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This book examines how the U.S. government used Asian Americans to promote the superiority of U.S. democracy over communism during the early Cold War years from 1946 to 1965. More specifically, it considers how the federal government both secured and infringed upon the rights of Asian Americans as it sought to showcase the legitimacy of U.S. democracy and the nation's goodwill toward all “free countries” in Asia. However, policies that monitored the activities and scrutinized the loyalties of Asian Americans were also implemented. In this sense, Asian Americans were cast as “loyal citizens” to be integrated into dominant society but at the same time as “alien subversives” to be deported. Using Asian American racial formation as a primary mode of analysis, the book also discusses the effects of U.S. foreign policy in Asia on the social standing of Asian Americans and on domestic civil rights. Finally, it explores how U.S. foreign affairs connected the fight against housing segregation to the fight against communism during the early Cold War years.

This chapter examines how the fight to end race-based restrictions in housing emerged at the forefront of the federal government's attempts to demonstrate to the world the validity of U.S. democracy. It first considers two Supreme Court cases, filed by Tommy Amer and Yin Kim, to identify the various forces that called into question the practice of race-based restrictions in housing during the early Cold War years. The Amer and Yin Kim lawsuits were embroiled in California's legal campaign to end housing segregation, and thus offered a glimpse into the contestations that were taking place on a local level, particularly in Los Angeles, to invalidate the whites-only housing restrictions. This chapter also explores how the category of blacks came to represent the interests of all racialized groups in the landmark ruling on property rights and concludes with an analysis of the role of Asian Americans in discourses on race and democracy in the United States.

This chapter examines the successes of Asian Americans in the United States to emphasize the importance of cultural assimilation in bringing about racial integration as well as the willingness and ability of racialized minorities to prove their desirability to dominant society. Using the discourse on the first, it explains how Asian Americans assumed the role of model minorities during the early Cold War years and how the social status of Asians in general was employed as a measure of the credibility of U.S. democracy. The firsts were featured in mainstream periodicals to show how the nation was progressing toward a racially inclusive society. The chapter focuses on three individuals whose professional achievements made headlines during the early Cold War years: Sammy Lee, Jade Snow Wong, and Delbert Wong. Finally, it explores the concept of tokenism and how it undermined the first as an indicator of America's steady progress toward racial equality.

This chapter examines the federal government's suppression of the political activities of Korean radicals in the United States in an effort to protect the integrity of the country's political system. After providing an overview of the McCarran Act of 1950 and the rise of the Los Angeles Committee for Protection of Foreign Born, the chapter explains how the McCarran Act was used by the federal government to monitor the nation's political activities and to identify the aliens, especially those from countries that had become communist, as most susceptible to communist infiltration. Citing the arrests of Korean immigrants David Hyun and Diamond Kimm, it highlights the U.S. government's narrow understanding of communist activities and which activities it deemed “un-American” and undermined the superiority of U.S. democracy. It also considers how the Hyun and Kimm cases revealed the efforts of progressive organizations to fight against the stigma of communism and of the foreign.

This chapter examines suburbanization as a process of Americanization and how racialized minorities, particularly Asian Americans, came to be regarded as assimilable during the early Cold War years. Drawing on the case of Sing Sheng in San Francisco, it considers how the shift in the way Asian Americans were perceived by dominant society, from unassimilable to assimilable, documented the changes that occurred in Cold War America to make racial equality a desirable ideal. It also discusses the ways state-sponsored studies emphasized assimilation not only as an effective means to rectify the housing disparities between whites and nonwhites, but also as an important ideological construct that prevented racism from undermining the credibility of U.S. democracy. Finally, it explains how ideas about gender and sexuality bolstered the desirability of Asian Americans in Cold War America. The chapter suggests that the path to residential freedom entailed not only the outlawing of race-based restrictions in housing but also nonwhite assimilation to the values and lifestyle of white middle-class suburbanites.

This chapter examines the U.S. government's systematic monitoring of the political activities and loyalty of Chinese Americans in the country in response to the communist revolution in China and the outbreak of the Korean War. It considers the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which related racial equality to the advancement of the U.S. Cold War foreign policy of internationalism, as an illustration of America's attempt to contain communism. Focusing on the 1951 Chinese extortion racket and the 1956 Chinese slot racket, it also demonstrates how the government incorporated Chinese loyalty into its expansionist goals in Asia to promote the extension of civil rights to Chinese Americans through immigration reform. It argues that immigration reform helped secure the rights of all and promote the credibility of U.S. democracy during the early Cold War years.

This book has explored how race and Cold War civil rights defined the superiority of the American political system by focusing on the racial formation of Asian Americans. More specifically, it has highlighted the ways that the racialization of Asian Americans as the foreigners-within enhanced the political significance of blurring the color line through desegregation policies and immigration reform. It has argued that the extension of equal rights to Asian Americans not only affirmed the ability of U.S. democracy to safeguard the rights of all but also demonstrated the nation's goodwill toward all people in Asia. At the same time, however, the federal government limited the rights of Asian Americans in order to maintain the credibility of the American political system. This book concludes by discussing an emerging racial paradigm that sees Asian Americans not as citizens of America or as representatives of Asia. Instead, it recognizes Asian Americans—along with Latinos, blacks, and whites—as members of the global family of man.

This chapter provides a history of Black internationalist feminism. It begins with the intertwinings of Black nationalist and Old Left movements in the interwar years, with special attention to the Black Belt Nation Thesis, which produced political solidarities beyond the limited affiliations engendered and policed by U.S. liberal democracy. While putting the Black Belt Nation Thesis into practice entrenched Left masculinism more fully, several leading Black Communists transformed the meaning of self-determination to allow for intersectional analysis of race and gender and to address the “special oppressed status” of Black women. In doing so, African American Left women in particular paved the way for postwar Black feminism, which Claudia Jones definitively theorized. The chapter then demonstrates how the activism and analysis of African American women on the Old Left such as Maude White Katz and Louise Thompson Patterson laid grounds for postwar Black feminism.