作者：Jia Lynn Yang 来源：New York Times
This isn’t the first time we’ve been treated
as a threat.
The coronavirus pandemic has unleashed a torrent of anti-Asian racism in
America that shows no signs of abating. Asian-Americans have been spat on in
the streets, harassed and insulted. Even children have been attacked as our
fellow citizens blame us for a virus that threatens our families no less than
any other household.
This
is not the first season of darkness for Asian-Americans in this country. Nearly
80 years ago, Japanese-Americans were forced from their homes into barren
internment camps. It did not matter how long they had lived here or what they
had contributed. They were still considered foreign — dangerous to their
neighbors and a threat that had to be contained.
Today,
as then, Asian-Americans are wondering how to respond. The former presidential
candidate Andrew Yang on April 1 called
on the community to “show our American-ness” by pitching in to
fight the pandemic, invoking the example set by Japanese-Americans who proved
their loyalty to white America by volunteering to fight in World War II.
Books and movies have memorialized the
dramatic story of those soldiers, who made up the 442nd Regiment of the U.S.
Army, one of the most decorated American units from the war. Less known is what
happened after their sacrifice, when Japanese-American leaders leveraged the
regiment’s heroism to end a ban on Asian immigration and to win naturalization
rights for all Asians.
But that political fight did not have a happy ending.
Appeasing white America did in fact achieve some victories — even major ones —
for the Asian-American community. As a strategy to defeat racism in the long
run, though, it fell painfully short.
The
chief architect of this plan was Mike Masaoka, a son of Japanese immigrants who
grew up in Utah. He was 26 years old when the U.S. military placed his family
in an internment camp. Working for a group called the Japanese American
Citizens League, he told terrified families to cooperate with evacuation orders
and lobbied the Pentagon to allow second-generation Japanese-Americans to
enlist in the military.
Not
all Japanese-Americans were on board with Mr. Masaoka’s strategy. After the
Japanese American Citizens League’s leadership voted on a resolution endorsing
military service, fights broke out at an internment camp in Manzanar, Calif.
But Mr. Masaoka dismissed these protests, arguing “the most effective weapon” against
Japanese-Americans being persecuted would be “a record of having fought
valiantly for our country side by side with Americans of other racial
extraction.”
Among
the first to join the 442nd Regiment, Mr. Masaoka participated in one of the
unit’s most daring episodes: the 1944 rescue of a battalion of Texans in the
Vosges Mountains in eastern France, in which the regiment suffered about 800
casualties. The dead included Mr. Masaoka’s older brother Ben.
When the war was over, and with
Japanese-American sacrifices on the battlefield still fresh, Mr. Masaoka
believed there would never be a better time to demand equal treatment.
It is hard to imagine now, with Asians the
fastest-growing racial group in America, but in the first half of the 20th
century they were largely blocked from entering the country and prevented from
becoming citizens after they arrived. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 had
banned the immigration of Chinese laborers, and in 1924, Congress enacted a new
set of ethnic quotas dreamed up by eugenicists aimed at maintaining their
conception of America as a white and Anglo-Saxon nation. By designating some
races as more desirable than others, the law sharply restricted Jewish and
Italian immigration — and banned nearly all Asians.
In
the years that followed, a small group of Jewish lawmakers fought to abolish
the quotas. In 1952, when Congress embarked on its most ambitious overhaul of
the country’s immigration system in decades, they recognized their best
opportunity in a generation.
Mr.
Masaoka joined the fray, successfully lobbying to add a measure giving Asians
the right to naturalize, and ending the nearly comprehensive ban on Asian
immigration by allowing a small number to enter each year.
But
defeating the overall quota system proved more difficult. Faced with a Red
Scare climate at its zenith, lawmakers were wary of admitting Eastern and
Southern European immigrants, whom they associated with radical political
activity. And so to the dismay of Jewish leaders, lawmakers refused to abandon
ethnic quotas giving preference to countries like Britain.
Nor
were African-American leaders pleased. By the end of World War II, more than
250,000 black immigrants from the Caribbean had settled in the United States,
mostly in New York City and Chicago, counted within the large quotas of their
colonizers, the British, the French and the Dutch. But the 1952 bill aimed to
cap this flow of immigrants at 100 a year from each of these European colonies.
Mr.
Masaoka did not relish having the interests of Japanese-Americans pitted
against those of other immigrants. But to secure gains for his community, he
decided to abandon the other groups to support what became known as the
McCarran-Walter Act.
Winning the right to naturalize was a
watershed moment in Asian-American history. But the fight left others bitter.
“It is impossible to compute the amount of harm which the Japanese American
Citizens League and Masaoka caused to effective opposition to this
legislation,” concluded an analysis conducted by the American Jewish Congress.
It would take another 13 years of pressure from Jewish
lawmakers and activists and support from the Irish-Catholic Kennedy family
before race-based quotas were finally abolished from the country’s immigration
system. The success of the black civil rights movement also provided moral
momentum for the cause. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed the
Immigration and Nationality Act, at last abolishing the race-based quotas once
and for all.
The
1965 law proved much more transformational for Asian-Americans than Mr.
Masaoka’s 1952 effort, opening the gates to non-European immigration,
especially from Asia, in numbers that this country had never seen before.
But
Mr. Masaoka’s battle was not inconsequential. Once Asian immigrants became citizens,
they were able to take advantage of the law’s preference for keeping families
together by bringing relatives living abroad to American shores. If Mr. Masaoka
had not previously won Asians the right to naturalize, far fewer of them would
have been able to settle in this country.
Yet
because he decided to go it alone in his fight, Asian-Americans lost a precious
opportunity to build allies across racial groups — a pattern that persists to
this day. The recent attacks have exposed the fact that Asian-Americans remain
dangerously isolated politically, estranged from one another and from potential
allies.
This
current spasm of racism offers an opportunity for the tenuous Asian-American
community to come together as never before and demand true equality — for
itself and for others. The battle cannot be won alone.
Jia Lynn Yang is a deputy
national editor at The New York Times and the author of the forthcoming book “One
Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration,
1924-1965,” from which this essay is adapted.
来源时间：2020/4/10 发布时间：2020/4/10
旧文章ID：21259
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