FIGHTING FOR WHITENESS – MINORITY INTERNALIZATION OF AN INSTITUTIONALIZED RACISM IN JOHN OKADA’S NO-NO BOY AND CHESTER HIMES’ IF HE HOLLERS LET HIM GO
Amanda Adams-Handy B.A., California State University, Sacramento 2007
THESIS
Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
in
ENGLISH (Literature)
at
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, SACRAMENTO
SPRING 2010
FIGHTING FOR WHITENESS – MINORITY INTERNALIZATION OF AN INSTITUTIONALIZED RACISM IN JOHN OKADA’S NO-NO BOY AND CHESTER HIMES’ IF HE HOLLERS LET HIM GO
A Thesis
by
Amanda Adams-Handy
Approved by:
______, Committee Chair Dr. Hellen Lee-Keller
______, Second Reader Dr. Sheree Meyer
Date: ______
ii Student: Amanda Adams-Handy
I certify that this student has met the requirements for format contained in the University format manual, and that this thesis is suitable for shelving in the Library and credit is to be awarded for this thesis.
______, Graduate Coordinator ______Dr. David Toise Date
Department of English
iii Abstract
of
FIGHTING FOR WHITENESS – MINORITY INTERNALIZATION OF AN INSTITUTIONALIZED RACISM IN JOHN OKADA’S NO-NO BOY AND CHESTER HIMES’ IF HE HOLLERS LET HIM GO
by
Amanda Adams-Handy
Constructing a system of economic and social power based upon the performance of certain characteristics classified as white, a dominant white group (those who adequately perform the particular characteristics of whiteness) powerfully exerts not only an external control, but also a pivotal internal oppression over groups classified as non- white (i.e. minorities), This internal oppression of minority groups comes in the form of a sociological process called internalization. Through internalization, minority individuals often choose to reject many alternatives to the white system—such as solidarity with other minority groups—and, instead may actually perpetuate the system by imitating its exploitive practices. Within this paper, I explore representations of internalization of white supremacy, as I analyze two novels, John Okada’s No- No Boy (1957) and Chester Himes’ If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945). By pointing out this process of internalizing white supremacy, both Okada and Himes do not merely intend to highlight a depressing and hopeless phenomenon. Instead, both authors offer their readers a warning against the dangers of allowing a racist system of economic power to continue. In addition, both writers also articulate a solution for countering white economic exploitation. That is, Himes and Okada ultimately encourage acting upon the creative alternatives of cooperation and solidarity that minority individuals in each novel formulate.
______, Committee Chair Dr. Hellen Lee-Keller
______Date
iv DEDICATION
To Jesus Christ, the only true world-changer
and source of perfect love.
John 3:16
And to my mom, who showed me what
Christ’s love looks like when lived out.
v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
To my amazing Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, who has given me all that I need and so much more.
To my mom, my best friend and guide. I want to be just like her as I grow up.
To my dad, my steady rock no matter what.
To my sister Gracie, my personal trainer for life.
To my brothers, Spencer, Evan, and Ryan, my bestest buddies.
To the Cordova Crew, Ken, Joe, Dan, Erin, Tony, Abbi, Moriyah, and Scarlett, thank you for adopting me, loving on me, and giving me a place to rest when I feel spent.
To Sheree Meyer, my constant encourager, teacher, and friend. Thank you for investing in me and encouraging me to accomplish all that I dreamed possible, and then some!
To Hellen Lee-Keller, the most awe-inspiring teacher, motivator, inspiration, encourager, and friend. Thank you for caring so deeply, pushing me when I needed it most, and encouraging me always. May I one day be even half the amazing woman that you are!
I also just want to thank Brian and Linds, my MA buddies and biggest supporters;
Bailey, my prayer warrior and light; the beautiful Ernst family, who bring the sunshine of
Jesus into my life every week; Kayla, my best friend forever; Suzette, the greatest boss ever; my bestest friends from YAF and Greenwood Calvary; the wonderful Handy and
Adams families; and, my beautiful church family at Cool Community Church. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Dedication………………………………………………………………………………....v
Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………...... ……...vi
Chapter
1. INTRODUCTION………………………………………...…………………….…...... 1
Sociocultural Context: Cultural Theory Concerning Whiteness, Institutionalized Racism, and Internalization……………………………………………………….4
Critical Stakes………………………………………………………………...... 27
Critical Arguments……..………………………………………………………...29
2. CHAPTER 2………………………………………………………………….……….32
3. CHAPTER 3…………………………………………….……………..……………...62
4. CONCLUSION……………….……………………………………………………….93
5. Works Consulted……………………………………………………………………..101
vii 1
Chapter 1
INTRODUCTION
Why is it that ―the humiliated of one culture become the shock troops of another, the ignominy of a slave prompting a need to retrieve dignity and self-respect by identifying with the master‘s voice and the very forces that gave rise to domination in the first place‖ (Gibbons 94)? In posing this question to the antebellum United States, Luke
Gibbons interrogates the interracial fight for economic power and value in a U.S. society that is controlled by a system of institutionalized white racism. More specifically, this interracial struggle that Gibbons emphasizes can be traced back to a system of minority economic exploitation and disempowerment built upon the performance of a category of whiteness. Using the power of whiteness to construct what Robert Jensen, in his work
The Heart of Whiteness, terms a white supremacist social system, a dominant white group
(those who adequately perform certain characteristics categorized as white) powerfully exerts not only an external control, but also a pivotal internal oppression over groups classified as non-white (i.e. minorities) (Jensen 3). This internal oppression of minority groups comes in the form of a sociological process called internalization. With internalization, a minority individual, observing the way in which the system of institutionalized racism—although oppressive—delivers tangible economic rewards and consequences to those classified as white, may be led to believe that his or her own value and economic productivity is minimal in comparison to that gained by a white identity
(Jensen 5). Furthermore, with this belief in mind, the individual may choose to reject many alternatives to the white system such as solidarity with other minority groups and 2 instead may affirm the power of whiteness by imitating its racist propaganda and seeking white approval at the expense of other minority groups.
Within this paper, I explore representations of internalization of white supremacy, as I analyze two novels, John Okada‘s No- No Boy (1957) and Chester Himes‘ If He
Hollers Let Him Go (1945) that are set in the transitional two-year period immediately following WWII. In both novels, a central tension revolves around the protagonists‘ vacillation between economic alternatives available to minorities and the seemingly more practical and effective economic values of the exploitive white system they occupy. This central conflict between individual economic methods and the values of the white system is illustrated within very specific textual instances in which African-American and
Japanese-American minority groups fight with each other in order to attain greater economic success within the oppressive white supremacist system. Ultimately, these literary representations of interracial minority fighting illustrate the underlying phenomenon—whereby minority individuals come to formulate but then reject their own economic alternatives—as they tend to internalize and emulate the values and economic practices of the destructive white racist system that oppresses them. By pointing out this process of internalizing white supremacy, both Okada and Himes do not merely highlight a depressing and hopeless phenomenon. Instead, both authors offer their readers a warning against the dangers of allowing a racist system of economic power to continue.
Furthermore, both authors also offer a solution to countering white economic exploitation—acting upon the creative alternatives of cooperation that minority individuals in each novel formulate. 3
In this introduction to my thesis, I lay the groundwork for my larger project by providing key theoretical and background data. First, I highlight the four major theoretical concepts that inform my literary arguments: 1) racism as an institutionalized system in the U.S.; 2) whiteness as a systemic concept; 3) minority internalization of this white system; and 4) interracial minority conflict and imitation of white economic values.
By defining and underscoring these four major concepts, in particular, I construct my literary argument that due to the institutionalized power and economic reality of the white system, minority groups tend to fight each other as they internalize and emulate the very system that exploits them. Following this theoretical section, I underscore the different issues of agency that shaped African-American and Asian-American experiences in the two- to three- year span immediately following WWII. Ultimately, by highlighting these issues of agency, I will indicate the specific historical context and power dynamics that served to shape the minority groups illustrated in each of the novels. Finally, building from this historical overview, I indicate the primary critical stakes of my argument. That is, I express how my thesis contributes to the burgeoning, controversial field of whiteness studies, and, more significantly, how my thesis can be utilized as a point of departure for reexamining and reconstructing how minority groups—and members of a dominant white group, as well—confront and directly challenge the annihilating racism imbedded within the white economic system in the U.S. Ultimately, I conclude this section by providing brief outlines for each of the two chapters of my project.
4
SOCIOCULTURAL CONTEXT: CULTURAL THEORY CONCERNING
WHITENESS, INSTITUTIONALIZED RACISM, AND INTERNALIZATION
In approaching the task of literary analysis in this paper, I chiefly rely upon four key theoretical concepts derived from the current framework of American cultural studies research. These four theoretical constructs include: 1) that racism in the U. S. is an institutionalized system; 2) that this system grants and restricts access to resources based on the symbolic power of whiteness; 3) that minorities who are oppressed under this white system tend to internalize its ideologies and methods; and 4) that minorities often emulate the white system and reject an alternative of solidarity amongst themselves.
I. Racism as an Institutionalized System
I build upon the idea that racism in the United States is an institutionalized system. That is, the policies and structures that make up pivotal U.S. institutions – such as education, economics, and politics – are inherently racist (Jensen 17). Due to this systemic foundation for racism, the racial inequalities in the U.S. cannot simply be attributed to individual racist tendencies, but rather to what Joe Feagin and Eileen
O‘Brien, in White Men on Race, call ―an umbrella framework that encompasses the racial stereotypes and understandings common across the society. These are not just individually held, but are part of a societal framework of knowledge about race matters‖
(10). As this passage indicates, the racial inequalities that currently exist in the U.S. can be attributed not only to racist individuals, but rather to a flawed social system in which core racialized beliefs are imbedded in the decision-making processes—and are 5 becoming part of a larger social framework. Omi and Winant in their work, Racial
Formations in the United States, refer to this system of racism as one in which a ―racial project‖—how race is interpreted and defined by those in power—is utilized to fit particular individuals and groups within a larger social structure or mode of distributing power and resources (56).
II. System of racism is built upon the power of whiteness
Consequently, if racism in the U.S. is a systemic issue, the question then arises as to how this system is constructed. According to Robert Bernasconi in his essay ―Waking
Up White in Memphis,‖ whiteness is an ―alliance‖ (19). Thus, the term whiteness is used for group identification (who is a member of the alliance), as well as for consolidating power within the group: an alliance is able to consolidate and utilize group resources more effectively. Along with establishing this group status and solidarity, whiteness also functions as a term of exclusion.
As Cheryl Harris argues, in her essay, ―Whiteness as Property,‖ ―whiteness as a theoretical construct evolved for the very purpose of racial exclusion‖ (112). Thus, whiteness is not only used to mark who is seen as white, but more importantly who is not.
By using whiteness as a mode of racial exclusion ―European Americans‖ who have classified themselves as white have constructed a system in the U.S. in which ―all new racial hierarchies …[revolve] around applying race labels to ‗nonwhite‘ groups in order stigmatize and exploit them, while at the same time reserving extra value for whiteness‖
(Lipsitz, Possessive 3). As George Lipsitz suggests, by attributing a certain symbolic 6 value to whiteness, one group of people— those who classify themselves as white— is able to degrade (stigmatize) and ultimately, exploit, or unfairly utilize the resources of other groups of people. Thus, whiteness in the United States primarily functions as a means of accumulating and preserving power.
Ultimately, the identifying, exclusionary power of whiteness is connected with actual tangible benefits, as it is united with the open affirmation of the law. That is, whiteness is institutionalized. Under the economic, political, and legal systems of the
U.S., those individuals who classify themselves as white have been able to consolidate tangible power.
As the law recognizes, either implicitly or explicitly, the settled expectations of
whites built on the privileges and benefits produced by white supremacy, it
acknowledges and reinforces a property interest in whiteness that reproduces …
subordination. (Harris 108)
This classification of whiteness as a type of legal property within the United States is exemplified in the 1896 ruling in the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court case. Through this case, in which the U.S. Supreme Court declared that whites and blacks were
―separate but equal,‖ policies of racial segregation and the consequent unequal distribution of resources and access to facilities were federally validated. Furthermore, as
Justice William Rehnquist pointed out in 1954, the case ruling also asserted that ―in the long run it is the majority who will determine what the constitutional rights of the minority are‖ (6). Thus, as the Plessy v. Ferguson case illustrates, those who claim to possess whiteness, under the U.S. law, tend to receive a status of social privilege, 7 acceptance, and power—akin to that experienced by a landowner. Furthermore, he or she is also entitled to greater tangible advantages such as greater security under the law, greater job opportunities, and greater access to resource and positions of political and economic leadership. Therefore, the power of whiteness creates a social system in
America in which the most valuable asset or piece of symbolic property that one can possess is not a piece of land or a reliable investment of capital, but rather a group identity and status that classifies one as white.
III. Minority internalization of white racism
Under this racialized system in which group affiliation with whiteness grants significant power, minority individuals—those classified as non-white—often suffer not only external political, economic, and social disadvantages, but also significant sociological reverberations (i.e. internalizing white supremacy). According to Donald
Baker, in his work Race, Ethnicity, and Power, racial domination is often achieved internally through a state of dependency (74). In this state, the subordinate group feels a sense of inferiority, and, so, it symbiotically relies upon the dominant group—with its believed levels of higher expertise and knowledge—for a model of behavior. The subordinate group, then, gradually comes to depend upon the dominant group due to certain social tendencies that they develop over time. Foremost, Baker expresses that
―individuals [or groups] …who early in life are deprived of affection or believe that they do not ‗belong‘ often become distrustful of others‖ (174). However, joined with 8 this distrust they also develop a strong need for ―affiliation‖ with a ―strong leader or cause‖ (often the very source of their inferiority complex in the first place) (174).
In his work Black Skins: White Masks, Frantz Fanon explores this complex dynamic of distrust and affiliation within a specific sociocultural framework. Although specifically referring to Algerian colonization (rather than the U.S. situation), I assert that one of the central arguments that Frantz Fanon expresses in his book, Black Skins: White
Masks, holds true for minority individuals under the American system of instutionalized racism, as well. Both Americans classified as non-white and the post-colonial residents of
Algeria, operate under a system of economics that regulates access to resources and basic rights based upon a specific performance by those classified as colonizers or white. Fanon argues that in the colonized situation of native-born black Algerians there existed a unique mixture of both fear of and also an affiliation with those in power resulting in the contradictory and complex position of the colonized individual:
To be the ‗other‘ is to feel that one is always in a shaky position, to be always on
guard, ready to be rejected, and…unconsciously doing everything needed to bring
about exactly that catastrophe. (76)
Therefore, through their sociocultural tendencies (internally responding to the oppressive realities of the environmental system), the subordinate groups, or as is the case in this thesis, minority groups in the U.S. often respond to the very real oppression and economic consequences experienced under the dominant group by replicating its repressive, power-garnering strategies as these methods often seem the most powerful means available for garnering even some modicum of freedom and success. The process 9 of internalizing racism, subsequently, entails that ―after having been the slave of the white man, he [subordinates] himself‘ by accepting these notions and beliefs about his own inferiority‖ (Baker 37).
IV. Internalization of racism leads to minority conflict
I posit that due to the process of internalizing racism as minority groups seek to attain some sense of power and freedom, Okada and Himes show that they often imitate the strategies of the oppressive white system rather than seeking solidarity amongst themselves or revolution against the system. This penultimate choice to replicate the oppressive strategies of the white system is at times a stark decision – complete and consuming. This total internalization of white racism is exemplified in Richard
Rodriguez‘s autobiography, Hunger of Memory. In this work, Rodriguez, a Mexican
American, chiefly argues against the institution of affirmative action, by claiming that it grants undue privilege to minorities who have not necessarily earned a higher education
(141). By making this argument, Rodriguez indicates his complete internalization of the oppressive white power system, due to the fact that he utterly ignores that minority individuals do not have equal access to resources that would enable them to earn their higher education as easily as white individuals, in the first place. That is, through a white system of institutionalized racism, minority individuals are denied access to even the most basic economic rights—labor rights, housing, educational access—that determine a minority individual‘s desire to pursue future education and the ability to accumulate enough savings to make that pursuit a reasonable possibility. Thus, Rodriguez 10 exemplifies a minority individual who has completely internalized the concepts of an exploitive white system that hoards resources at the expense of disempowered minority groups.
In contrast to Rodriguez, the characters in the two novels that form the focus of my thesis do not so easily undergo an internalization of white strategies. The main characters of both Okada‘s No-No Boy and Himes‘ If He Hollers Let Him Go exhibit a sharp, painful struggle and tension between their own alternative modes of garnering power and the pragmatic methods of the white system. Initially, the characters posit an alternative concept of diverse minority groups such as African Americans and Japanese
Americans cooperating together to create a new sense of social belonging and a collective of resources as the key to attaining a higher level of power. Ultimately, however, this alternative is gradually chipped away by the observation that the exploitive methods of the dominant group or those who classify themselves as white are more practically successful and effective at garnering tangible economic rewards. This conflicted internalization of whiteness can be defined as the gradual erosion of an interracial alternative by the strategies and ideologies of a white racist system. It is absolutely essential to keep in mind that this act is not represented by these authors in a way that illustrates any sense of minority complacency or greed. In fact, it is quite the opposite.
