By Philip Chin and Leonard Chan

(Continued from our March 2021 newsletter article "Part 1: Why Do People Commit Hate Crimes and What Can We Do About It")

One thing many people don’t realize in America is how interconnected the history of Americans, and especially minority Americans are. This interconnectedness demonstration how unity can serve both good and bad causes – when done for good, society flourishes. Here are some examples.

Going back as far as 1882, arguments about the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first anti-immigrant legislation to ban members by race, included scenes of Southern Democrats in Congress promising to show “understanding” of the West Coast’s “Chinese problem” if their members would show a similar understanding for their “Negro problem” in the South, thus explicitly connecting both group’s racist actions and legislative efforts.

Immediately after the Civil War, during Reconstruction, former Southern slave owners wanted to replace their recently freed African Americans with Chinese. But they faced a major problem in that treating the Chinese as slaves, complete with whippings and the like, only resulted in workers running away in the middle of the night and no new takers coming to the South.

Thus former Southern slave owners had to figure out ways to keep African Americans working under slave like conditions. They settled on the creation of Jim Crow laws that took away African Americans’ voting and property rights and used the terror and violence of hate crimes to keep them in line. At the same time, out west, legal efforts and terror were also being used against Chinese and other Asians.

It was that coalition of Southern Democrats and Western Congress members, coming from both major parties, which passed the Chinese Exclusion Act against the strong opposition of Northeastern Republicans (the remnants of the Radical Republicans that had passed the 13th Amendment banning slavery and the 14th Amendment to protect the rights of former slaves). This unholy coalition kept Congress from exercising any efforts to stop what happened in the South as the legal structures of Jim Crow was built and implemented. Year by year the voices speaking out against them grew fewer and fewer until the remainder were but lonely outcasts in a howling wilderness of bigotry and xenophobia that covered America from sea to shining sea. As we’ve seen in recent times with the Black Lives Matter Movement, the racism that infected the country continues to have painful and lasting repercussions to this day.

Minorities in America were practicing racial inclusion and solidarity long before those terms came into existence in America, but oftentimes their defeats came precisely from the divide and rule tactics that were implemented over and over again to dilute what should have been their combined power.

Chinese immigrants on the West Coast constituted a challenge to white American labor in the 19th Century, although they should have been seen as allies of the labor unions that constantly rejected and denigrated them because of their race.

An estimated five thousand Chinese railroad workers went on strike against the Central Pacific Railroad to protest their unequal pay in comparison to white workers in 1867, one of the largest organized strike actions in the 19th Century in America. This completely disappeared in American popular memory because it received no support from whites.

Meanwhile, white labor unions constantly condemned the Chinese as eagerly willing to work for fractions of what white laborers were paid. The use of Chinese as strikebreakers in a labor dispute in a shoe factory in North Adams, Massachusetts in 1870, was cited repeatedly by the unions as evidence of this willingness to undercut white wages. But this came even though none of the unions in any strikebreaking incident from the 1860s onwards made any effort to communicate with or organize Chinese as union workers.

It was with universal mainstream union support that the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was passed and it was unions that continued to argue in favor of the act even as it was repealed in 1943 in the middle of World War II. The legacy of those Chinese immigrants were countless lawsuits and legal precedents that continue to govern birthright citizenship, immigration laws, and equal treatment under law today. (See United States v. Wong Kim Ark and Yick Wo v. Hopkins) Far from meekly accepting discrimination in the 19th and 20th Centuries, Chinese immigrants acted like true Americans, by filing lawsuits.

After the passage of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, Japanese immigrants began to replace them. Soon their numbers grew to the point where they too were seen as a threat. The United States and Japan effectively block immigration from Japan with the 1907 “Gentlemen’s Agreement,” which was then codified into law by the Immigration Act of 1917. That law created the Asiatic Barred Zone that legally blocked all immigration from a region stretching across the Pacific to the Middle East with the outright goal of protecting white supremacy. Again, Japanese labor activism didn’t receive any support or recognition from white labor unions.

The Philippines, then an American colony, became the new source for cheap immigrant labor. The people there were regarded as American nationals after the Spanish-American War, but crucially never received American citizenship because they weren’t white. One of the officially unstated reasons for passing the Tydings–McDuffie Act of 1934 to prepare the way for Filipino independence was specifically to reclassify Filipino’s (even those already living in the United States) as aliens in order to deport them, bar further Filipino immigration, and prevent any Filipino from achieving naturalized citizenship. Their numbers were seen in the US as a threat, not only to the wages of white labor, but also to racial purity as Filipino men had been marrying white women. The few such marriages were covered breathlessly and somewhat hysterically by the mainstream American press of the 1920s and 30s. With Filipino women rarely recruited or allowed to come to the United States, marriage prospects were few for Filipino men if they wanted to remain here.

The need by Americans for cheap immigrant labor continued even after cutting off the supply from the Philippines. So then came the Mexicans (who are still being vilified today). Through history texts and media the United Farm Workers (UFW) story is commonly seen as a Latino movement, but Filipino farm workers were there from the very start. The predominately Filipino comprised labor union, Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), started the Delano grape strike in September 1965 and soon after were joined by the predominately Latino National Farmworkers Association (NFWA) union. They would merge to form the UFW in 1966 and continue the strike until 1970. Although the exploits of Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta are largely known in this movement, the efforts of Filipino farmer workers and their labor leaders Larry Itliong and Philip Vera Cruz are often marginalized or left out.

Similarly, the complete dominance of the Democratic Party in Hawaii today originally started as the result of an alliance that started among the sugarcane workers from all the major different ethnic groups working in the fields – Japanese, Portuguese, Chinese, and Native Hawaiian. They first tentatively started organizing in faltering strike actions to win greater labor rights in the 1930s that failed due to the lack of unity and coordination among the groups. Companies would just pit one ethnic group against the other until they won. Truly unified union activity and political activism in alliance with New Deal supporting Democrats, often led by hardened young World War II combat veterans from the different ethnic groups, successfully overturned the dominant political establishment with surprise election wins in 1954. Hawaii became the first state to elect Chinese and Japanese American representatives to Congress in the form of Republican Hiram Fong and Democrat Daniel Inouye respectively (both World War II veterans). They took their seats in 1959 when Hawaii became a state.

Both men supported civil rights legislation for African Americans in the 1960s. In Inouye’s case he credited his support to the battle during World War II that lost him his arm (and eventually resulted in his earning the Medal of Honor in 2000). The massive transfusions of blood he got to keep him alive came from the African American soldiers of the 92nd Infantry Division, the Buffalo Soldiers, some of whom also did the backbreaking work of carrying him down an Italian mountain on a stretcher just to get him those transfusions. He said he would always owe African Americans for saving his life.

The process of vilification and condemnation stretches all the way back in American history – just change the name of the ethnic group. In 1751 for example, Benjamin Franklin condemned German immigrants as a foreign element that needed to be restricted and eliminated from American life. Specifically Franklin said,