Mary Dudziak (USC) on the Legal History Blog highlights two new books that may be of interest to ImmigrationProf readers.
Nadia Kim in Imperial Citizens: Koreans and Race from Seoul to LA examines the origins, nature, and extent of racial ideas about Koreans in relation to White and Black Americans, investigating how immigrants engage these ideas before they depart for the United States, as well as after they arrive. It shows how Korean history has shaped race relations, from interactions with white soldiers in Korea to interactions with Americans in the US.
Charlotte Brooks in Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California (University of Chicago Press, 2009) examines how the attitudes of white Californians toward their Asian American neighbors evolved from outright hostility to relative acceptance. She does so by looking at this transformation through the lens of California’s urban housing markets, arguing that the perceived foreignness of Asian Americans, which initially stranded them in segregated areas, eventually facilitated their integration into neighborhoods that rejected other minorities. Against the backdrop of cold war efforts to win Asian hearts and minds, whites who saw little difference between Asians and Asian Americans increasingly advocated the latter group’s access to middle-class life and the residential areas that went with it. But as they transformed Asian Americans into a “model minority,” whites purposefully ignored the long backstory of Chinese and Japanese Americans’ early and largely failed attempts to participate in public and private housing programs.
Hat tip to IntLawGrrl Diane Amann!
KJ
