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Chapter 1
INTRODUCTION
Why is it that “the humiliated of one culture become the shock troops of another,
the ignominy of a slave prompting a need to retrieve dignity and self-respect by
identifying with the master’s voice and the very forces that gave rise to domination in the
first place” (Gibbons 94)? In posing this question to the antebellum United States, Luke
Gibbons interrogates the interracial fight for economic power and value in a U.S. society
that is controlled by a system of institutionalized white racism. More specifically, this
interracial struggle that Gibbons emphasizes can be traced back to a system of minority
economic exploitation and disempowerment built upon the performance of a category of
whiteness. Using the power of whiteness to construct what Robert Jensen, in his work
The Heart of Whiteness, terms a white supremacist social system, a dominant white group
(those who adequately perform certain characteristics categorized as white) powerfully
exerts not only an external control, but also a pivotal internal oppression over groups
classified as non-white (i.e. minorities) (Jensen 3). This internal oppression of minority
groups comes in the form of a sociological process called internalization. With
internalization, a minority individual, observing the way in which the system of
institutionalized racism—although oppressive—delivers tangible economic rewards and
consequences to those classified as white, may be led to believe that his or her own value
and economic productivity is minimal in comparison to that gained by a white identity
(Jensen 5). Furthermore, with this belief in mind, the individual may choose to reject
many alternatives to the white system such as solidarity with other minority groups and
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instead may affirm the power of whiteness by imitating its racist propaganda and seeking
white approval at the expense of other minority groups.
Within this paper, I explore representations of internalization of white supremacy,
as I analyze two novels, John Okada’s No- No Boy (1957) and Chester Himes’ If He
Hollers Let Him Go (1945) that are set in the transitional two-year period immediately
following WWII. In both novels, a central tension revolves around the protagonists’
vacillation between economic alternatives available to minorities and the seemingly more
practical and effective economic values of the exploitive white system they occupy. This
central conflict between individual economic methods and the values of the white system
is illustrated within very specific textual instances in which African-American and
Japanese-American minority groups fight with each other in order to attain greater
economic success within the oppressive white supremacist system. Ultimately, these
literary representations of interracial minority fighting illustrate the underlying
phenomenon—whereby minority individuals come to formulate but then reject their own
economic alternatives—as they tend to internalize and emulate the values and economic
practices of the destructive white racist system that oppresses them. By pointing out this
process of internalizing white supremacy, both Okada and Himes do not merely highlight
a depressing and hopeless phenomenon. Instead, both authors offer their readers a
warning against the dangers of allowing a racist system of economic power to continue.
Furthermore, both authors also offer a solution to countering white economic
exploitation—acting upon the creative alternatives of cooperation that minority
individuals in each novel formulate.
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In this introduction to my thesis, I lay the groundwork for my larger project by
providing key theoretical and background data. First, I highlight the four major
theoretical concepts that inform my literary arguments: 1) racism as an institutionalized
system in the U.S.; 2) whiteness as a systemic concept; 3) minority internalization of this
white system; and 4) interracial minority conflict and imitation of white economic values.
By defining and underscoring these four major concepts, in particular, I construct my
literary argument that due to the institutionalized power and economic reality of the white
system, minority groups tend to fight each other as they internalize and emulate the very
system that exploits them. Following this theoretical section, I underscore the different
issues of agency that shaped African-American and Asian-American experiences in the
two- to three- year span immediately following WWII. Ultimately, by highlighting these
issues of agency, I will indicate the specific historical context and power dynamics that
served to shape the minority groups illustrated in each of the novels. Finally, building
from this historical overview, I indicate the primary critical stakes of my argument. That
is, I express how my thesis contributes to the burgeoning, controversial field of whiteness
studies, and, more significantly, how my thesis can be utilized as a point of departure for
reexamining and reconstructing how minority groups—and members of a dominant white
group, as well—confront and directly challenge the annihilating racism imbedded within
the white economic system in the U.S. Ultimately, I conclude this section by providing
brief outlines for each of the two chapters of my project.
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SOCIOCULTURAL CONTEXT: CULTURAL THEORY CONCERNING
WHITENESS, INSTITUTIONALIZED RACISM, AND INTERNALIZATION
In approaching the task of literary analysis in this paper, I chiefly rely upon
four key theoretical concepts derived from the current framework of American cultural
studies research. These four theoretical constructs include: 1) that racism in the U. S. is
an institutionalized system; 2) that this system grants and restricts access to resources
based on the symbolic power of whiteness; 3) that minorities who are oppressed under
this white system tend to internalize its ideologies and methods; and 4) that minorities
often emulate the white system and reject an alternative of solidarity amongst themselves.
