The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles. By Scott Kurashige http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080630/wiener/print

City of Fear

By Jon Wiener

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080630

This article appeared in the June 30, 2008 edition of The Nation.

June 11, 2008

Associated Press
Quiet streets: Little Tokyo in July 1942, after the US government interned thousands of citizens.

From 1920 to 1960, Los Angeles was the whitest and most Protestant city in the United States, and the American city with the smallest proportion of immigrants–just 8 percent in 1960. By the end of the twentieth century, it was a multiracial place: 3.7 million residents, with 30 percent white, 10 percent black, 10 percent Asian and almost half Latino. During “the white years” in LA history, you might think Asian immigrant groups and black migrants from the South lived in separate worlds. The truth is more complicated: sometimes they were pitted against each other, sometimes they fought–and sometimes they joined forces in left-wing campaigns for jobs, housing and political power. Those competitions and alliances are the subject of Scott Kurashige’s fascinating and important new book, The Shifting Grounds of Race. Kurashige’s originality lies mostly in his research on Japanese-Americans and in his use of black history as an illuminating counterpoint to their struggles.

A professor of history at the University of Michigan, Kurashige begins his story in the 1920s, when Japanese immigrants were legally defined as “aliens ineligible for citizenship,” although, alone among Asian immigrant groups, Japanese men were permitted to bring wives–and thus raise a generation of American-born children, the Nisei, or “second generation.” Because whites wanted to keep racial minorities out of their neighborhoods, the small number of Japanese in LA sometimes lived in the same neighborhoods as blacks. For those with some money, the West Jefferson neighborhood, near USC, was the place to be. Chester Himes described it in his 1945 novel If He Hollers Let Him Go as “a pleasant neighborhood, clean, quiet, well bred.” In a 1929 study of the neighborhood, USC interviewers found that while local whites were hostile to both groups, blacks and Japanese-Americans “generally held favorable views of each other.”

The Communist Party organized among blacks and Japanese-Americans in LA in the 1930s and ’40s, and Kurashige emphasizes the CP’s “multiracial vision of full equality” for both groups. In the ’20s, the party in LA was a small organization of mostly Jewish immigrants from Russia, but during the Popular Front period, beginning in 1936, it grew to nearly 3,000 members. The national CP had a “Japanese section” with 200 members and claimed a thousand more Japanese-American fellow travelers, vocal opponents of the rise of fascism in Japan. (LA at the time had a population of 35,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans.) Nisei leftists in LA organized the Market Workers Union in 1936, with 500 Japanese-American members. But when the Teamsters took over the union in 1937 in a jurisdictional dispute, they purged the Nisei.

Kurashige has found in the archives a few vivid cases where Japanese-Americans and blacks joined forces: in the mid-1930s Japanese-American Communists in LA produced bilingual fliers declaring “Scottsboro Boys Must Be Freed”; and in 1934 Langston Hughes gave the keynote speech at the party’s “Japan Night”–his topic was “The Japanese and the Darker Races.” Internationalism was the party line, but for those who saw World War II in the Pacific as a race war, there was a more sinister side to solidarity: in those same years, W.E.B. Du Bois praised Japan’s invasion of Manchuria for “showing the way to freedom” from white supremacy, calling the Chinese, as Kurashige puts it, “the Uncle Toms of the Far East.” This notion, Kurashige reports, “had spread through portions of Black America.” Hughes had a similar position, writing in 1944 about a white person telling a black church audience that “these Japs are really trying to wipe us white folks off the face of the earth”–to which “a dark and wrinkled old grandma in the amen corner” responded, “It’s about time!”

Prominent Japanese Communists in the United States faced a terrible choice in the 1930s, when almost a dozen from LA were threatened with deportation. With the help of the party’s International Labor Defense, they “voluntarily” accepted exile to the Soviet Union rather than returning to Japan, where they faced execution. But in Stalin’s Russia, Kurashige notes, at least five of them were “imprisoned and executed as ‘infiltrators.’” As tensions across the Pacific grew, mainstream Japanese-Americans, represented by the Japanese-American Citizens League (JACL), were torn between allegiance to Japan and the United States. As late as 1940, LA’s Japanese daily newspaper Rafu Shimpo (founded in 1903 by three students at USC) was printing Japanese government propaganda in its English section, describing the Chinese in Manchuria welcoming invading Japanese soldiers as liberators and describing the Japanese puppet state Manchukuo as a “miracle of the 20th century.”