Both Okada and Himes represent minority internalization of a racist system of whiteness as a highly destructive, painful act that is often accompanied by a heavy struggle between the desire to maintain ties of humane solidarity and unity and the desire to attain 11 individual access to the most basic economic rights and benefits such as fair wages and adequate housing conditions.
SOCIOCULTURAL CONTEXT: LITERARY THEORY AND THE REALIST
NOVEL AS A MEANS OF SOCIAL CRITIQUE
In approaching this thesis project, I will be taking each of the four theoretical concepts I have outlined above and applying them to two works of literary fiction.
Making this connection between social theory and works of literary fiction, I build upon current literary theory that posits literature, in particular, the realist novel form, as a representation of active social phenomena. The realist novel is a form that has traditionally sought to represent everyday life or reality. In representing real life, the realist novel form is merely fictive in that it often makes up characters, settings, and plots. However, on a deeper level, the novel often seeks to represent underlying social structures, interrelationships, and systems of power as they really are.
Even more so in minority literature, such as Asian-American literature, as Lisa
Lowe expresses, in her work, Immigrant Acts, the unequal distribution of resources between ―dominant white citizens and subordinated racialized noncitizens‖ ―emanates‖ from the reality of the social system (that seen through the perspective of a nonwhite group) that the novels represent (Lowe 27). That is, within minority realist novels nonwhite American authors write through the lens of their own experiences under the oppression of the U.S. white power structure. Through this perspective, the minority authors tend to impart either an implicit or explicit social critique of the oppressive realities of this social structure within their novels. Thus, the social critique that emerges 12 in American minority realist novels tends to be an ―immanent critique‖ or one that emanates directly from the author‘s actual experience of racial exploitation and disempowerment (Lowe 28).
Having experienced real disempowerment and exploitation under the United
States system of white power, minority authors also tend to write novels that reflect the specific history and methods of this institutionalized racism. According to Toni
Morrision, in, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the Literary Imagination, primary characteristics of American fiction (primarily white romance fiction) cannot be considered ―separate and unaccountable‖ from the ―presence‖ of African American individuals in the United States, and the particular history of oppression that they have experienced (5). Although Morrison‘s argument chiefly focuses upon how African-
American history and forms of identification in the U.S. have shaped white romantic representations of black characters, I assert that her central claim about American literary representations extends to African-American, that is, minority literature, as well.
Extending Morrison‘s argument, I argue that the oppressive racialized history and modes of identifying African American individuals in the U.S. not only influenced white authors but also, concurrently, how African-American authors saw themselves and, subsequently, constructed the language and social system of their novels. Under the system of institutionalized racism in the U.S. African-American authors were implicated in a specific history of exploitation and were exposed to various, disempowering and dehumanizing forms of identification. This real history and identification, ultimately, exerted a ―presence‖ that cannot be considered ―separate‖ from how these African- 13
American authors constructed the characters and social settings of their novels.
Therefore, in analyzing two minority, realist novels I investigate representations of the
United States social system that emanate from an actual experience of the oppression and exploitation of the system of institutionalized racism within America.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND – ISSUES OF AGENCY
In analyzing the phenomenon of internalizing white racism, I will be focusing upon two novels that were set and published within a very specific time period: the reactionary two decades immediately following WWII. My analysis centers upon this particular period in American history for two primary reasons. The first reason derives from the fact that this time period was one in which the economic prosperity of white
Americans far outweighed that of minority individuals. That is, within the booming economic atmosphere of the U.S. during and immediately following the war, economic advantages such as greater housing availability, higher standards of living, and higher savings rates primarily applied to only a select group of white individuals (Oliver and
Shapiro 22). Minority individuals were, thereby, subjected to an ever-widening economic gap. In highlighting this specific economic situation, I will be illustrating not only how the power of whiteness operates to maintain economic power and prosperity, but, more importantly, I will be able to illustrate how the economic power of whiteness is responsible for the generation of concurrent minority revolutions and conflicts.
Ultimately experiencing economic repression and at the same time being motivated by the very recent war propaganda that urged fighting in the cause of freedom 14 and democracy for all, African-American and Asian-American individuals began to construct very culturally-specific and separate movements for greater liberties as minority
Americans. In constructing these very unique revolutions, each minority group primarily functioned on its own, although there were a few small, outlying inter-minority alliances.
During the immediate post-war years, one of the primary characteristics is an emphasis on increased group power. That is, each minority group fought separately in order to secure civil rights and obtain greater advantages within the white system for itself (De
Graaf, Mulroy, and Taylor 332). Thus, human rights do not chiefly characterize the revolutions of the period, but rather desires for group power. I, consequently, focus on this immediate post-war period of change because it exemplifies the basic tenets of my argument—that minority revolutions tend to actually uphold the white system of power rather than tearing it down.
African-American Agency Within the Pre- and Post-WWII Period
Within the years from 1944-1960, the economic and revolutionary experiences of two specific minority groups are especially key to my central arguments. The first is that of African Americans. Immediately following the war, two major economic shifts specifically affected the financial well-being of the average African American individual.
First, was what Daniel Pete, in his book Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s, terms, the Southern ―decline of labor intensive agriculture‖ (4). With the increase of new technologies created during the war, and with many Southerners ―having traveled and tasted relative affluence during the war‖ apart from the Southern planting system, the post-war period saw the major decline of the traditional, rural sharecropping economy of 15 the southern United States (Pete 9). Southern African Americans migrated in enormous numbers to cities across the U.S. especially those urban centers located on the West coast. By the end of the 1950s, more than half of the South‘s farm families had moved to industrial cities across America (Pete 9). Moving to these industrial centers, African
Americans were placed in a much more competitive economic position. No longer simply filling the role of portrayed subservient, submissive farm workers who lived in sparse shacks that were set apart from the dwellings of white individuals and from each other,
African Americans were now working and living right alongside white workers and, even more significantly, they were living together in concentrated numbers. These factors contributed to an increased white urgency over the problem of integration (Pete 9). As a result, white individuals viewed African Americans as a competitive threat within the economic market, threatening the availability of higher-paying jobs, job security, and prime housing. Thus, many white community leaders fought for continued segregation
(Bass 4). This segregation was maintained first and foremost through overt discrimination in the workplace. African Americans were paid much lower wages and given jobs that were both easily dispensable and lacking in upward mobility (Lipsitz, Rainbow at
Midnight 343). This overt labor discrimination was further augmented by the more subtle economic discrimination taking place in the housing market.
The second major economic shift during this period, apart from mass African-
American migration into the industrial cities, was the major increase in funding for government subsidized housing. The Federal Housing Act, originally passed in 1934, established the modern mortgage industry by providing federal funds at low interest rates 16 for the purpose of bolstering the housing market and, in turn, the economy (Oliver and
Shapiro 18). Immediately during and after the war, millions of dollars were provided under this act in order to increase the accommodation of America‘s urban centers and facilitate the efficient return of American soldiers back into the workplace. However, these funds and the housing practices established by the act were not administered equally to each individual. Instead, the Housing Act became a means of maintaining racial segregation and securing white prosperity in American cities (Avila 7). In the name of so-called neighborhood stability, the act provided higher amounts of funding to white individuals and subsidized the construction of specifically all-white suburbs on prime pieces of outlying retail, and fueled the construction of much cheaper, specifically all- black ghetto tracts in the congested centers of urban areas (Oliver and Shapiro 7). This racialized ghettoization of the American city exemplified the economic trend whereby
African Americans were left to suffer much lower standards of living and much lower abilities to accumulate and use economic resources than their thriving white counterparts during and immediately following the war. As George Lipsitz writes in Rainbow at
Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s, the housing restrictions of the 1940s left
African Americans with a highly decreased economic legacy due to fewer savings and higher income taxes based upon a lack of secure equity. At the same time, the housing restrictions motivated African Americans to initiate the legacy of the civil rights movement (339).
Due to the increasing tension over the economic disparity in housing and the economic competition brought about by increased migration into the cities, African 17
Americans began to activate as agents for an economic revolution. Weary of seeing their white industrial neighbors thriving in the post-war economy, African Americans began to form their own groups to fight for greater economic opportunities. In many cases these movements toward greater economic agency were racially specific and African
Americans simply united with each other. However, in a few rare instances especially right before WWII African Americans actually allied themselves specifically with
Japanese workers and formed very small inter-racial labor unions. According to Marc
Gallicchio, in his work, The African American Encounter with Japan and China, these small alliances often formed due to the African American perception of the Japanese as a
―universal abstract representing non-white unity against white supremacy‖ (26). That is, the Japanese, having historically resisted American domination and control in their own country, were seen as a universal symbol for non-white strength and resistance in the
United States. Therefore, African-American and Japanese-American laborers bonded on a small scale before the war due to the shared commonality of their status and repression as nonwhites in the U.S. (Okihiro 62).
Unfortunately, though, with the advancement of WWII and the Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbor these African American and Japanese labor alliances became increasingly rare. Gallicchio highlights the cause of this growing distance between African American agents of change and Japanese Americans when he indicates that, ―as long as black
Americans believed that their conditions might be improved through organization and protest, they were not likely to jeopardize their chances of success by aligning themselves with a potential enemy of the U.S.‖ (16). Thus, immediately following WWII, African 18
Americans tended to form their own racially exclusive, activist groups in order to better appeal to and garner for themselves the power inherent in the system of whiteness. In other words, they saw themselves set apart as friends rather than enemies of the state.
In the WWII years, African Americans most commonly formed very racially specific ―colored workers‖ unions. The goals of these unions included seeking higher wages, greater opportunities for job advancement, and fairer work benefits. These groups were also primarily identified by their exclusivity. They did not fight for the equal rights of all workers, just the ―colored worker.‖ Following this same trend, the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) increased its membership by the thousands in the war years and immediately following (Gallicchio 25). Again, these groups which began to powerfully urge for increased economic opportunities only fought for them on a racially-exclusive level: increased power was only desired for one group, not for all. This pattern of exclusivity directly modeled the very white, hierarchal system that the African Americans of the post-war period were beginning to revolt against. That is not to say, in any terms that African-American activists of this period were acting in a way that was defined by excessive selfishness or close-mindedness.
Instead, the tendency for African-American groups to form racially-exclusive forms of agency points directly to the destructive power exerted by a white system of institutionalized racism over the ability of minority groups to achieve economic change.
According to the system of whiteness, only one group could be eminent, and so African
Americans during the years from 1944-1960 in the hopes of gaining some sort of access to this zenith of economic rewards (even just to taste the most basic economic rights and 19 freedoms), crafted a revolution that was racially exclusive. During this time, civil rights became synonymous with African-American rights and not the rights of all minorities.
Asian-American Agency Within the Pre- and Post- WWII Period
Immediately following WWII, Asian economic experiences also resulted in the initiation of an exclusive activism for increased economic opportunities. Prior to
World War II, Asian Americans especially in the western United States were exposed to economic discrimination based upon their race. For example, in 1908, many Western states passed legislation restricting the immigration of Asian individuals and denying any current Asian immigrants the rights of citizenship (Weston 31). Furthermore, in 1913,
California passed the Alien Land Law, which specifically ―forbid the purchase and ownership of land by any alien ineligible for citizenship‖ (Weston 33). Thus, Asian immigrants living in California were denied the economic privilege and security of owning their own land. This discrimination continued well into the twentieth century, and it was continually justified by the idea that Asians should be denied the economic rights of American citizens due to their position as both a social peril and an economic threat.
That is, Japanese Americans in the post-war period were perceived as a social ―yellow peril,‖ an uncivilized, barbaric influence, and a minority group (who with a pre-war model of community cooperation and solidarity possessed higher rates of average economic success in the U.S.) that was seen as a potential threat to the prime jobs and land of white Americans. 20
By the World War II period, Asian immigrants inhabiting the western United
States were still being exposed to this racialized discrimination and yet many were making great economic strides in spite of it. In particular, the Nisei (second generation
Japanese), who were born in the U.S., and thereby were American citizens by birth, were garnering high levels of education, establishing their own independent businesses, and amassing wealth and land. Unfortunately, however, this success only exacerbated white racist fears concerning the economic threat of the Asian American population in the
West. Therefore, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, white individuals across the western United States constructed a legal justification for stripping Asian Americans in the west of all their economic earnings. Under the auspices of patriotism, 110,000
Japanese, ―70,000 of whom were American citizens,‖ were forcibly removed from their homes and placed in concentration camps across the U.S., even as ―far away as Arkansas and Wyoming‖ (O‘Brien 7). In addition to this forced removal, Japanese internees were also robbed of all their economic resources. As one Japanese individual remarked,
[it] is difficult to describe the feeling of despair and humiliation experienced by
all of us…as we watched the Caucasians coming to look over our possessions and
offering such nominal amounts knowing we had no recourse but to accept.
(Takaki 393)
Due to this internment, many Japanese-American individuals were left, after the war, in a desperate situation characterized by both economic degradation and social insecurity and unsure of where they stood as Americans and where they stood in relation to the shattered
Japanese-American community now scattered across the U.S. 21
In the period immediately following the war, Japanese-American individuals on the western coast of the United States responded to their new situation—as individuals struggling to rebuild a social identity and economic base in the United States—by constructing a very racially specific literary revolution. Before the war, many Nisei individuals had begun to subtly rebel against their more traditional Issei parents in their approach to American-Asian policies. That is, they began to rebel against the more traditional Japanese policy of submission to one‘s position within a ―specific social nexus‖ and their parents‘ emphasis upon complete assimilation within the United States
(Moore 143). Instead, many young Japanese-American individuals began to try and find a complex individual balance between being Japanese and being American. That is, they sought to discover an identity that was somewhere in between.
Within the decade following the war, this rebellion turned into a large cultural, intellectual movement as Asian-American writers, turned their chief focus upon trying to negotiate and fit a distinct individual Asianness and power, with a collective American identity or to balance being both Asian and American. According to Viet Nguyen, in his work, Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America, prominent Asian
American writers of the post-World War II period, were chiefly involved in a literary revolution that fought to ―claim a domestic authenticity that [did] not threaten whites‖
(22). That is, they sought to garner greater Asian-American acceptance and power within the United States, but only as that power fit into the preexisting white racist system.
Ultimately, this pattern of attempting to gain power by appealing to and replicating the system of racism in the U.S. is one that characterizes both national and 22 trans-national Japanese and American relations. On the one hand, throughout the twentieth century the Japanese replicated the Western hierarchal system in its own national policies in an attempt to ally Japan more closely with U.S. power and resources.
However, at the same time, the Japanese also placed themselves outside of the U.S. racialized system. According to Yokiko Koshiro, in his book, Trans-Pacific Racisms and the U.S. Occupation of Japan, many Japanese in both America and Japan encourage their children to believe that ―higher learning‖ and aesthetic pursuits can ―overcome‖ any racial exploitation (10). Thus, throughout the course of twentieth century Japanese and
American relations and especially during the WWII period there existed an often paradoxical dialectic between a Japanese striving for insider status (white power in the
U.S.) and a belief that Japanese literary agency could triumph over and remain outside that same system of power
As a result of this insider and outsider dialectic, Asian American authors in the post- WW II period, such as Carlos Bulosan, in his work America Is in the Heart, and
Louis Chu, in his novel Eat a Bowl of Tea, often constructed forms of literary agency in which Asian-American characters enacted the very policies of economic exploitation practiced by the oppressive white system. As Nguyen states, these fictional characters followed the pattern whereby, ―to fulfill the conditions of loyalty…the alien must find another alien whom he can denounce and against whom he can define his necessary inclusion‖ (75). In many works of Asian-American writing in the late 1940s, the other alien that was exploited in order to gain a higher position within the white hierarchy was 23 the African-American individual. It is key to note here, that the exploitation of the
African-American characters in these works of Asian-American literary agency was not a reflection of minority gullibility—simply being duped into the practices of a white system—but rather a reflection upon the debilitating power of the very real racist system of whiteness. Ultimately, by embedding this alien African-American figure within the written form, Japanese-American authors, in particular, engaged in an aesthetic act of agency that seemed one of the most tangible ways to potentially remove them from the oppressive system of institutionalized racism within the United States. Perhaps, higher learning and achievement could set the Japanese-American individual free. Thus, the
Asian-American literary revolution urging for greater economic power and social acceptance for the Asian-American individual in the U.S. was characterized by its exclusivity and imitation of the exploitive practices of the white system of power.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND—ISSUES OF ASIAN-AMERICAN AND
AFRICAN-AMERICAN CONSTRUCTIONS OF MASCULINITY
In addition to the issues of agency that shaped the production of African-
American and Asian-American literature in the post-WWII period, particular issues of gender, definitions and identifications of masculinity, also shaped literary creation in this post-war and Cold War period.
Asian-American Constructions of Masculinity
During the post-war and Cold War period, a popular version of both Japanese and
Japanese-American masculine identity was that of the ―salaryman.‖ According to Kam 24
Louie and Morris Low‘s work, Asian Masculinities: The Meaning and Practice of
Manhood in China and Japan, the ―salaryman‖ masculine identity was one that defined the male as the primary producer and provider in the home (118). This patriarchal role functioned as a reflection of the militarization taking place in the Cold War period in the
U.S. That is, as Cynthia Enloe states in The Morning After, the need to protect America from foreign attack during the Cold War required the ―militarization‖ of masculinity at home. In other words, the male was defined according to his role as courageous protector and defender (Enloe 18). In addition to this militarized identity, the Japanese-American male was also defined according to his ability to maintain a labor position as an extremely loyal, hard-working employee in a private sector, white-collar job (Louie and
Low 120). Thus, in the post-war and Cold War period, the Japanese-American male was primarily defined according to his ability to defend his family and his country, as well as his ability to maintain a secure, middle-class job. This masculinity was, ultimately, one that embodied the dominant white masculine identity or as Louie and Low put it, ―the dominant or hegemonic form of masculinity, one that is culturally privileged‖ (118).