I. Racism as an Institutionalized System
I build upon the idea that racism in the United States is an institutionalized
system. That is, the policies and structures that make up pivotal U.S. institutions – such
as education, economics, and politics – are inherently racist (Jensen 17). Due to this
systemic foundation for racism, the racial inequalities in the U.S. cannot simply be
attributed to individual racist tendencies, but rather to what Joe Feagin and Eileen
O’Brien, in White Men on Race, call “an umbrella framework that encompasses the racial
stereotypes and understandings common across the society. These are not just
individually held, but are part of a societal framework of knowledge about race matters”
(10). As this passage indicates, the racial inequalities that currently exist in the U.S. can
be attributed not only to racist individuals, but rather to a flawed social system in which
core racialized beliefs are imbedded in the decision-making processes—and are
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becoming part of a larger social framework. Omi and Winant in their work, Racial
Formations in the United States, refer to this system of racism as one in which a “racial
project”—how race is interpreted and defined by those in power—is utilized to fit
particular individuals and groups within a larger social structure or mode of distributing
power and resources (56).
II. System of racism is built upon the power of whiteness
Consequently, if racism in the U.S. is a systemic issue, the question then arises as
to how this system is constructed. According to Robert Bernasconi in his essay “Waking
Up White in Memphis,” whiteness is an “alliance” (19). Thus, the term whiteness is used
for group identification (who is a member of the alliance), as well as for consolidating
power within the group: an alliance is able to consolidate and utilize group resources
more effectively. Along with establishing this group status and solidarity, whiteness also
functions as a term of exclusion.
As Cheryl Harris argues, in her essay, “Whiteness as Property,” “whiteness as a
theoretical construct evolved for the very purpose of racial exclusion” (112). Thus,
whiteness is not only used to mark who is seen as white, but more importantly who is not.
By using whiteness as a mode of racial exclusion “European Americans” who have
classified themselves as white have constructed a system in the U.S. in which “all new
racial hierarchies …[revolve] around applying race labels to ‘nonwhite’ groups in order
stigmatize and exploit them, while at the same time reserving extra value for whiteness”
(Lipsitz, Possessive 3). As George Lipsitz suggests, by attributing a certain symbolic
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value to whiteness, one group of people— those who classify themselves as white— is
able to degrade (stigmatize) and ultimately, exploit, or unfairly utilize the resources of
other groups of people. Thus, whiteness in the United States primarily functions as a
means of accumulating and preserving power.
Ultimately, the identifying, exclusionary power of whiteness is connected with
actual tangible benefits, as it is united with the open affirmation of the law. That is,
whiteness is institutionalized. Under the economic, political, and legal systems of the
U.S., those individuals who classify themselves as white have been able to consolidate
tangible power.
As the law recognizes, either implicitly or explicitly, the settled expectations of
whites built on the privileges and benefits produced by white supremacy, it
acknowledges and reinforces a property interest in whiteness that reproduces …
subordination. (Harris 108)
This classification of whiteness as a type of legal property within the United States is
exemplified in the 1896 ruling in the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court case. Through
this case, in which the U.S. Supreme Court declared that whites and blacks were
“separate but equal,” policies of racial segregation and the consequent unequal
distribution of resources and access to facilities were federally validated. Furthermore, as
Justice William Rehnquist pointed out in 1954, the case ruling also asserted that “in the
long run it is the majority who will determine what the constitutional rights of the
minority are” (6). Thus, as the Plessy v. Ferguson case illustrates, those who claim to
possess whiteness, under the U.S. law, tend to receive a status of social privilege,
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acceptance, and power—akin to that experienced by a landowner. Furthermore, he or she
is also entitled to greater tangible advantages such as greater security under the law,
greater job opportunities, and greater access to resource and positions of political and
economic leadership. Therefore, the power of whiteness creates a social system in
America in which the most valuable asset or piece of symbolic property that one can
possess is not a piece of land or a reliable investment of capital, but rather a group
identity and status that classifies one as white.
