Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White

by Frank H. Wu

Overview

Writing in the tradition of W. E. B. Du Bois, Cornel West, and others who confronted the "color line" of the twentieth century, journalist, scholar, and activist Frank H. Wu offers a unique perspective on how changing ideas of racial identity will affect race relations in the twenty-first century. Wu examines affirmative action, globalization, immigration, and other controversial contemporary issues through the lens of the Asian-American experience. Mixing personal anecdotes, legal cases, and journalistic reporting, Wu confronts damaging Asian-American stereotypes such as "the model minority" and "the perpetual foreigner." By offering new ways of thinking about race in American society, Wu's work dares us to make good on our great democratic experiment.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780465006403
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	03/27/2003
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	416
Sales rank:	532,609
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

The first Asian American to serve as a law professor at Howard University Law School in Washington, D.C., Frank H. Wu has written for a range of publications including the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Nation, and writes a regular column for Asian Week. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Read an Excerpt

Like anyone else, I am often asked "Where are you from?" Like other Asian Americans but unlike most other Americans, I also am frequently asked the follow-up question even after I reply that I was born in Cleveland and grew up in Detroit but lived in San Francisco before moving to Washington, D.C., "Where are you really from?"

The paired queries are almost always sincere, revealing curiosity more than malice. Yet the inquiries, especially repeated constantly as if they cannot ever be answered satisfactorily, remind me that, for some of my neighbors, I remain a perpetual foreigner. They ask me, "When are you going home?" and "How do you like it in our country?"

This book not only tires to explain where I am really from, but also seeks to explore where we together can move. I have written it with faith that a democratic society can and should be diverse.
—(From the Introduction)

Table of Contents

1	East Is East, East Is West: Asians as Americans	1
2	The Model Minority: Asian American "Success" as a Race Relations Failure	39
3	The Perpetual Foreigner: Yellow Peril in the Pacific Century	79
4	Neither Black Nor White: Affirmative Action and Asian Americans	131
5	True But Wrong: New Arguments Against New Discrimination	173
6	The Best "Chink" Food: Dog-Eating and the Dilemma of Diversity	215
7	The Changing Face of America: Intermarriage and the Mixed Race Movement	261
8	The Power of Coalitions: Why I Teach at Howard	301
	Epilogue: Deep Springs	343
	References	349
	Notes	355
	Acknowledgments	383
	Index	385
	About the Author	399

Editorial Reviews

Whether they are portrayed as the model minority or the perpetually alien, diabolical Japanese or promiscuous Suzi Wongs, Asian Americans suffer. Professor/activist Frank H. We believes that even racially sensitive Americans have a blind spot for yellow. Harboring special views about Asian Americans is, he thinks, something we've been practicing for centuries. This Oprah guest knows how to communicate his points succinctly and with human force.

Yellow also offers an excellent overview of the official and unofficial policies that have shaped Asian-American history and identity in the U.S., and of the thinking that has laid the foundation for them. Wu draws on a refreshingly disparate bank of thinkers and writers (from Shakespeare to essayist Randolph Bourne) to grant him his points.

Chicago Tribune

[Wu] adroitly works his way through the brier patch of America's racial challenges with remarkably good humor and an open mind.

National Journal

This fascinating blend of Wu's personal experiences and his experiences as a lawyer, professor, and reporter provides a different and much-needed perspective on an important and often neglected subject.

Library Journal

[Wu's] defiant yellow-in-a-black-and-white-world perspective is refreshing.

Mother Jones

Beginning with a recap of his childhood bewilderment with the paltry selection of appealing Asian characters in 1970s American pop culture, Frank H. Wu, associate professor at the Howard University School of Law, describes the alienation experienced by Asian-Americans in the 20th-century in Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White. An activist and journalist (the Washington Post, the Nation, the L.A. Times, etc.), Wu discusses key moments and phenomena in Asian-American history: the WWII internment camps, the 1992 L.A. riots, the "model minority myth," the virulent anti-Asian sentiment in the U.S. during the 1980s' recession (exemplified by the murder of a Chinese American engineer by two white auto workers, fined $3,780 for the crime) and periodic fads involving "Asian-ness" in American media. His sobering, astute, compelling investigation locates the particulars of Asian-American experience with racism in this country's spectrum of ethnic and cultural prejudice. (Jan.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

An exhaustively detailed brief provocatively argues that Asian-Americans should be included in the national dialogue about race. Drawing on an eclectic range of references from John Stuart Mill to Tom Wolfe, Wu (Law/Howard Univ.) admits he hopes to stimulate discussion as well as invite dissent as he advances his ideas. Addressing both black and white prejudices against Asian-Americans, Wu is punctilious about acknowledging the greater burden race has imposed on blacks. Divided into three sections, his study begins with personal recollections of growing up as a Chinese-American and ends with a chapter detailing his reasons for teaching at Howard, a historically black university. In the first section, Wu rebuts the myth of the model minority by demonstrating that, while Asians are highly educated, they receive a lower return on their investment in education and are underrepresented in management; their higher income, he argues, reflects families pooling their resources. Next, he analyzes the implication of mixed-race marriages, as well as such problems as Asian-Americans' stand on affirmative action (he supports it), racial profiling (he discusses the case of Wen Ho Lee), and the dilemma of diversity. Citing the abhorrence that the Asian custom of eating dogs evokes in Westerners, he argues that, while everyone favors diversity, no one has thought critically enough about its implications. Wu suggests that one way of reconciling assimilation with multiculturalism would be to distinguish the division between what is substantial and what is superficial: ". . . an Afrocentric curriculum that is rigorous may be preferable to one that is auctioned off for product placements." In the finalsection, he suggests that Asian-Americans should engage in building coalitions with African-Americans and other minorities as well as with whites to create a tolerant civic society. A timely and thoughtful, if at times overidealistic, plea for full participation in the great ongoing debate.

Kirkus Reviews