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05.18 Four Examples from the Last Week Prove Obama Is Full of Hot Air on Climate Protection 05.17 New Jersey Hospital Is the Costliest in the Nation 05.17 Angelina Jolie has done something extraordinary 05.17 Obama must Make Fighting Climate Change National Project, or Die the death of a thousand Scandals 05.17 Study: Why Pot Smokers Are Skinnier 05.16 What Will It Take for Us to Recognize That the Way We Live Could Be Destroying Life as We Know It? 05.16 How Drug Companies Keep Medicine Out of Reach 05.15 Don't Look Now, but Our Medicare Spending Projections Are Plummeting 05.15 No Benefit Seen in Sharp Limits on Salt in Diet 05.15 Why the world faces climate chaos 05.14 US Supreme Court finds for Monsanto in seed patent battle (Update 2) 05.13 Austerity and the Unraveling of European Universal Health Care 05.13 Global Warming: Halfway to a Mass Extinction Event? 05.13 Coming Corporate Control of Medicine Will Throw Patients Under the Bus 05.12 The giants of the green world that profit from the planet's destruction 05.11 Psychiatrists under fire in mental health battle Video Health Care Systems in Less Corrupt Countries News Media
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05.18 Senator wants U.S. in oil price-fixing probe 05.18 Timothy Geithner Is Key To IRS Scandal 05.16 Why Won't the SEC Rein In the Firms That Tanked America's Economy? 05.16 Elizabeth Warren to Obama Administration: Take the Banks to Court, Already! 05.15 The IRS should do more, not less, scrutinizing of political groups 05.15 Did the IRS illegally target the Tea Party? Seven questions answered. 05.14 IRS kept shifting targets in tax-exempt groups scrutiny: report 05.12 Authorities Announce tax Haven Investigation US Politics, Policy & Culture
05.17 The Great American Descent into Plutocracy 05.17 The Real Benghazi Scandal 05.16 Take Politics Away From the I.R.S. 05.16 Should 501(c)(4)’s Be Eliminated? 05.16 What We Mean When We Say 'Race Is a Social Construct' 05.12 The Assault on Food Stamps Takes Legislative Form, and Jamie Dimon Profits! 05.11 The Military’s 40-Year Experiment 05.11 Student Debt Slows Growth as Young Spend Less 05.11 'Purity' culture: bad for women, worse for survivors of sexual assault 05.11 At Least 71 Kids Have Been Killed by Guns Since Newtown 05.11 Steve Jobs 2005 Stanford Commencement Address [15:05 video] 05.11 The Good, the Bad and the Crazy [6:05 video] High Crimes?
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05.18 Pope blames tyranny of capitalism for making people miserable[1:00 video] 05.18 A Simple Graph That Should Silence Austerians and Gold Bugs Forever [graph] 05.18 The Savings Heist 05.18 Sheila Krumholz and Danielle Brian on How Money Rules Washington [20:31 video] 05.14 10 Scenes From The Economic Collapse That Is Sweeping Across The Planet 05.14 The Vicious New Bank Shakedown That Could Seriously Ruin Your Life 05.14 Neo-liberalism – the antithesis to democracy [charts] 05.14 Bloomberg: "Coup d’Etat to Trade Seen in Billionaire Toxic Lead Fight" 05.13 Mel Watt, Nominee to Head FHFA, Opposes Administration by Voting to Deregulate Derivatives 05.12 IRS Blunder Gives Republicans Ammunition in Effort to Defund the Agency 05.12 Visualizing the World’s Tax Havens [Infographic] 05.11 A New Era for Worker Ownership, 5 Years in the Making Ref. : Susan Crawford on Why U.S. Internet Access is Slow, Costly and Unfair [25:35 video] Ref. : Nurses vs. High-Speed Traders Ref. : We’re More Unequal Than You Think – Graphic: Unequal rise in income International
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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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