III. Minority internalization of white racism
Under this racialized system in which group affiliation with whiteness grants
significant power, minority individuals—those classified as non-white—often suffer not
only external political, economic, and social disadvantages, but also significant
sociological reverberations (i.e. internalizing white supremacy). According to Donald
Baker, in his work Race, Ethnicity, and Power, racial domination is often achieved
internally through a state of dependency (74). In this state, the subordinate group feels a
sense of inferiority, and, so, it symbiotically relies upon the dominant group—with its
believed levels of higher expertise and knowledge—for a model of behavior. The
subordinate group, then, gradually comes to depend upon the dominant group due to
certain social tendencies that they develop over time. Foremost, Baker expresses that
“individuals [or groups] …who early in life are deprived of affection or believe that they
do not ‘belong’ often become distrustful of others” (174). However, joined with
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this distrust they also develop a strong need for “affiliation” with a “strong leader or
cause” (often the very source of their inferiority complex in the first place) (174).
In his work Black Skins: White Masks, Frantz Fanon explores this complex
dynamic of distrust and affiliation within a specific sociocultural framework. Although
specifically referring to Algerian colonization (rather than the U.S. situation), I assert that
one of the central arguments that Frantz Fanon expresses in his book, Black Skins: White
Masks, holds true for minority individuals under the American system of instutionalized
racism, as well. Both Americans classified as non-white and the post-colonial residents of
Algeria, operate under a system of economics that regulates access to resources and basic
rights based upon a specific performance by those classified as colonizers or white. Fanon
argues that in the colonized situation of native-born black Algerians there existed a
unique mixture of both fear of and also an affiliation with those in power resulting in the
contradictory and complex position of the colonized individual:
To be the ‘other’ is to feel that one is always in a shaky position, to be always on
guard, ready to be rejected, and…unconsciously doing everything needed to bring
about exactly that catastrophe. (76)
Therefore, through their sociocultural tendencies (internally responding to the oppressive
realities of the environmental system), the subordinate groups, or as is the case in this
thesis, minority groups in the U.S. often respond to the very real oppression and
economic consequences experienced under the dominant group by replicating its
repressive, power-garnering strategies as these methods often seem the most powerful
means available for garnering even some modicum of freedom and success. The process
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of internalizing racism, subsequently, entails that “after having been the slave of the
white man, he [subordinates] himself’ by accepting these notions and beliefs about his
own inferiority” (Baker 37).
IV. Internalization of racism leads to minority conflict
I posit that due to the process of internalizing racism as minority groups seek to
attain some sense of power and freedom, Okada and Himes show that they often imitate
the strategies of the oppressive white system rather than seeking solidarity amongst
themselves or revolution against the system. This penultimate choice to replicate the
oppressive strategies of the white system is at times a stark decision – complete and
consuming. This total internalization of white racism is exemplified in Richard
Rodriguez’s autobiography, Hunger of Memory. In this work, Rodriguez, a Mexican
American, chiefly argues against the institution of affirmative action, by claiming that it
grants undue privilege to minorities who have not necessarily earned a higher education
(141). By making this argument, Rodriguez indicates his complete internalization of the
oppressive white power system, due to the fact that he utterly ignores that minority
individuals do not have equal access to resources that would enable them to earn their
higher education as easily as white individuals, in the first place. That is, through a white
system of institutionalized racism, minority individuals are denied access to even the
most basic economic rights—labor rights, housing, educational access—that determine a
minority individual’s desire to pursue future education and the ability to accumulate
enough savings to make that pursuit a reasonable possibility. Thus, Rodriguez
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exemplifies a minority individual who has completely internalized the concepts of an
exploitive white system that hoards resources at the expense of disempowered minority
groups.
In contrast to Rodriguez, the characters in the two novels that form the focus of
my thesis do not so easily undergo an internalization of white strategies. The main
characters of both Okada’s No-No Boy and Himes’ If He Hollers Let Him Go exhibit a
sharp, painful struggle and tension between their own alternative modes of garnering
power and the pragmatic methods of the white system. Initially, the characters posit an
alternative concept of diverse minority groups such as African Americans and Japanese
Americans cooperating together to create a new sense of social belonging and a collective
of resources as the key to attaining a higher level of power. Ultimately, however, this
alternative is gradually chipped away by the observation that the exploitive methods of
the dominant group or those who classify themselves as white are more practically
successful and effective at garnering tangible economic rewards. This conflicted
internalization of whiteness can be defined as the gradual erosion of an interracial
alternative by the strategies and ideologies of a white racist system. It is absolutely
essential to keep in mind that this act is not represented by these authors in a way that
illustrates any sense of minority complacency or greed. In fact, it is quite the opposite.
