The Paradox of Reparations

This chapter offers a more complex and multiracial view of history by revisiting the narrative of the Japanese American redress movement and discovers a paradox at its core: while the campaign by Japanese Americans for reparations for their wartime confinement started at the end of the 1960s as part of a wider antiracist coalition, and received key support in its early stages from African American political leaders, Japanese Americans increasingly distanced themselves from their black allies as the goal of redress grew nearer, even as African Americans became increasingly public in their opposition. The chapter also shows how the victory of the redress movement in 1988 offered a major precedent, and a model, for reparations efforts by blacks.

An Analytic Model of Conflict and Cooperation on the Terrain of Race

This chapter offers an analytic model for understanding conflict and coalition on the terrain of race by discussing racialization and racial stratification. In this analytic model of first-, second-, and third-order racial analyses, the first-order binary model restates the duality of the primary racial opposition in U.S. history—black and white—and recognizes that many analyses of racial and ethnic conflict follow this basic majority–minority binary opposition. Meanwhile, second-order binary analysis stays within a group-to-group binary framework, but looks at the relationship between minority A and minority B. The chapter then shows how an understanding of racialization and racial stratification lends itself to third-order multigroup analysis. It concludes by discussing the limits of building coalitions in a purely oppositional mode, and explores the need for building common cause that extends beyond opposition to white capitalist patriarchy.

Re-reading Vincent Chin

This chapter provides a new look at the Vincent Chin case. Chin was a young Chinese American from the Detroit area whose beating death at the hands of two white men in 1982, and the light sentences they received at trial, sparked widespread outrage among Asian Americans and helped catalyze Asian American political organizing. The chapter urges scholars and researchers to beyond the received ideas in the established narrative about Chin's murder and to understand how the particular spatial, gender, and class dynamics of Detroit influenced the case. The chapter also specifically details the important involvement of African Americans in the case.

Gay Is the New White (Gay Is the New Straight)

This chapter challenges the misappropriation of African American civil rights struggles by white LGBT advocates who present themselves as the victims of discrimination akin to that suffered by blacks, and, in the process, continue to marginalize the experiences of African Americans who are LGBT. Historically, pro-gay rights advocacy has reflected a racial ideology that invokes black civil rights symbols, political victories, and legal reforms, on the one hand, and elides contemporary black disadvantage and social inequality, on the other. The chapter shows how this “gay rights color blindness” deploys African American identity and civil rights history to advance a gay rights agenda in which black LGBT people are nowhere to be found and blackness, more generally, is marked as an identity whose civil rights aspirations have already been fulfilled.

Segregated Together

This chapter focuses on the complex and troubled history of interethnic violence between blacks and Latinos. It compares prevailing conditions in areas such as New York's Staten Island, where the chief violence is perpetrated by African Americans on Latinos, and California, where the opposite pattern prevails, and examines the asserted justifications made by the authors of such violence. The chapter concludes that the constant force in reproducing such violent behavior, irrespective of the group responsible, is the surrounding conditions of race-based poverty and residential segregation. The chapter shows that in the end, only a renewed societal focus on combating the institutional forces of poverty and racism, along with segregation, can address interethnic relations nationwide.

Race, Place, and Historic Moment

This chapter presents a comparative history of minority communities, in this case the impact of the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 (better known as the GI Bill of Rights). It addresses the reasons why Japanese American World War II veterans were able to make greater use of the benefits offered by the law to broker their group's postwar social advancement, while black veterans were restricted in their enjoyment of its advantages. In addition to more potent discrimination against blacks in areas such as housing, one salient distinction between the groups that the chapter points to is their differing educational preparation, which led to comparatively greater use by Japanese Americans of the college benefits available under the bill.

Civil Rights, Free Speech, and Group Libel

This chapter examines the contrasting efforts of organizations representing two marginalized groups, blacks and Jews, to counter defamation. In the end, civil rights advocates from both groups came to the conclusion, on a mixture of principled and pragmatic grounds, that it was wiser not to push for adoption of laws against “group libel,” such as those that characterize post-Holocaust Europe and Canada. Yet both groups were forced to wrestle with how to organize and justify protest campaigns against bigoted media representations, including threats of economic reprisals, while refuting charges of censorship. The chapter shows that the absolute embrace of free speech in the United States after World War II was far from inevitable.

A Modest Proposal

This chapter calls for a revision of history and argues that one of the barriers to coalition building among subordinated groups results from a fragmentation of history. It locates part of this in something that might be described as black exceptionalism, stating that the history of black people during the 1865–1965 period of political, social, cultural, and economic change remains largely exceptional, treated as different from the history of Chinese, Mexican, and Japanese Americans during the last third of the nineteenth century and the first six decades of the twentieth century. The chapter asserts that to have a more complete and accurate idea of their own history, African Americans must study their connections to other racialized groups.

The Power Dynamics of Color on Color

This chapter looks at what the media has characterized as America's “interminority problem.” It shows that the persistent desire for alliance forging often leads theorists and advocates to target what might be characterized as a “common ground” approach that focuses on common issues—“bread and butter” issues like wages and discrimination while largely avoiding the difficult interrogation of the ragged history of power-sharing and the broad ignorance of one another's culture and social and economic conditions. These common issues are seized upon as opportunities to build bridges and relationships. While such an approach might have some success in the short term, the chapter argues that this approach has a tendency to neglect dealing with the deeper grievances honestly and self-critically.

The Birth and Death of Affirmative Action

This chapter argues that the fatal flaw of the discourse on affirmative action is that it treats affirmative action as an ahistorical aberration. By reconstructing the history of efforts to offer compensation for past discrimination to African Americans, the chapter reveals that the most sustained and formidable opposition did not stem from White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) conservatives. Rather, it was Jewish intellectuals such as Sidney Hook and Nathan Glazer, who were involved as contributors to Commentary magazine, who devised the anti-affirmative action discourse adopted by later neoconservatives. The chapter also offers an analysis of the chances for a revival of affirmative action under the current political system in America.