War Brides Act Of 1945: Interracial Relations

Around the mid-19th to the 20th century, myriads of immigrants flocked to the U.S. seeking better job opportunities,or searching for religious freedom. U.S. citizens were fearful, envious, and willing to exclude immigrants who came to the US as they were viewed as an economic threat to the society. They believed that these immigrants were racially, morally and intellectually inferior to them and as such did not see or treat as their equals. These dysfunctions lead to severe and harsh treatment of immigrants. Historically, the three major immigrant groups that faced the most discrimination during this era were the Asians, German, and the Irish. American citizen’s fear of job secureness led to the resentment and discriminatory treatment towards Asian Immigrants. They believed that the majority of the Asian American immigrants were taking too many of their jobs. As such, the U.S. government decided that it would be necessary to restrict the amount of Asian Americans, in order to keep the U.S. citizens from being unemployed. The U.S. government passed numerous laws, banning Asian American immigrants from the United States. One distinct law that they passed was the 1922 Cable Act, this law “stripped a female citizen of citizenship, if she married an alien unable to become a citizen.”(Lutz 7).The law was basically passed to prevent Asian immigrants from obtaining citizenship by marrying a female U.S citizen.In fact, the government believed that female citizens that engaged in this

America feared that the Cold War would inspire the Soviet communism nurture egalitarian societies, and prompt the colored people inside and outside America to remain marginal between capitalism and communism. This inspired American policy makers to undermine their practice of discriminating the colored communities. Thus, during the 1960s America witnessed radicalization of anti-racism movements. The Cold War affected the Asian Americans in different ways. First and foremost, a vociferous call by Asian Americans against racism would invite condemnation of the white Americans. Nevertheless, famed Americans of Asian origin voiced against racism. Until the year 1950, the Japanese were kept beyond the purview of new immigration reforms. Early 1950s saw the Japanese given immigration rights to join hands with Americans to fight communism, which had earlier invaded China by the late 1940s. In 1945, America allowed its citizens who fought the war in different parts of Asia to bring their wives from Philippines and China as Filipinos, Koreans and South Asians were allowed to enter America after granting naturalization rights. This in turn created significant gender imbalance, for instance, among the Chinese and Filipino immigrants.

Asian immigrants raised their children on the values of filial piety. Filial piety is based on Confucianism ideology which is one showing respect to one’s parent. American-born children are raised with two values which are Confucianism and the American values. The American values allow an individual to make their decisions either in their career, marriage, or lifestyle. Unlike, the American values, Confucianism decisions are decided by the parents, which have created tension in both generations. The immigrant parents stress the importance of a proper education to their children because the parents did not have the opportunity for education. Education was a privilege meaning only the families that had money could send their children to school. The parents began working at a young age to support their family and maintaining the household was more important than education. The immigrant parents are motivated by the “American Dream” instead of a financial benefit, the better the education and the employment, the more opportunities that would be offered. A person without a proper education would not succeed in life compared to the ones that have an education.

The idea of the one-drop rule was applied to these laws causing it not only to be a widely excepted rule by the countries populous, but also as a legally accepted one. Hollinger explains that “The principle was sharpened under Jim Crow, when opposition to social equality for black was well served by a monolithic notion of blackness accompanied by legislation that outlawed as miscegenation black-white marriages.” [10] These laws rested upon the constructed notion that blackness was somehow indicated by biological factors. A perfect example of this is that “Law regulating interracial marriage and the conduct of free people of color defined blackness as a genealogical quantum” In some places even those who had “one-sixteenth “black blood” [were] legally black,” [11] and therefore denied the right to marry a white person. Anti-miscegenation legislation, which has implied use of the one-drop rule, has a long history in the United States with the final anti-miscegenation law was struck down in Loving vs. Virginia as recently as 1967. These laws were created to maintain racial purity, and have been instrumental in solidifying both the idea of race and different racial categories in the United States.

In the mist of the countries involvement in one of the most grueling wars in history new barriers were broken to make room for an equal America. Although true equality was not reached, these short four years would lead to the turning point in American acceptance toward diversity, both in and out of the work place. The movement of thousands of men overseas create a substantial gap in the work place, creating a never before seen chance for women, Blacks, and immigrants to flood the many war based jobs. At the same time, the Japanese faced radical discrimination for the events in which provoked the United States entry in to the War. In the years incasing WWII opportunity opened to those who had been affected hardest but

