Race and Asian American citizenship from World War II to the movement

This dissertation takes as its central problematic the changing race and citizenship status of Chinese and Japanese Americans after the end of Asiatic exclusion in World War II. With the end of exclusion, the social status of Chinese and Japanese Americans in the postwar period became more ambiguous and uncertain than before. What needed to be determined was on what terms they were to be incorporated into the nation. The problem was resolved with the invention of a new racial understanding of Asian Americans as definitively not-black, "model minorities" by the mid-1960s.;This study argues for three fundamental factors that explain how Asian Americans came to be regarded as "model minorities" in American society.;First, unprecedented state interventions initiated major demographic and social changes in Asian American communities. These included immigration reforms, the extension of naturalization rights, and the internment and resettlement of Japanese Americans. As a result, Chinese and Japanese in the United States enjoyed greater access to a range of residential, occupational, and social options than ever before.;Second, Chinese and Japanese Americans founded new opportunities during World War II, the Cold War, and the Civil Rights era to demonstrate persuasively their rights to legitimate membership in the American nation. With emphases on patriotism, anti-Communism, and family, these self-representations gained currency by resonating with widespread concerns in American culture at mid-century.;The third fundamental factor which propelled Chinese and Japanese Americans to "model minority" status was the need for proponents of the American liberal democracy to counter charges of structural racism in the United States. Hoping to strengthen the nation's claim as the leader of the free world during the Cold War, members of the state, academia, and the mainstream media re-appropriated Chinese and Japanese Americans' claims of being "good citizens." These actors portrayed both groups "success stories" of assimilation, and, by the mid-1960s, as solutions to the nation's race problem. In doing so, they positioned Chinese and Japanese Americans in direct contradistinction to African Americans, touting the achievements of the former as "evidence" of the promise of liberal democracy for all peoples of color in the United States.