However, although this ―salaryman‖ definition of Japanese-American masculinity was tied to the rewards of white ―cultural privilege,‖ it was, in actuality, complicated by the racial realities facing Japanese-American males in the aftermath of World War II.
Following the internment that took place on the U.S. West Coast during the war, many
Japanese-American males had to face the reality whereby the racialized system of power within the U.S. denied them the ability to both defend their families and their place in the economic market – as both their homes and their jobs were stripped away by the 25 internment process. Thus, the ideal salaryman masculine identity was called into question as it was affected by racial exploitation. Consequently, Asian-American male writers such as John Okada in the post-war and Cold War period, crafted representations of
Japanese-American masculinity that embodied tension. This tension dealt with the divergence between the ideal salaryman masculine identity and the real racial disempowerment that made the maintenance of this version of maleness unattainable for the Japanese-American male.
African-American Constructions of Masculinity
Like the tensions contingent upon Asian-American male literary representations of masculinity, African-American literature during the post-war period also evinced tensions concurrent upon definitions of masculinity. Literature written by African-
American male authors including Chester Himes in the post-war period, reflected a clear tension between two very different definitions of African-American masculinity. The first definition of African-American masculinity was that of a hyper-sexualized, aggressive, violent male—e.g. the gangsta or player. According to Patricia Hill Collins‘ work, Black
Sexual Politics – African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism, this definition was used by those in power, those who define themselves as white, as both a tool of denigration that restricted African-American men from the ―work of the mind‖ and a reflection of desire that projected onto the black male a desirable sexual freedom and power (Collins 153). Due to its duplicitous nature, as both a tool for discrimination and an alternative to constrained white masculinity, this definition of black masculinity often served as a point of conflict within African-American literature of the post-war period. 26
On the one hand, some African-American male authors embraced this masculinity as the most natural black male identity because it was a direct contrast to the dominant white male identity (one defined by control and moderation) (Collins 152). As Patrick Johnson, discusses in his book, Appropriating Blackness – Performance of the Politics of
Authenticity, these black authors associated black masculinity with male strength and power and whiteness with ―effeminacy‖ (Johnson 58). With the literary appropriation of this version of African-American masculinity, however, African-American male authors also had to deal with its material consequences. That is, this version of black masculinity was used by those in power—a majority of white readers—to define African Americans as deviant and subsequently, invalidate their literary production and voice, the work of the mind.
As a result of the negative literary consequences of this gangsta version of
African-American masculinity, some black male authors of the post-war period chose to reject it. In its place, these African-American male writers asserted an asexual, moderate, friendly version of black masculinity (Collins 154). According to Collins, this male identity was ―a highly marketable commodity‖ (168). That is, African-American literature portraying this version of black masculinity was more readily accepted and valued by those who practiced the power of whiteness because it presented no threat or alternative to the dominant performance of white male identity. However, this portrayal of the black male also denied any individual African-American expression or exploration of sexuality and gender identity—especially as these categories intersected with race and racial exploitation. Therefore, in the literature written by African-American male authors 27 in the post-war, Cold War period there exists a tension between divergent versions of masculinity and attempts to navigate between them.
CRITICAL STAKES
I have intentionally constructed an argument that will significantly contribute to the primary fields of academics and social activism. First and foremost, my thesis contributes to the field of academics as it applies to the emergent area of whiteness studies. According to Vron Ware and Les Back, in their book, Out of Whiteness, whiteness studies, specifically cultural whiteness studies examine ―whiteness‖ in terms of its involvement in the ―making of subjects in the formation of structures and institutions‖
(Ware and Back 24). Whiteness, in this field, is examined in its role as a cultural tool of power that is used to construct and shape the institutions of a collective society in general, and the United States more specifically. Since the mid-1990s, looking at whiteness in this way has become a prolific field of study in ―mainstreamed and well- respected academic gatherings such as the American Social Science Association, the
Modern Language Association, the Institute for Culture and Study, the American Studies
Association and the like‖ (Hill 3). Thus, constructing this thesis, I am contributing to this burgeoning field of study that, as yet, is still in its early stages, and still in need of literary studies, like mine, that examine the highly complex relationship between the white system of minority exploitation and minority choices for revolution and relations themselves. 28
Apart from adding highly unique material to the field of whiteness studies, my study also makes academic contributions in that it automatically enters into the controversial debates surrounding the field of whiteness studies itself. Being a work that investigates the power of whiteness, my study enters into the mass of works that have been charged with serving to ―exacerbate the problem of white hegemony that [they] pretend to unmask‖ (Hill 16). That is, by tightly focusing on the issues of whiteness, my study – and others in the field of whiteness studies – have been charged with actually making the symbolic power of whiteness even more significant and all-powerful by giving it undue emphasis. However, my study refutes this controversial claim by, first, looking at whiteness through works of fiction that are written by minority authors or those oppressed under the white system. Thus, my study does not emphasize the experience of those in power—praising or exalting the power of whiteness—but rather it emphasizes the more negative repercussions and consequences of the system, itself.
Furthermore, by emphasizing this minority perspective on whiteness, I illustrate how whiteness studies is not simply a dichotomous issue that always emphasizes a white over non-white dialectic. Through the works of minority fiction that I have selected, the power of whiteness operates in such a complex way that the struggle for power does not simply center around a so-called superior white versus an ostensibly inferior non-white conflict, but more deeply it takes place along non-white relational lines, as well. Thus, my study of the U.S. white racist system engages with the current arguments raised against the field of whiteness studies, by providing a perspective on whiteness that is highly complex, one that does not simply emphasize whiteness vs. non-whiteness. 29
As my study gives voice to the minority individual and also reveals the complexities associated with inter-minority relationships, it is my ultimate intention to imbed a foundation for activism within my essay. It is my paramount goal, with this literary study, to stimulate leading figures, both minority and white individuals, in the literary and social studies fields to pay closer attention to my analytical arguments concerning institutionalized racism and its antagonistic effects upon interracial cooperation. By securing the attention of these leading creative and critical minds, I ultimately intend to encourage a crucial reevaluation specifically within the area of
American cultural analyses. For, as my study indicates, past minority revolutions have only succeeded in emulating and reinforcing the pre-existing racialized, hierarchal system. It is, therefore, necessary that leading figures in the creative fields of literature and cultural studies collaborate together to construct and encourage new methods of revolution. Ultimately, my study intends to actively encourage new dialogue among creative and critical leaders as to what new methods can be crafted in order to unite diverse groups of all different ethnic backgrounds, deconstruct the hierarchal system of white power, and construct a new system of equality in its place. This new system would not be one that pits one group of people against another, but instead, would exemplify the egalitarian, cooperative principle upon which America was founded: that under God we are all created equal, and, subsequently, ought to treat each other as such.
CRITICAL ARGUMENTS
30
Finally, having highlighted all the necessary background information and stakes involved in the construction of my essay, I will indicate the central critical arguments of the two chapters of my study.
Chapter 1
In the first chapter, I will closely analyze two very specific scenes within John
Okada‘s No-No Boy. The significance of this analysis is two-fold. In both passages,
Okada highlights instances of minority conflict between groups of African Americans and Japanese Americans that he implicates as stemming from a desire to garner greater acceptance into and value from the white system of economic power. In addition to illustrating the economic root of many minority conflicts, these scenes also point to the tendency toward internalization, whereby minority individuals support the white system of power rather than uniting and fighting against it. In my first chapter, I ultimately argue that Okada paints internalization as a process in which minority individuals (after much internal wrangling) choose to support the white economic system of power over their own alternative visions of cooperation and solidarity, not because they are self-absorbed or gullible, but because the white economic system appears to be the only pragmatic way to achieve even the most basic economic rights and benefits.
Chapter 2
Within the second chapter, I will focus my analysis upon two very specific scenes in If He Hollers Let Him Go, in order to emphasize Himes‘ representation of the phenomenon of the minority internalization of a system of white economic power. In my 31 analysis, I will focus first on how both scenes highlight economic competition as the root of conflict and disunity between minority groups—particularly Japanese American and
African American groups. Ultimately, by emphasizing this minority disjuncture I will further analyze both scenes to highlight what Robert Lee, in his essay, ―Violence Real and Imagined: The World of Chester Himes‘ Novels,‖ terms the process by which continual external destruction by the white racialized system produces an internal ―self- destruction‖ (15). That is, continual oppression by an unfair white economic hierarchy produces a response within the individual in which the competitive, oppressive tendencies of the dominant system are internalized and individual modes of revolution and action are repressed. Ultimately, in this chapter, however, I argue that Himes illustrates the process of minority internalization of whiteness as one motivated not by selfishness or ignorance on the part of minority individuals or groups, but rather by the apparent pragmatic reality that even the most basic economic rights (those associated with labor, housing, and social power) could not be achieved apart from a white economic system.
32
Chapter 2
[T]he Negro who was always being mistaken for a white man become a white man and he becomes hated by the Negroes with whom he once hated on the same side. And the young Japanese hates the not-so-young Japanese who is more Japanese than himself and the not-so-young, in turn, hates the old Japanese who is all Japanese, and, therefore even more Japanese than he….(Okada 135-36)
At the center of John Okada‘s novel, No-No Boy, there lies a continual thread of interracial or minority economic conflict. However, Okada does not simply tie this interracial conflict between Japanese Americans and African Americans to a monolithic tendency toward mutual animosity as if each group just inexplicably disliked the other.
Instead, he implicitly ties this central theme of minority struggle to an underlying, highly complex, often paradoxical phenomenon: the minority internalization of a system of white power manifested through economic conflict. Okada investigates and complicates the process of minority internalization of the power of whiteness by highlighting scenes of conflict between groups of Japanese Americans and African Americans. That is, he explains the struggle that often accompanies the tendency of groups of color to displace alternative power structures of interracial cooperation and unity with an imitation of a racist power system that is built upon hierarchy, competition, and minority disempowerment. Ultimately, this focus upon the tumult of internalization, rather than highlighting weakness (emotional or intellectual) on the part of those classified as non- white, primarily points to the extremely unjust and debilitating effects of a system of power that distributes the most basic economic rights and rewards according to a narrow categorization of whiteness. 33
In this chapter, I argue that economic conflict between minority groups often stems from the complex, often paradoxical internalization of the oppressive practices of a racist power structure. However, before engaging in a close literary analysis, I address a few theoretical, historical, and biographical frameworks. In the first segment of this chapter, I highlight a few major cultural and theoretical concepts. First, I describe how whiteness rather than just being a physical designation, more importantly functions as a performative category based upon an individuals‘ performance of traits categorized as white (i.e. moderation, political conservatism, and Christianity); second, I emphasize the material and internal implications of a system of whiteness that distributes access to economic rights and rewards based upon the performance of whiteness; and finally, I illustrate the conflicted phenomena of minority internalization that often accompanies this system of whiteness (and was articulated specifically in Okada‘s post-war novel).
Following this section, I provide a brief overview of the following historical points that are relevant for my literary analyses: the internment of Japanese Americans during
WWII, acts of Asian-American agency in the labor market during the post-WWII and
Cold War periods, and issues of Asian-American masculinity and militarization following the war. Then, I focus specifically on John Okada‘s personal experience and development as an Asian-American author, thereby connecting the broader historical context with Okada‘s individual cultural production.
Immediately following this initial section, I move into the literary analysis and critique of Okada‘s No-No Boy. First, I analyze a scene in which Okada illustrates a conflict between a group of African-American individuals and his main character, Ichiro, 34 a Japanese American. Through this passage, Okada initially illustrates that minority conflict tends to arise from a struggle to garner greater acceptance into and material benefits from a white system of economic and racial power. Alternately, however, within this same passage, Okada also points to the tendency toward internalization whereby minority individuals experience fierce internal struggle between their own economic alternatives of unity and cooperation and the pragmatic denial of basic economic rights and benefits contingent upon refusing to perform whiteness. After analyzing this first scene of minority conflict within No-No Boy, I turn to a second argument in the novel. In this passage, Okada represents a situation in which a group of Japanese Americans initiate conflict with a group of African Americans. This scene initially illustrates that the root of much minority conflict is a fight for greater access to the economic rights tied to a white system of economic power. However, in addition, the interracial conflict in this second passage also points to the underlying process of internalization. Ultimately, through both of these scenes, Okada underscores that minority groups and individuals generate a vast resource of alternative economic practices such as cooperation and acceptance. However, these practices often fail to come to fruition not due to undue minority weakness or selfishness, but primarily due to a an economic system of whiteness that restrictively controls and regulates nearly every attempt to access even the most economic rights and resources.
35
CULTURAL AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK – ASIAN-AMERICAN
INTERNALIZATION OF WHITENESS AND ITS REPRESENTATION IN POST-
WWII LITERATURE
Building upon the work presented in the introduction, here I specifically focus upon three theoretical concepts that underlie Okada‘s novel. First, I highlight the concept of whiteness as a performative category utilized to negotiate power. Secondly, I describe the major external (access to the most basic economic rights and rewards) and internal
(sense of self and individual voice) consequences of performing whiteness experienced by many Asian Americans in the immediate post-war and Cold War years. Finally, I emphasize the literary representation of the tension incumbent upon the Asian-American process of internalization.
The concept of whiteness as a performative category implicitly informs No-No
Boy. As current American cultural studies scholars have argued, race is not merely a phenotypical category, one based on outward appearance or color. Instead, outward appearance simply serves as an initial marker of categorization, making it easier to relegate an individual to a non-white or white category, on the spot (Omi and Winant 55).
This phenotypical categorization of race primarily functions to make racial assignments appear more tangible, stable, and reliable. So, in one sense, race is, as Kandice Chuh argues in her work, Orientations: Mapping Studies in Asian Diaspora, a bodily
―inscription,‖ in part, a categorization that is based upon one‘s physical appearance (12).
This working definition of race would help to explain the enormous surge in Asian-
American eyelift surgeries—eradicating the bodily inscription of Asianness—in both 36
Japan and the U.S. in the early- and mid-twentieth century. However, as Eric Lott points out in his article, ―Racial Cross-Dressing and the Construction of American Whiteness,‖ racial categories are in actuality much more fluid and performative in nature than basic phenotypical assignments. That is, an individual is categorized as white based on his or her performance of specific cultural traits (Lott 1). Particular traits associated with the performance of whiteness include moderation, self-control, purity, political conservatism, a Puritan work ethic, proper English, and the practice of Christianity. In the same vein, an individual is categorized as black or other based on the performance of traits that are counter to these traits of whiteness. For example, wildness, an alien tongue, and a different religion or mode of practicing Christianity might be considered by many whites to be counter to their social and cultural values. Ultimately, this performative categorization of whiteness functioned within the Asian-American community to both externally and internally oppress and exploit. Matthew Jacobsen argues that a performance of whiteness is connected with the accumulation of social, political, and economic ―capital.‖ It has material benefits and the power to enact political and social change (110). Thus, the systematic categorization of whiteness performance functions to redistribute both material and social resources, both monetary rewards and deeper internal ones.
As Cheryl Harris argues, in her essay, ―Whiteness as Property,‖ whiteness as a form of symbolic property ―is accompanied by the right to exclude‖ (110). Thus, whiteness is not only used to mark who is white, but more importantly who is not. That is, those who are categorized as white (who perform the traits of whiteness) have access 37 to a particular right—a privilege of power validated by the law—to socially and economically exclude those classified as non-white. According to George Lipsitz, in his work, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, by using whiteness as a mode of racial exclusion ―European Americans‖ who have classified themselves as white have constructed a system in the U.S. in which ―all new racial hierarchies …[revolve] around applying race labels to ‗nonwhite‘ groups in order to stigmatize and exploit them, while at the same time reserving extra value for whiteness‖ (Lipsitz, Possessive 3). As Lipsitz suggests, by attributing a certain symbolic value to ―whiteness,‖ members of a particular group, those who classify themselves as white and perform the traits associated with this categorization, are able to degrade (stigmatize) and ultimately, exploit, or unfairly utilize the resources of, other groups of people, those categorized as non-white. Thus, whiteness in the United States primarily functions as a means of accumulating and preserving economic labor rights and benefits. In his work, The Wages of Whiteness, David
Roediger, writing about the symbolic function of whiteness within the post-Civil War institutionalized systems of the U.S. (particularly economic production and politics), argues that ―whiteness was a way in which white workers responded to a fear of dependency on wage labor and to the necessities of capitalist work discipline‖ (13). More specifically, Roediger expresses that whiteness as a symbolic category developed as a means of protecting the economic privileges and rights belonging to those categorized as white from the competition and power of wage labor and the working classes from those individuals classified as non-white minorities. 38
Under this institutionalized system of whiteness, many Asian Americans on the
Pacific West Coast during the immediate post-war and Cold War period experienced several external repercussions. Foremost, many Asian Americans experienced the loss of land and goods experienced in the internment. This tangible loss of material resources resulted in not only a struggle to relocate and regain jobs following the war, but also in what Chuh refers to as an ―ethico-political‖ struggle (80). That is, with a loss of material goods and rights, many Asian Americans came to doubt American law as an effective means for achieving social change. Thus, the political and social action of Asian
Americans immediately preceeding World War II was deeply inscribed with the ―less than honorable treatment‖ that they received under a U.S. law that did not deliver ―equal justice for all,‖ but rather only equal justice for all who were categorized as white (Chuh
87). Situated outside a national sense of identity, Asian Americans from the post-war period into the Cold War faced a continual struggle to unite their own individual actions and conceptions of self with a larger faith in the surrounding social structure. They could no longer believe that what they did individually to produce positive social change would actually manifest itself in the nation.
