Panel discussion highlights exclusion of Chinese-Americans

The Chinese Exclusion Act had long-lasting negative effects on the Chinese-American community, University history professor Beth Lew-Williams and New York University professor Jack Tchen argued in a panel discussion on Wednesday.

Stanley Katz, a Wilson School lecturer and the moderator, said he could “think of very few episodes that are less known to today’s students than Chinese exclusion.”

There are parallels between American fear and fascination toward China at the time and the current American attitude toward North Korea, Tchen said.

“This country now thinks of North Korea as the epitome of evil in a way that, you know, is not just about whatever is happening there,” Tchen said. “It’s very much about, you know, a larger phobia that has afflicted, that has stuck to, other groups as well.”

Tchen added that this larger phobia is or has been attached to Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Muslim people.

Public recognition of Chinese-American exclusion came from Congress in 2012 when the Senate passed a statement of regret for the legalized exclusion of Chinese-Americans, Tchen said, which he added was a cue that Chinese Exclusion Act was still an issue that needed to be “dealt with."

Even if Americans began grappling seriously with the Chinese Exclusion Act, stereotypes of Chinese people, things and ideas would still be deeply infused in American culture, he added.

The rise of anti-Chinese violence in the wake of the Exclusion Act seemed paradoxical to traditional scholarship on the issue, which proposed that the American government quelled anti-Chinese sentiment by barring most Chinese from immigrating, Lew-Williams said.

“While previous scholarship has portrayed Chinese exclusion as sort of a sudden and yet inevitable culmination of racism in 1882, I argue that the rise of Chinese exclusion was a slow, contentious and contingent process which was far from over when the U.S. erupted in this violence,” Lew-Williams said.

Lew-Williams highlighted the tales of her great-grandfather, Lew Fook, an undocumented immigrant in the United States.

“What I knew about Chinese-American history came from oral histories, from stories I heard from my family, not history books,” Lew-Williams said.

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After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Lew Fook took advantage of the fact that the fire “destroyed all birth certificates” and claimed to be a native-born citizen.

Lew-Williams said thatLew Fook’s story was not unique.

“Most of them claimed to be citizens by birth, as he did, and historians now estimate that 70 to 90 percent of those claims were fraudulent,” she said.

Katz closed the lecture by noting the role of inequality in the college admissions process, the dubious notion of equality in the American constitution and the role of history in studying and rectifying inequalities.

“One of the functions of history is to enable a people to come to terms with what it has done wrong,” Katz said.

The lecture, called "Chinese Americans: From Exclusion to Inclusion,” took place at 4:30 p.m. in the Whig Hall Senate Chamber. The lecture was co-sponsored by the American Whig-Cliosophic Society and the Program in American Studies.