Before World War II, Japanese-Americans and blacks were, in Kurashige’s words, “roughly equal targets of degradation by whites.” But after Pearl Harbor, the former were defined as enemies of the state, while the latter were granted equal employment rights by the White House. However, Kurashige points out that there were hardly any calls for internment in the month immediately following the bombing. In fact, FDR, Attorney General Francis Biddle and many others spoke out against hostility to Japanese-Americans. In LA, the County Board of Supervisors passed a resolution on December 9, two days after the bombing, declaring that Japanese-Americans had “proven their loyalty to the United States by service in the [First] World War and in other ways.” And the Los Angeles Times ran a photo of Mayor Fletcher Bowron with Nisei leaders on December 8 headlined Japanese Americans Ready to Aid Nation. A liberal Republican supporter of civil liberties, Bowron had dismantled the notorious LAPD Red Squad and spoken out against anti-Communist witch hunts in 1940. Immediately after Pearl Harbor he assured Nisei leaders that the city would provide them with the “protection accorded any other citizen.” But by January 1942, with public opinion inflamed over news accounts of Japanese atrocities in the Philippines and with FDR issuing Executive Order 9066 requiring internment, Bowron had turned into a virulent advocate of rounding up all Japanese-Americans. He went so far as to argue that the Nisei posed the greatest threat of sabotage and espionage in what he said would be a “second Pearl Harbor” in LA.

It’s well-known that the mainstream JACL called on Japanese-Americans to cooperate with internment on the grounds that, although it was unjust, the community was powerless to stop it, and redress could be pursued after the war’s end. It’s also well-known that the CP supported the roundup on the grounds that opposing FDR would interfere with winning the war. (The leading Japanese-American CP member, Shuji Fujii, published a telegram he sent to FDR in the Popular Front Eagle that called on the government to “exterminate…un-American elements amongst us.”) But the most shocking fact in Kurashige’s book is that internment was not challenged by Nisei Communists. Despite their enthusiasm, the party suspended its Nisei comrades under the slogan “Everything for National Unity!”

The key research on black organizations’ positions on the internment has been done by Cheryl Greenberg, a professor of history at Trinity College, who found that the NAACP, the National Urban League and the National Council of Negro Women were mostly silent about the internment. Kurashige’s impressive research deepens the gloom. He searched the archives for LA blacks who criticized the internment as racist and found only one black newspaper, the Tribune, that “took a firm stand against” it–but “unfortunately the bulk of its wartime publications are unavailable in existing archives,” so we don’t really know what they said, or whether they changed their position when the climate became even more inhospitable.

Public opposition in LA to the internment was limited to a few individuals–notably Clifford Clinton, a white man and the proprietor of the famous Clifton’s Cafeteria downtown (which is still open). Even Carey McWilliams, then chief of California’s Division of Immigration and Housing (and not yet editor of The Nation), reluctantly supported internment in a 1942 article–although he soon became its most outspoken white critic. In black LA, the Eagle, published by leftist Charlotta Bass, ignored the internment and publicized the “Negro Victory Market,” a grocery co-op aimed at replacing the departed Japanese-American grocers.

Meanwhile, poor blacks from Texas and Louisiana were pouring into the city in search of wartime factory jobs. Whites didn’t want black neighbors, and so the newcomers moved to the suddenly vacant Little Tokyo. Overnight Little Tokyo turned into Bronzeville, an overcrowded ghetto known for its wild nightlife, centered on Shepp’s Playhouse, where young Charlie Parker and Miles Davis played. What the white elites had viewed as a Japanese slum they now saw as an even worse Negro slum.

The internment officially ended on January 2, 1945, but the mayor warned that Japanese-Americans “had better not come back to Los Angeles.” In Manzanar, they listened; over the next six months, only 3 percent of LA’s prewar Japanese-American population returned to the city. The War Relocation Authority (WRA) had to force the rest to leave Manzanar in the fall of 1945. Eventually two-thirds came back to LA, but they had nowhere to live–leading the WRA to house them (FEMA-style) in trailer parks in Burbank, Santa Monica, Hawthorne, El Segundo and Santa Ana. The city fathers feared rioting in Bronzeville, but it never materialized; in July 1946 Ebony magazine ran a story on “The Race War That Flopped.” The racial peace seems in part to have been the work of Common Ground, a 1945 project of the Pilgrim House, one of several Protestant church efforts to promote “interracialism.” But Bronzeville/Little Tokyo was still targeted for “urban renewal,” and in 1949, 2,500 Japanese-Americans and blacks were evicted to make way for a new LAPD headquarters and then a city parking garage.