Both Okada and Himes represent minority internalization of a racist system of whiteness
as a highly destructive, painful act that is often accompanied by a heavy struggle between
the desire to maintain ties of humane solidarity and unity and the desire to attain
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individual access to the most basic economic rights and benefits such as fair wages and
adequate housing conditions.
SOCIOCULTURAL CONTEXT: LITERARY THEORY AND THE REALIST
NOVEL AS A MEANS OF SOCIAL CRITIQUE
In approaching this thesis project, I will be taking each of the four theoretical
concepts I have outlined above and applying them to two works of literary fiction.
Making this connection between social theory and works of literary fiction, I build upon
current literary theory that posits literature, in particular, the realist novel form, as a
representation of active social phenomena. The realist novel is a form that has
traditionally sought to represent everyday life or reality. In representing real life, the
realist novel form is merely fictive in that it often makes up characters, settings, and
plots. However, on a deeper level, the novel often seeks to represent underlying social
structures, interrelationships, and systems of power as they really are.
Even more so in minority literature, such as Asian-American literature, as Lisa
Lowe expresses, in her work, Immigrant Acts, the unequal distribution of resources
between “dominant white citizens and subordinated racialized noncitizens” “emanates”
from the reality of the social system (that seen through the perspective of a nonwhite
group) that the novels represent (Lowe 27). That is, within minority realist novels
nonwhite American authors write through the lens of their own experiences under the
oppression of the U.S. white power structure. Through this perspective, the minority
authors tend to impart either an implicit or explicit social critique of the oppressive
realities of this social structure within their novels. Thus, the social critique that emerges
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in American minority realist novels tends to be an “immanent critique” or one that
emanates directly from the author’s actual experience of racial exploitation and
disempowerment (Lowe 28).
Having experienced real disempowerment and exploitation under the United
States system of white power, minority authors also tend to write novels that reflect the
specific history and methods of this institutionalized racism. According to Toni
Morrision, in, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the Literary Imagination, primary
characteristics of American fiction (primarily white romance fiction) cannot be
considered “separate and unaccountable” from the “presence” of African American
individuals in the United States, and the particular history of oppression that they have
experienced (5). Although Morrison’s argument chiefly focuses upon how AfricanAmerican history and forms of identification in the U.S. have shaped white romantic
representations of black characters, I assert that her central claim about American literary
representations extends to African-American, that is, minority literature, as well.
Extending Morrison’s argument, I argue that the oppressive racialized history and modes
of identifying African American individuals in the U.S. not only influenced white authors
but also, concurrently, how African-American authors saw themselves and, subsequently,
constructed the language and social system of their novels. Under the system of
institutionalized racism in the U.S. African-American authors were implicated in a
specific history of exploitation and were exposed to various, disempowering and
dehumanizing forms of identification. This real history and identification, ultimately,
exerted a “presence” that cannot be considered “separate” from how these African-
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American authors constructed the characters and social settings of their novels.
Therefore, in analyzing two minority, realist novels I investigate representations of the
United States social system that emanate from an actual experience of the oppression and
exploitation of the system of institutionalized racism within America.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND – ISSUES OF AGENCY
In analyzing the phenomenon of internalizing white racism, I will be focusing
upon two novels that were set and published within a very specific time period: the
reactionary two decades immediately following WWII. My analysis centers upon this
particular period in American history for two primary reasons. The first reason derives
from the fact that this time period was one in which the economic prosperity of white
Americans far outweighed that of minority individuals. That is, within the booming
economic atmosphere of the U.S. during and immediately following the war, economic
advantages such as greater housing availability, higher standards of living, and higher
savings rates primarily applied to only a select group of white individuals (Oliver and
Shapiro 22). Minority individuals were, thereby, subjected to an ever-widening economic
gap. In highlighting this specific economic situation, I will be illustrating not
only how the power of whiteness operates to maintain economic power and prosperity,
but, more importantly, I will be able to illustrate how the economic power of whiteness is
responsible for the generation of concurrent minority revolutions and conflicts.