Experiencing the very real internal and material consequences of the system of whiteness in the U.S., many Asian Americans in the post-war period experienced a process of internalization characterized by a tension between the desire to create an alternative system of distributing power and the material draw of the system of whiteness, itself. Within the literature of the period, this tension of internalization is a focal point of representation. As George Lipsitz indicates in Time Passages: Collective Memory and 39
American Popular Culture, many pieces of minority literature in the 1940s and 1950s represented the tension of internalization through the juxtaposition of what he terms
―counter-memory‖ and dominant history. According to Lipsitz, ―counter-memory‖ is an alternative way of looking at history through the personal perspectives of minority or marginalized individuals (Lipsitz, Time Passages 213). However, alongside this counter- memory, a viewpoint that offers a new alternative mode of looking at history and one‘s place in the world, many Asian-American writings of the post-war period also illustrated the strong pull of the system of white power, itself. This tense struggle between counter- memory alternatives and the tangible power of whitenes indicated the inherent contradictions of the process of minority internalization.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND – ASIAN-AMERICAN ISSUES OF AGENCY IN
PRE- AND POST- WWII SEATTLE
In order to appropriately contextualize Okada‘s literary representations, a brief historical overview of Japanese-American agency in pre- and post-war Seattle is also essential. In this section, I define the primary characteristics of Japanese-American political and economic agency, the means of exerting power or influence, as it appears in pre- and post-war Seattle.
Japanese-American agency in pre-war Seattle was facilitated largely by the social and communal structures that were established by the Issei—first generation Japanese immigrants to the United States. Viewing life in America, for themselves, as something temporary rather than permanent (due in large part to the fact that they were restricted 40 from owning their own land according to the 1920 Alien Land Act) many Issei in pre-war
Seattle emulated the communal traditions and social constructions of Japan rather than seeking immediate assimilation into the United States (Fugita and Fernandez 15). As
Fugita and Fernandez have found, most significant among these social constructions was the central position of the ken network (17). In Japan, the ken (extended family unit) served as the foundation for all community structures.1 With this social structure the name and needs of the family (interpersonal harmony) were paramount over individual needs (autonomy). Transplanting this social tradition of family networking to the United
States, the Issei in pre-war Seattle set up very tightly knit ethnic enclaves. Although these ethnic enclaves were also heavily shaped by racialized economic factors that kept
Japanese-Americans from accessing specific housing zones and even owning their own land, these enclaves with names like ―Little Tokyo‖ or Japantown (Nihonmachi)— known as the heart of Japanese-American life in the Pacific Northwest—also recalled a close connection to Japan and a cultural tendency toward Japanese-American community in pre-war Seattle (Fugita and Fernandez 19).
Through the initial ethnic enclaves that they established within the city, Japanese
Americans in pre-war Seattle created a powerful tool for political agency. By emphasizing the needs of the community as top priority, as well as maintaining a social network that concentrated individuals of similar background and economic expertise and resources (those with similar struggles, points of interest, and levels of income to invest),
1 The muras (villages) in Japan were built around a particular family network – with multiple generations residing together and assisting each other in both the domestic and public work of the community (Fugita and Fernandez 17). 41
Japanese-American enclaves facilitated the organization of several grassroots community-improvement clubs and institutions.2 All of these groups, in turn, were represented under the arm of the Seattle Japanese Association, a branch of the prominent
Japanese Association of Washington State. The Seattle Japanese Association, founded in
1910, was a group devoted to ―assisting new arrivals, fighting anti-Japanese legislation, supporting social and educational programs, acting as quasi-Japanese government offices, and promoting the immigrant community‘s economic interests‖ (Fugita and Fernandez
24). Thus, the role of the Japanese American Association in Seattle was to act as a political agent not just in Japanese American and U.S. relations, but also in relations between Japanese-Americans and the Japanese. In other words, it was set up to serve both a national and international political role. Finally, in addition to the Japanese American
Association, the Japanese American Citizens‘ League was founded in Seattle in 1930, as an organization through which Japanese-American businessmen could pool their resources and fight for greater economic rights and rewards for their labor (Fugita and
Fernandez 25).
In addition to fostering political agency, the communal structure of pre-war
Japanese-American Seattle also generated specific modes of economic agency. The primary social structure, the ethnic enclave, established by the Japanese Americans in pre-war Seattle facilitated the establishment of their role as economic ―middleman minorities‖ (Bonacich and Modell 4). According to Bonacich and Modell, in their work,
The Economic Basis of Ethnic Solidarity: Small Business in the Japanese-American
2 These clubs included the Seattle Japanese Youth Club, the Japanese Chef‘s Friendship Association, and the Japanese Businessmen‘s Club (Fugita and Fernandez 24). 42
Community, ―middleman minorities‖ are groups that ―occupy a position not at the bottom of the social structure, but somewhere in the middle, typified by a concentration in independent small business‖ (4). Some of the Japanese-American population in pre-war
Seattle established its economic position between the American upper and middle classes
(primarily white) and the working populous—mostly disenfranchised minority groups
(5).
Due to a highly efficient structure of social networking and community cooperation (an alternative to the white system built upon economic competition, exploitation, and hierarchy), many Japanese-Americans in pre-war Seattle were able to concentrate in the small business or agricultural fields. The social networking set up in the Japanese-American enclaves was a system in which older, established Japanese
Americans, Issei, utilized their economic resources and labor positions to secure employment for incoming or younger generation Nisei Japanese (Bonacich & Modell
35). Many of these older Japanese Americans owned their own small businesses within the ethnic enclaves of the city and they primarily served as go-betweens between the general American populous and the Japanese-American community selling mainstream goods to a primarily Japanese-American clientele. As Miyamoto remarks, ―In speaking of the economic activities of the Japanese in Seattle, we must take special note of the overwhelming dominance in their lives of the ‗small shop‘ (Miyamoto 39).3 In addition, many Japanese Americans also established themselves as independent farm workers primarily working as sharecroppers or leasers for white farmers or, in the cases of
3 By World War II, nearly three fourths of the Japanese-American community members were working in small business (Bonacich and Modell, 37) 43
American-born Japanese, buying their own lands.4 Through this middleman position (not serving in commercial industry but also not part of the working-class masses), the
Japanese-American communities of Seattle had greater power and freedom within the processes of hiring. Many Japanese-American business owners hired only newly-arrived
Japanese employees and many chose to give back to their communities and fund the economic endeavors of the newly-arriving or younger generation Japanese Americans.
These systems of economic and political agency in post-war Seattle remarkably changed following the forced removal and internment of over 120,000 Japanese-
Americans living on the West Coast in 1942. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, and due to the increasing animosity and sense of impending economic competition felt by many white Americans living in the Pacific Northwest, the federal government on
February 19, 1942 issued Executive Order 9066, which ―authorized the exclusion of all persons of Japanese descent—citizens and aliens alike—from designated areas of
Washington, Oregon, California, and Arizona‖(Inada xii). The internment of Japanese
Americans crucially affected the social and communal structures that had been established in pre-war Seattle. First and foremost, the internment did not necessarily separate people based on kinship lines and families were mostly kept together. However, the internment did destroy the social networks that had been established along communal lines. That is, the strong sense of community and family-first was shattered as families
4 Also by World War II, Japanese-Americans farmed 56% of the land in Kings County, Washington (Fugita and Fernandez 19). 44 were stripped of their names and given numbers instead.5 Secondly, in addition to breaking up the communal structure, itself, the internment also facilitated a tangible loss of the economic resources accumulated by the Japanese-American community in Seattle.6
Therefore, the social and economic base for agency in the Japanese-American community in Seattle was radically broken apart by the internment of 1942.
When the internees could finally return back to Seattle in 1945, as former
Japanese Americans were allowed to return to Seattle for reoccupation, the modes of
Japanese-American economic and political agency in the city had to be rebuilt. In the area of economic agency, a major shift took place, from a middleman, Issei-led economic system to a more mainstream, commercial, Nisei-led economic structure. This economic shift was facilitated as the Nisei took over the role of economic leaders upon their return to Seattle in 1945. The Nisei reoccupying Seattle were more removed from the traditional communal economic practices of Japan and were, consequently, more inclined to embrace the bigger business practices of mainstream American capitalism.7 Furthermore,
Japanese-American economic agency also shifted due to the continued influence of a white economic power structure. Viewing Japanese Americans as a threat to post-war economic stability and a return to social normalcy—a stable white American identity and
5 Although, some members of each camp worked together to provide better food, education, and work opportunities, many internees, like the Takei family of Tule Lake Camp, simply struggled to maintain a sense of purpose and comfort amidst the monotony and complete lack of privacy at camp – ―[Mama] didn‘t like the idea of people lining up outside our windows three times a day…and she complained bitterly about the smell‖ (Takei 3). 6 According to the evacuation order, itself, internees could only bring with them items that they could personally carry. The United States government promised to provide funded storage for other larger household items – but often, this promise was haphazardly carried out. Furthermore, the evacuation order did not provide any guarantee for the security of economic collateral such as shops, homes, and land. Subsequently, most of these things were irrevocably lost or confiscated. (Inada 8,9). 7 Furthermore, the growth of corporations and ―super‖ chain stores in the decade following the war, made small business and agricultural retailers virtually obsolete (Bonocich and Modell 100). 45 economic leadership role—Japanese Americans were forced to seek economic power through more restricted channels.8
Along with this shift in economic agency, the Japanese-American approach to political action also experienced a marked change in the years following the war. In the decade following World War II, the Japanese-American Citizen‘s League (JACL) chapters in Seattle continued to grow gradually and fight for political and social change.
However, they did so in an atmosphere of fear and temerity, as many of the newly- returning Japanese-American occupants of Seattle desired to simply fade into the background of white American life (Bonacich and Modell 101). Thus, on the one hand, the old vehicles for political agency, the Japanese-American clubs and associations were characterized by a new historical amnesia: a purposeful forgetting of the traumas of internment in order to better appeal to the prominent system of white political power in the United States.9
Counter to this new assimilationist approach to Japanese-American political agency in Seattle, the works of many Japanese-American authors in the post-war period took up a more radical approach. In the tense and racially charged atmosphere of post- war Seattle, the former political agency of the old Japanese-American associations—the approach that drew its power from a continual navigation between identification as both
Japanese and American—was taken up in the more subtle form of literary representation in the novel. Rather than simply promoting acculturation into the U.S. as the primary
8 Japanese Americans had to seek economic success through employment in American corporations – i.e. individual desk and management jobs – and through a diversification of their own businesses – i.e. in ―Little Tokyo smarter entrepreneurs were looking to black customers‖ (Bonocich and Modell 95). 9 For historical amnesia in a European immigrant context see Matthew Jacobsen‘s Whiteness of a Different Color page 95. 46 mode for attaining political power, many Japanese-American writers in the post-war period used the internment of the early 1940s as the starting point for exploring alternate modes of identification and self-expression (social and political voice) for Japanese
Americans. For example, writers like Mine Okubo, Minoru Kiyota, and John Okada, wrote novels that either focused on internment camp life, or life immediately following, and utilized these fictional representations to engage in a form of political agency that George Lipsitz, in his work, Time Passages, refers to as the construction of
―counter-memory‖ (213). According to Lipsitz, counter-memory is a specific way of recalling the past that focuses not on the universal (i.e. white, hegemonized version of history), but rather on silenced, personal narratives and perspectives—primarily those of exploited, minority individuals (Lipsitz, Time Passages 213). By looking at the internment and the following post-war decade through the fictional lens of personal narrative and interrogation, Japanese-American authors in the years immediately following the war questioned the dominant systems of political power in the U.S. and, simultaneously, encouraged thinking about possible alternative forms of Japanese-
American political agency in post-war Seattle and the Pacific Northwest.
OKADA’S BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
In addition to the surrounding historical and cultural context, Okada‘s personal experiences and ideologies also shed some light on the creation of his novel. Okada was born in the Pioneer Square area of Seattle in September 1923. He was the eldest of three sons in a middle-class family of Japanese-American entrepreneurs, and his parents owned and ran a boarding house (Chen 281). Raised with moderate economic resources, Okada 47 was able to pursue higher education, and he attained degrees in English and Library
Science at the University of Washington (Chen 286). Soon after graduation in 1942,
Okada and his family were evacuated under Executive Order 13660, the Japanese
Internment Order, to Minidoka, Idaho. Seeing his hard-working parents carelessly stripped of all their economic resources, Okada developed a growing sense of pessimism toward the ideals of citizenship—that is, security, prosperity, and normalcy—promised by the United States (McDonald ―John Okada‖ 9). However, despite this growing distrust, Okada took the U.S. Loyalty Oath, answered affirmatively to both questions, and proceeded to serve in the U.S. Air Force. He was discharged in 1946, at which time he married and went on, under funding from the GI Bill, to gain an MA in English from the
University of Columbia. As a result of these post-war gains in education and familial security Okada expressed that rather than being the standard for most Asian Americans
(or white Americans, in general) his success and assimilation into the categories of U.S. normalcy was, instead, an exception to the rule: ―I have been endowed with a larger capacity for normalcy than most people‖ (McDonald 7). Exploring this idea of what constitutes normal in the United States, and specifically how the power of whiteness plays into defining that category, Okada began work on No-No Boy in the early 1950s
(Ling 142). While working on the novel, Okada also worked as a librarian and technical writer in Detroit, Los Angeles, and Seattle. Okada finally completed No-No Boy in 1955 and published it in 1957. Six years later in 1971, Okada died of a sudden heart attack, and soon after his wife, Dorothy, burned all of his remaining manuscripts, including the latest version of his second novel, a story about the Issei experience in the U.S. (Chen 289). 48
WARNING AGAINST AND SOLUTION TO THE MINORITY
INTERNALIZATION OF A WHITE SYSTEM OF RACISM IN OKADA’S, NO-
NO BOY
In the first chapter of his novel, Okada illustrates a crucial moment of interracial conflict. He does this as he constructs a scene in which a group of African Americans compete with a group of Japanese Americans in order to try and garner the greater economic rewards contingent upon whiteness. In the passage below, Okada succinctly depicts the minority conflict between African Americans who have taken over the Seattle enclave of Little Tokyo (after the Japanese Americans who once occupied it were forced out in the internment) and the Japanese Americans who are returning there after the war:
[Ichiro] walked past the pool parlor gingerly picking his way among the
Negroes…They were smoking and shouting and cussing and carousing
and the sidewalk was slimy with their spittle. ‗Go back to Tokyo, boy.‘
Persecution in the drawl of the persecuted. (5)
The interracial persecution of the African-American men toward Ichiro (a Japanese
American) in this scene functions to illustrate two key points. First, is that the conflict is grounded in an African-American imitation of the modes of accumulating economic rewards that is delineated by a white power system, in which those who do not adequately perform traits of whiteness are exploited and denied access to even the most basic economic rights. Imitating the white example of defining the Japanese Americans as permanent outsiders, the African-American characters in this scene call for Ichiro to
―Go back to Tokyo, boy‖ (5). Furthermore, pushing the Japanese Americans in this scene 49 even further outside the categorization of whiteness—associated with being extremely superior and intellectual—the African Americans in this passage also refer to Ichiro as a
―boy‖ (an intellectually and socially inferior position), and one commonly applied by whites against African Americans.
Okada goes deeper, though, than simply illustrating this surface level imitation of an economic system that regulates access to basic financial resources and rights based upon a performance of whiteness. He indicates that the minority imitation of white modes of exploitation is simply a manifestation of an underlying belief in the tangible, economic rewards contingent upon this imitation. Okada makes this connection between the white system of power and a belief in its tangible benefits, through the specific reference to
Tokyo made in his scene of minority conflict—―Go back to Tokyo, boy‖ (5). By specifically expressing their desire for Ichiro to go back to Tokyo, the African Americans in this scene point to their deeper desire to protect their newly-acquired Little Tokyo from its prior Japanese-American occupants. Following the internment of the Japanese-
American residents in 1942, African-American residents of Seattle had been able to set up homes in that area. Previously, African Americans had been restricted from living in this section of the city, which offered better access to businesses and better housing opportunities. This section of the city was only made available to the economic middle- men of the Japanese-American community. Thus, with the increased access to the most basic labor and economic resources gained through their new residence in Little Tokyo, the African Americans in Okada‘s passage wanted to protect the economic rewards that 50 had been gained through the institutionalized racism of the white system of power, manifested through Japanese-American internment.
