6 - African Americans and the Racial Middle Ground

Summary

The African American reaction to the events in California was a complicated one. The similar situation in which Black Americans were stranded without doubt led to feelings of sympathy towards the Japanese. However, sharing the White animosity directed towards the Japanese may have given African Americans the opportunity to improve their position inside the American racial system, that is, being granted a racial middle ground of their own.

The race at the bottom (I): the Black press and the California Crisis

The ambivalent position of Black Americans hinders us from giving a uniform account of their reaction to the California Crisis. This is reflected in the Black American press of the time: commentators from outside the Pacific Coast area tended to be more objective in their assessment of US–Japan relations, while those from the West Coast were prone to denounce the privileged position of the Japanese.

The intellectual W. E. B du Bois (1868–1963) promptly recognised the torn feelings of his community. According to him, the educated African Americans on the West Coast understood the implications of anti-Japanese feelings, but Black labourers shared the animosity of their White counterparts. The question was what would matter most: racial solidarity or economic competition? Du Bois was unequivocal: school segregation was ‘a mark of contempt, an institution of inferiority, where it is imposed on the man who has to attend it against his free choice’. In his understanding, the hostile feelings directed towards both the Japanese and Blacks were the same race bigotry based on the belief that the White race was ‘the natural and divine guardian of all other races’.

Du Bois was not isolated in his criticism. The Colored American Magazine, for example, assured that African Americans ‘do not subscribe to race prejudice’. Adding a pinch of salt to its solidarity, it asserted that the Japanese hated Chinese people and were ‘in haste to show their contempt for the Negroes’. Nervetheless, ‘race hatred was wrong per se’. The Voice of the Negro used the unclear stipulations of the treaty between the Unites States and Japan to assure that the segregation order was illegal. Recognising the parallels between the Japanese exclusion from White schools and the segregation of Black children in the South, the magazine assured its readers that ‘we are watching this controversy with great interest.