ABSTRACT
While most of the essays in this collection focus on the black/white race binary, this 2013 essay by Kyung Eun Jahng uses critical race theory (CRT) and Foucauldian theory to trace racism against Asian-American children in the late-nineteenth century in the western United States. As Kyung notes, recently Asian-Americans have been framed in the United States as ‘model minorities’, but such positive (though still problematic) treatment does not extend to early periods of American history. Instead, Asians, mostly described collectively as ‘Mongols’, ‘Orientals’, and Chinese, were framed as racially deficient, dangerous, unlawful, and infectious to an unnamed, unremarked-upon white population. Asians at that time were not provided citizenship rights, given their apparently inferior and deviant racial status, and they were educated, if at all, in segregated schools, so that white students could be ‘safe’ and ‘free’ to develop apart from Asians (as well as apart from Native American ‘Indians’ and black children). This essay elegantly intertwines perspectives from CRT and Foucauldian analyses of history with a critical examination of policy documents and other discourses at vogue in the United States in the late-nineteenth century, to document and trace the racialization and racism faced by Asian-American people and children in the society and its institutions, particularly schools.