The Protestant integrationists’ goal was to prevent the formation of a new Little Tokyo and instead integrate Japanese-Americans into suburban LA. Nisei leaders worried about undermining their historic community support institutions yet were drawn to the idea of integration; Kurashige notes that “public recognition that the Nisei were even potentially capable of assimilation represented a paradigm shift.” And so the same Japanese-Americans who were treated as criminals during the war became the “model minority” whose successful integration into mainstream America was contrasted with the failure of blacks to overcome what sociologists called “dysfunction.” Liberals like Ronald Reagan embraced them, honoring Japanese-American veterans and declaring in 1945 that “America stands unique in the world, the only country not founded on race, but on…an ideal.” Not everyone agreed; the Teamsters’ official magazine declared it “senseless to argue” that “Japs are American citizens.” The union lobbied for the revocation of citizenship for Japanese-Americans.

In 1952 Congress passed the McCarran Walter Immigration Act over Truman’s veto. The act banned “suspected subversives” from entering the United States–those kept out included Gabriel García Márquez, Pablo Neruda and Graham Greene. Yet it contained a political triumph for the Nisei. In a little-known provision, the bill asserted that Japan had become our principal cold war ally in Asia. It granted naturalization rights to Japanese immigrants and permitted many more Japanese to immigrate. The quota itself wasn’t as significant as family reunification: in the 1950s, tens of thousands of Japanese legally immigrated, almost all of them family members of US citizens. As a result, more Japanese people arrived in the United States in that decade than in the previous forty years put together.

The new model minority completed its move to the suburbs, notably Gardena, Long Beach and Pasadena. But for blacks, moving just one block into white territory provoked protests and then white flight. The neighborhood around Florence and Normandie, where the Rodney King riots began in 1991, was virtually all-white in 1950; 6,000 blacks moved into the neighborhood during the 1950s, and by the ’60s, only a handful of whites remained.

For blacks there was one shining exception to the sea of black segregation in 1960s Los Angeles: the Crenshaw district, west of USC and south of the Santa Monica Freeway. There, Japanese-Americans, blacks and liberal whites lived together–for a time. Crenshaw started out after World War II as “the new Little Tokyo,” and by the early 1960s it had Southern California’s largest Japanese-American community, centered around the new Crenshaw Square shopping center, with its 1950s “Oriental” architecture and landscaping and a Japanese summer festival. But that changed in 1965, when the anger from the riots in nearby Watts spilled into Crenshaw. Japanese-American stores were looted and burned. Afterward, Crenshaw Neighbors, an organization formed by white and black women in 1961, tried to persuade whites and Japanese-Americans not to flee. (It was perhaps the region’s only homeowners’ group that fought for integrated neighborhoods.) The city opened a new high school, Crenshaw High, hoping to keep white and Japanese-American families in the area. That effort failed; Crenshaw became a black neighborhood in the 1970s.

Still, Crenshaw’s political legacy was huge. Tom Bradley, LA’s first black mayor, elected in 1973, got his start in the Crenshaw Democratic Club, where he learned to walk precincts and began his lifelong alliance with Jewish liberals. After taking office, he provided the first real opportunity for Japanese-Americans to participate in city government, and “always maintained a significant Japanese American presence in his office.” During the Bradley era, even as much of black LA fell deeper into poverty, many Japanese-Americans prospered. (Kurashige, however, is more interested in another kind of globalization–the young Japanese-American radicals of the campus Third World liberation movements of the early ’70s.)

After Watts, one symbol of interracial harmony in Crenshaw remained: Holiday Bowl, the Nisei-run bowling alley that had opened in 1958. In its coffee shop, blacks ate udon and Japanese-Americans ate soul food. Kurashige ends his book with the battle to save Holiday Bowl from the wrecking ball in 2000, when Manzanar survivors teamed up with working-class black veterans of the Negro bowling leagues and Anglo preservation activists. They lost that fight. The place was torn down in 2001, but it’s been enshrined in local history by the Japanese-American National Museum of LA. (It also has its own website, holidaybowlcrenshaw.com.) For Kurashige, Holiday Bowl provides a model of an alternative future for “polyethnic” Los Angeles–a future we might call “bowling together.”

About Jon Wiener

Jon Wiener started writing for The Nation in 1984. Since then he’s written more than 100 stories and reviews for the magazine, many about American history, university politics, and California life. He’s also professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, and a Los Angeles radio host. His most recent book is Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud, and Politics in the Ivory Tower (New Press).

