Title: Washington Post
Headings: The real reasons the U.S. became less racist toward Asian Americans
The real reasons the U.S. became less racist toward Asian Americans
Can you tell us a little bit about the question that got you started on this book?
How did these earliest stereotypes — these very negative, nasty images — take root?
How true were these stories though? How much of this was racial propaganda, and how much of it was rooted in reality?

Content: Chinese immigrants came to do mining, then they ended up working on the Transcontinental Railroad, and agriculture. When those jobs died down, a lot of them moved to the cities where they started working in manufacturing. At that time, in the 1870s, the economy wasn’t doing that well in California. White American workers were very anxious about keeping their jobs. They looked around and they saw these newcomers who seemed very different from them. Story continues below advertisement
There already had been a long tradition in the Western world of portraying the “Orient” as unknowable and mysterious. American workers started attaching these ideas to the Chinese newcomers, who were an easy target for white American anxieties about the growth of industrial capitalism and the undermining of workers’ autonomy and freedom. They believed that the Chinese threatened American independence and threatened American freedom. Advertisement
These ideas were particularly popular among the white working class at the time. The momentum started to build in the American West.