Thread by @Noahpinion

1/Next up in my "immigration and diversity" reading series is "The Color of Success," by @ellendwu: amazon.com/Color-Success-…

This is a fascinating history book, about Asian Americans, and about official U.S. policies that helped create the "model minority" stereotype.

2/The core story of the book is about something the author calls "racial liberalism" - official, top-down efforts to include Asian Americans (and, sometimes, other minority groups) more fully in American society.

The results were interesting, and very mixed.

3/The narrative starts out during World War 2, during the Japanese Internment. That internment wasn't an isolate incident - before the war, Japanese and Chinese Americans were viciously and systematically oppressed by American law and culture both.

4/Many people might not realize this, but in the early 20th century, Asian Americans in California were forced into ghettos, denied many occupations, subject to violent attacks, etc. Asian immigrants weren't allowed to become citizens.

5/But in the late 1930s, something started to change. American elites worried that their country was going the way of the Nazis (which it probably was), and made a concerted effort to change things.

6/Although the U.S. was about to go to war with Japan, the government made a concerted effort to improve attitudes toward Chinese-Americans.

7/The single most startling detail in the entire book, to me, was that this song was sung at the national conventions of both the Republican Party AND the Communist Party in 1940:

8/This part of the book underscores how important the ideological struggle against the Nazis was in changing Americans' beliefs and ideals and our vision of what our country was fundamentally about.

Of course, you know my favorite example of this:

9/Anyway, during the war, American government propaganda tried to integrate Chinese Americans fully into the American mainstream. In the war's later years, it even tried to create a positive image of *Japanese* Americans as noble warriors fighting patriotically for their country.

10/After the war, legal anti-Asian discrimination was basically eliminated (though immigration quotas didn't get fully lifted until 1965). With the lifting of official discrimination, Asian Americans began to succeed economically and spread out throughout the country.

11/In the postwar period, there arose a new reason for the American government to promote Asian Americans - the Cold War.

The U.S. was imperially entangled in East Asia, and communism was sweeping the region. America needed to present a positive alternative.

12/To this end, the American government sent a bunch of Asian Americans around East Asia to show how well Asian Americans were (supposedly) accepted into American society.

It also heavily promoted anti-communist activism by Asian Americans in the U.S.

13/One interesting tidbit: Though many people think that "assimilation" used to mean enforce cultural conformity and uniformity, the U.S. government's plan for Asian Americans emphasized what we might today call multiculturalism:

14/In the 60s and 70s, racial liberalism took a darker turn. Liberals like Daniel Patrick Moynihan hoped to use Asian Americans as a model for incorporating Black Americans into the American mainstream. But this often went bad places:

15/It was all too easy for the government's official message of "Yay, Asians are great!" to morph into "Hey Black people, why can't you be more like Asians?"

A few Asian American writers embraced this contrast too, prompting ferocious debates within the Asian American community.

16/The other problem with what the author calls "racial liberalism" was that by highlighting Asian Americans' achievements or good qualities as a group, it also helped perpetuate the idea of Asian Americans as "perpetual foreigners" rather than normal, unremarkable Americans.

17/That's the basic outline of the book. There are also a couple of interesting detours. In one chapter, for example, Wu describes Hawaii's very different approach to racial liberalism and integration.

18/The author ends with a decidedly ambivalent attitude toward "racial liberalism" - recognizing its shortcomings and pitfalls, yet also recognizing its real and impressive accomplishments:

19/Essentially, "racial liberalism" was a blunt, imperfect tool for a bygone age - in an age of government propaganda, stereotype-based thinking, and top-down management of civic life, it might have been the best the U.S. could do. But its time has passed.

20/Now, the author stresses, Asian Americans have taken their political and cultural destiny into their own hands. The era of the "model minority" is over.

Anyway, this is a fascinating book, and I recommend it to everyone.
amazon.com/Color-Success-…

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