SAVE THE DATES!
Sunday August 24th and Tuesday August 26th

Colorado AAPI Democrats
Asian Pacific Americans for Progress
DNC Vice Chair U.S. Representative Mike Honda (CA-15)
Obama for America AAPI Vote Team

INVITE YOU TO

WHAT: AAPI Colorado Summit at the Democratic Convention

WHEN: Sunday August 24, 2008
12:00 PM - 4:30 PM

WHERE: Colorado Convention Center,
700 14th Street, Downtown Denver

WHY:
* Build upon the activism of AAPIs in the Democratic Party
* Learn from local and national AAPI leaders
* Network with people from Colorado and across the country

WHO: Anyone who is interested in taking action and affecting change

Also, on Tuesday August 26th from 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM, Asian Pacific
Americans for Progress will be sponsoring an “Asian American
Grassroots Strategy Session with Special Guest Congressman Mike
Honda.” Come join us for this brainstorming session to be held at the
Convention Center.

Please email Apafp@apaforprogress.org for more information or to
RSVP. You can also stay in touch by joining our facebook group at:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2295577919

The Program in Critical Studies invites applications for part-time
teaching positions at California College of the Arts, a small fine
art, design, and architecture college with campuses in San Francisco
and Oakland. Salary and rank vary with seniority, and the maximum
number of courses that part-time faculty can teach in a year is 4. The
Ph.D. is preferred but advanced ABD students with teaching experience
will be considered. Experience working with art & design students or
other “non-academic” college populations is quite desirable but is not
required. The immediate opening is for two or three courses in spring
of 2009, but this position is renewable at the discretion of the chair
for up to seven semesters, after which a formal application for
promotion and retention is necessary. Part-time faculty are eligible
for participation in college-wide self-governance activities and in
helping to shape Critical Studies curriculum.

Scholars who wish to teach courses rooted in American Studies,
Cultural Studies, Diaspora Studies, Disability Studies, Ethnic
Studies, LGBT Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, or similar
interdisciplinary fields are encouraged to apply. The program has a
special interest in cultural history outside the US; in cross-cultural
and comparative courses; and in courses designed to teach research
skills.

If you are interested in pursuing this opportunity, please submit a CV
and letter describing your professional and teaching qualifications to
Julian Carter, Chair of Critical Studies, at juliancarter@cca.edu.
Attach sample course descriptions for three or four interdisciplinary
social science/humanities courses you would like to offer at CCA.
Please do*not* focus on literature or the visual arts, as these areas
are covered by different programs in CCA’s rather unorthodox
curriculum. Two of your sample course descriptions should be for
lower-division courses and two should be for upper-division courses.
Two may be focused on issues of race, ethnicity, and/nationality,
while the other two should be framed in more general terms (though
they may include ethnic-studies content, of course). The program chair
will be happy to answer questions or to email you copies of the
program’s course rubrics for each curricular area if you would find
that level of detail helpful.

The successful candidate may be asked to participate in a team-taught
Foundations in Critical Studies course, so if you have experience
working on teams, please do mention it.

Applications are due as soon as possible, but no later than August 15.

Julian Carter
Chair, Program in Critical Studies
California College of the Arts
1111 8th St
San Francisco, CA 94107
juliancarter@cca.edu

The English Department at The University of Texas (Austin) seeks to appoint an
Assistant or beginning Associate Professor in anglophone South Asian
literature, with additional interest in one or more periods of the English
literary curriculum. Candidates will also be expected to teach survey courses
in world or British literature. Applicants should have the PhD in hand (or
expected by August 2009), evidence of teaching excellence, and a clearly
defined research agenda that will contribute to our highly ranked programs in
Ethnic and Third World Literatures and to the South Asia Institute. The
selected candidate will be expected to teach at all levels of our curriculum,
to direct dissertations, MA reports, and honors theses, to publish actively,
and to offer service to the Department, the College, and the University.
Deadline for applications is October 1, 2008. Please send letter, CV,
dissertation abstract, writing sample and 3 recent letters of recommendation to
South Asian Recruitment Chair, Department of English, University of Texas at
Austin, 1 University Station B5000, Austin, TX 78712-1164. If your letters of
recommendation arrive after the deadline we will still accept them. The
position is subject to budgetary approval. The University of Texas is an EEO
employer: women and minorities are encouraged to apply. Background checks will
be conducted.

Internship Opportunity at Local Television Station

KBS, the biggest Asian-community television station in North America operating 5 platforms including 24-hour cable (KXLA) and satellite channels, is looking for an intern who has Korean, Japanese or Chinese ethnic background and speaks English as his/her first language. The station is located in Los Angeles Korea-town (Wilshire and Kingsley).