Subsequently, as they sought to maintain their new, basic economic assets—their new home in Little Tokyo—the African Americans had to mix celebration over their new economic rewards with a perpetuation of Asian-Amerian denigration and exploitation—their ―carousing‖ and rejoicing was placed in the same phrase with their racially derogatory ―shouting‖ and ―cussing.‖ Thus, in order to even gain a taste of the most basic economic rights and benefits, the African Americans in Okada‘s scene of minority conflict rely upon the exploitive methods of a white system of economic power.
Consequently, the streets of ―Little Tokyo‖ are described as ―slimy‖ with ―spittle.‖ By describing the streets of ―Little Tokyo‖ as ―slimy,‖ Okada, ultimately, utilizes a term that comes very close to painting a mental picture of prosperity (i.e. the word ―slimy‖ is extremely close to the word ―shiny,‖ which calls to mind streets of gold). However, by utilizing the term ―slimy‖ Okada ultimately points to the grotesque and yet very real system of racial persecution (prejudicial ―spittle‖) that is necessary to attain even the most basic financial resources.
Having illustrated the racialized struggle for the material rewards contingent upon a white economic system, Okada moves on, in this first scene of interracial fighting, to illustrate the larger, underlying phenomena of internalization that, ultimately, generates these surface-level actions. Within Ichiro‘s response to the derision of his African-
American counterparts, Okada illustrates the internal conflict that, in turn, produces the external one. After being ridiculed on the street, Ichiro remarks that ―the tolerance [he 51 felt] for the Negroes and the Jews and the Mexicans and the Chinese…because he was
Japanese…[was replaced by] the hate which was unrelenting and terrifying‖ (6). Through this passage, Okada makes it clear that Ichiro initially supports an alternative system of human solidarity and unity—all groups, including Jews, Mexicans, Negroes, and Chinese joined together in a bond of tolerance and compassion. Framing this statement of a potential alterative system of power in the words of a minority narrator who has experienced the internment process and racial exploitation, firsthand, Okada presents the reader with a clear example of Lipsitz‘s counter-memory. By giving voice to the past through Ichiro‘s perspective, Okada presents an initial framework of literary counter- memory that allows his narrator (and the reader) to imagine the ―possible alternative courses of history‖ and the material consequences of particular systems of power – increased fighting and competition for resources rather than harmony (Yoneyama 30).
Thus, Ichiro‘s initial statements reflect a rejection of dominant discourses and historical viewpoints (the ones written by those in power) and, instead, embrace a perspective of minority solidarity that runs counter to them.
However, this system of minority solidarity is brought into battle with the system of racist power that Ichiro sees at work within the deriding acts of the African Americans on the street. That is, Ichiro is torn between the hopeful solution of tolerance that he has imagined and the real, tangible consequences (basic access to labor and housing rights and resources) contingent upon performing whiteness that he has witnessed in the actions of the African-American characters. Internally then, Ichiro undergoes a fierce battle between his own alternative system of power and the ―unrelenting‖ militant system of 52 white racism. This reaction embodies the ―ethico-political‖ struggle that Kandice Chuh theoretically defines. That is, with a loss of material goods and rights, Ichiro comes to doubt the means by which he can enact social justice and change within his own life and the life of his community, and he rejects the American institutions of law. Subsequently,
Ichiro does not promote the law as the means through which he can enact social change, but rather it is the force which he must combat (fight its ―unrelenting‖ and ―fearful‖ force) to enact any positive, collective action. Ultimately, though, Ichiro‘s individual ethico-political struggle is assuaged as he internalizes the racism that he witnesses firsthand. Ichiro experiences the disempowering and exploitive effects of the white system of power as he is mocked on the street and stripped of a place within Little Tokyo and, by extension, the U.S. in general. Undergoing this exploitation, Ichiro comes to associate greater power and strength with the power of whiteness than he does with his own alternative, imagined vision. Consequently, Ichiro perceives whiteness and white‖ hatred as more ―unrelenting‖ and ―terrifying‖ than what imaginary unity and compromise have to offer. Contingent upon his confrontation with the harsh, pragmatic realities of the white economic system and its discourse, Ichiro, thereby, rejects his own egalitarian alternative of acceptance. Thus, Ichiro‘s creative alternative of minority solidarity is repressed by an internalized ―dominant discourse‖—one that promises tangible rather than just ideological monetary benefits and rewards (Ling 367).
Ultimately, by juxtaposing the hope offered by a creative, new historical perspective and the real repercussions of not ascribing to the perspective of whiteness,
Okada points to the inherent tension of minority internalization of racist politics. This 53 internalization is characterized by a highly complex conflict between a desire for a new system of power distribution, one that is more communal and egalitarian—and the desire to acquire and maintain the tangible material and social rewards offered by the institutionalized system of white power. Consequently, in his first scene of interracial conflict, Okada indicates that the tumultuous internalization of white racism is very often the underlying factor that motivates external minority confrontations that aid in the preservation rather than the destruction of white power within the United States.
Nonetheless, it is important to note, that Okada does not highlight this process of internalizing ―white‖ racism as an homage to the power of whiteness or as an illustration of excessive minority weakness and gullibility. On the contrary, Okada illustrates the tumultuous phenomenon of internalization in order to serve as a sharp warning. This warning expresses that the system of institutionalized racism in the U.S. is excessively exploitive and destructive. It is a system that restricts access to even the most basic economic rights and seeks to crush all healthy alternatives of community and cooperation. Furthermore, Okada‘s warning also communicates that all those who desire to see the system of racist power changed need to act upon the alternatives of tolerance and hope that already exist (in the mind) and fight to gain them a tangible social and economic voice.
In the latter portion of his novel, Okada continues to emphasize this theme of the conflicted internalization of racism and the preservation of white power through minority conflict—although Okada now performs a slight reversal as he no longer focuses upon black Americans who are identifying with white racist power but Japanese Americans. In 54 the following passage, Okada describes the conflict that emerges at an Asian-American bar, the Club Oriental, as one of the Japanese-American patrons tries to bring two
African-American individuals into the bar:
A Japanese…shouted out sneeringly: ‗Them ignorant cotton pickers make
me sick. You let one in and before you know it, the place will be black as
night.‘
‗Sure,‘ said Jim Eng, ‗sure. I got no use for them. Nothing but trouble and
I run a clean place.‘ (134)
Initially, this passage reverses the roles in a tendency to imitate the modes of minority disempowerment modeled by a white economic system. Now, in this passage, this tendency is seen in the terms and arguments used by Japanese Americans against the
African Americans. In the very first line of the quoted passage, the Japanese-American patron of the bar refers to African Americans as ―ignorant,‖ thereby, imitating the white argument that African Americans are intellectually inferior individuals. Furthermore, the
African Americans are referred to as ―cotton pickers,‖ a term that refers to their former status as slaves and sharecroppers and alludes to their inferior social and economic position in comparison to white middle and upper class Americans. Finally, the Japanese-
American owner of the bar, Jim Eng, implies that African Americans are dirty and ill- mannered and will make his place unclean. This idea is derived directly from the white imagination that the black individual is animalistic and uncivilized. Ultimately, this argument justifies treating the African American as less-than human and exploiting his or 55 her labor and resources—a treatment that is initially practiced by the system of whiteness in the U.S.
Within this passage of interracial conflict, Okada also illustrates a desire to reap and protect tangible economic rewards. In the passage, Okada imbeds a sense of
Japanese-American fear over losing the material benefits contingent upon a white system of power. That is, the Japanese-American bar owner fears losing his white patrons if he serves black ones: ―let one [African American] in…before you know it, the place will be black as night‖(134). This phrase initially indicates the underlying tension concerning social exclusion – being sent away from the illumination of the white power system. This tension over access to a sense of white social belonging was an internal struggle that
Asian Americans in the post-war period continually faced. As Dorothy Ritsuke
McDonald expresses, in her essay ―After Imprisonment: Ichiro‘s Search for Redemption in No-No Boy,‖ it was not enough for an Asian American to undergo a procedure and racially re-write his or her body, but he or she also had to fully perform whiteness – enacting traits such as moderation, practicing Christianity, and speaking proper English that are associated with being white. McDonald indicates that, ―being an American is a terribly incomplete thing if one‘s face is not white and one‘s parents are Japanese of the country Japan…It is like being pulled asunder by a whirling tornado‖ (emphasis added
―After Imprisonment‖ 21). Thus, those Japanese Americans (like those in Okada‘s bar scene) living in the post-war and Cold War period faced a continual struggle due to the fact that a sense of racial belonging or acceptance into the category of whiteness was 56 contingent upon both the tangible body and the intangible performance of character traits—those not designated as belonging to ―the country Japan‖ (22).
While connecting his passage to this tense struggle for white social belonging and power, Okada also ties it to a fear of economic recession or loss. Connecting the symbolic phrase ―black as night‖ to a specific business condition—the bar serves as a symbolic marker for individual ownership and entrepreneurship—Okada makes an implicit connection between blackness and a fear concerning the loss of economic privilege and prosperity. This connection between ―blackness‖ and economic success plays upon the post-war readers‘ reference back to the very recent Great Depression
(1930s and 1940s) and the negative monikers of ―Black‖ Tuesday and ―Black
Wednesday‖ which were days of catastrophic economic loss. By utilizing the term
―black‖ to refer simultaneously to race and to allude to an economic state of recession and collapse, the Japanese-American bar owner in this scene connects a tolerance of non- whites, more specifically, those who do not adequately perform whiteness, with business failure and a complete loss of access to the most basic economic rights such as the ability to function as an entrepreneur and run a small business that generates enough capital to be successful. Consequently, the phrase ―black as night‖ subtly communicates the fear over economic recession and loss of tangible material rewards associated with the exploitive practices of the white economic system.
Illustrating the after-effects of the conflict between the Japanese Americans and
African Americans in the bar, Okada, ultimately, highlights the larger, internal turmoil— 57 internalization of racism that stimulates the external fighting. In the aftermath of the bar confrontation, Okada focuses upon the internal musings of Kenji, a Japanese-American war veteran who observed the entire scene unfold. Initially, Kenji responds to the interracial fighting by reflecting that:
One hears the voice of the Negro or Japanese or Chinese or Jew, a clear
and bell-like intonation of the common struggle for recognition as a
complete human being (134).
Through these thoughts, Kenji, like Ichiro in the earlier scene, similarly asserts an alternative viewpoint that unites all humans—especially those minority groups exploited by the white system—together in a common struggle. This struggle is not one that pits one group against another, or exclusively fights for the civil rights of one specific minority group, rather it is a struggle for humanity, an egalitarian fight for equal recognition and value for all individuals. This viewpoint of human solidarity and unity serves as a sharp contrast to the hierarchal system of white power that pits whiteness against all others in order to garner greater social and economic rewards. Thus, Kenji‘s initial musings serve as a bright and hopeful alternative to the power of whiteness.
However, this alternative does not emerge without sharp opposition. Soon after presenting his new egalitarian system of power distribution, Okada illustrates Kenji‘s tense struggle to maintain it in the face of the harsh realities of the system of whiteness.
Observing the interracial conflict in the bar, Kenji‘s alternative system of power is placed into conflict with a belief in a ―world full of hatred‖ (136). Ultimately, through this expression, Kenji indicates his internal condition of being torn between two 58 diametrically-opposed ways of viewing the world: one affirms the power of all human beings and the other cuts all ties of intimacy and compromise. Struggling between these two worldviews or versions of history, Kenji rejects the way in which a dominant perspective of history, one that only favors and gives voice to those individuals categorized as white, excludes and disempowers him. However, at the same time,
Kenji also acknowledges its inescapable power. As Lipsitz expresses, Kenji can neither accept a dominant perspective of history, ―but neither can he escape its consequences‖
(Lipsitz Time Passages 225). Thus, while proposing an alternative construction of power, one that is characterized by a community of voices that represent the oppressed or the marginalized rather than simply the powerful white voice, Okada‘s novel also represents the very real power of the dominant white system.
The resolution of this conflict finally results in Kenji‘s choice to invest his belief in the power of a hierarchal white system of power, as the voice of human unity is symbolically drowned out by a world ―full‖—without room for any alternatives—of hatred and division. Subsequently, Kenji rejects his own system of power, as he invests the power of whiteness with greater tangible social power and rewards. In this passage,
Okada makes it clear that Kenji, as a representative of a group classified as non-white, is not motivated in his internalization process by a sense of incredible selfishness or gullibility. Instead, it is quite the opposite. Kenji clearly constructs and imagines the
―clear, bell-like intonation‖ of an alternative of minority tolerance and cooperation. He desires this alternate power system and economic structure or else he would not imagine it and hear its call so vividly. However, this alternative is stripped of its effectiveness (its 59 ability to produce sound for all to hear), by the exploitive and destructive force of an economic system that distributes the most basic, tangible economic rights and resources based upon a performance of whiteness. Thus, it is not that minorities do not want a different system of economic access, rather it is that the white system that is already in place is so restrictive and oppressive. That is, even the most basic right of being able to run a small business and make a profit is regulated by one‘s performance of whiteness.
Under the extreme, disempowering force of a white system of distributing economic rights and rewards, Kenji‘s internal turmoil (an internalization of the power of white racism), ultimately, registers in the external production of minority conflict. In this final internalization of the power of whiteness, Okada illustrates what Stan Yogi, in his article,
―You Had To Be One or the Other: Oppositions and Reconciliations in John Okada‘s No-
No Boy,‖ refers to as the conflicted phenomena that leads to ―the perpetuation [of] a racial hierarchy… elevating the status of European Americans‖ (Yogi 68). As this quote, and Okada‘s second scene of minority conflict illustrate, the embattled process of internalizing white racism often leads minority groups to fight with one another and preserve the power of whiteness rather than uniting together creatively to destroy it.
CONCLUSION
In the final, climactic scene of his novel, Okada concisely drives home his warning concerning a system of power that denies so many minorities access to basic economic resources based on the performance of whiteness, as well as the danger of internalizing this system. Furthermore, Okada also communicates a vision for hope in which an alternative of cooperation and unity is substituted for the dangerous white 60 system of exploitation and competition that currently exists. In the closing passage, a
Japanese-American war veteran named Bull picks a fight at a bar with a much smaller, former Japanese-American internee named Freddie. Refusing to let Freddie gain service at the bar, Bull drags him outside yelling that he ―wasn‘t fightin‘ my friggin‘ war‖ for
Japanese-Americans who refused to serve in WWII (i.e. ―Jap-boys‖). Chased by Bull,
Freddie jumps in his car, speeds away, and consequently, crashes head-on into an oncoming vehicle and is instantly killed as his body is shorn in two. This part of the closing passage serves as a powerful implicit warning against the phenomena of internalizing the racism of a white economic system. That is, Okada connects Bull‘s actions, which deny Freddie‘s access to the bar on the basis that he is not part of the white American populous who can refer to WWII as ―my,‖ personal war, but is instead an unwanted outsider, a ―Jap-boy,‖ with terrible death and destruction. This terrible death is not only a literal loss of life (as in the novel), but also a symbolic unmanning or dehumanization, which is symbolized through the way in which Freddie not only dies but is utterly cut in two: he is completely demasculinized, dismembered, and emotionally and physically cut down to size. Ultimately, with the haunting scene of Freddie‘s death burned into the imagination and Okada‘s implied invectives against a white economic system and its internalization ringing in the ears, the reader is left with a final exhortation: do something! This something comes in the form of acting upon the imagined alternatives of unity and cooperation that have been articulated within each scene of minority conflict in the novel. Therefore, after witnessing Freddie‘s crash, Ichiro 61 does not react by internalizing and acting upon interracial hatred, but rather he reaches out and,
[P]ut a hand on Bull‘s shoulder, sharing the empty sorrow in the hulking
body, feeling the terrible loneliness of the distressed walls, and saying
nothing…A glimmer of hope – was that it?...in the darkness of the alley of
the community that was a tiny bit of America, he chased the faint and
elusive insinuation of promise as it continued to take shape in mind and in
heart (251).
It is in acting upon the sorrow and loneliness that he shares with Bull—as a fellow minority exploited by the economic power of whiteness and as a fellow human being— that Ichiro is able to produce a glimmer of hope in contrast to the destruction and disempowerment of a white power structure. Therefore, Okada‘s finale— tragic, haunting, and yet also, hopeful—serves both to illustrate the consequences of allowing a white system of power to continue unchanged, as well as the positive alternative of tolerance and community that already exists to counter it. Such an alternative just waits to be collectively acted out.
62
Chapter 3
I had to know that Negroes weren’t the lowest people on the face of God’s green earth. I had to talk it over with somebody, had to build myself back up. The sons of bitches were grinding me to the nub, the white meatless bone. (Himes 78)
Like Okada, Chester Himes in If He Hollers Let Him Go, interweaves a continual theme of interracial or minority conflict. This interracial conflict, or more specifically conflict between minority groups over economic rights and benefits, primarily involves the African-American community and their Asian-American counterparts residing in post-WWII central Los Angeles. However, Himes clearly indicates throughout his work, that the conflict arising between these two minority groups has a greater underlying cause than simple animosity or dislike. Throughout his novel, Himes indicates that one minority groups‘ fierce desire to assert itself over another—prove that it was not the lowest group on the planet—derives from the unjust and oppressive internalization of a much larger system of white exploitation. This exploitation of a system of whiteness, a system which utilizes the category of whiteness to exploit and disempower economically those who are labeled as non-white, ultimately forces many minority groups into a financially-strapped position. In this economically restrictive position, there often appears to be no practical way up and out except to yield to and imitate the competitive and vicious financial practices of whiteness itself. Through several scenes of minority conflict between African
Americans and Japanese Americans in his novel, Himes complicates and questions the tense process of internalization through which minority groups are cruelly pushed to replace their own individual, egalitarian concepts of economical power distribution with 63 the annihilating methods of a system of whiteness that utilizes racial categorizations to enforce a destructive financial hierarchy.
