HIST 160 Chapter Notes - Chapter Readings: Chink, Frisbee, Egalitarianism
27 Feb 2020
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Notes on Two Faces of Exclusion: The Untold History of Anti-Asian Racism in the US by Lon
Kurashige
Introduction (pg. 1-13)
• Two answers to the image of Asian victimization:
o The hostility is seen as a reflection of more recent racism that has plagued Asian
Americans (pg. 1)
▪ The murder of Vincent Chin (mistaken for Japanese and beaten to death
by vengeance against Japanese automakers being successful) (used racial
epithets like “Chink” and “Jap”)
• More recently, and more commonly are hate speech, accent discrimination to Asian
Americans
o Stereotypes (One type assumes that Asian Americans are uniformly smart and
successful “model minorities” while another questions their ability to become
truly American (pg. 1))
• Anti-Asian laws and legal precedents were expunged from the books and Congress
officially apologized for Chinese exclusion and gave payments of 20k to all living
survivors of Japanese American internment (pg. 7)
• Since then Asian representation has been becoming greater in areas like entertainment
and politics
• Quote (3): The burden of this book is to explain the long-term process through which US
leaders overcame hostility toward Asian Americans in order to embrace the “Pacific
destiny” a golden age of US-Asian commerce and civilization
• Exclusionists: those who excluded Asian Americans and discriminated
• Egalitarians: those who opposed the Exclusionists efforts
o People such as Senator George Frisbee and President Theodore Roosevelt acted
like Egalitarians with their inclusive views
• FDR’s actions showed some contradictions with egalitarian view because he had his own
racial opinions and willingness to discriminate against groups deemed threatening to him
• Quote (5): Egalitarian defense of Asian Americans was limited by both a pragmatic sense
of what was politically possible in an imperfect society as well as by judgments based in
religion, race, class, nation, gender, and other constructs that only certain types of Asian
Americans were worthy of.
• Quote (7): The framework used in this book is designed to understand the conflict
between exclusionists and egalitarians rather than to judge or rank how bad the past was
• The book is centered around 4 policy issues: immigration and labor, race relations,
foreign relations, and national security
o Fears related to this jumpstarted the Asian exclusion (fear Chinese would
overthrow American population)
o Egalitarians can be seen as moderates in today’s political scale while exclusionists
were more conservative and restrictive
o Everyone was unpredictable because of their beliefs and ideas
