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Chains of Babylon: The Rise of Asian America (Book)

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Book Citation:

Maeda, D. J. (2009). Chains of Babylon: The Rise of Asian America. University of Minnesota Press.

  1. Racism against Asians summary
    1. East vs West: People of the “Orient” were seen as weak and morally inferior to those of the Occident, who represented Western strength and innovation (Maeda, 20).
    2. Asian Americans were subjected to three main kinds of racism:
      1. Drawn by the two-faced seductions of capitalism and the chance to make money, Asians mass-immigrated and were exploited for their labor whilst being thoroughly restricted in their lives, as seen in the Chinese Exclusion Act (Maeda, 20).
      2. Despite asking for naturalization rights, Asian Americans were denied the ability to become citizens and were uniformly labeled as “aliens ineligible to citizenship” (Maeda, 20).
      3. Asian Americans, specifically Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, Indians, and Filipinos, were subject to harsh cycles containing periods of both weak friendliness and harsh hatred, influenced by wars in Europe and Asia (Maeda, 20).
  2. Asians and Blackness
    1. Imitating African Americans:
      1. On March 22, 1969, a group of Chinese-Americans that called themselves the Red Guard Party held a rally, announcing their plans to create a free breakfast system at a local school, stop the destruction of a designated Chinese playground, and advocate for the removal of colonial police from the area (Maeda, 73).
        1. To playwright and critic Frank Chin, this rally was seen as a “yellow minstrel show” and a pitiful attempt in exuding something akin to black nationalism (Maeda, 73).
        2. The Red Guard started the avalanche of Asian social progression that was seen in a later group named I Wor Kuen (Maeda, 74).
          1. I Wor Kuen took part in the fight for Asian rights by starting community programs, organizing rallies for safe working conditions, and protesting against the Vietnam War (Maeda, 74).
        3. The Red Guard Party adopted language and fashion mannerisms of the Black Panthers, signifying their alignment with the political and moral ideologies of the Panthers (Maeda, 75).
          1. The RGP, in allying themselves with black rights groups, argued that Asian Americans and African Americans shared the same brand of racism, therefore placing Asian Americans in an awkward, if not tense, position through its radical comparison (Maeda, 75).
          2. The Red Guard Party was later criticized by the chairman of the Black Panther Party for being “insufficiently Chinese” and for over-assimilation, despite it being nearly illegal for Chinese people before the 1960s to assimilate into America (Maeda, 77).
            1. The sudden changes in legal statuses (naturalization, marriage, etc.) for Chinese people in the 1960s, and later on the Japanese, was accompanied by the birth of the “model minority myth” (Maeda, 77).
              1. As soon as Asians became seen as superior to blacks due the fact that they could assimilate without argument and “overcome racial discrimination,” the RGP’s and others’ adaptations of black power was swiftly rejected (Maeda, 78).
              2. The fight for an Asian American identity turned from bonding with African Americans through similarities in oppression to appealing to whites for approval of properly Americanized Asian cultures (Maeda, 78).
      2. Frank Chin, however, wrote a play called The Chickencoop Chinaman that was also an attempt, if not a successful one, to ally and relate Asians and African Americans with each other through their similar (yet vastly different) struggles (Maeda, 73).
        1. The main characters of this play, who were Chinese and Japanese respectively, performed mannerisms that were mostly attributed to African Americans during the time and were seen associating themselves with multiple black characters (Maeda, 74).
        2. Chin is both embraced for his success of writing The Chickencoop Chinaman and berated for his exaggeration of Asian American culture for better “white consumption” (Maeda, 74).
    2. Chin + Red Guard:
      1. Through their individual genres of general performance, Chin and the Red Guard Party (as well as a semblance of Asian blackness) became the baseline for outlining and protesting for an Asian American identity (Maeda, 75).
        1. Before Chin and the Red Guard Party, Asian ethnic groups in America scarcely rallied together, even going as far as to specifically avoid contact with and differentiate themselves from each other
          (Maed, 75).
          1. After the 1960s, Asian American groups and parties eventually came to an agreement concerning the fundamental ideologies within the Asian American communities: all Asians living in America, no matter their ethnicity, shared racial oppression with other Asian Americans, and Asian Americans as a whole were, essentially, stronger when they were united despite any cultural differences (Maeda, 75).
      2. Through Chin’s and the RGP’s unique adaptation of black power by emphasizing a unified and strong racial identity for Asian Americans of all ethnicities, they gave Asian Americans and African Americans a focal point around which both racial groups could relate to (Maeda, 76).
        1. This solidified the fact that racial groups, like Asian Americans and African Americans, shared a level of interdependence in their formation of a racial identity (Maeda, 76).
          1. Among people of color, the factor of “non-whiteness” unifies them and brings them closer, rather than just purely separating them further from “whiteness” and each other (Maeda, 76).
        2. However, groups that agreed with Chin and groups like I Wor Kuen/RGP diverged in ideals at some point along the line. The RGP was strictly focused on staying ethnically tied to China and Asia, while Chin and his supporters argued that the Asian American nationality was specific to America only and couldn’t be replicated elsewhere. (Maeda, 76). 
  3. Common struggles shared between AA and AAPI:
    1. Aside from people like Chin or groups like I Wor Kuen, African Americans and Asian Americans crossed and shared idealisms multiple times (Maeda, 79).
      1. The exchange of admiration and ideology that occurred between Asian Americans and African Americans is often called the “multicolored Left” (Maeda, 80).
    2. Asian exchanges:
      1. Blacks and Asian Americans often crossed physical paths in cities and were alike intellectually; many Asians living in America found themselves living with blacks and reading works by authors like Malcolm X and W.E.B. DuBois (Maeda, 81)
      2. Grace Lee, a Chinese American political activist, was deeply involved with the civil rights movement and worked closely with her husband, James Boggs, an African American worker (Maeda, 81).
      3. Guy Kurose, a Japanese American who was raised alongside a black community, and Lee Lew-Lee, a Chinese Jamaican, joined the Black Panther Party (Maeda, 81)
    3. Black exchanges:
      1. During the 1930s, African Americans were notable backers of the Pacific Movement of the Eastern World, which was a crusade for the empowerment of Japanese individuals as a minority and member of the POC (Maeda, 79).
      2. During WWII, Malcom X, the founder of the Nation of Islam, greatly emphasized his support of Japan’s resistance to Euro-American capitalism and its strength as a POC nation, going so far as to state that he wanted to join the Japanese Army (Maeda, 79).
      3. Black nationalists in both the Nation of Islam and the Black Panther Party used and applied practices from Mao Zedong’s written works into their every day lives; some nationalists even dressed like Chinese peasants in order to signal their ideological alliance with China (Maeda, 80).
      4. Despite his confrontations with Red Guard Party members, David Hillard proclaimed Asian-black solidarity through his well-known statement to the National Liberation Front ambassadors in Vietnam: “You’re Yellow Panthers, we’re Black Panthers” (Maeda, 80).

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