In this chapter, I argue that economic conflict between minority groups often stems from the complex, often paradoxical internalization of the oppressive practices of a racist power structure. However, before engaging in a close literary analysis, I address a few theoretical, historical, and biographical frameworks. In the first segment of this chapter, I highlight several major cultural and theoretical concepts. First, I describe how whiteness in pre- and post-WWII America, rather than just being a physical designation, more importantly functions as a performative category based upon an individuals‘ performance of traits categorized as whiteness (i.e. moderation, political conservatism, and Christianity)10; second, I emphasize the material and internal implications of an economic system that distributes access to economic rights and rewards based upon the performance of whiteness; and finally, I illustrate the conflicted phenomena of minority internalization that was articulated specifically in Himes‘ novel, whereby many minority groups tend to replace a cooperative alternative of behavior with that of the oppressive white economic structure. Following this section, I provide a brief overview of the following historical points that are relevant for my literary analyses: pre-WWII African-
American entrepreneurship, housing, and activism in Los Angeles and acts of African-
American agency in the Los Angeles labor market during the post-WWII and Cold War
10 It is important to keep in mind that during this WWII period and in the following years there was a radical white reaction to these traditional traits. According to Howard Winant, in his work The New Politics of Race, the 1940s saw the beginning of a new radical series of movements whereby white individuals sought to act in opposition to every one of these traditional characteristics of whiteness, thereby creating a new norm and eradicating social and racial boundaries (68). 64 periods. Then, I focus specifically on Himes‘ personal experience and development as an
African-American author, consequently, connecting the broader historical context with
Himes‘ individual literary representations.
Following this initial overview section, I analyze and critique two very specific scenes in If He Hollers Let Him Go. The first scene is one in which the main female character, Alice, is discussing housing conditions within a section of Los Angeles called
Little Tokyo, a section of the city that had been stripped from its Japanese-American inhabitants due to internment (Himes 83)11. Ultimately, as I analyze this scene of interracial, economic conflict, I highlight what Robert Lee, in his essay, ―Violence Real and Imagined: The World of Chester Himes‘ Novels,‖ terms the process by which continual external destruction by the white racialized system produces an internal ―self- destruction‖ (15). That is, continual oppression by an unfair white economic hierarchy produces a response within the individual in which the competitive, oppressive tendencies of the dominant system are internalized and individual modes of revolution and action are repressed. It is essential to note here, though, that Himes clearly indicates that this internalization is not due to any extreme emotional weakness or psychological unsteadiness on the part of minority groups, but rather can be tied directly to the destructive pragmatic realities of a white power structure that severely limits the actual economic success of alternative or cooperative modes of power.
11 “Little Tokyo‖ was a section of L.A. officially known as Bronzeville. It housed approximately 50,000 Japanese-American middle-class to low-income individuals before WWII, giving it the nickname ―Little Tokyo.‖ Following the internment of Japanese Americans in 1944, the area of Bronzeville was used as a housing district for the rapidly-growing African-American working-class population in L.A. (Waldinger 305). 65
After emphasizing this scene of minority conflict within the novel, I analyze a second scene that indicates Himes‘ proposal for an alternative solution to the oppressive system of institutionalized racism. In this second scene, in which Himes‘ main character
Bob Jones reflects upon having observed a scene in which a family of Japanese-
Americans is forcefully evicted from their home as a result of internment, ―Himes critiques the tendency of the black community to blame the poor migrants…rather than accusing the actual perpetrators‖ (Itagaki 73). That is, Himes critically explores and questions the process whereby African-American individuals undergoing the annihilating economic pressures of the system of whiteness tend to conflict with one another and perpetuate the oppressive white system of economic power, rather than identifying and overturning the destructive system itself. I, ultimately, conclude my study then by analyzing Himes‘ alternative solution to destructive minority competition for white economic power—human unity and cooperation against the white hierarchal system or perpetrator itself.
CULTURAL AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK – AFRICAN-AMERICAN
INTERNALIZATION OF WHITENESS AND ITS REPRESENTATION IN POST-
WWII LITERATURE
Beginning with this brief theoretical section, I specifically focus upon three key concepts. First, I focus upon the concept of whiteness as a performative category utilized to negotiate power. Second, I define the major financial, social, and psychological consequences of performing whiteness experienced by many African Americans in the 66 immediate post-war and Cold War years. Finally, I illustrate the literary representation of the tension that accompanies the African-American process of internalization.
First, the concept of whiteness as a performative category implicitly underlies If
He Hollers Let Him Go. This phenotypical categorization of race primarily functions to make racial assignments appear more tangible, stable, and reliable—they have something seemingly concrete to attach themselves to. However, as Eric Lott points out in his article, ―Racial Cross-Dressing and the Construction of American Whiteness,‖ racial categories are in actuality much more fluid and performative in nature than basic phenotypical assignments. That is, an individual is categorized as white based on his or her performance of specific cultural traits. Some key traits included moderation, proper speech, and the Christian religion (Lott 1). In the same vein, an individual is categorized as black or other based on the performance of traits that are counter to these traits of whiteness. Traits of otherness or non-whiteness included any performance of wildness, an alien tongue, a different religion or mode of practicing Christianity. Therefore, even though the law in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s, classified any individual as black who had 1/16th African ancestry, or at least had a great-grandparent who was of
African descent, performative characteristics often served as a more readily observable racial marker (Kuenz 172). Consequently, an individual was classified as black according to their performance of blackness or otherness—in addition to physical characteristics and legal bloodline. As Lott points out, in his essay, this performativity of blackness was a highly conflicted one. On the one hand, it was an act of rebellion against those in power or those who perfectly performed whiteness. At the same time, due to its very 67 rebelliousness, it was an act that represented exclusion and isolation from the hierarchal system of power that designated rewards and benefits according to one‘s performance of whiteness. Therefore, for those who performed blackness, both African-American individuals and white individuals who engaged in blackface, the performance was both one of fear over losing power and one of desire to break rules and escape the staunch boundaries of whitenes (Lott 3). Continually vacillating between fear and desire, then, the
African American living in the post-war and Cold War period faced a continual struggle to achieve a sense of social belonging and power while at the same time trying to retain a margin of independence as a social actor. These African-American individuals were, subsequently, pulled between the desire to maintain the liberties and relative freedom of behavior contingent upon blackness without losing the tangible economic and labor rewards of whiteness.
Ultimately, the performative categorization of whiteness functioned as a legally- sanctioned (institutionalized) means of exploiting and oppressing many members of the
African-American community within the U.S. As Martin Carnoy indicates in his book,
Faded Dreams: The Politics and Economics of Race in America, the performance of whiteness is tied to a very real process of denationalization, whereby individuals are either empowered or disempowered by the federal government based upon their mode of performativity—―the government legally defined a part of the U.S. population as different from the majority…and [consequently] put it outside the national community and outside the norms of equal protection (2). As a result then, through the institution of the law and federally mandated programs the government of the U.S. redistributed 68 resources, both economic access and protection and an internal sense of social belonging or national identity, based upon the performance of whiteness.
Under this institutionalized system of whiteness, a system undergirded and supported by the law, African Americans during the immediate post-war and Cold War period experienced financial repercussions. First were the strict labor and housing restrictions that were placed upon African-American individuals during this period.12
With these heavy restrictions, African-Americans were primarily relegated to manual, low-paying labor positions and overcrowded, under-funded housing locations (Avila 34-
55). As a result of both of these factors, African-Americans in the post-war decade also endured inadequate education opportunities and an inability to save capital and invest for the future of themselves and their children (Carnoy 176). This tangible restriction, ultimately, left many African Americans trapped for ―even if they [African Americans] never accepted the script that white society had written for them, they were not able to develop economic alternatives that would allow them to get the capital and education needed to write a different script‖ (Carnoy 178). It is this very economic system, under which the African-American individuals in post-WWII America were disempowered economically and cruelly left without a pragmatic means of countering this condition that
Himes critiques within his novel.
12 According to Eric Avila in his work, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight – Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles, prevalent housing restrictions included the denial of Federal Housing Authority (FHA) loans to those in concentrated urban areas (African-American workers in L.A.), the designation of minority housing centers as urban ―blights‖ to be ignored or rejected, and the focus on corporatization of minority housing areas rather than attempts to actually fix and improve public housing (34-55). Coupled with these housing restrictions, many African American individuals in post-WWII L.A. also had to deal with labor restrictions that included a lack of access to education for higher-paying positions, a denial of basic labor benefits such as equal pay and humane work hours and conditions, and an inability to accumulate savings for posterity. 69
The denial of resources to African Americans resulted in not only a struggle to economically survive following the war, but also in a deeper ―ethico-political‖ struggle, similar to that endured by Asian Americans in the same decade (Chuh 80). That is, with the lawful denial of material goods and rights, many African Americans came to doubt the means by which they could enact social justice and change (produce a ―different script‖) within their own lives and the lives of their communities. For these African-
American individuals, the institutions of law were imbued with doubt. This loss of belief in the American judicial system manifested itself, most powerfully, in the literature of the time, including in many of Himes‘ writings—both in his short stories and If He Hollers
Let Him Go. For example, Himes represents the African-American ethico-political struggle in a 1944 short story entitled ―All God‘s Chillun Got Pride.‖ In this story, Himes writes that,
Having been educated in America, he [the African-American protagonist]
had learned of course that living and breathing unaccompanied by certain
unalienable rights, such as liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, was of no
small consequence; but he had learned also that this ideology did not apply
to him. He never really sat down and thought about it for any length of
time, because he knew that if he ever did living in America would be
impossible. (24)
As implied through this passage, the internal struggle to unite conceptions of self with a larger faith in the surrounding social structure was a fierce one as many African-
American individuals had to fight hard to believe that who they were and what they did 70 individually to produce positive social change would actually manifest itself in the national fabric.
Hand-in-hand with the external economic and social exploitations and the internal ethico-political struggle that they endured, many African Americans in the post-WWII period also experienced a process of internalization characterized by a tension between the desire to create an alternative system of distributing power and the material draw of the system of whiteness itself. Within the minority literature of the period, this tension of internalization is a focal point. Using Himes‘ If He Hollers Let Him Go, as a case study,
George Lipsitz in his work, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s, illustrates the primary ways in which African-American literature represents internalization in the 1940s and 1950s. Lipsitz indicates that Himes‘ work represents the tensions of African-American internalization through its juxtaposition of counter memory and the dominant white version of history. According to Lipsitz, ―counter-memory‖ is an alternative way of looking at history through the personal perspectives of minority or marginalized individuals (213). This definition of counter-memory is further articulated in Walter Benjamin‘s term ―historical materialism.‖ Benjamin defines ―historical materialism‖ as a version of history that ―takes into account omitted, unfulfilled promises‖ (the experiences of the disempowered or marginalized) (Benjamin 48).
Furthermore, as Lisa Yoneyama expresses, in her work, Only What We Could Carry, both Benjamin and Lipsitz‘s historical concepts, ultimately, ―compel us to imagine possible alternative courses of history‖ (Yoneyama 30). That is, by looking at history through the lens of the disempowered or marginalized, one is better able to see the social 71 structures that bring about the marginalization of particular groups and, in turn, to imagine alternatives to these oppressive structures. Therefore, both historical materialism and counter-memory offer an alternative mode of looking at history and one‘s place in the world. An alternative that supports a more critical view of existing systems of power, and in turn, supports new, more egalitarian solutions to combating systemic injustices.
Alongside this alternative historical perspective, however, Himes‘ novel also clearly illustrates the strong pull of the system of white power itself. That is, while
Himes‘ main character, Bob Jones, rejects the way in which a dominant perspective of history, one that only favors and gives voice to those individuals categorized as white, excludes and disempowers him, he also acknowledges its inescapable power. The novel particularly illustrates this very real power of whiteness through its definition of masculinity. Throughout his entire novel, Himes‘ main characters are severely restricted and often oppressed by staunch post-war white constructions of gender presenting men as strong, stable, masculine, protectors of history and economic resources. Due to their restriction from access to economic and social resources that would allow them to be fully masculine according to white standards, the African American male characters within Himes‘ novel are never able to be fully masculine according to white standards.
For example, Bob Jones in If He Hollers Let Him Go continually struggles with feelings of impotence due to his degradation by white men and especially white women in the workplace. This inability to achieve white masculinity leaves Himes‘ African-American characters, including Bob, with feelings of powerlessness that counteract their alternative cooperative approaches to economic power distribution. This juxtaposition of the 72 ideological hope offered by a creative, new historical perspective and the very real power of whiteness gender constructions finally points back to the inherent tension of minority internalization.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND – AFRICAN-AMERICAN ISSUES OF AGENCY
IN PRE- AND POST- WWII LOS ANGELES
In order to appropriately contextualize Himes‘ literary representations, a brief historical overview of African-American agency in pre-and post-war Los Angeles is also essential. In this section, I define the primary characteristics of African-American agency, the means of exerting power or influence, as it appears in the areas of economics and politics in pre- and post-war Los Angeles.
Before the war, economic and social conditions for African Americans in Los
Angeles were primarily defined by heavy restrictions. Economically, African Americans were confined to lower-paying, non-skilled labor. In their work, Seeking El Dorado:
African Americans in California, Lawrence De Graaf, Kein Mulroy, and Qunitard Taylor indicate that the job restrictions placed on African-American workers in Los Angeles during the early 1940s—and other minority workers, as well—were the result of two major factors. The first factor was the white fear concerning labor shortages that lingered following the Depression years in California. This white fear was chiefly the product of concern that if minorities took all the higher-paying jobs with benefits there would not be enough left for white workers. Secondly, there was the desire of those who classified themselves as white to establish their place at the top of a hierarchy of power in the urban 73 center of Southern California—a desire that characterized those who classified themselves as white ever since the California shift from Mexican rule in the mid- nineteenth century (27). Due to these two factors, white Los Angeles labor leaders were motivated to establish hiring guidelines that restricted African Americans from access to higher paying, skilled labor, particularly those jobs that required training and provided greater monetary and social benefits.13
Due to these labor restrictions, African Americans were relegated to an economic position that John Butler, in his work Entrepreneurship and Self-Help Among Black
Americans, defines as a ―truncated African-American middleman‖ (245). Butler ties the
African-American economic position to that of the Asian American using the term
―middleman,‖ and yet he also differentiates it. According to Butler, African-American economic agency in pre-war Los Angeles resembled that of Asian Americans in Seattle since it was characterized by a strong element of community and self-help. In the 1930s and early 1940s many African Americans developed community assistance projects in
Los Angeles such as those encouraged by Father Divine and Daddy Grace, that provided financial assistance and spiritual encouragement to struggling black members of the city
(De Graaf, Mulroy, and Taylor 25)14. Furthermore, due to housing restrictions that precluded blacks from many urban neighborhoods, many black individuals also resided in independent ethnic enclaves. For example, the city of Watts was an independent annexed
13 Many industrial plants made ―hiring Negroes‖ a breach of ―company policy‖ (De Graaf, Mulroy, and Taylor 28). Furthermore, many shipyard unions relegated blacks to basic ―auxiliary unions‖ where African Americans were ―the last to be hired and only for low-skill jobs‖ (De Graaf, Mulroy, and Taylor 28). 14 According to August Meier in his article, ―Negro Protests and Organizations,‖ both Father Divine and Daddy Grace were leaders of ―pentecostal and chiliastic sects‖ in L.A. during the 1940s (1). Both pastors led active community involvement and assistance programs within their congregations. 74 section of Los Angeles in the early 1940s where many African Americans resided.
Through this factor of ethnic community assistance, Butler characterizes the economic position of African Americans in pre-war Los Angeles as ―middlemen‖—between the lowest working classes and the white middle and upper classes.
However, the financial agency of black Los Angelians was not able to flourish as readily as the Asian Americans in Seattle due to the heavier social and employment restrictions placed upon them. That is, unlike the Asian Americans of Seattle, whose independent financial success was due, in large part, to their freedom to navigate between their own ethnic identity and white economic rules, and subsequently, own and operate their own businesses as Asian Americans, the majority of African Americans were denied both economic success and ethnic identity based on whiteness. Due to segregation and institutionalized racism, African Americans were not permitted to be both black and successful entrepreneurs. Segregation denied African Americans ready access to white consumers, and, therefore, most African-Americans in the business world could not effectively occupy an economic mediator role. Furthermore, through institutionalized racism, which heavily targeted African Americans in the United States,15 African-
American business owners were denied access, not only to white consumers, but also to proper housing, education, and job training that would enable the accumulation of capital necessary for entrepreneurship and the sponsorship of financially independent ethnic enclaves. Thus, only a small percentage of African Americans living in pre-war Los
15 For example, in 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson legally sanctioned segregation by declaring whites and blacks ―separate but equal.‖ This court ruling remained firmly institutionalized until 1954 with the Brown v. Board of Education ruling. 75
Angeles were able to achieve independent economic prosperity and attain higher job training and success in privately owned business or other labor positions. Thus, unlike the actual success of the Asian-American middleman position, African-American entrepreneurial and business success based on a strong community base remained largely a myth rather than a prevailing reality (249).
