhetorical and discursive strategies, several of which Schlessinger draws on in this exchange. For instance, she naturalizes the behavior the caller is concerned about: if you marry someone of another race, you just have to accept that their friends and family are going to consider you a representative of your entire race and constantly interact with you through the lens of your racial/ethnic background. That’s just to be expected, and if it starts to bother you, you’re “hypersensitive.” In fact, you ought to be sure and constantly educate yourself about all social trends as they relate to African Americans, so that if someone has any questions about what “Blacks think,” you can quickly tell them.
Think about the level of mental energy that is being expected here. Schlessinger is saying that it is the responsibility of minorities to know what members of their race/ethnicity think, in the aggregate, about whatever topic anybody else might want to know. I, as a White woman, am not expected to be able to provide, at the drop of a hat, data on Whites’ opinions about anything. (Though I do find that people who find out I’m a sociologist often think I must have insight into every aspect of social life, leading to questions such as, “My sister-in-law likes to _____. What do you think causes that?” or “So what do you think _____ will be like in 50 years?”, neither of which I am usually prepared to address in the middle of getting some potato salad at a picnic or buying a soda at the gas station.) The underlying argument here is that it is minorities’ responsibility to patiently educate Whites about things related to non-Whites, and an unwillingness to take on that role is evidence that you have a “chip on your shoulder.”
Another frame Schlessinger draws on is the minimization of racism: we have a Black president now, so racism’s totally over. What’s your problem?
Schlessinger is also holding all members of a racial group responsible for the actions of any of them. She argues that the routines of some Black comedians invalidates this individual African American woman’s right to be upset by racialized language in any context. It doesn’t matter whether this woman approves of the comedians’ comments — or has ever heard any of them; all African Americans are treated as an undifferentiated group, and the behavior of some revokes the rights of any others to bring up issues they find problematic.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Schlessinger hints at another rhetorical strategy, the “some of my best friends are _____ and thus I can’t possibly be racially prejudiced” argument:
I went out to dinner with three friends after Larry King. One of my friends who is gay is sitting there with another friend who is black, and he looks up and says, “I wonder what the media would do with this? You’re with a black guy and a gay guy.” We laughed, because we all understand what this is really about — censoring a point of view.
So there you have it: a round-up of ways to frame non-Whites as overly sensitive and unilaterally responsible for improving race relations.
UPDATE: The comments section is closed. There were still a lot of people commenting, but much of it had descended into name-calling and accusations, and I can’t keep up with all of them to catch the truly offensive ones. I may reopen comments in 48 hours after a cooling-off period.
Last month the cast of Jersey Shore rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE):
The public responded negatively. Says one snarky observer on the NYSE’s Facebook page:
The kids of the Jersey Shore rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange this week. In a related story, civilization is down 500 points.
The trouble, it seems, comes from the weirdness of bringing together trivial-and-fake-”reality”-stars with the very-important-and-really-real-U.S.-financial-market.
I’d like to suggest that what seems so wrong with that picture of Snooki and company ringing the opening bell actually makes a lot of sense sociologically. If this meeting of worlds—entertainment and the stock market—seems strange, it may be because we’re so used to regarding the markets as “real,” rather than as a performance (or even as entertainment in their own right).
Markets, she explains, aren’t “more ‘real’ than ‘reality TV.’” Instead, both the characters on Jersey Shore and markets are playing themselves. The reality show stars respond to expectations of “Guido” and “Guidette” personalities. Likewise, the market responds to economists whose predictions often create the very reality that they anticipate.
Harrington brings in a fancy concept:
Both are engaged in producing what French sociologist and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard calls “the simulacrum:” a copy without an original, a pretense that replaces and ultimately negates “reality” so successfully that we no longer care about what is real.
She finishes:
Theorized through this lens, the image of the Jersey Shore cast ringing the opening bell at the NYSE persists in memory not because it is represents a collision of worlds, but because it brings together two genres of performance whose entertainment value depends on their purported “reality.”
U.S. unemployment numbers only begin to describe how U.S. workers have suffered in this recession. The Pew Research Center has some additional data on this experience.
Twenty-six percent of full-time workers who became re-employed currently only work part-time. Thirteen percent moved from part-time to full time work. So, among the employed, there are 13 percent fewer full-time workers.
Americans who lost their jobs and became re-employed during this recession say that they’re making about the same, that the benefits are about equal, and many like their new job better:
Still, the re-employed are more likely than the still-employed to say that they are overqualified for their current job:
People that moved from full- to part-time work are significantly less likely to be satisfied with their new position:
Forty-seven percent of part-time workers would like a full-time job:
The term “underemployed” refers to this 47 percent of the population. Men, young people, the less educated, lower income, and non-whites are more likely to be underemployed:
Reel Injun, a new documentary about the portrayal of American Indians in U.S. movies, has been earning high praise and notice from bloggers and film critics. About the film:
Hollywood has made over 4000 films about Native people; over 100 years of movies defining how Indians are seen by the world...
Travelling through the heartland of America, Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond looks at how the myth of “the Injun” has influenced the world’s understanding – and misunderstanding – of Natives.
With candid interviews with directors, writers, actors and activists, including Clint Eastwood, Jim Jarmusch, Robbie Robertson, Sacheen Littlefeather, John Trudell and Russell Means, clips from hundreds of classic and recent films, including Stagecoach, Little Big Man, The Outlaw Josey Wales, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Atanarjuat the Fast Runner, Reel Injun traces the evolution of cinema’s depiction of Native people from the silent film era to today.
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(Image from Time.)
