Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-p9bg8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T10:17:44.143Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Confronting Race and Ethnicity: Education and Cultural Identity for Immigrants and Students from Asia

Part of: 60th Anniversary Forum

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 November 2020

Liping Bu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Years ago at graduate school, a fellow student in the American Seminar class asked, “What is the difference between race and ethnicity?” The professor replied, “Asians usually find it hard to distinguish the two.” The student was from an Asian country and the professor did not elaborate the distinction between the concepts. It is no brainer for Americans to tell the difference; however, for people new to American society who have not lived in a racially conscious and divisive society, it is confusing to refer to a minority people as belonging to both a particular race and to a different ethnicity. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when millions of immigrants came to America in search of better life and supplied American industries with labor, they were labeled white, yellow, brown, or black. This skin-colored definition of people as different races reflected American racial views of people of different cultures. Even in current mainstream discourse, racial and ethnic minorities are still called people of color or colored people, instead of minorities.

Keywords

raceethnicityimmigrationeducation and cultural identityAsian students
Type
60th Anniversary HEQ Forum
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 60 , Issue 4 , November 2020 , pp. 644 - 656
Copyright
Copyright © 2020 History of Education Society

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Jacobson, Matthew Frye, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Higham, John, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

3 Barnes, Jessica S. and Bennett, Claudette E., The Asian Population, 2000 (Washington, DC: US Census Bureau, 2002)Google Scholar.

4 Espiritu, Yen Le, Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

5 Tamura, Eileen H., “Asian Americans in the History of Education: An Historiographical Essay,” History of Education Quarterly 41, no. 1 (Spring 2001), 59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Tyack, David B., Seeking Common Ground: Public Schools in a Diverse Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 3Google Scholar.

7 Bailyn, Bernard, Education in the Forming of American Society: Needs and Opportunities for Study (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960)Google Scholar.

8 Higham, Strangers in the Land.

9 Kuo, Joyce, “Excluded, Segregated and Forgotten: A Historical View of the Discrimination of Chinese Americans in Public Schools,” Asian Law Journal 5, no. 1 (1998), 181–212Google Scholar.

10 Hinnershitz, Stephanie, “Across the Divides: Beyond School, Nation, and the 1965 Immigration Act in the History of Asian American Education,” History of Education Quarterly 60, no. 4 (Nov. 2020), 623–631Google Scholar.

11 United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 261 U.S. 204 (1923); and and Gjerde, Jon, ed., Major Problems in American Immigration and Ethnic History: Documents and Essays (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 288–90Google Scholar.

12 United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 261 U.S. 204 (1923).

13 López, Ian Haney, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 61–77Google Scholar.

14 Isaacs, Harold R., Scratches on Our Minds: American Images of China and India (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1980)Google Scholar.

15 Anna May Wong (1905–1961) was the first Chinese-American actress with international recognition as a Hollywood movie star. She was born in Los Angeles with the name Wong Liu Tsong (黄柳霜).

16 Leong, Karen J., The China Mystique: Pearl S. Buck, Anna May Wong, Mayling Soong, and the Transformation of American Orientalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 68–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Latourette, Kenneth S., World Service; A History of the Foreign Work and World Service of the Young Men's Christian Associations of the United States and Canada (New York: Association Press, 1957)Google Scholar.

18 Knüsel, Ariane, Framing China: Media Images and Political Debates in Britain, the USA and Switzerland, 1900–1950 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2012)Google Scholar.

19 Pai, Margaret K., The Dreams of Two Yi-Min (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

20 University, Fisk, Orientals and Their Cultural Adjustment: Interviews, Life Histories and Social Adjustment Experiences of Chinese and Japanese of Varying Backgrounds and Length of Residence in the United States (Nashville, TN: Social Science Institute, Fisk University, 1946), 136–37Google Scholar.