American minorities made up a significant amount of America’s population in the 1920s and 1930s, estimated to be around 11.9 million people, according to . However, even with all those people, there still was harsh segregation going on. Caucasians made African-Americans work for them as slaves, farmers, babysitters, and many other things in that line. Then when World War II came, “World War II required the reunification and mobilization of Americans as never before” (Module2). They needed to cooperate on many things, even if they didn’t want to. These minorities mainly refer to African, Asian, and Mexican-Americans. They all suffered much pain as they were treated as if they weren’t even human beings. They were separated, looked down upon,

This was mainly due to the fact that within Asian households, the children are raised and taught in a completely different manner than an American household even though I was born and raised in Philadelphia. However, I was raised both by Vietnamese standards of discipline and respect without questioning authority, whilst also being raised on American

“The worst loneliness is to not be comfortable with yourself.” (-Mark Twain) Being a child of immigrant parents who move to American can be hard. There is a lingering feeling of not feeling like a child belongs. They are stuck in the invisible world between where their parents came from, in this specific case, Asia and where the child lives now. It can be difficult to be raised as an Asian American and learning both culture and traditions. Many Asian American kids end up deviating from the Asian culture and embracing the American culture. However, children of immigrants should embrace their own culture in order to keep traditions alive and be proud of who they are.

The Asian American immigrants are part of the ethnic and racial groups in the United States who lives in the continent of Asia. Asian have lived in the United States for a long time. Throughout the history, Asian Americans have encountered segragation and discrimination during the periods of changes in demographics, economic recession, and war. They have been discriminated by school policies and practices due to beign different. Paul Spickard (2007) has said that Asian Americans was an idea invented in the 1960s to bring together Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino Americans for political purposes. Later, other

Japanese Americans during World War II were displaced from their homes and placed in concentration camps (Takaki, 147). “In the War, we are now engaged in racial affinities are not severed by immigrations” (Takaki, 148). Furthermore, Japanese Americans were not citizens due to the exclusion of Asian people

In What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America, Peggy Pascoe examines the history of miscegenation and how it laid the foundation of white supremacy in the United States. While visible forms of white supremacy such as segregation helped mask the importance of miscegenation laws, Pascoe argues that miscegenation laws was a national movement tied inseparably to gender and sexuality that went beyond the Black/White dynamic, which courts and bureaucracies of local marriage officials used to produce race in America. Pascoe goes on to argue that the core of miscegenation laws reached beyond the realm of romance as courts began to condemn the respectability of interracial relationships by equating them with illicit sex rather than marriage. Thus, this idea of unrespectable, unnatural, and immoral relationships became women into the fabric of the American society.

Starting in the 1880s, the story of Japanese Americans and their presence within the grand scheme of America’s culture has its fair share of controversies, but perhaps the most contentious chapter is the internment of Japanese Americans during World War 2. Widely considered one of the most egregious breaches of civil rights during this era, Japanese internment was blatant discrimination that took advantage of the panic during World War 2, and the predisposed notions many Americans had concerning the Japanese. In order to best understand the cultural impact that this period had on the American racial landscape, one must understand the Japanese immigration to America, racial relations leading up to World War 2, the causation of the internment,

The pain and the suffering, the oppression, and the exclusion all describe the history of Asia America. When they arrived to the United States, they become labeled as Asians. These Asians come from Japan, China, Korea, Laos, Thailand, and many other diverse countries in the Eastern hemisphere. These people wanted to escape from their impoverished lives as the West continued to infiltrate their motherland. They saw America as the promise land filled with opportunity to succeed in life. Yet due to the discrimination placed from society and continual unfair

I was born in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and live in the U.S. I went to Lowell High School and took all ESL because I didn’t know much about English. In order to succeed, I started to read and speak more English than my first language, yet I speak Khmer at home because my parent doesn 't want me to lose my native language. In America, there are a lot of immigrants that are trying to come and to get a better opportunity. According to Joel Swerdlow, in “Changing America,” “before 1965 more than three-quarters of all immigrants to the U.S. came from Europe, owing largely to quotas that favored northern Europeans.” (313). In 1965 Congress removed those quotas, and since then more than 60 percent of immigrants have come from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and Latin America. However, do children of immigrants often feel they must lose their cultural identity in order to be American? Children of immigrants often feel they must lose their cultural identity because they are changing their own culture identity regarding three topics: Language, Dress, and Behavior.

     What culture they had was to be forgotten – a difficult and practically impossible feat. The Chinese-Americans faced a wall of cultural difference that could only be scaled with the support of their parents and local community. The book review of Bone by Nhi Le stated clearly how “ … the first generations’ struggle to survive and the second generations’ efforts to thrive … ” made the transition into American culture possible. Overcoming barriers such as language, education, work ethic, and sex roles was just a beginning to the problems that all Asian – Americans faced.