If there was a time machine, only whites would be able to go back in time in this country. Most everyone else would get enslaved, slain, maimed, or chased after by feral children. But I would risk it, for a day, just to witness the fear of living through the anti-Chinese campaign after the mid-1800s where Chinese immigrants couldn’t even leave their homes without being spat at, clubbed, or shot in the back, a campaign culminating in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the first immigration law that banned a race from entering the United States, after legislators and media characterized the Chinese as “rats,” “lepers,” but also “machine-like” workers who stole jobs from good white Americans.
Those remaining in the United States were a moving target vulnerable to ethnic cleansing. Vigilantes planted bombs in their businesses, shot them through tents, and smoked them out of their homes. Along the West Coast, thousands of Chinese immigrants were driven out of their towns. In 1885, in Tacoma, Washington, one woman was pregnant when whites burst into her home, dragged her out by the hair, and forced her to march, along with three hundred other Chinese immigrants in town, out into the night, into the cold driving rain, into the wilderness, while their homes—all evidence of their lives—burned behind them. They had nowhere to go but into perpetual flight. Another time, in 1871, a mob of nearly five hundred Angelenos infiltrated Chinatown in L.A. over a rumor that some Chinamen had killed a white policeman. They tortured and hanged eighteen Chinese men and boys, which was the largest mass lynching in American history. The street in which they were lynched was called Calles de los Negros.
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In 1917, the U.S. government expanded the ban to all of Asia, later even restricting Filipinos from coming in, though the Philippines was a former U.S. colony. Basically, the immigration ban was racial segregation on a global scale. When America welcomed “the degraded race” back in 1965, it was because they were enmeshed in an ideological pissing contest with the Soviet Union. The United States had a PR problem. If they were going to stamp out the tide of Communism in poor non-Western countries, they had to reboot their racist Jim Crow image and prove that their democracy was superior. The solution was allowing nonwhites into their country to see for themselves. During this period the model minority myth was popularized to keep Communists—and black people—in check. Asian American success was circulated to promote capitalism and to undermine the credibility of black civil rights: we were the “good” ones since we were undemanding, diligent, and never asked for handouts from the government. There’s no discrimination, they assured us, as long as you’re compliant and hardworking.
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But the status of our model minority can change. Currently, Indian Americans are one of the highest-earning groups among Asian Americans, but since 9/11, and especially within the last few years, they have been downgraded to or have begun self-identifying as “brown.” It’s a funny thing about racialization in America. It doesn’t matter that Japan once colonized Korea and parts of China and invaded the Philippines during World War II. It doesn’t matter that there’s been a long, bloody territorial dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir or that Laotians have been systematically genociding the Hmong people since the Vietnam War. Whatever power struggle your nation had with other Asian nations—most of it the fallout of Western imperialism and the Cold War—is steamrolled flat by Americans who don’t know the difference. Since Trump’s election, there’s been a spike in hate crimes against Asians, most pointedly Muslims and Asians who look Muslim. In 2017, a white supremacist mistook two Hindu Indian engineers for Iranian terrorists and gunned them down. The next month, a Sikh Indian man was shot right outside his driveway in suburban Seattle after being told to “go back to your own country.”
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After years of scraping by as an adjunct in New York City, the poet Prageeta Sharma was eager to begin her new job at the University of Montana as the director of the creative writing program. I attended her farewell party in 2007. I recall her excitement as she told me about the house she’d live in with her husband, the space they’d have, the plans she had as a director. Sharma was one of the warmest and most generous-hearted poets I knew in the city. I had no doubt she would settle easily in the West.
During her first year as director, Sharma hosted a party at her new home. A visiting professor and two graduate students snuck up to her bedroom and stole a private article of clothing from her drawer. At the bar afterwards, the visiting professor and students took pictures of themselves wearing it on their heads like they were in a fraternity. Later, they sent the photos around so others in the program could gawk. What to make of the fact that the visiting professor, a poet, was an Asian man? In this case, misogyny trumps any racial solidarity. This man and Sharma were also the only two Asians working in a mostly white program in a remote white state. When there are only two Asians, instead of uniting, one may try to take the other out so that the meager power meted out to minorities will not be shared; so that one will not be mistaken as like the other.
“I felt abject,” Sharma said. “There is no other way to describe it.”
Sharma found out and made a sexual harassment complaint. All those involved apologized but then became enraged when she wouldn’t accept their apology. It was a prank. Why couldn’t she get over it? In a deposition, one white female colleague said, “It just got ridiculously blown out of proportion.” Instead of resolving to repair the toxicity of the program, her colleagues decided they had made a grave error in hiring Sharma, since she refused to assimilate to their culture. Sharma wanted to change it. She wanted to diversify the program, which most everyone, including the students, resisted. Not Montana enough, was the overall opinion; not the right fit, they said aloud. Although she’d had three books published, colleagues dismissed her as a “beginning poet.” “No one’s heard of you,” was another swipe. The chair of the English department suggested that Sharma could learn more about “women’s leadership” if she read her twelve-year-old daughter’s copy of Anne of Green Gables.
Sharma felt like she was going crazy. No one would validate her reality that these aggressions were happening because she was an Indian woman. “Everyone around me behaved badly,” Sharma said, “but somehow I was the biggest problem.” Sharma worked that much harder as a director. But she also made a point to say something whenever she was demeaned, behavior which people in the program scorned as overdramatic. Eventually, the faculty in the program convinced the chair of the English department to strip Sharma of her directorship and cut her salary, claiming that her labor wasn’t “measurable” and she should be reduced to administrative duties. This move finally motivated Sharma to file a discrimination lawsuit against the university. She realized that her colleagues never wanted her to be a director. They wanted a secretary.