Intern duties includes:
- researching Asian-American community events and issues for the weekly show
- editing show script
- assisting field production (organizing camera/audio/light equipment)
- assisting post production (logging tapes, editing, sub-title inserting)

No skills in video production required. Internship length and weekly hours negotiable. Once agreed upon, these will be considered a commitment. College credit available.

Ideal candidate will have:
- Professional attitude, focus, patience, determination
- Native level spoken/written English
- Strong writing skill will be beneficial
- Reliable weekly availability

Interested candidates should send resume, contact info, and cover letter to us.
Contact: Hyun Oh, Producer hyunoh@kbs-america.com

Dean, Social Sciences
University of California, Los Angeles
The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) invites inquiries, nominations and applications for the position of Dean of Social Sciences.

The Division of Social Sciences is one of the four academic divisions of the UCLA College of Letters and Sciences, encompassing some of the university’s highest-ranked academic programs. These include nationally-ranked departments in the longstanding disciplinary fields of anthropology, economics, geography, history, political science and sociology. A leader in interdisciplinary studies, the division also contains departments with strong interdisciplinary cultures, including Asian American studies, Chicana and Chicano studies, communication studies and women’s studies, and three interdepartmental degree programs in African American studies, American Indian studies and archaeology. The division is home to aerospace studies (ROTC), military science and naval science and four organized research units: the Center for the Study of Women, the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, and the Institute for Social Science Research. The division also partners with the J. Paul Getty Trust to offer a master’s program in archaeological and ethnographic conservation.

With nearly 300 ladder faculty, 8,143 undergraduate majors, 767 graduate students, and 22 percent of all students enrolled at UCLA, the division of social sciences is the largest and one of the most distinguished academic units in the university. The faculty boasts 27 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, three members of the National Academy of Science, 26 Guggenheim Fellows, six Fulbright Scholars, two MacArthur Fellows and two Pulitzer prize winners. Annual expenditures come to $100M, and the division attracts approximately $19M in external funding annually.

As the chief executive officer for the division, the dean will set the standard for its intellectual engagement and accomplishment, provide strategic vision and operational leadership to all aspects of the academic and scholarly program, and create an environment and community that supports the division’s faculty and students. In particular, the dean will assure that the division continues to serve its students with academic programs of the highest quality and effectiveness, promoting excellence through diversity in undergraduate and graduate programs and faculty recruitment. Supporting the university’s research mission, the dean will promote opportunities to establish newer disciplines and advance the scholarly activities of the faculty, including the opportunities that interdisciplinary approaches afford. In pursuing these responsibilities, the dean, who reports to the executive vice chancellor/provost, will work collaboratively with the chancellor and executive vice chancellor/provost and with vice chancellors, other deans and department chairs at UCLA and throughout the University of California system. In particular, the dean will work closely with the other deans in the College, which includes the divisions of humanities, life sciences, physical sciences and undergraduate education, as well as social sciences.

The successful candidate will be a nationally-recognized scholar with demonstrated leadership in teaching, research and public service. Minimum requirements include: an earned doctorate in a social sciences field; a record of distinguished teaching and research; substantial administrative leadership, preferably in a research university; proven success in external fund development; and credentials that merit appointment at the rank of full professor.

Situated on 419 acres, five miles from the Pacific Ocean, UCLA is enriched by the cultural diversity of the dynamic greater Los Angeles area, as well as the geographic variety and temperate climate of Southern California. It is among the most distinguished research institutions in the world, public or private, with 4,000 faculty members who teach 37,500 students in the College of Letters and Science and 11 professional schools, and who in 2006-07 generated more than $900 million in research contracts and grants. UCLA is an international leader in the breadth and quality of its academic, research, health care, cultural, continuing education and athletic programs. Four UCLA alumni and five faculty members have been awarded the Nobel Prize.

Confidential review of applications, nominations and expressions of interest will begin immediately and continue until an appointment is made, with a preferred starting date no later than July 1, 2009. Compensation for the position is highly competitive. Electronic submission of materials is preferred. A cover letter, curriculum vita and list of five references should be forwarded to uclasocialscience@wittkieffer.com. Inquiries may be addressed to the Witt/Kieffer consultants supporting this search, Mary Elizabeth Taylor (212-686-2676) or Elizabeth Bohan (630-575-6161).

The University of California is an affirmative action/equal opportunity employer, and seeks candidates who are committed to the highest standards of scholarship and professional activities and to a campus climate that supports equality and diversity.