Ultimately experiencing economic repression and at the same time being
motivated by the very recent war propaganda that urged fighting in the cause of freedom
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and democracy for all, African-American and Asian-American individuals began to
construct very culturally-specific and separate movements for greater liberties as minority
Americans. In constructing these very unique revolutions, each minority group primarily
functioned on its own, although there were a few small, outlying inter-minority alliances.
During the immediate post-war years, one of the primary characteristics is an emphasis
on increased group power. That is, each minority group fought separately in order to
secure civil rights and obtain greater advantages within the white system for itself (De
Graaf, Mulroy, and Taylor 332). Thus, human rights do not chiefly characterize the
revolutions of the period, but rather desires for group power. I, consequently, focus on
this immediate post-war period of change because it exemplifies the basic tenets of my
argument—that minority revolutions tend to actually uphold the white system of power
rather than tearing it down.
African-American Agency Within the Pre- and Post-WWII Period
Within the years from 1944-1960, the economic and revolutionary experiences of
two specific minority groups are especially key to my central arguments. The first is that
of African Americans. Immediately following the war, two major economic shifts
specifically affected the financial well-being of the average African American individual.
First, was what Daniel Pete, in his book Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s, terms,
the Southern “decline of labor intensive agriculture” (4). With the increase of new
technologies created during the war, and with many Southerners “having traveled and
tasted relative affluence during the war” apart from the Southern planting system, the
post-war period saw the major decline of the traditional, rural sharecropping economy of
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the southern United States (Pete 9). Southern African Americans migrated in enormous
numbers to cities across the U.S. especially those urban centers located on the West
coast. By the end of the 1950s, more than half of the South’s farm families had moved to
industrial cities across America (Pete 9). Moving to these industrial centers, African
Americans were placed in a much more competitive economic position. No longer simply
filling the role of portrayed subservient, submissive farm workers who lived in sparse
shacks that were set apart from the dwellings of white individuals and from each other,
African Americans were now working and living right alongside white workers and, even
more significantly, they were living together in concentrated numbers. These factors
contributed to an increased white urgency over the problem of integration (Pete 9). As a
result, white individuals viewed African Americans as a competitive threat within the
economic market, threatening the availability of higher-paying jobs, job security, and
prime housing. Thus, many white community leaders fought for continued segregation
(Bass 4). This segregation was maintained first and foremost through overt discrimination
in the workplace. African Americans were paid much lower wages and given jobs that
were both easily dispensable and lacking in upward mobility (Lipsitz, Rainbow at
Midnight 343). This overt labor discrimination was further augmented by the more subtle
economic discrimination taking place in the housing market.
The second major economic shift during this period, apart from mass AfricanAmerican migration into the industrial cities, was the major increase in funding for
government subsidized housing. The Federal Housing Act, originally passed in 1934,
established the modern mortgage industry by providing federal funds at low interest rates
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for the purpose of bolstering the housing market and, in turn, the economy (Oliver and
Shapiro 18). Immediately during and after the war, millions of dollars were provided
under this act in order to increase the accommodation of America’s urban centers and
facilitate the efficient return of American soldiers back into the workplace. However,
these funds and the housing practices established by the act were not administered
equally to each individual. Instead, the Housing Act became a means of maintaining
racial segregation and securing white prosperity in American cities (Avila 7). In the name
of so-called neighborhood stability, the act provided higher amounts of funding to white
individuals and subsidized the construction of specifically all-white suburbs on prime
pieces of outlying retail, and fueled the construction of much cheaper, specifically allblack ghetto tracts in the congested centers of urban areas (Oliver and Shapiro 7). This
racialized ghettoization of the American city exemplified the economic trend whereby
African Americans were left to suffer much lower standards of living and much lower
abilities to accumulate and use economic resources than their thriving white counterparts
during and immediately following the war. As George Lipsitz writes in Rainbow at
Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s, the housing restrictions of the 1940s left
African Americans with a highly decreased economic legacy due to fewer savings and
higher income taxes based upon a lack of secure equity. At the same time, the housing
restrictions motivated African Americans to initiate the legacy of the civil rights
movement (339).
