Why a 19th-Century Plan to Replace Black Labor with Chinese Labor Failed - Jay Caspian Kang (The New York Times Magazine )

Uma história que poderia ser brasileira, igualmente, mas tampouco foi... 

Why a 19th-Century Plan to Replace Black Labor with Chinese Labor Failed

Jay Caspian Kang

 The New York Times  Magazine – 29.8.2021

 

In the late 1860s, just a few years after the end of the Civil War, a group of plantation owners in the Mississippi Delta began talking to one another about a labor problem. Newly freed Black people made up the majority of the agricultural work force, but they were going against the party of the South’s white establishment and voting Republican. Some were simply picking up and leaving.

In 1869, an article published in De Bow’s Review cut right to the chase:

We will state the problem for consideration. It is: To retain in the hands of whites the control and direction of social and political action, without impairing the content of the labor capacity of the colored race. We assume the effort to restrain the political influence of the colored race in the South … has failed.

Efforts to recruit white labor had been hampered by the low wages and dangerous conditions on the plantations. The leaders of agriculture in the South needed a quick influx of workers that would keep the plantations running without bringing in anyone who might vote against the existing order. Their solution was to look to the Far East, to bring in Chinese workers (then known by the derogatory name “coolies”).

“Emancipation has spoiled the negro and carried him away from fields of agriculture,” an editorial in a Vicksburg newspaper read. “Our prosperity depends entirely upon the recovery of lost ground, and we therefore say let the Coolies come, and we will take the chance of Christianizing them.”

Thus began one of the strangest sales pitches in American history. Southern papers, politicians and plantation owners all began to broadcast a call to Chinese men — those already in the U.S. and those in China — to come work the cotton fields of Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana. The goal, according to Powell Clayton, then the governor of Arkansas, wasn’t just to replace lost hands, but also to undercut the remaining Black workers by flooding the fields with cheap labor — “to punish the negro for having abandoned the control of his old master, and to regulate the conditions of his employment and the scale of wages to be paid him.”

The scheme to recruit Chinese workers to punish and undermine Black farm laborers failed, but its history — detailed by the late sociologist James W. Loewen in his 1971 book “The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White” — offers a useful parable for understanding how race has operated in America’s immigrant communities in the years since.

Loewen, who died last week at the age of 79, is best known for his recastings of American history in books such as “Lies My Teacher Told Me” and “Lies Across America.” Those books should be read as interventions against widely accepted historical misconceptions — in “Lies My Teacher Told Me,” he corrects popular history textbooks. “The Mississippi Chinese” was his first book, and it lacks the polemic energy of those later works, but it presents a thesis about race that would go on to be replicated throughout the academy, and particularly in so-called “whiteness studies.”

This thesis, that race is a construct that changes based upon context, and can shift over time, is illustrated in the book’s epigraph, where Loewen quotes an exchange with a white Baptist minister he interviewed:

“You’re either a white man or a [epithet], here,” the minister says. “Now, that’s the whole story. When I first came to the Delta, the Chinese were classed as [epithet].”

“And now they are called whites?” Loewen asks.

“That’s right!”

Chinese laborers began to arrive in Mississippi roughly between 1870-1875. The first “wave” were mostly made up of so-called “sojourners” who came straight from China, alongside a few railroad workers who had just finished up the Transcontinental railroad.Despite their small numbers, there was great enthusiasm among landowners about the arrival of these early Chinese Americans in the Delta region. The expectation was that they would be docile, completely uninterested in politics, and industrious. They were also almost all male, and, according to Loewen’s research, had come from humble but not entirely impoverished backgrounds in China. (The maleness of Chinese workers in America would be cemented into law in 1875 when the Page Act effectively barred Chinese women from entering the country, under the pretense of prohibiting prostitution.)

The vision of fields filled with these new workers never materialized: The Chinese laborers refused the working conditions and wages that many Black laborers had left. Reflecting on this era, Clayton wrote, “the efforts to utilize Chinese labor proved a disastrous failure.” In a short while, he wrote, the Chinese workers “sagaciously learned the purposes for which they were introduced.”

The Chinese workers quickly found a new purpose: to start small grocery stores that served the Black population. A handful of Chinese migrants began buying small stores with even smaller rooms in the back where they would eat and sleep. To navigate the language barrier, the Chinese would sometimes provide their Black customers with a long stick to tap their purchases. When it came time to restock their wares, they would keep at least one of each item so that when wholesalers came by, the shopkeepers could simply point to what they needed.

These stores filled a hole in the economy that most white people did not want to touch and from which Black people were largely excluded. This often gave the Chinese something of a monopoly. By 1881, just about a decade after their arrival, Chinese names began showing up on lists of landowners in the Delta. These new store owners did not have the benefits of citizenship or any rights to speak of, but they did have several economic advantages over their Black counterparts. Wholesalers, for example, were willing to extend them lines of credit to start their businesses.

Because it was practically impossible by then to bring over women from China to start families, the Mississippi Chinese remained a tiny, insular community for decades. In the early years, many of their interactions were with Black people. The Chinese lived in the Black neighborhoods and oftentimes hired Black workers. A small number of Chinese men started families with Black women, but as the Chinese community grew, those unions were ultimately discouraged by both Chinese community members and white people who would sometimes end preferential treatment once a Black person was part of the family. As some Chinese grocers accumulated wealth and began interacting more with wealthy, white society, an internal divide was drawn between the rich Chinese and a smaller, lower class who still lived among, or had entered into relationships with Black women.

