Double-crossing the color line: Japanese Americans in Black and White Chicago, 1945--199

In this dissertation, I use the tools of ethnography and cultural history in order to rethink the problem of race and the "color line" in twentieth-century America. Specifically, I examine the lives and histories of Japanese Americans in Chicago from 1945 to the present I show how the complex relations between Japanese Americans and other ethnic groups lead to a multifaceted picture of the construction of race in urban America, and make it impossible for us to think of race in America merely in terms of black and white. My primary ethnographic research is with a group of now elderly Japanese American men and women, who relocated to Chicago in the 1940s, and were active over the years in the Human Rights Committee of the Japanese American Citizens' League. My informants recount their experiences dealing with race and racism in Chicago; they also speak of their activism, which attempted to "double cross the color line" by building coalitions for change and justice across the traditional dividing lines of race, age, and class. Over the course of fifty years, my informants were discriminated against as Asian Americans and clearly were not regarded as white; but they also found themselves played off against blacks. Alongside these first-person accounts, I look at the work of three neglected Nisei sociologists of the Chicago School, who trace the shifting positions of Japanese Americans within Chicago's racial hierarchies. I examine the ways that relations between Japanese Americans and blacks were reflected in media images during the post-War period. All this is placed against the backdrop of the ongoing gentrification of Chicago's Far North Side, and Chicago's image as a rigidly segregated city. Overall, my dissertation breaks through the misleading rhetoric that has all too often defined the issue of race in terms exclusively of black and white, and sheds new light on the politics of multiple identities, conflicting interests, and external forces that have defined race relations in America over the past century.