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Breaking the Black-White Binary
From: Columbia University
| By:
Gary Okihiro |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Where do Asians fall in the American construct of race? According to Gary Okihiro, the director of Columbia University's Center for Race and Ethnicity, the position of Asians has had to be invented and reinvented over the past two centuries to fit into a binary, black-white national racial definition. |
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| Gary Okihiro discusses contemporary confusion around Asian-American identity. | |
Gary Okihiro: In the US, the racial formation is a binary of black and white. In fact, there is actually mainly black. White is frequently not seen as a racial category; it is simply the normative. Blackness is race. And when today we deploy the term "minority," for example, we mean basically African-Americans. I think binaries are simpleminded ways of categorizing not just people but also things, objects other than oneself. Binaries provide a kind of coherence. They allow for a simple and straightforward explanation of who one is and who one is not. And so this binary of who one is, which is whiteness, and who one is not, which is blackness, in this case affords a kind of self-definition and also a privilege that authorizes one to define the other. |
Now, Asians and Latinos and other racialized minorities who do not fit into that black-white binary pose a problem for that kind of racialized thinking. The binary itself, by the way, is very functional. Obviously it is an invention, first of all. Who is white, for example, is an invention, and the category "white" is an elastic one. It includes different peoples at different times; for example, at some point Irish people were not included within the category "white" within the United States. Similarly, the category "black" is an invented category and is also an elastic one. |
But the idea behind these binaries is to define and to separate one group from the other, and that is the idea behind segregation. It was enforced in the late nineteenth century by a science, a science of race which argued that people were inherently distinctive and could be classified scientifically, and that each racial group had attributes, natures and characters associated with them. So the idea then was to create a binary that would separate one from the other, yet these groups somehow defied the binary classification and posed a real problem for the border police. And the border police, therefore--the racial border police, in this instance--concocted another kind of binary when confronted with Asians. Asians, they said, were like blacks; they were inferior insofar as their culture, their religion and their physical attributes were all inferior to whites', as was the case with blacks. |
Fathom: When was the question first tested in court? |
Okihiro: As early as 1854, in California, when the state Supreme Court was faced with a case in which a man named George Hall was accused of murder on the basis of Chinese witnesses. Hall claimed that Chinese could not testify against him in court because they were uncivilized. He was a civilized citizen of this country and should not have been subject to such unreliable testimony. So he argued that Asians were to be excluded from the white courtroom, and the Supreme Court agreed and said, "Those who formulated this law specified blacks and Indians. They did not specify Asians, because Asians were not here. But if we are to think about this problem we know that Indians"--this is his appeal to science--"come from Asia, they came across the land bridge in the Aleutian Straits, the Bering Strait, and they came to the United States. So they're actually Asians. So Asians are included within the categories of Indians. But if we really think of this in a generic term, Indians and blacks are nonwhites, that is, the negation, the opposite of whites. Asians clearly are not whites; Asians fit therefore within this category of nonwhite." And so here we go again. Instead of a black-white binary we have a white-nonwhite binary. That was the solution to that. |
Fathom: How did the courts redefine the place of Asians in later years? |
Okihiro: In 1922, Takao Ozawa, a Japanese man, argued that he was actually white and could therefore naturalize. Asians, you see, could not naturalize, since the 1790 Naturalization Act said that only free whites could become naturalized citizens of this country. That was in effect until 1952. In any case, Ozawa argued that he was white because, you see, in Japan there is this group of people called the Ainu, in Hokkaido. And the Ainu clearly are Caucasian. And he is a descendant of that group of people. But just in case the court did not really agree with that, he said that he was white in culture. He was totally assimilated. He did not speak Japanese; he spoke English. He did not eat Japanese food; he ate Anglo-American food. He was a Christian. He graduated from Berkeley High School and went to Berkeley. Culturally he was assimilated; he was as American as any white person. Therefore, he was white and should be naturalized. Well, the US Supreme Court said, "Oh, no. Culture does not determine whiteness. You might behave like a white person, but clearly--physically, scientifically--you are a person of Asian descent, which is distinct from Europeans." |
So, a year later, an Asian Indian presented the court with another case. His name was Bhagat Singh Thind, and Mr. Thind argued that in the previous case it was determined that Ozawa was physically, scientifically, not white. "OK," Mr. Thind said, "Asian Indians are whites; they're Caucasians. Indo-European languages come from our subcontinent. Aryans come from our subcontinent. I am of the upper caste, and we treat the darker Indians and indigenous peoples and other Asians with a great deal of scorn. So we can match you in terms of our superior attitudes." But the trump really was to bring in anthropologists and scientific testimony that Asian Indians were indeed Caucasians, and Caucasians are white people. |
Well, the court ruled, "No, no, no, no. Asian Indians clearly are not white. I mean, the ordinary person on the street can determine the difference. Perhaps in some dim reaches of time the blond Scandinavian and the brown Indian were related, but today anyone can distinguish between them. Therefore, race is what the common man understands it to be." That is an astonishing ruling, because it was argued previously that science determined these categories that were fixed, that were natural, that were perhaps endowed by God Himself in some religious sense. But here the court says race is a construction, and it is a construction by the ordinary man on the street. |
The argument here is that Asians, within their testing of the laws and the categories of race, helped to show that race was truly a construction that was artificial and helped to show that the boundaries that defined races are flexible. They are pervious; they flow one into the other; they are not actual borders; they are not divisions. One cannot tell, for example, where to put a Turk or an Armenian or a Syrian, or other West Asians. Were they Asians or were they whites? Were they Europeans or were they Asians? Those boundaries, therefore, were challenged by Asians, and in that way I think they helped to at least diversify if not undermine the binary that we began with. |
Fathom: And that testing role has continued up to the present? |
Okihiro: I guess we think of Asians principally as East Asians, meaning Chinese, Japanese or Koreans. But of course Asians are a hugely diverse group, including West Asians, too. As I alluded to, Iranians and Iraqis might be considered Asians, clearly, even though we have this category called the Middle East, or we call people from there Arabs. And obviously Arabs also merge into Africans, so there are ambiguities there that they present. But, in any case, our contemporary manifestation of Asians might be what is called the model minority, that is, Asians are superachievers. They are in one account termed "whiter than whites," because they value education, because juvenile delinquency and crime is very low, and because they have higher annual incomes and educational levels than whites. So they have out-whited whites, in that sense. |
So, when Asians are admitted into schools or when they are employed, they are frequently not targeted as minority students or employees. They frequently do not fall under the category of affirmative action. And Asians themselves are puzzled as to where they belong; are they minorities or are they white people? Some people might argue that Asians are simply white ethnics in that way, not a racialized other. So I think there is a contemporary confusion around Asians that may not be their own creation or their own challenge, but an imposition on their identities. |
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