Anthony Tran
ASA 115
Week 3 Readings

In this week’s reading, there is a theme of criminals, deviants, outcasts posing as privilege, authenticity, and tragedy. I very much resonated with the article, “Unsuitable Suitors: Anti-Miscegenation Laws, Naturalization Laws, and theConstruction of Asia.” by Deenesh Sohoni. In the piece, they address issues in the past such as the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1822, Gentleman’s Agreement of 1908, and the Immigration Act of 1917. These heavily limited the number of Asians that could immigrate to the United States. This obviously would hurt the Asian and Asian Americans people already living in the United States. It is really frustrating to think about because Asiana, especially the Chinese, were forcefully brought here in order to provide extremely cheap labor in the development of the United States infrastructure. Having such laws in place would only allow white citizens to feel more righteous when being prejudice and hurting the innocent. There is even this notion of Asians being considered people of color. They are just not white, but the fact that individual people have mixed opinions as to whether or not they are intermediate between white and black, so they can have a little more privilege than other peoples of color, while other Asians were straight up treated as black. It was a tragedy what had happened to any group outside of white that has come to America by choice or force that only want to have a full life, but has to then reevaluate their expectations because of white paternalism. One question that I have is why didn't the author address the treatment of the Asian community by the colored community? I am interested to see what the dynamic was as people are fighting for better treatment together, but Asians had the slightly better treatment already for not exactly being colored/black, but obviously still not white.