Japanese-Americans & Racism

This study will examine racism as it is experienced by Japanese-Americans in the United States. The specific approach of the study will be to focus on racism against Japanese-Americans as a means for other Americans to relieve their various frustrations and uncertainties through a psychology of exclusion and domination.

What James Baldwin in his essay "Stranger in the Village" says about white prejudice against blacks can be very easily applied to white prejudice against Japanese-Americans. Baldwin writes that "The idea of white supremacy rests simply on the fact that white men are the creators of civilization (the present civilization, which is the only one that matters; all previous civilizations are simply 'contributors' to our own) and are therefore civilization's guardians and defenders. Thus it was impossible for Americans to accept the black man as one of themselves, for to do so was to jeopardize their status as white men. But not to accept him was to deny his human reality, his human weight and complexity, and the strain of denying the overwhelmingly undeniable forced Americans into rationalizations so fantastic that they approached the pathological" (Baldwin, 1953, p. 935).

Baldwin goes on to argue that blacks are so thoroughly a part of every segment of American society that whites can no longer --- for the sake of their own sanity, if nothing else ---pretend that those blacks are somehow some external phenomenon who will one day disappear. As Baldwin wri

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o react with rage and seeks a scapegoat for its own failures. In this case, the Japanese have come to serve as that scapegoat for the Americans and their failing empire around the world, in economic terms at the very least. This racist attitude is based on an arrogance which has its roots in fear --- especially fear on the part of (primarily) white Americans who believe that the United States should always be the greatest and most powerful and richest nation in the world. Faced with the fact that it is no longer so great or so powerful or so rich, especially in relation to other nations, the United States (i.e.,white Americans) go into a kind of psychological panic in which a target is sought for their woes. The Japanese have been seen as "inscrutable"; they are clearly differentiated by their color and features; they stick together in groups and speak Japanese --- all these conceptions help to bolster the American (read: white) racist attitude toward Japanese-Americans. It does not help that Japanese-American youth, reflecting their cultural emphasis on discipline and hard work, have thoroughly outperformed white Americans in classrooms all across the nation. This racism has its impact on Japanese-Americans, to say the le

Category: Psychology - J