Discussion Topic

The influence and justification of pre-WWII racially based laws on Asian American communities in a republic founded on equality

Summary:

Pre-WWII racially based laws significantly influenced Asian American communities, imposing restrictions that contradicted the principles of equality on which the republic was founded. These laws justified discriminatory practices, such as exclusion from immigration, denial of citizenship, and segregation, reflecting widespread racial prejudices and economic fears. This legal framework marginalized Asian Americans, undermining the nation's foundational commitment to equality and justice for all citizens.

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How did racially based laws before WWII impact Asian American families and communities? How were these laws justified despite the principle that "all men are created equal"?

First, I would argue that this question is based in some ways on a misunderstanding of what it means to say that our republic was founded on the basis of the idea that “all men are created equal.”  Clearly, when Thomas Jefferson wrote those words, and his fellow founders signed their names to the ideas of the Declaration, they were not saying that they believed that all men really were equal.  Men like Jefferson owned slaves and believed as a matter of course that they were superior to their slaves and all other black people.  In other words, our republic was founded on the idea that all white men were created equal, not that all men of all races were created equal.  Once we think of the founding of our country in this way, the treatment of Asian immigrants is no longer incompatible with our founders’ principles.  It was perfectly...

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logical to treat Asians as inferior in a country in which whites were assumed to be racially superior.

Because of these ideas, various laws and legal decisions arose which shaped Asian communities before WWII.  For the most part, these laws shaped Asian communities by constraining what they could do and preventing them from assimilating into American society.  These laws helped to maintain Asian cultural distinctiveness because they prevented Asians from aspiring to become American.

Let us look at two such laws or legal decisions as examples of this dynamic.  First, there was the case of Gong Lum v. Rice.  In this case, the Supreme Court of the United States held that it was legal to require Asian children to attend separate schools from those attended by white children.  Second, there were laws in various states banning marriages between Asians and whites. 

In both of these examples, the major impact was to separate whites and Asians.  When the two races were separated, Asians were forced to remain as a separate cultural group.  They could not integrate into mainstream American society.  This was the main way in which these racially-based laws and decisions shaped Asian communities, reinforcing the idea that America was a republic in which only white men were created equal to one another. 

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How did racially based laws influence Asian American communities before WWII and how were these justified in a republic founded on equality?

When we start to talk about things like “dominant understandings,” and why they come to be the way they are, it is very hard to give definitive answers.  It is impossible to know exactly what motivates people to see a given group in a given way at a given time.  We can only speculate, using what evidence we have.  Let us look at four main potential reasons why Asians could come to be excluded from dominant understandings of what it meant to be American.

One reason was economic.  Asians were typically brought to the United States specifically for work purposes.  This meant that it was easy for them to be seen as an economic threat to those already in the country.  It was possible (as it is now with illegal immigrants) to tell a plausible story about how the Asians were taking jobs from the Americans.

A second reason was “racial.”  Particularly at the time when Asians were first coming in large numbers to the United States, the US was a country that was very conscious of race.  There were many scientific theories at the time that “demonstrated” how human beings existed on a racial hierarchy, with Northern and Western Europeans at the top and “colored” races at the bottom.  The physical differences in appearance between Asians and white Americans were a clear reason, in the thinking of the time, to differentiate Asians from “real” Americans.

A third reason was religious.  Again, this was a time when American attitudes were much less tolerant.  The Japanese and Chinese were, of course, not Christian for the most part.  Filipinos who came were Christian, but they were Catholic.  Religious differences made all of these Asians seem less “American” than white, Protestant, Americans.

Finally, there were cultural differences.  Asians came, of course, from a non-European cultural background.  While the US had assimilated various sorts of Europeans, it had not tried to assimilate any non-Europeans other than the enslaved Africans.  It had never had to deal with the idea of large numbers of people who were free, but who were so culturally different.  These cultural differences made Asians seem not to be real Americans.

In short, what we can really say is that Asians seemed too different in too many ways at a time when the United States was nowhere near as tolerant as it is today.  This led to such things as the Chinese Exclusion Act of the 1880s and other laws that discriminated against Asians and treated them as fundamentally different from “real” Americans.

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