This week’s theme from the reading is policies and Anti-Miscegenation laws which deal with the history and policies that ruled from between the Civil War and the civil rights movement in the 1960s. The reading from Deenesh Sohoni’s “Unsuitable Suitors: Anti-Miscegenation Laws, Naturalization Laws, and the Construction of Asian Identities,” specifically deals with Asian immigration during that time in America and how lawmakers and policymakers dealt, usually unfairly and in a discriminatory-like manner against incoming Asian immigrants and its history. The beginning of the reading talks about how Asian people were once seen as welcomed to the country, as they were a helpful force labor for building necessary items in the United States. However, affections toward them quickly turned hostile when white Americans were afraid Asian people would overtake their careers or receive equal pay to their white counterparts.
During this time, there was still much segregation between white people and black people, and Asian people were not excluded. During the 1960s, not only was there conflict between white and black people, but in general a conflict between all white and non-white people. As more immigrants were coming into the United States, policymakers made racist laws prohibiting privileges against minorities for the sake of white superiority, white ‘purity,’ and even banned interracial marriages.
For example, a case called The People v. George W. Hall (1854), the Supreme Court of California voted that, “a Chinese person could not testify against a white person because it violated state strictures in criminal proceedings that ‘No Black or Mulatto person, or Indian, shall be allowed to give evidence against a white man.’’’ This showed the apparent racist laws existing at the time to exclude all Asian and minority groups from white people, which infuriated me. It showed me there is still much to change and this racist history was only a century ago, and we still have much to progress in America. A question I have is: Are Asian people still considered a group welcomed into the United States, or rejected because of our immigrant/minority status today?
Here is a video of one of the first Chinese-American marine officer, Lieutenant Chew-Een Lee who initially faced racist comments from his white soldiers. Yet he demanded respect and gained admiration from his colleagues.
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