Citizens of Asian America: Democracy and Race during the Cold War

Chapter 2. Living in the Suburbs, Becoming Americans

57 chapter 2 Living in the Suburbs, Becoming Americans Postwar suburbanization is often portrayed as a process that spatially reified racial divisions in society, where the separations that manifested in the built environment expanded on the privilege of whites. As the historian Eric Avila has explained, postwar suburbanization, as a course of white flight, fortified racial segregation by building whites-only neighborhoods that kept at bay the racialized underclass.1 The lines that were drawn importantly set the stage for what the historians Scott Kurashige and Shana Bernstein described as the rise of an interracial activism that strove to break down the color divide. But as Avila also took note of the capacity of postwar suburbs to reconstitute the terms of racial belonging, he demonstrated that there were other forces at work to blur the color line besides the legal campaign to outlaw race-based restrictions in housing. Avila analyzed how postwar suburban growth prompted middle-class ethnic whites to “discover [themselves] as white,” and argued that suburbs were conduits of racial assimilation, not just racial separation, such that the suburbanization of Jewish, Italian, and Irish immigrants appeared to have made them like Anglo Americans.2 Notably, the transformative potential of suburban living extended well beyond reconstituting the meaning of whiteness and worked during the early Cold War years to promote the nation as a place that was accepting of all people regardless of racial and ethnic differences. 58 Living in the Suburbs This chapter examines suburbanization as a process of Americanization . It argues that what made this process noteworthy was the way racialized minorities, particularly Asian Americans, came to be regarded as assimilable during the early Cold War years. The shift that took place in the way Asian Americans were perceived by dominant society, from unassimilable to assimilable, importantly documented the changes that occurred in Cold War America to make racial equality a desirable ideal. As the cultural critic Caroline Chung Simpson has noted in An Absent Presence, her 2001 study of postwar Japanese American cultural representations, the entry of a Japanese war bride in the suburbs of Melrose Park, Illinois, marked a significant occasion, for it offered a new way for the nation to imagine itself. Unlike news features on the resettlement of Japanese Americans following their release from wartime internment, stories on Sachiko Pfeiffer and her successful adjustment to life in the United States showed the nation to be a place that embraced people of all backgrounds without having to confront its racist past.3 This chapter expands Simpson’s analysis and explores how U.S. Cold War politics cultivated this pluralist view of the nation. It analyzes the ways sociological studies along with popular newspaper and magazine accounts of the early Cold War years emphasized the inclusive and transformative capacity of postwar suburbs in order to establish the superiority of U.S. democracy over communism following the outbreak of the Korean War. The study of Chinese residence in postwar suburbs seeks to bring to the fore in a more extensive way than the study of a Japanese war bride had how the assimilation of Asian Americans into dominant society provided a means to account for racial divisions in society without having to tackle the problem of structural racism. As state officials justified the passing of exclusionary measures against Asians since the mid-nineteenth century by pointing to their supposed unassimilability, the use of this rationale importantly shaped the rise of segregated ethnic neighborhoods like Chinatowns to appear foremost to be the result of cultural differences rather than racist practices. State-generated narratives that noted how the Chinese during the postwar period were moving out of Chinatowns and into the suburbs thus used this change of residence to speak to how succeeding generations of Asian Americans were starting to let go of old world ways and take up the social mores of mainstream society. What these accounts neglected to mention was how this movement may have also stemmed Living in the Suburbs 59 from a lack of decent housing in segregated neighborhoods and the lifting of race-based restrictions in housing. The failure to address such issues elevated the belief that racial equality was truly just a matter of time and that social divisions based on race did not necessarily mean that the U.S. justice system prior to World War II worked largely to protect the interests of white Americans. The 1952 Sing Sheng...