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4 RACIST LOVE In 1974, the writer Frank Chin expressed it this way: “Whites love us because we’re not black.”1 The elevation of Asian Americans to the position of model minority had less to do with the actual success of Asian Americans than with the perceived failure—or worse, refusal—of African Americans to assimilate. Asian Americans were “not black” in two significant ways: They were both politically silent and ethnically assimilable. The Cold War construction of Asian America as a model minority that could become ethnically assimilated, despite what U.S. News and World Report euphemistically called its “racial disadvantage,” reveals the contradiction between the continuing reproduction of racial difference and the process of ethnic assimilation. The representation of Asian Americans as a racial minority whose apparently successful ethnic assimilation was a result of stoic patience, politica1 obedience, and self-improvement was a critically important narrative of ethnic liberalism that simultaneously promoted racial equality and sought to contain demands for social transformation. The representation of the Asian American as the paragon of ethnic virtue, who the U.S. News and World Report editors thought should be emulated by “Negroes and other minorities,” reflected not so much Asian success as the triumph of an emergent discourse of race in which cultural difference replaced biological difference as the new determinant of social outcomes. Although the deployment of Asian Americans as a model minority was made explicit in the mid-1960s, its origins lay in the triumph of liberalism and the racial logic of the Cold War. THE COLD WAR ORIGINS OF THE MODEL MINORITY MYTH Robert G. Lee The narrative of Asian ethnic assimilation fit the requirements of Cold War containment perfectly. Three specters haunted Cold War America in the 1950s: the red menace of communism, the black menace of race mixing, and the white menace of homosexuality. On the international front, the narrative of ethnic assimilation sent a message to the Third World, especially to Asia where the United States was engaged in increasingly fierce struggles with nationalist and communist insurgencies, that the United States was a liberal democratic state where people of color could enjoy equal rights and upward mobility. On the home front, it sent a message to “Negroes and other minorities” that accommodation would be rewarded while militancy would be contained or crushed. The successful transformation of the Oriental from the exotic to the acceptable was a narrative of Americanization, a sort of latter-day Pilgrim’s Progress, through which America’s anxieties about communism, race mixing, and transgressive sexuality might be contained and eventually tamed. The narrative of Asian ethnic assimilation helped construct a new national narrative for the atomic age that Walter Lippman had dubbed the American Century. WORLD WAR II AS PRELUDE Ironically, it was Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into the Second World War that began the unraveling of the Yellow Peril myth. The Second World War was a watershed event for Asian Americans. The treatment of Asian American ethnic groups brought into sharp focus the contradiction between their exclusion as racial subjects arid the promise of their assimilation as ethnic citizens. America’s entry into the war against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan made it increasingly difficult to sustain national policies based on theories of white racial supremacy. After Dunkirk, the United States and its allies depended on support from their colonial subjects in India, China (not, strictly speaking, a colony), southeast Asia, and north Africa. The very nationalist movements whose representatives had been summarily dismissed by Woodrow Wilson at Versailles were now actively courted by the United States as allies against the Axis powers. In August 1941, four months before the United States entered the war, Roosevelt and Churchill signed the Atlantic Charter recognizing the right of “peoples” to decide their own form of government. Later that year, in response to the threat by civil rights leader A. Phillip Randolph to lead a massive protest march on Washington, Roosevelt signed an Executive Order outlawing racial discrimination by companies doing business with the federal government and established a Committee on Fair Employment Practices. Official pronouncements of racial equality notwithstanding, the wholesale and brutal incarceration of the Japanese American population on the west coast underscored, in no uncertain terms, the willingness of the U.S. government to invoke race as a category of subordination to achieve its goals.2 This willingness to use racial categories would result in physical hardship, economic ruin, family disintegration, and psychological...

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