By Jacalyn D. Harden
Because the nice Migration of the early 20th century, Chicago has been a cauldron of race family, symbolizing the tenacity of discrimination and segregation. yet as in different towns with major populations of Latinos and Asians, Arabs and Jews, this picture belies complicated racial dynamics. In Double pass, Jacalyn D. Harden presents a vital rethinking of the methods we comprehend and discuss race, utilizing an exam of the japanese American neighborhood of Chicago's a long way North part to shape an leading edge new framework for race, identification, and political switch.
The jap American neighborhood in Chicago speedily extended among 1940 and 1950 within the aftermath of wartime internment and govt relocation courses. Harden tells their tale via archival study and interviews with a number of the first jap americans who have been relocated to Chicago within the Nineteen Forties, incorporating her personal stories as an African American student who has lived in Japan. the result's a compelling and miraculous account of racial interactions, one who clarifies the complicated interweaving among black and Asian lives and reclaims a misplaced background of unity among the 2 teams.
Moving from the nice Migration to the ''great relocation'' to gentrification, Harden explores the shared background of civil rights struggles that firmly hyperlinks eastern and African american citizens, most significantly the problem of reparations (for internment in the course of global warfare II and slavery, respectively). She describes the efforts of jap americans to ''double-cross the colour line'' by way of development coalitions throughout race, age, and sophistication barriers, and their vexed place as occasionally ''colored,'' occasionally white (for instance, the japanese American soldier who used to be recommended to exploit the white washrooms at boot camp in Alabama in the course of global conflict II, whereas hundreds of thousands have been being relocated to internment camps).
Double pass is a huge contribution to our considered race family members, not easy orthodoxy and laying off new mild at the complicated identities, conflicting pursuits, and exterior forces that experience outlined the concept that of race within the usa.
Jacalyn D. Harden is assistant professor of anthropology at Seattle collage.
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Extra resources for Double Cross: Japanese Americans in Black and White Chicago
Example text
But at the same time, as much as the seductive newspaper headlines, magazine covers, and movie reviews call out to be analyzed and deconstructed, there can be no turning away from the material realities that buttress such images. There cannot be a dichotomy of analyses, no matter what the current fashion or faction of thought that demands a pledge of allegiance in exchange for admittance to a particular Double-Crossing the Color Line 33 group of theorists. ” What I locate and define as Japanese American/black race politics serves a variety of causes and interests.
25 From the late 1940s until the mid-1950s, Scene magazine, like other photo magazines of the day, presented stories that were both uplifting and to some extent political. The magazine, published, like Ebony, in Chicago, put out numerous articles showing Japanese American success Double-Crossing the Color Line 29 in the years following Internment, along with national and international coverage of issues affecting Japanese Americans and Japan. Thus articles about the latest hairstyles for Japanese American young women in Chicago and the glamorous bachelor lifestyle of a Nisei bachelor architect in Crested Butte, Colorado, shared space with editorials about President Eisenhower’s approach to Japan in light of the Korean War.
Black, Japanese, Mexican, and Italian migrants took the Chinese laborers’ places as the competition that white workers despised and white employers exploited as cheap sources of labor. If the Mississippi Delta and its hard way of life was the birthplace of the blues, then the West Coast and the promises of opportunity it held for Japanese and black workers—with the price of racial discrimination—was the birthplace of Japanese/black race politics. The iron horse as a symbol of the industrialization and westward expansion of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was an extremely powerful and financially profitable technological force.