Racism and the Anti-Asian Movements

One of the unifying themes in Asian American history is racism. As targets of economic discrimination, legal disfranchisement, violence, ridicule, and segregation, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, and Asian Indian immigrants in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were told repeatedly, and in myriad ways, that they were outsiders in American society. While anti-Asian xenophobia drew on long traditions of Orientalist thought, it intensified in times of social, economic, and moral crisis, during which Asian immigrants were scapegoated for an array of problems. All of the major Asian groups, moreover, became the targets of organized movements and eventually federal immigration exclusion, the ultimate symbol of their rejection from the American melting pot. Racism was not just a common thematic experience among Asians in America; the movements against Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, and Filipino immigration that spanned over half a century were connected and successively built on one another. For instance, in 1892, the California anti-Chinese crusader Denis Kearney decried Japanese immigrants as “another breed of Asiatic slaves to fill up the gap made vacant by the Chinese,” and unveiled the slogan “The Japs must go!” a modification of the phrase he popularized at anti-Chinese rallies in the 1870s.¹