Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848-1882 (review)

Until very recently, historians treated Chinese immigration to the United States as an experience distinct from that of European groups. Similarly, they attributed attitudes toward the Chinese as rooted in forces unique to the western United States, namely labor competition. Najia Aarim-Heriot takes such older understandings to task, exploring instead the links between racism toward African Americans and the Chinese, and noting similarities between Asian and European immigration.

Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848–1882, has many purposes. It seeks to integrate the Chinese experience into the scholarship of U.S. immigration; determine the causes behind efforts to ban immigration from China; rebut the standard interpretation that attributes Chinese exclusion to labor competition; place apprehensions about the Chinese presence in the West within the context of Reconstruction politics and other national currents; and to show proof that labor, politicians, the courts, and U.S. presidents all account for the anti-Chinese movement that culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

With such purposes in mind, Aarim-Heriot focuses on post–Civil War movements that deprived blacks of rights, finding a similar campaign unfolding against the Chinese living in the American West. Numerous debates occurred during Reconstruction, according to the author, regarding the place of African Americans and the Chinese within the American political and social milieu. Then, when Radical Republicans moved away from their commitment to insure African American rights, the lot of the Chinese suffered concurrently. Anti-Chinese attitudes nationally became increasingly hostile after Redemption occurred in the South during 1870s, Aarim-Heriot observes, and such attitudes culminated in the contentious debates of the era that produced the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

The book is persuasive in its thesis that the Chinese became victims of "Negroization" and that American immigration policy toward the Chinese rested on racist ideology grounded in antiblack attitudes. It is equally convincing in arguing that it was a national movementand not solely the reaction of labor groups in the Westthat accounts for the virulent treatment of the Chinese in the West and the prohibition placed on their immigration to U.S. shores. It is obvious, furthermore, that the later immigration policies adopted by the United States toward European immigrants had their origins in the Chinese exclusion campaigns. Many of the earlier explanations regarding Chinese American history consequently lose credibility under the weight of Aarim-Heriot's research. So falters the understanding that Chinese immigration policy was disconnected from the one applied to Europeans.