Title of Programme: M.A.

English and Cultural Studies

Module Code and Title of Module: ENG 6014Y: Asian American/Cultural Studies / Part B:
Asian American Literature
Student ID: 0920574

The construction of Asian American Identity within the Civil Rights History.

Although multi-racial alliances between different immigrant groups had long played an important part in
campaigns for civil rights in the West , it wasn't until the 1960s and 1970s that diverse communities in the
US began to self-consciously unite as "Asian Americans. 1" My paper today will focus on how the
development of the Asian American Movement 2, through the Seattle’s Civil Rights History, has
contributed to an integration of Asian American Identity.

 Immigration trends of recent decades have dramatically altered the statistical composition and
popular understanding of who is an Asian American.
 The McCarran-Walter Act repealed the "free white persons" restriction of the Naturalization Act
Of 1790 , but it retained the quota system3 that effectively banned nearly all immigration from
Asia
 The Asian American movement that promoted this new identity 4 was driven largely by student
activists radicalized by anti-Vietnam war and black power movements.
 Challenging stereotypes about Asian "passivity", and rejecting the racism of "oriental" labels5,
Asian American activists mobilized this new consciousness with an aim to consolidate their
identity.
 After World War II, the Jackson Street Community Council brought community leaders from
Seattle's Asian and African American communities together to advocate for neighborhood
improvement issues, which frequently included important civil rights advocacy.
 The ‘black power’ movement caused many Asian Americans to question themselves.
 “Earlier,unlike other groups, Asian Americans were expected to be quiet and behave and thus did
not have sanctioned outlets to express the anger and indignation that accompanied their racially
subordinated status,” 6

1
Carson, Clayborne.1980, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960's. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press,

2
In the 1960s and ’70s, Asian Americans mobilized for a slew of political causes, including the development of ethnic studies
programs in universities, the end of the Vietnam War and reparations for Japanese Americans placed in internment camps during
World War II.

3
Due to the immigration statistics at that time, this step favored immigration that came mostly from Western and Northern
Europe. The immigration quotas established that around three-hundred and fifty thousand immigrants would be permitted access
to the United States.
4
Marable, Manning. Race, Reform and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945-1982. University Press of
Mississippi, 1984
5
Burns, Stewart, ed. 1997, Daybreak of Freedom. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
6
Laura Pulido , Black, Brown, Yellow and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles.
Conclusion

Therefore, in watching African Americans expose institutional racism and government hypocrisy, Asian
Americans began to identify the ways in which they, too, had faced discrimination in the U.S. and in turn
took steps to re-negociate Asian America identity which was constructed by U.S. immigration policies
through racialist discourses,exclusion acts and quotas.