21 Different studies of Chinese students in America include Ye, Weili, Seeking Modernity in China's Name: Chinese Students in the United States, 1900–1927 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Qian Ning, Liuxue Meiguo [Studying in the USA] (Nanjing: Jiangsu wenyi chubanshe, 1996); Yufa, Zhang, “Returned Chinese Students from America and the Chinese Leadership (1846–1949),” Chinese Studies in History 35, no. 3 (Spring 2002), 52–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Tsai, Shih-shan Henry, The Chinese Experience in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

22 Committee on Friendly Relations Among Foreign Students, The Unofficial Ambassadors, 1936, 3, in box 2, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, Special Collections, University of Minnesota Libraries, Minneapolis, MN.

23 Chen Da, “Ting wo su ku” [Listen to Me Pouring Forth My Bitterness], Liu Mei xue sheng ji bao [Chinese Students’ Quarterly], no. 2 (Summer 1920), 188–89.

24 Chen Guangfu, Chinese Oral History Project Collection, Series 2: Interviewee files, box 8, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York.

25 Liang Shiqiu, “On Wen Yiduo,” Liang Shiqiu sanwen [Writings of Liang Shiqiu] (Beijing: Zhongguo guangbo dianshi chubanshe, 1989).

26 Hsu Kai-yu, Wen I-to (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980), 64.

27 For details, see Bu, Liping, “Cultural Expansion: The Missionary Thrust,” in Making the World Like Us: Education, Cultural Expansion, and the American Century (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 15–49Google Scholar.

28 Bu, Liping, “The Challenge of Race Relations: American Ecumenism and Foreign Student Nationalism, 1900–1940,” Journal of American Studies 35, no. 2 (Aug. 2001), 217–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Yang, Ching-Kun, Meet the USA: Handbook for Foreign Students in the United States (New York: Institute of International Education, 1945)Google Scholar.

30 Hsu, Madeline Y., The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 114–15Google Scholar.

31 The importance of faculty advising was duly recognized in post-World War II US global educational exchanges. Faculty advisors formed a new organization in 1948 called the National Association of Foreign Student Advisors (NAFSA). See Liping Bu, “Changes in Government Cultural Policy and the Realignment of Private Forces in Worldwide Educational Exchange,” in Making the World Like Us, 145–80.

32 Hongyu Zhou and Jingrong Chen, “Paul Monroe and Education of Modern China,” Education Journal [Jiaoyu Xuebao] 35, no.1 (Summer 2007), 1–38; Bu, Liping, “Paul Monroe,” in North American Scholars of Comparative Education: Examining the Work and Influence of Notable 20th Century Comparativists, ed. Epstein, Erwin H. (New York: Routledge, 2019)Google Scholar; and Wang, Jessica Ching-Sze, John Dewey in China: To Teach and to Learn (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

33 Monroe, Paul, “Mission Education and National Policy,” International Review of Missions 10, no. 39 (July 1921), 321CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Miss Secord, “The Life History of Mohan.” Papers of William C. Smith (A-237, A-102, 84—A), Special Collections & University Archives, University of Oregon. Cited in Major Problems in Asian American History: Documents and Essays, ed. Kurashige, Lon and Murray, Alice Yang (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003), 151–55Google Scholar.

35 Bu, Liping, “Attraction of Democracy and Alienation of Racism: Chinese Students’ Experience in America, 1910–1930,” Journal of the North Carolina Association of Historians 14 (April 2006), 1–24Google Scholar.

36 Zhang, “Returned Chinese Students”; and Wang, Y. C., Chinese Intellectuals and the West, 1872–1949 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966), 76Google Scholar.

37 Donovan, Sandra, Madame Chiang Kai-shek: Face of Modern China (Minneapolis, MN: Compass Point Books, 2007)Google Scholar.

38 For a discussion of middle-class Chinese and East Asians, see Hsu, The Good Immigrants; and Matsumoto, Noriko, Beyond the City and the Bridge: East Asian Immigration in a New Jersey Suburb (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 Wu, Ellen D., The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015)Google Scholar; and Chou, Rosalind S. and Feagin, Joe R., Myth of the Model Minority: Asian Americans Facing Racism (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2008)Google Scholar.

40 Chow, Claire S., Leaving Deep Water: The Lives of Asian American Women at the Crossroads of Two Cultures (New York: Penguin Group, 1998), 193–94Google Scholar.

41 Chow, Leaving Deep Water, 187–89.

42 Chow, Leaving Deep Water, 191–93.