Thread by @Noahpinion

I thought @ellendwu's "The Color of Success" did a good job of busting the myth of "USA as a white supremacist superpower" with regards to Asia during the Cold War:

amazon.com/Color-Success-…

https://twitter.com/viet_t_nguyen/status/1207345445887889408

Wu first documents how U.S. support for China in WW2, and the need to depict Chinese people as allies, caused the government to experiment with an early form of multiculturalism:

This involved a concerted effort to eliminate the anti-Chinese racism that had been pervasive on the West Coast in the prewar years:

Later, as part of the effort to get Asian countries to resist communism, the U.S. promoted the idea of a dual identity - Asian, but also American - as a way of showing that the U.S. offered more freedom of identity than communist countries did:

Of course, this is on top of the fact that in order to see the U.S. as a white supremacist superpower, one has to see its Asian Cold War allies - South Korea, Taiwan, etc. - as essentially satrapies or puppet states of a white supremacist empire, which seems problematic.

Anyway, "The Color of Success" is a great book, and I recommend it to everyone:
amazon.com/Color-Success-…

(end)