Race, Prejudice, Class Conflict, and Nationalism

Abstract

he United States has set the pattern of Oriental exclusion for such countries as Canada and Australia. On the Pacific Coast, and in California especially, a distinct and rather involved racial situation has developed; perhaps it may be thought of as the completion of a “race-relations cycle.” Here, because of the rapid cultural advancement of these colored people, the natural history of race relations has been greatly expedited. Like all racial situations, we approach this one also from the point of view of the white man’s initiative—he is the actor in chief; the Asiatics react to their best advantage. The Asiatics came into California because there was a great demand there for their labor; they came because the relatively high wages in California enticed them. But the “pull’ was far more significant than the “push.” No matter how great the lure of higher wages, they could by no means have “invaded” the Coast if the encouragement and inducement of certain hardpressed white employers did not facilitate it. The great wave of Asiatic common labor began to move upon the Western Hemisphere after the decline of the Negro slave trade—after 1845 especially. The West Indies, the Pacific Coast of America, and even South and East Africa received their quotas. The Asiatics came not as slaves but mainly as coolies; and gradually, among others, California and other Pacific states had their Chinese and Japanese problem; Trinidad and South Africa, their East Indian problem; and Cuba, its Chinese problem. These “Coolies” came mostly as contract laborers, some form of indentured-servant relationship; and “Wherever they were imported, they were used as substitutes for slave labor in plan-