Nonetheless, although the African-American community base in pre-war Los
Angeles could not facilitate powerful economic agency, it did help build a strong foundation for political activity. Reacting to the unfair hiring and housing practices that they experienced themselves, many members of the African-American communities in
Los Angeles formed community-based action groups in the pre-war period.16Although these social organizations were often split along class lines—between the black working class laborers and the middle to upper class black elite—, they all built upon the idea of communal action for social change. This construct of African-American political agency was further extended in the pre-war years to include other disempowered minority groups. Following the Zoot Suit riots of 194317, African-American and Mexican-
American community leaders joined forces to create the Los Angeles Commission on
Human Regulations (LACCHR), in order to take action against interracial labor
16 Examples of these groups included the African-American Urban League, the Congress of Industrial Organization (working classes), the Los Angeles chapter of the NAACP, and the Negro Victory Committee (founded by members of the black elite) (De Graaf, Mulroy, & Taylor 30). 17 In 1943, an altercation took place in the Port of Los Angeles between several U.S. navy members and Mexican-American laborers – who during their off hours wore ―zoot suits.‖ In response to this conflict – which, ultimately stemmed from increasing labor tensions and war-time anxieties – a series of riots took place throughout the city as the police of L.A. began attacking and arresting anyone wearing a zoot suit. 76 injustices.18 Through this interracial and communal approach to labor rights, African
Americans were able to achieve tangible economic rewards. By 1943, more than 30,000
African Americans had been hired in Southern California war defense plants, and they constituted 12% of Los Angeles‘ enrollees in job training programs (DeGraaf, Mulroy, and Taylor 28). Therefore, in the pre-war years in Los Angeles both African-American and interracial community-based action groups served as a powerful means of political agency.
During WWII and immediately following it (the post-war period), African-
American economic and political agency within the city can be chiefly defined as paradoxical. On the one hand, African Americans made tremendous financial and political gains while America was in the war, and yet, entering into the post-war years many of these gains were significantly reversed. African-American economic agency in the post-war years was primarily shaped by two key factors: migration and decentralization. Due to the boom in industrial jobs during the war and the subsequent availability of manual and skilled work in war defense plants, thousands of African
Americans from the Southern United States migrated to the urban centers of the West
Coast.19 During the war, jobs were so prevalent that many of these migrants received ready employment, many in positions that came with training, and were moderately skilled and paid. However, with the end of the war, many war production plants in the
Los Angeles area either shut down or were converted back into industrial parts
18 As expressed in a 1943 issue of the Los Angeles Eagle, the LACCHR viewed Mexican-American and African-American discrimination as ―indistinguishable.‖ 19 By 1943, Los Angeles was receiving 10,000 African American migrants a month (De Graaf, Mulroy, & Taylor 27). 77 manufacturers or shipping plants that required very little trained labor or personal labor, in general, due to technological advancements in production made during the war.
Therefore, on the heels of the economic advancements in labor made during the war,
African Americans in post-war Los Angeles found themselves either out of jobs or stuck in employment that offered little in terms of benefits and advancement.
Along with the economic fluctuations that met the incoming tide of African-
American migrants, the trend of decentralization also reversed the positive strides in home ownership that blacks had been making during the war. During the war, African
American migrants took part in the ―bungalow boom‖ that characterized much of the country—i.e. they bought or rented cheap housing that had been set up for war workers in
Los Angeles (De Graaf, Mulroy, and Taylor 26). Thus, the war facilitated a temporary trend of independent home ownership. Many of the migrants who came to Los Angeles concentrated in the annexed city of Watts, establishing a growing community of African-
American homeowners.
Unfortunately, these positive housing gains were overturned by the trend of decentralization that characterized the post-war period in Los Angeles. According to Eric
Avila, in his work, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight—Fear and Fantasy in
Suburban Los Angeles, decentralization was a federal policy that encouraged white industrial and population movement to the suburbs in post-war Los Angeles (Avila 34).
This policy—also termed ―white flight‖—was instituted in an attempt to take back the city from increasing racial diversification and power, and to reestablish a condition of
―white homogeneity and safety‖ (Avila 30). Decentralization policies encouraged the 78 movement of industrial control, independent business and management to the suburbs, and the development of corporatization or big business development within the urban core (55). This policy, in particular, left residents of the downtown or urban centers of the city without access to private business ownership or management positions within the big business sector. That is, they remained excluded others. Furthermore, decentralization also operated to ensure that those who remained disempowered residents of the urban core were primarily minorities. By precluding home ownership within urban neighborhoods and redlining20 all residential districts defined as ―African-American‖ or
―racially diverse,‖ the FHA and HOLC of Los Angeles forced African Americans into an urban living situation characterized by instability, over-concentration, and ―ghettoization‖
(Avila 31, 34). Watts, in particular, was transformed from a burgeoning, independent community to an over-crowded, poverty-line ghetto district. Urban centers like Watts were characterized as blights whereas, the all-white suburbs were a place characterized by peace and safety.
Along with the tumultuous shifts associated with economic agency in the post- war years, African Americans in Los Angeles also experienced a marked transition in their modes of political action. During the war, interracial alliances were still on the rise in Los Angeles, and they became one of the most significant forms of political agency for
African Americans living in the city. One of the most prominent examples of this type of
20 Redlining is a process whereby the FHA sets up residential lines around a particular area ensuring that property values within that area remain low and only those of a particular economic class and racial designation reside in these areas. Through practices like redlining, the federal government created poorer ―ghetto‖ areas that were defined by a concentration of minority individuals, and also legally sheltered ―an inclusive white identity on the fringes of the urban core‖ (Avila 41).
79 political action at work was the publication of the magazine Common Ground (O‘Brien and Parsons 40).21 Although the magazine did not encourage its writers to voice negative or critical opinions of American politics, it did not refuse to publish articles that critiqued
American policy toward Japanese American internment and educational and labor policies toward African Americans (O‘Brien and Parsons 47).
However, following the war, this interracial, cooperative approach to achieving political change was markedly repressed. With the increasing decline of job availability and the growing restrictions of decentralization, many African Americans turned to a political policy of African American civil rights protests. In a pragmatic attempt to gain better access to better jobs and basic housing rights, many African Americans engaged in fierce ―turf wars‖ with other ethnic minority groups occupying the urban center (Avila
31).22 In addition to civil rights labor and housing protests, African Americans in the post-war period also reflected the civil rights approach to political agency in their writings. Although many African- American writings briefly mentioned their empathy for the similar exploited conditions of other minority groups in Los Angeles—particularly
Japanese Americans and Mexican Americans—they primarily focused on the issue of
African-American rights. For example, Common Ground became a magazine that focused exclusively on the writings and concerns of African Americans or ―people of
21 This magazine, founded in 1941 in L.A., was funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York in hopes of promoting solidarity between all Americans during the war. Throughout the course of its publication, the magazine devoted itself to representing ―diversity,‖ and it published articles by several minority writers such as Langston Hughes and Mine Okubo (O‘Brien and Parsons 42). 22 In the same vein as these ―turf wars,‖ African Americans immediately took over the Japanese district of ―Little Tokyo‖ after it was evacuated during the war, seeking to establish a more stable housing community for themselves – i.e. desperately escape from under the social label of urban ―blight‖ (Avila 30).
80 color,‖ rather than interracial ―diversity‖ (O‘Brien and Parsons 50). In the writings of authors such as Chester Himes, Langston Hughes, and Ralph Ellison this focus on
African-American rights and issues also became a central concern. Thus, political agency for African Americans in post-war L.A. became an issue of black vs. white rather than a systemic, minority struggle. Paradoxically then, as O‘Brien and Parsons express in their work, The Home Front War: World War II and American Society, WWII and the following decade both initially promoted interracial unity and then ―set in motion forces that intensified fragmentation‖ (55).
HIMES’ BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
Living within this tumultuous time of shifting economic and political agency,
Chester Himes‘ own personal background also shaped the creation of his novel. Born
July 29, 1909 in Jefferson City, Missouri, Himes was raised in a home that can be best defined as a racial battleground. On one side was his father Joseph, who taught mechanical skills such as blacksmithing and metal work at several African-American trade schools in the Midwest and South and who Himes‘ described as having ―adopted the slave mentality…[which] accepts the premise that white people know best‖ (7). In sharp contrast to this accommodating racial position, Himes‘ mother was the embodiment of ―indignation and impatience‖ (Sallis 8). Ultimately, the central racial conflict within the Himes‘ home, became Chester‘s, as well, and powerfully shaped his life and his writings. It was this ―fundamental conflict within himself—of white versus black values, 81 but just as importantly of patrician versus egalitarian—[that] became perhaps the central theme of Himes‘ life‖ (Sallis 10).
In addition to his childhood in a racially tumultuous household, Himes also experienced certain events in his adulthood that influenced his writings. Like his childhood, Himes‘ adult life was characterized by a contradictory, as Himes‘ terms it a
―schizophrenic‖ tendency, as he fluctuated between multiple racial ideas and social identities. For example, while attending Ohio State University from 1925-1927, Himes fluidly moved between roles as an ―introverted brooder‖ and a socially adept and charming young man (Sallis 50). Ultimately, although he enjoyed writing and the intellectual rigors of university life, Himes‘ rebelled against its social constraints and was expelled due to his increasing involvement in shady activities such as robbery and fraud.
As James Sallis indicates, in his work, Chester Himes: A Life, this time in Himes‘ life represents his propensity to wear multiple African-American identities at once—the mask of African-American literary man and scholar and, simultaneously, the mask of a ―the black hardened criminal‖ (Sallis 36). In 1928, Himes was sentenced to 20-25 years in prison for his involvement in an armed robbery. Following his release, Himes worked for various state writing projects and then sought steadier work in the industrial promised land of Los Angeles in 1942. While living in Los Angeles, Himes held twenty-three different jobs in three years, and, as a product of his own labor frustrations and his own continued inner racial conflicts, he wrote and published his first novel, If He Hollers Let
Him Go in 1945. Himes‘ novel embodied his own paradoxical inner struggles as it 82 represented clashes between not only whites and blacks but also blacks of different classes, as well as various different minority groups.
WARNING AGAINST AND ALTERNATIVE TO THE MINORITY
INTERNALIZATION OF A WHITE SYSTEM OF RACISM IN HIMES’ IF HE
HOLLERS LET HIM GO
Having laid the necessary theoretical, historical, and biographical foundations, I will now analyze just how Himes‘ novel explores and questions the tense process of the minority internalization of a system of economic power based upon the performance of whiteness. In the following passage, Himes begins his exploration as he illustrates a scene of minority conflict between African-American economic and social interests and those of the Japanese Americans of central Los Angeles. This scene is one in which the main female character, Alice, and some of her friends are discussing housing conditions within a section of Los Angeles called Little Tokyo, a section of the city that had been stripped from its Japanese-American inhabitants due to internment.
‗What they [new African-American migrants to L.A.] need down there
more than anything else is public housing,‘ Polly said bluntly, ‗Have you
seen some of those places that those people live in? Twelve people in a
single room and not even any running water…That place is a rat hole.
Without adequate housing you can‘t even start a programme of
integration…‘ 83
‗What do you think, Mr. Jones...what is your opinion as to the problem
arising from the conditions of Little Tokyo?‘
‗All kidding aside,‘ I said ‗ if I knew any solution for the race
problem I‘d use it for myself first of all.‘ (83)
Initially, this passage illustrates a minority conflict that stems from a desire for a very basic economic resource, in this case, public housing benefits. Unfortunately, as these foundational housing rights are contingent upon a performance of whiteness, an enactment of the competitive practices of exploitation and disempowment practiced by those classified as white, the competitive conflict in this passage takes the very form of those modes of disempowerment utilized by the white system of power against those minorities classified as nonwhite. For example, Little Tokyo exists for the African-
American social workers in this passage as if it never had any past owners or occupants.
Thus, the name Little Tokyo simply refers to a location of available housing; it has been entirely disconnected from its role as a home for those who navigated between dual identities as Japanese still remembering ―Tokyo‖ and Americans creating an entirely new
Japanese subculture within the United States. The only reference that is made to the former Japanese-American residents is through the vague pronoun ―they,‖ which could refer to any group of people and does not appear in this passage with a specific noun antecedent. This invisible status mirrors what Amy Kaplan refers to as ―historical amnesia,‖ a method in which the white system of power in the U.S. has justified the taking of land and resources from a colonized people by writing a version of history that purposefully forgets these people and glosses over their rights and struggles (Kaplan 10). 84
Along with this purposeful forgetting, the white power structure also justifies the taking of resources from those classified as nonwhite by relegating these individuals to a non-human role without any economic claims or rights. In the passage above, the African
Americans employ this means of disempowerment by referring to the conditions of Little
Tokyo as those of a ―rat hole.‖ Utilizing this particular term, the African Americans imply that the former Japanese residents of the enclave were solely to blame for making the conditions within it so bad. That is, the Japanese Americans were on the level with vermin in their ability to construct a home for themselves. Although this was not in actuality the case, as the Japanese-American residents were often denied even basic access to the necessary economic funding and housing benefits necessary to escape Los
Angeles ghettoization, Himes constructs this scene to illustrate how a desire for economic rewards under a system of whiteness often motivates minority conflict and competition while simultaneously crushing alternatives of cooperation and egalitarianism.
Notwithstanding their engagement in economic conflict with the former Japanese-
American residents of Little Tokyo, the African Americans in this first scene are not completely tension-free. This tension is evident even in the use of the vague pronouns
―they‖ and ―them.‖ Although the use of these particular pronouns points initially to the invisible status assigned to the Japanese Americans, they also point to the underlying union between minority groups. ―They‖ and ―them‖ can simultaneously refer to the
Japanese American former residents and the current new African-American migrants, thus intermingling both groups together indiscernibly. This vague reference strategy enables Himes to point to the disjuncture that takes place in this passage between external 85 interracial conflict and the recognition of internal interracial unity that underlies this conflict. As this passage hints at, the Japanese Americans who once occupied Little
Tokyo had to face the same struggle for adequate housing conditions and rights through white public policy that the African Americans who occupy the neighborhood now face.
Consequently, the former Japanese-American residents also lacked ―adequate housing‖ and had to live in conditions without ―running water‖ or livable space.
Experiencing the tension contingent upon relating to the oppressed experience of a fellow minority group while also desiring something better than a bare economic state,
Chester Himes‘ character Bob Jones articulates the following: ―All kidding aside,‖ I said
―if I knew any solution for the race problem I‘d use it for myself first of all‖ (83).
Through these words, Himes initially indicates that Jones deeply desires a ―solution‖ to the larger ―race problem.‖ That is, Jones desires to rectify the inequalities and exploitation experienced by all those classified as non-white, and, for that reason, he refers to the ―race‖ problem not just the African-American problem. Lynn Itagaki writes in her essay ―Transgressing Race and Community in Chester Himes‘ If He Hollers Let
Him Go,” that this scene highlights Himes‘ underlying argument that the economic inequality experienced by African Americans was not something that could be overcome by individual civil rights efforts. Instead, overcoming economic exploitation would involve uniting with both those disempowered by the system of whiteness and those complicit in it, and fighting the actual system of institutionalized racism itself (73). And yet, Jones is torn between this desire to find a real solution and the practical economic realities inscribed by the white system of power. Due to the severe restriction from even 86 the most basic economic rights and privileges, a non-white individual is placed within a debilitating position, in which the only way in which it appears to get out and get ahead is by thinking of him or herself first. Therefore, the process of internalizing whiteness is not represented as a simple, complicit act, but rather it is inscribed with tension and turmoil due to the destructive and dehumanizing power of a white economic hierarchy.
This inherent paradox built into the process of minority internalization is further explored within the second scene of interracial interaction between Japanese-Americans and African-Americans in the novel. Having personally observed a young Japanese-
American boy being evicted from his home in Little Tokyo due to internment, Bob Jones makes the following reflections:
I‘d seen them send the Japanese away…Little Riki Oyana singing ‗God
Bless America‘ and going to Santa Anita with his parents next day. It was
taking a man up by the roots and locking him up without a chance.
Without a charge. Without even giving him a chance to say one word. It
was thinking about if they ever did that to me, Robert Jones, Mrs. Jones‘s
dark son, that started me to getting scared. (3)
This scene, unlike the earlier housing conflict passage, does not initially seem to focus upon interracial conflict, rather it appears primarily to highlight an alternative of human solidarity and community. That is, rather than justifying the disempowerment of the evacuated Japanese Americans in order to further the economic interests of the African-
American community of Los Angeles, Bob Jones empathizes and personally connects with their exploitation—―thinking that if they [the white power structure] ever did that to 87 me…that started me to getting scared.‖ Through this passage, Himes indicates a deeper interracial solidarity that is based upon a shared experience of exploitation and complete disempowerment under a white system of economic power. Furthermore, by presenting this cooperative, interracial solidarity that is based upon a shared human desire to combat a debilitating system of economic injustice, Himes presents an implicit critique of ―the tendency of the black community to blame the poor migrants…rather than accusing the actual perpetrators‖ (Itagaki 73). Thus, this passage initially presents an alternative to the oppressive methodologies of the white system of power—an alternative that favors humane compassion and a fear of injustice that has the potential to motivate action for change.