Due to the increasing tension over the economic disparity in housing and the
economic competition brought about by increased migration into the cities, African
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Americans began to activate as agents for an economic revolution. Weary of seeing their
white industrial neighbors thriving in the post-war economy, African Americans began to
form their own groups to fight for greater economic opportunities. In many cases these
movements toward greater economic agency were racially specific and African
Americans simply united with each other. However, in a few rare instances especially
right before WWII African Americans actually allied themselves specifically with
Japanese workers and formed very small inter-racial labor unions. According to Marc
Gallicchio, in his work, The African American Encounter with Japan and China, these
small alliances often formed due to the African American perception of the Japanese as a
“universal abstract representing non-white unity against white supremacy” (26). That is,
the Japanese, having historically resisted American domination and control in their own
country, were seen as a universal symbol for non-white strength and resistance in the
United States. Therefore, African-American and Japanese-American laborers bonded on
a small scale before the war due to the shared commonality of their status and repression
as nonwhites in the U.S. (Okihiro 62).
Unfortunately, though, with the advancement of WWII and the Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbor these African American and Japanese labor alliances became increasingly
rare. Gallicchio highlights the cause of this growing distance between African American
agents of change and Japanese Americans when he indicates that, “as long as black
Americans believed that their conditions might be improved through organization and
protest, they were not likely to jeopardize their chances of success by aligning themselves
with a potential enemy of the U.S.” (16). Thus, immediately following WWII, African
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Americans tended to form their own racially exclusive, activist groups in order to better
appeal to and garner for themselves the power inherent in the system of whiteness. In
other words, they saw themselves set apart as friends rather than enemies of the state.
In the WWII years, African Americans most commonly formed very racially
specific “colored workers” unions. The goals of these unions included seeking higher
wages, greater opportunities for job advancement, and fairer work benefits. These groups
were also primarily identified by their exclusivity. They did not fight for the equal rights
of all workers, just the “colored worker.” Following this same trend, the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) increased its membership
by the thousands in the war years and immediately following (Gallicchio 25). Again,
these groups which began to powerfully urge for increased economic opportunities only
fought for them on a racially-exclusive level: increased power was only desired for one
group, not for all. This pattern of exclusivity directly modeled the very white, hierarchal
system that the African Americans of the post-war period were beginning to revolt
against. That is not to say, in any terms that African-American activists of this period
were acting in a way that was defined by excessive selfishness or close-mindedness.
Instead, the tendency for African-American groups to form racially-exclusive forms of
agency points directly to the destructive power exerted by a white system of
institutionalized racism over the ability of minority groups to achieve economic change.
According to the system of whiteness, only one group could be eminent, and so African
Americans during the years from 1944-1960 in the hopes of gaining some sort of access
to this zenith of economic rewards (even just to taste the most basic economic rights and
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freedoms), crafted a revolution that was racially exclusive. During this time, civil rights
became synonymous with African-American rights and not the rights of all minorities.
Asian-American Agency Within the Pre- and Post- WWII Period
Immediately following WWII, Asian economic experiences also resulted in the
initiation of an exclusive activism for increased economic opportunities. Prior to
World War II, Asian Americans especially in the western United States were exposed to
economic discrimination based upon their race. For example, in 1908, many Western
states passed legislation restricting the immigration of Asian individuals and denying any
current Asian immigrants the rights of citizenship (Weston 31). Furthermore, in 1913,
California passed the Alien Land Law, which specifically “forbid the purchase and
ownership of land by any alien ineligible for citizenship” (Weston 33). Thus, Asian
immigrants living in California were denied the economic privilege and security of
owning their own land. This discrimination continued well into the twentieth century, and
it was continually justified by the idea that Asians should be denied the economic rights
of American citizens due to their position as both a social peril and an economic threat.
That is, Japanese Americans in the post-war period were perceived as a social “yellow
peril,” an uncivilized, barbaric influence, and a minority group (who with a pre-war
model of community cooperation and solidarity possessed higher rates of average
economic success in the U.S.) that was seen as a potential threat to the prime jobs and
land of white Americans.
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By the World War II period, Asian immigrants inhabiting the western United
States were still being exposed to this racialized discrimination and yet many were
making great economic strides in spite of it. In particular, the Nisei (second generation
Japanese), who were born in the U.S., and thereby were American citizens by birth, were
garnering high levels of education, establishing their own independent businesses, and
amassing wealth and land. Unfortunately, however, this success only exacerbated white
racist fears concerning the economic threat of the Asian American population in the
West. Therefore, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, white individuals across the
western United States constructed a legal justification for stripping Asian Americans in
the west of all their economic earnings. Under the auspices of patriotism, 110,000
Japanese, “70,000 of whom were American citizens,” were forcibly removed from their
homes and placed in concentration camps across the U.S., even as “far away as Arkansas
and Wyoming” (O’Brien 7). In addition to this forced removal, Japanese internees were
also robbed of all their economic resources. As one Japanese individual remarked,
[it] is difficult to describe the feeling of despair and humiliation experienced by
all of us…as we watched the Caucasians coming to look over our possessions and
offering such nominal amounts knowing we had no recourse but to accept.
