Asian Americans in WWII and Beyond: Race, Class, and Gender
This paper analyzes Ronald Takaki's scholarship on Asian Americans, focusing on the impact of race, class, and gender from World War II through the 1990s. Drawing on Takaki's works—including Democracy and Race, Strangers from a Different Shore, and A Different Mirror—the paper traces the history of Asian immigration to the United States, key discriminatory legislation such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. It also explores Takaki's concept of Asian Americans as "strangers" in a nation they helped build, and considers his projections for the growing Asian American population in the twenty-first century.
- Introduction: Multiculturalism and the Challenge of Discrimination: Takaki's scholarship confronts persistent racial discrimination in America
- Asian Immigration: Early Waves and Legal Exclusion: Early Asian immigrants faced labor hardship and exclusionary laws
- Race and Naturalization: The Legal Foundations of Inequality: 1790 Naturalization Law embedded white supremacy in citizenship law
- World War II and Its Impact on Asian Americans: WWII disrupted racial and gender hierarchies, enabling internment
- Strangers at the Gate: The Persistence of Otherness: Asian Americans remain perceived as foreign despite generations of presence
- Takaki's Projections and Future Trends for Asian Americans: Takaki projects growing Asian American population and continued struggle
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper opens with a concrete, memorable anecdote—the taxi driver questioning Takaki's origins—that grounds an abstract argument about racial otherness in lived experience.
- It grounds its claims in specific legislative history (the 1790 Naturalization Law, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the 1924 immigration restriction), giving the argument documentary weight.
- The paper connects broad historical forces—World War II, fascism, women's labor mobilization—to the specific lived experiences of Asian Americans, showing how macro events reshuffled racial and gender hierarchies simultaneously.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates effective use of a single scholar's corpus to build a sustained argument. Rather than surveying multiple competing voices, it mines three of Takaki's books to trace a coherent narrative arc from nineteenth-century exclusion to twenty-first-century projection. This technique—close engagement with a primary scholarly source—shows how a single author's body of work can itself serve as both evidence and analytical framework.
Structure breakdown
The paper moves chronologically from the late nineteenth century through the 1990s, organized around three interlocking themes: legal exclusion, wartime disruption, and the enduring social experience of otherness. It opens with a framing argument about the importance of historical memory, moves through immigration law and racial legislation, arrives at World War II as a turning point, and closes with a reflection on Takaki's future projections. Each section builds on the last, reinforcing the thesis that forgetting history enables discrimination to persist.
Introduction: Multiculturalism and the Challenge of Discrimination
Ronald Takaki's extensive studies on ethnicity and multiculturalism in the history of the United States were destined to make the public—especially younger generations—aware that the diversity America is so proud of becomes a problem when the present dismisses old issues such as discrimination based on race, gender, or class, and places them into a drawer rarely opened. The average citizen and the general public need to be kept informed about the evolution of American society in its entirety, and narrow-mindedness must be fought by all those who do not wish to see their country return to harmful practices such as discrimination.
Although the United States has become one of the most democratic countries in the world—promoting anti-discrimination laws and closely guarding their spirit—discrimination of any kind has not been fully eradicated. Among other groups, Asian Americans have come a long way, yet they still represent an ethnic community that has not finished struggling to earn its full place in American society, competing against entrenched views of white racial supremacy that have deep roots in this country's history.
Asian Immigration: Early Waves and Legal Exclusion
The appearance of Asian Americans makes them easily distinguishable. In the 1930s, a confused older white American woman asking a second-generation Japanese American girl where she had learned English so well would have been regarded as nothing out of the ordinary—even viewed with hope for the next generation of white Americans. By contrast, in the 1990s, when a forty-year-old taxi driver from Norfolk posed the same question to Takaki as he rode to a conference on multiculturalism, Takaki realized for what felt like the hundredth time that no matter how many generations had passed since his ancestors came to this continent and helped build this country, as long as non-Asian Americans knew little about the history of Asian American immigrants and their contributions to the United States, he would be doomed to hear that question again and again.
In the introduction to his book Democracy and Race: Asian Americans and World War II, Takaki reviews statistics related to American immigration laws for Asians from the late nineteenth century through the 1990s. The numbers show that Asian immigrants represented approximately half of the total number of immigrants arriving in the 1990s (Takaki, 9). Since immigration laws changed in favor of Asian immigrants beginning in 1960, the thirty years between 1960 and 1990 showed a substantial increase in the studied population, with about 7 million members of the total population being Asian Americans (Takaki, 9). Takaki identifies the origins of this population, in order of their percentage, as Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Asian Indian, Korean, Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian, and Hmong.
Those Asians who arrived during the first immigration wave were mostly workers with little formal education, drawn by the promise of the Gold Rush on the West Coast or by the labor shortages the United States faced at various points in the nineteenth century. Few held higher education degrees. Most struggled and worked hard to make a living and then to bring their families over to join them (Takaki, 12). In this respect, they were no different from the European immigrants who flooded the country during the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. Yet specific laws were enacted to halt some of these Asians from entering the United States. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited Chinese people from entering the country as immigrants, and forty-two years later, in 1924, the Japanese were similarly barred from immigrating (Takaki, 13).
Race and Naturalization: The Legal Foundations of Inequality
Takaki points out that racial discrimination was embedded in American law from the very founding of the republic, when the Naturalization Law of 1790 was passed—stipulating that only white persons were eligible for naturalized citizenship. It took the young American nation, a country built by immigrants, over a century and a half to abolish this law, not advancing fully into its repeal until well into the second half of the twentieth century (Takaki, 13).
Returning to the question the Norfolk taxi driver asked him, Takaki reaches a straightforward conclusion: there is a critical gap in the history lessons taught about the building of this nation—a shared mentality, perpetuated over generations, that proclaimed European whites as the primary race responsible for the birth of the United States (Takaki, A Different Mirror, Chapter 1). This gap in public historical knowledge is precisely what his scholarship seeks to address.
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