Digging a bit deeper, however, reveals that underneath this initial presentation of a hopeful communal alternative to the system of white power, lies a complex web of contradictions and tensions—those that continually accompany minority internalization.
First and foremost, there is the tension between the ethico-political struggle that Bob
Jones undergoes and the heavy, very real consequences of a system of law that is dominated by racism. In the passage above, Jones specifically references the law when he laments a system that would take a man up by the roots and lock him up without a
―charge‖ or a ―chance.‖ This initial lament is Himes‘ literary representation of the
African-American ethico-political struggle, as he makes it clear that the current status of
American law is not one that is conducive to allowing African Americans to create cooperative alternatives, establish community roots, and pursue opportunities or
―chances‖ for success. Thus, Himes does not promote the law as the means through 88 which his African-American characters can enact social change. In fact, scenes of violence and dreams of intentional lawbreaking such as murder, rape, and robbery recur frequently in the novel (Himes 19,70,126,149). Thus, rather than embracing the law as the means for social change Himes actively questions, challenges, and fights against it.
At the same time, though, this ethico-political circumvention of the law as the best means for achieving social change and justice is juxtaposed with a fear of the tangible consequences of breaking the laws of a system of institutionalized racism in the
U.S.. Bob Jones remarks that he feels afraid of a system of justice that can charge and lock up an individual simply based upon his or her racial classification: it ―started me to getting scared.‖ At a later point, toward the very end of the novel, Himes articulates this fear more directly as Jones goes before a court on false charges of raping a white woman.
As he faces the court, Jones reflects that ―now I was scared…Not of the violence. Not of the mob. Not of physical hurt. But of America, of American justice…knowing that I was innocent and that I didn‘t have a chance‖ (187). In this passage, Himes indicates that the greatest obstacle for achieving change for minority individuals is not the threat of physical violence, but rather the destructive capacities and disempowerments enforced by the American legal system. Thus, although circumventing the law is seen as the most effective way of achieving real social justice and change for disempowered minority groups, both African Americans and Japanese Americans, this circumvention is restricted by the real consequences contingent upon this very system.
In addition to emphasizing the tensions concurrent with seeking to establish an interracial alternative to the white system of justice, Himes also highlights the 89 contradictions inherent in the process of a minority internalization of a white or dominant version of history. Initially, in the second passage of conflict, Himes imbeds an emphasis upon counter-memory within the voice of his main protagonist, Bob Jones. By simply narrating the observation of Japanese-American evacuation through the voice of an
African American who is also excluded from the system of whiteness and enmeshed in a labor system that continually restricts access to a better labor position and benefits,
Himes demands that society and history acknowledge a marginalized version of history, its ―whole bitter memory…the indignity of it, the gutting of… pride‖ (Himes 76). By highlighting this alternative or counter-memory version of history, Himes draws the reader to see history in a different light that is not dominated by the white winners, but instead focuses upon human indignities and injustices towards those classified as non- white in the U.S.. In turn, he seeks to encourage readers more fully to empathize with and change these exploitive conditions.
Himes does not just stop here though, with his alternative counter-memory.
Instead, he illustrates that this alternative comes linked with its powerful, paradoxical opposite: the view of history that is dominated by and written by those who occupy the white system of power. Particularly, Himes illustrates the counter-memory version of history (embodied in the voice of Bob Jones) in fierce conflict with a dominant version of history that favors a particular construction of white masculinity in the post-WWII period. As Lipsitz argues ―Himes‘ assumptions about the need for men to protect and possess women undermined any possibility of forming an effective oppositional critique of the ways in which racism becomes sexualized, how it becomes rendered a product of 90
‗nature‘ rather than of history‖ (38). Ultimately, Himes‘ view of masculinity is derived from a powerful pre- and post-war concern of those who defined themselves as white.
This concern was founded upon a desire to protect the country‘s economic resources against foreign enemies and the dominant white history from increasing minority voices within the urban centers of the U.S. Within the second passage of minority interaction,
Himes imbeds this view of masculinity as Bob Jones refers only to his fear of a ―man‖ being torn up by the roots due to a system of white legislative power – a word choice that connects white exploitation with a concurrent fear of demasculization. Furthermore,
Jones specifically refers to himself as ―Mrs. Jones‘ dark son‖ when he describes the onset of his fear over degradation under the white justice system (Himes 3). This clear reference back to his mother reveals a simultaneous fear over being considered a
―mama‘s boy‖ that coincides with Jones‘ fear of being stripped of all his material resources. Thus, due to the fact that Himes fails to address that an extrication from the racial disempowment of a white economic system also requires an extrication from white definitions of gender, and in particular, masculinity, he never fully frees his characters from an internalized version of white history. Consequently, the second scene of conflict in If He Hollers ends not with a lived out system of interracial alternatives, but a continual tension between these alternatives (or at least, the hope contained within them) and an internalized belief that the most practical way to achieve even a modicum of financial security is only possible through the destructive practices of a system of white power.
91
CONCLUSION
With the epigraph contained at the beginning of this chapter, Himes concisely drives home his warning concerning a system of power that denies so many minorities access to basic economic resources based on the performance of whiteness, as well as the danger of internalizing this system. Furthermore, Himes also communicates a vision for hope in which an alternative of cooperation and unity is substituted for the dangerous white system of exploitation and competition that currently exists. In the following passage, Bob Jones reflects upon both the exploitive and annihilating effects of a white economic system, and, in turn, the alternative of human cooperation and unity that can overcome this system of power:
I had to know that Negroes weren‘t the lowest people on the face of God‘s
green earth. I had to talk it over with somebody, had to build myself back
up. The sons of bitches were grinding me to the nub, the white meatless
bone. (Himes 78)
Himes implies that the system of exploitation that leaves the African American feeling like one of the ―lowest people‖ on earth is one that is symbolically based upon whiteness.
This whiteness is not simply a phenotypical characteristic, though. It is also part of a larger system of power. The system of whiteness is one that excludes, exploits, and disempowers all those who are defined as nonwhite or as inadequate performers of the designated traits of whiteness, such as moderation and self-sufficiency. It is a system in which the performance of whiteness ensures that only a few, nameless white ―sons of 92 bitches‖ remain at the top of the economic hierarchy and all those characterized as nonwhite are relegated to the bottom, consumed, and spit out as ―white, meatless bone.‖
Having illustrated the destructive and dehumanizing power of the economic system of whiteness through the metaphor of human bone, Himes also makes a conclusive call to action for countering this dangerous economic system by using this self-same metaphor. Himes uses the image of bone to point to an alternative system of distributing economic resources. This alternative system grounds the distribution of resources upon the perspective that the inside of all human beings is made of the same essential material and is, therefore, equal—i.e. all human beings are composed of the same colorless ―meatless bone‖ on the inside. Thus, Himes concludes his novel by hopefully asserting that the dangerous system of whiteness which continually fuels a minority perspective and approach to action defined by a sensation of being ―the lowest creatures on God‘s green earth‖ can be overcome. The solution is simple enough: it simply requires turning the foundation of the economic system of whiteness inside out
(just like Himes turning the metaphor of human bone around upon itself). Turning the system of whiteness inside out, one then chooses action that is grounded upon the recognition that God has actually created all human beings purely and inherently equal.
93
Chapter 4
CONCLUSION
Conflict over cooperation and battle over brotherhood. What induced many minority individuals to choose the latter over the former of these two options when seeking even a modicum of financial security and success in post-WWII United States?
Was it a lower sense of self-esteem, or perhaps just the opposite, a heightened sense of competition and aggression? As both John Okada and Chester Himes point out in their novels, No-No Boy and If He Hollers Let Him Go, written and set in the immediate post-
WWII period of U.S. history, neither is the case. Instead, through literary representations of minority economic conflict, Himes and Okada point to a much larger and more devastating system of whiteness or institutionalized racism in the United States as the root of many interracial struggles between different minority groups for economic power.
It is this system of whiteness which assigns even the most basic economic rights such as housing and labor rights according to an individual‘s performance of specific white traits of moderation, independence, and traditional Christianity. Unable to perform these white traits adequately—and as most minority individuals are institutionally denied access to the economic resources that would make the performance of such traits as independence not even feasible—minority individuals are labeled as economic outsiders and subsequently exploited and disempowered. In this exploited and degraded economic state, many minority individuals must choose between the two options in italics above: whether to cooperate with other minority groups to gain even the most basic economic rights or to internalize the economic pressures of an oppressive white system and imitate 94 its model of competition and exploitation. Ultimately, as both Himes and Okada point out, minority individuals tend to replace alternatives of cooperation with a repetition of the competitive economic methods of a white system of power, not because of weakness or aggression, but simply because the white system is so extremely destructive. Thus,
Himes and Okada both offer a powerful warning against allowing the white system of economic power to continue one more day unabated and unquestioned. This warning serves as the foundation for the solution of egalitarian cooperation that both authors imbed in their works, and also, in turn, serves as the foundation for contemporary
American minority authors who are not merely questioning and warning against the larger economic system of whiteness, but are now interrogating the racialized term whiteness, itself.
Okada and Himes‘ warning against a destructive system of economic power built upon the performance or non-performance of particular traits associated with whiteness, is grounded within a very specific theoretical and historical context. Theoretically, the literary warning is illuminated by three key theoretical concepts. First, there is the concept that racism is an institutionalized system within the United States. That is, within the very operations of the law within America in the post-WWII period, there was a racial bias. As Himes points out in his novel, this racialized bias made American justice something more fearful than even physical violence or pain because it was the institutionalized racism within the law that most often left the minority or non-white individual with the following judicial resolution: ―knowing that I was innocent and that I didn‘t have a chance‖ (Himes 187). 95
Operating under this unjust umbrella of institutionalized racism in the U.S., there is the specific economic system of whiteness. This is the second underlying theoretical concept: that whiteness is a specific system of delegating power. The basic tenets of this concept are that whiteness in post-WWII U.S. is not just an external designation based on phenotype but also a symbolic category referring to a specific mode of behavior—a performance of specific white traits such as moderation, proper English, conservative,
Christianity, and independence. This performance is, in turn, attached to a tangible economic value. That is, those who adequately perform whiteness gain economic rewards and benefits and those who do not are classified as non-white and financially exploited and disempowered (Harris 104-115).
Underneath this system of whiteness in which a performance of specific white traits is attached to a pragmatic monetary value, the minority individual is often pulled asunder. This internal conflict, or a minority internalization of whiteness, is the third key underlying concept. Ultimately, the minority individual experiences an internal struggle as he or she must decide whether to oppose the exploitive system of whiteness with alternative economic practices of equality and cooperation or to replicate the exploitive but pragmatic practices of the white system itself. This struggle, as both Himes and
Okada point out, often ends in the minority individual replicating the competitive and oppressive tendencies of the white system. The minority individual does not come to this resolution because of weakness or moral corruption, rather it is because the annihilating system of whiteness often appears the only pragmatic means to gain even the most elemental economic rights necessary for basic survival in the U.S.. Therefore, the 96 internalization of the system of whiteness, which distributes economic resources based upon the categorization of white vs. non-white, serves as a point of tense internal struggle that tends to result in minority perpetuation of white competitive practices. More so, the process of internalizing white racist practices also serves as a key point of warning. As
Himes and Okada both go on to indicate, the tense struggle over internalization is only one symptom of the all-consuming lifelong struggle the minority individual will face as he or she continually remains at least marginally non-white or incomplete within a white system of power.
Both Himes and Okada‘s literary critique of the economic system of whiteness is grounded not only upon key theoretical concepts, but also upon a very specific historical and biographical context. For Okada, writing in the immediate post-WWII period in
Seattle meant writing in a time heavy with change. Following the war and the internment of Japanese Americans on the Pacific West Coast during the war, Japanese Americans in
Seattle struggled to establish a new sense of social identity and a new economic infrastructure (Bonacich and Morell, 90-110). This new social and economic re-creation had to take place amidst an overarching sense of doubt and despair incumbent upon the internment of hundreds of thousands of Japanese Americans, who had been forcibly removed from their homes and stripped of everything, with the full support of the
American justice system (Inada 8,9). Along with his Japanese-American counterparts on the Pacific West Coast, Okada struggled to come to terms with what it meant to be
Japanese American in the new post-WWII era, and he interrogated whether it was possible for Japanese Americans to access any of the rights contingent upon being 97
American at all—having just been blatantly denied these rights of private property, protection, and freedom of speech through internment. This historical context of social and internal turmoil plays itself out powerfully throughout Okada‘s novel, No-No Boy, as it explores, questions, and warns against a white economic infrastructure that not only exploits minority individuals financially but also destroys their very sense of human value and community.
Like Okada, Himes also wrote within and about the tumultuous times immediately following World War II. During this period, African Americans living in
Los Angeles also experienced extremely marked and rapid changes. Following the war, the burgeoning African-American migrant-worker community in Los Angeles shifted from a society marked by communal solidarity, interracial community labor organizations, and renewed hope in equality and victory sparked by the war, to an
African-American society torn apart by increasingly strict labor restrictions, forced ghettoization, and unfulfilled U.S. government promises (De Graaf, Mulroy, and Taylor
1-40). These rapid shifts resulted in a marked movement toward a more exclusive and restrictive African-American civil rights approach to economic rights—an approach that singled out labor and housing issues as specifically African-American issues rather than systemic problems due to the minority disempowerment of a white economic structure.
Affected by these historical shifts, as well as his own personal biography as a man constantly torn and conflicted, Himes constructed a novel, If He Hollers Let Him Go, that interrogates and warns against an economic system that tears down human bonds as it 98 builds exclusive financial strongholds for only those who can adequately perform whiteness.
Ultimately, within their novels, Okada and Himes both present a clear warning against, as well as a powerful solution to the occurrence of interracial conflict that stems from an internalization of a destructive white system of economic power. Initially, through scenes of minority conflict between Japanese Americans and African Americans, both authors illustrate that this conflict arises not from mutual animosity or selfishness, but rather from the destructive power of an economic system of whiteness. Through the institutionalization of a system that delegates even the most basic business and labor rights based on the performance of white traits, the minority groups in both Himes and
Okada‘s scenes of conflict are left to struggle deeply between their desire for basic financial survival and their desire for an economic system that is much more egalitarian, humane, and cooperative. Ultimately, both authors illustrate that it is due to the extreme annihilating power of the system of whiteness, a system that leaves no apparent practical means of economic survival accept through cutthroat racialized competition, that the minority groups in their initial scenes of economic conflict choose to reject collaborative economic solutions and compete with one another instead.
Building from these initial scenes of interracial economic conflict, both Himes and Okada deliver poignant warnings against and solutions to the destructive nature of the white economic hierarchical system. Both authors conclude their novels with pivotal scenes that imbed a clear warning against the destructive consequences of allowing the system of white economic exploitation of minority individuals to continue. In Okada‘s 99 concluding scene, minority perpetuation of a white economic system results in not only a repetition of economic exploitation and disempowerment, but more importantly a complete annihilation of human value and human life. In this concluding scene, economic conflict between minority groups climaxes in a fiery dismemberment and death. The same destruction of human value and life is emphasized in a pivotal scene in Himes‘ novel, as well, as the root of both minority financial disempowerment and disembodiment
(tearing meat from bone) is highlighted as the systemic exploitation of a white economic hierarchy. Ultimately, then both authors conclude their novels with a powerful warning against the extremely destructive internalization of whiteness and its further perpetuation.
However, rather than just leaving the reader with this lingering critique of the degrading effects of the white economic system, both Okada and Himes, end their novels by presenting a solution. Ultimately, both authors present nearly identical resolutions to the destructive continuation of a white system of financial distribution of resources: to simply act upon its opposite. That is, both authors urge their readers, racial designations notwithstanding, to reject white competitive practices of attaining financial rights and rewards, and instead to value the inherent equality of each human being. By valuing the inherent equality of one another and acting upon that valuation, each author indicates that a new economic structure of cooperation and community can be built up instead: a system that reaffirms human life while redistributing economic resources cooperatively and upon equal horizontal rather than hierarchal lines.
Having set this pattern of questioning, critiquing, and, ultimately, rejecting the dominant system of economic power within the United States in the post-WWII era, 100
Himes and Okada set up a framework, not just for their readers to build and act from, but also for future American authors—particularly, those writing from a minority experience.
For example, writers like Himes and Okada, established the early groundwork for contemporary authors to interrogate not only how the system of whiteness operates within the United States today, but more significantly to dissect the very terms that it uses to operate. Ultimately, within their works, these present-day authors point out the destructive consequences of allowing a system that distributes economic and social resources based upon a performance of whiteness to continue. However, these authors also move beyond this point. They leap from the starting mark set out by Himes and
Okada to illustrate the arbitrary and ultimately, meaningless, nature of the very terms that allow the white system of power to exist at all—terms like ―white,‖ ―other,‖ and ―race.‖
Thus, from the early works of John Okada and Chester Himes to the works of contemporary authors, literary representations of the economic system of whiteness have sought to bring readers closer and closer to an actual reality that one day affirms cooperation over conflict and brotherhood over battle.
101
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