“The rich Chinese won’t have much to do with the poor Chinese, and even less with the [epithet],” a white Delta businessman is quoted as saying in Loewen’s book. “Oh, they’ll take his money just like any of us will, but they won’t have anything to do with him socially.”

The wealthier Chinese may have made some inroads into white society, but for the first half of the 20th century, they still existed in a nebulous place whose contexts and restrictions were in constant flux. In 1924, Gong Lum, a grocer in the Delta town of Rosedale, tried to enroll his oldest daughter in a white school. She was rejected. Lum hired a lawyer and took the case to court. A district court found in Lum’s favor, but the Mississippi Supreme Court found that because the Chinese were not “white” they had to fall under the heading of “colored races.”This decision was upheld by the United States Supreme Court.

This setback proved to be only temporary and localized. Some smaller towns in Mississippi never barred Chinese students from attending white schools. By the early 1950s, other areas in the Delta had followed suit, educating Chinese but not Black students before Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 prohibited racial segregation in public schools. With access to white schools, the children of the Mississippi Chinese went off to college at an extremely high rate and entered relatively high-paying professional fields, including engineering and pharmaceuticals. Most would eventually move away.

There are still descendants of the original migrant workers in the Delta, some of whom run grocery stores, but for the most part, the Mississippi 

“The Mississippi Chinese” was published in 1971 to great acclaim, much of which was well-deserved. There are, however, a few parts of Loewen’s analysis that don’t quite hold up to modern scrutiny. For one, he mulls over cultural reasons why the Chinese were able to start groceries and most Black people at the time could not, referring to American Black and Chinese cultural norms — when the clearer reason can be found in his own text: Many of the Chinese came to Mississippi with small but significant amounts of capital, and were able to secure goods on credit from wholesalers who often refused to deal with the Black population. Formerly enslaved people mostly lacked the capital, or the means to secure it, to start businesses. Wholesalers rarely extended them credit.

As deservedly influential as it was, “The Mississippi Chinese” should not serve as a singular template for understanding the trajectory of every circumstance in which an immigrant groups found and filled a hole in the economy — whether Korean liquor store and grocery owners in Black neighborhoods in Los Angeles, the early generations of Irish laborers, or Jewish merchants. The currently fashionable impulse to turn somewhat similar histories into One Big Narrative flattens history and ignores what’s actually interesting. The idea of a fixed racial binary that eventually swallows up every incoming group might have made sense when Loewen was writing his book, but the demographics of the country have shifted drastically since then as millions of immigrants have entered a country where upward mobility looks much different than it did when the Mississippi Chinese first opened their shops.

The specific value offered by “The Mississippi Chinese” lies in its examination of white indifference. The Chinese in the Delta succeeded, in large part, because white people did not really think all that much about them, especially when contrasted with the malice they showed to Black Americans. Indifference and a little start-up capital, it seems, was enough.

There’s one other insight I took from Loewen’s book, although one he may have not anticipated. For the past decade or so, I’ve wondered why Asian American politics and discourse seems so preoccupied with the concerns of its most well-off and educated, latching on to issues such as representation in Hollywood movies, entry into Ivy League schools or the microaggressions of the corporate world. In the afterword to his book, Loewen writes that some of the Mississippi Chinese he interviewed objected to his emphasis on those who had intermarried with Black people. Why would he focus on them?

Loewen should not have felt a moment of remorse for this choice. His thorough reportage on those mostly poorer Chinese workers who went on to start Black families reveals a largely unspoken, yet intractable truth of immigrant upward mobility: Yes, the climb into the middle class oftentimes comes at the expense of Black communities. It also often requires you to abandon your own people.

Immigrant stories are told by the winners, which is why they tend to turn triumphalist, nostalgic and ornate over time. And in the case of the Mississippi Chinese or today’s professional Asian Americans, they are mostly told by those who took care to uphold the class and color lines — and who ignored or even tried to erase the evidence of those who did not.

 

Surprising Stat of the Week

 

There were 15 Korean churches in Montgomery, Alabama as of 2017, according to the Alabama News Center. This seems like an usually high number for any city that’s not a major metropolitan area or a military base. There are also somewhere between nine and 12 Korean restaurants.

What’s even odder is that the food they serve is exceptional — something I learned during a reporting trip to Alabama about six years ago. Los Angeles will always have the best Korean food in the United States, but Montgomery’s spreads are better than what I’ve found in Chicago, the Bay Area or most of New York City.

Montgomery’s thriving Korean food scene shows how the explanations for unexpected pockets of Asian migrants have changed since the publication of “The Mississippi Chinese.” Loewen said he first became interested in the Delta Chinese when he was enrolled at Mississippi State and noticed a number of Chinese classmates. He was curious how they got there and several years later, wrote a book about it. A lot of the Korean restaurants started showing up in Montgomery after around 2002, when Hyundai announced it would open up a plant there. More Korean companies, including the car manufacturer Kia, began setting up shop on the I-85 corridor.

When executives and workers from Korea came to Alabama, they needed some place to eat, which in turn opened up opportunities for Korean restaurateurs. Because those eateries were mostly catering to a fully-Korean, well-off customer base, the food they cook is pretty close to what you’ll find in Korea.