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01.26 Local Democrats Invited to Brainstorming Session on Sun., Jan. 31 Ref. : Local Newsbriefs Travel
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Video National Health Care Systems In Other Countries 02.09 States Launch their Own Health Care reforms 02.03 States Face Worsening Recession with Health Care Funds on the Chopping Block 01.18 Drugmaker Got Kickbacks for Nursing Home Patients Media Watching
02.04 Err-America 02.03 The Right Gets Itself 'Wired' Ref. : The Daily Howler Legal Matters
01.25 Thinking About Fictions 01.24 US Democracy's End of the Road 01.22 Editorial: U.S. Supreme Court Nails Down the Coffin of Democracy 01.22 Security Fools US Politics, Policy & Culture
02.09 Palin, Psy-Ops & 'Condescending' Libs 02.09 Growing Hunger in America 02.08 The US Government has Lost its Reason for Being 02.08 Thinking About Oracles 02.06 No Direction Home: Pakistan and the Imperial Principle 02.04 Howard Zinn and the State of the Union 02.04 The US Supreme Court: Vanguard of Friendly American Fascism? 02.04 The New War Against Money 02.04 David Brooks Goes After Greedy Geezers 02.02 Obama's Budget Ducks Pentagon Cuts 02.02 Budgets, War and Blind Ambition: The Limited Minds of the American Elite 02.01 Thinking About Definitives 02.01 Remembering Howard Zinn (1922 - 2010) 01.29 American History 101: We Are Devo 01.29 Obama's Outreach to Americans: Empty Rhetoric, Business As Usual 01.28 The Supreme Court's Partisanship 01.27 Freeze Frame: Flopsweat and Farce in the Hollow Halls of Power 01.25 Granny D on Campaign Finance Reform 01.25 S.C. Republican’s Plan: Starve the Poor So They’ll Stop “Breeding” 01.23 It's Time for Kucinich, Conyers, Feingold and Other `Progressives' in Congress to Take a Stand 01.21 Massachusetts' Message of Stupid 01.21 Terrorism Defined: Bill Clinton Lights Our Way to Truth 01.21 How Obama Lost His Way 01.21 Political Earthquake Rocks Massachusetts 01.20 Obama Cuts Deal that Will Reduce Social Security, Medicare and all Entitlements 01.20 Critical Mass: Dem Agenda Opens Right-Wing Doors 01.19 Outsourcing War: The Rise of Private Military Contractors High Crimes?
01.25 The Silence and the Shield: Depraved Indifference to the Atrocities of Power 01.19 Dark as a Dungeon: A Brutal System Stripped Bare Economics & Business Non/Mis/Malfeasance
02.07 AIG-Gate: The World's Greatest Insurance Heist 02.06 The Free Market Fetish 02.04 The Crisis is Not Over 02.03 States Face Worsening Recession with Health Care Funds on the Chopping Block 02.02 Rule by the Rich 01.29 The Battle of the Titans: JPMorgan vs. Goldman Sachs 01.27 State of the Union: Obama’s “Automatic IRA” Plan Could Make Bush’s Wildest Dreams Come True 01.26 Obama, Read Your Reagan on Capital Gains Taxation 01.24 Funding Public Health Care with a Publicly-Owned Bank: How Canada Did It 01.18 Thinking About Accelerants International
02.08 Aafia Siddiqui: Victimized by American Injustic 02.07 Annals of Liberation: Obama Surge Driving Thousands From Their Homes 02.05 Human Rights Abuses in Israel and Occupied Palestine 02.03 Child Slavery in Haiti 01.30 Blood is His Argument: Tony Blair's Gentle Cuddling at Iraq "Inquiry" 01.28 Obama Ignores Key Afghan Warning 01.27 Haiti's Earthquake: Natural or Engineered 01.26 Helping Haiti’s Elders 01.26 Focus on Israel: Harvesting Haitian Organs 01.25 Focus on Haiti: Washington's Militarized Takeover 01.22 The Lessons of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions 01.18 Disaster Capitalism Headed to Haiti We are a non-profit Internet-only newspaper publication founded in 1973. Your donation is essential to our survival.
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BOOK REVIEW:Contemporary Lessons from a Tragic ChapterThe anti-Chinese pogroms in California, Oregon and Washington are largely missing from our collective memory.
Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese
Chinese immigrants were targeted by racist agitators who mobilized the white majority by appealing to their economic, demographic and cultural anxieties.
One of the most tragic chapters in American history—the spasms of white mob violence against Chinese immigrants followed by round-ups and expulsions that continued for more than half a century—forms almost no part of popular historical memory in the United States. Unlike the rolling genocide against Native American tribes, the brutality of African slavery and Jim Crow segregation, and the Second World War internment of Japanese Americans, the anti-Chinese pogroms in California, Oregon and Washington are largely missing from our collective memory. That is unfortunate because echoes of the savage, officially sanctioned racism motivating those outrages against the Chinese can be heard today in the populist agitation against Hispanic immigrants and in the jingoist drumbeat against China as an economic power. University of Delaware English and East Asian Studies professor Jean Pfaelzer’s Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans traces this tragic passage in a book that should appeal to both academic and popular audiences.
After low-capital gold mining was exhausted in the early 1860s, white agitation against the Chinese shifted to the opportunities in lumbering, fishing and orchard farming. Isolated in small-town Chinatowns and lacking most of the legal rights of citizens, Chinese immigrants were targeted by racist agitators who mobilized the white majority by appealing to their economic, demographic and cultural anxieties. White economic boycotts, mob violence, and mass round-ups abetted by local officials purged Chinese from many of California’s small towns, often driving them toward the relative safety of San Francisco’s Chinatown. The expulsion of more than 300 Chinese from the lumber town of Eureka in 1885 took place amid attempted lynchings and the looting of Chinese homes and businesses before they were burned (pp. 121-128). Pfaelzer’s Driven Out makes very timely reading not only because of the familiarity of the successful xenophobic agitation that begins locally and later emerges as a national issue, but also because of what it tells us about the limits of ethnic organization and resistance. Chinese immigrants and a handful of sympathetic whites were able to wage an uneven struggle by organizing Chinatown fire companies and Chinese unions, filing habeas corpus actions in federal courts, and organizing mass civil disobedience. Chinese across the United States unified after the passage of the Geary Act in 1892. Conceived by Congressman Thomas Geary, a Sonoma County Democrat, that legislation repeated the disability of Chinese becoming American citizens, extended the Exclusion Act banning further Chinese immigration for another decade, and made undocumented immigration a crime punishable by one year’s imprisonment at hard labor. What most enraged opponents, however, was that it required every Chinese to carry an identification card with photographs. The Chinese Six Companies in San Francisco, the largest ethnic Chinese organization at the time, responded by calling on all Chinese in the United States to refuse to register. Initially successful—only 3,169 of some 110,000 complied—the civil disobedience ended in 1894 at the urging of the Chinese government, which was pressured by the cost of U.S. trade sanctions. Chinese immigrants began registering and the pace of arrests and deportations for illegal immigration increased. “From 1890 to 1900, the total number of Chinese people in the United States dropped from about 107,000 to 90,000, a loss of 16 percent. In California, the drop was even more precipitous. In 1890, California had 72,000 Chinese residents; by 1900 that number had dropped by more than half, to 31,000” (pg. 330). The lesson in all this is that anti-immigrant agitation is more than a device for politicians to win votes. Whether it is the bug-eyed anti-Hispanic posturing of Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo or less hysterical versions of the same message from other Republican politicians, agitation against immigrants may do more than persuade working Americans to vote against their own interests. Basic human rights may be trampled as a consequence, and the United States left with a shameful legacy. John Hickman is associate professor of comparative politics at Berry College in Rome, Georgia. His published work on electoral politics, media, and international affairs has appeared in Asian Perspective, American Politics Research, Comparative State Politics, Contemporary South Asia, Contemporary Strategy, Current Politics and Economics of Asia, East European Quarterly, Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans, Jouvert, Legislative Studies Quarterly, Political Science, Review of Religious Research, Women & Politics, and Yamanashigakuin Law Review. He may be reached at jhickman@berry.edu.
Copyright © 2007 The Baltimore Chronicle. All rights reserved. pRepublication or redistribution of Baltimore Chronicle content is expressly prohibited without their prior written consent. This story was published on November 27, 2007. |
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