(Takaki 393)
Due to this internment, many Japanese-American individuals were left, after the war, in a
desperate situation characterized by both economic degradation and social insecurity and
unsure of where they stood as Americans and where they stood in relation to the shattered
Japanese-American community now scattered across the U.S.
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In the period immediately following the war, Japanese-American individuals on
the western coast of the United States responded to their new situation—as individuals
struggling to rebuild a social identity and economic base in the United States—by
constructing a very racially specific literary revolution. Before the war, many Nisei
individuals had begun to subtly rebel against their more traditional Issei parents in their
approach to American-Asian policies. That is, they began to rebel against the more
traditional Japanese policy of submission to one’s position within a “specific social
nexus” and their parents’ emphasis upon complete assimilation within the United States
(Moore 143). Instead, many young Japanese-American individuals began to try and find a
complex individual balance between being Japanese and being American. That is, they
sought to discover an identity that was somewhere in between.
Within the decade following the war, this rebellion turned into a large cultural,
intellectual movement as Asian-American writers, turned their chief focus upon trying to
negotiate and fit a distinct individual Asianness and power, with a collective American
identity or to balance being both Asian and American. According to Viet Nguyen, in his
work, Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America, prominent Asian
American writers of the post-World War II period, were chiefly involved in a literary
revolution that fought to “claim a domestic authenticity that [did] not threaten whites”
(22). That is, they sought to garner greater Asian-American acceptance and power within
the United States, but only as that power fit into the preexisting white racist system.
Ultimately, this pattern of attempting to gain power by appealing to and
replicating the system of racism in the U.S. is one that characterizes both national and
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trans-national Japanese and American relations. On the one hand, throughout the
twentieth century the Japanese replicated the Western hierarchal system in its own
national policies in an attempt to ally Japan more closely with U.S. power and resources.
However, at the same time, the Japanese also placed themselves outside of the U.S.
racialized system. According to Yokiko Koshiro, in his book, Trans-Pacific Racisms and
the U.S. Occupation of Japan, many Japanese in both America and Japan encourage their
children to believe that “higher learning” and aesthetic pursuits can “overcome” any
racial exploitation (10). Thus, throughout the course of twentieth century Japanese and
American relations and especially during the WWII period there existed an often
paradoxical dialectic between a Japanese striving for insider status (white power in the
U.S.) and a belief that Japanese literary agency could triumph over and remain outside
that same system of power
As a result of this insider and outsider dialectic, Asian American authors in the
post- WW II period, such as Carlos Bulosan, in his work America Is in the Heart, and
Louis Chu, in his novel Eat a Bowl of Tea, often constructed forms of literary agency in
which Asian-American characters enacted the very policies of economic exploitation
practiced by the oppressive white system. As Nguyen states, these fictional characters
followed the pattern whereby, “to fulfill the conditions of loyalty…the alien must find
another alien whom he can denounce and against whom he can define his necessary
inclusion” (75). In many works of Asian-American writing in the late 1940s, the other
alien that was exploited in order to gain a higher position within the white hierarchy was
23
the African-American individual. It is key to note here, that the exploitation of the
African-American characters in these works of Asian-American literary agency was not a
reflection of minority gullibility—simply being duped into the practices of a white
system—but rather a reflection upon the debilitating power of the very real racist system
of whiteness. Ultimately, by embedding this alien African-American figure within the
written form, Japanese-American authors, in particular, engaged in an aesthetic act of
agency that seemed one of the most tangible ways to potentially remove them from the
oppressive system of institutionalized racism within the United States. Perhaps, higher
learning and achievement could set the Japanese-American individual free. Thus, the
Asian-American literary revolution urging for greater economic power and social
acceptance for the Asian-American individual in the U.S. was characterized by its
exclusivity and imitation of the exploitive practices of the white system of power.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND—ISSUES OF ASIAN-AMERICAN AND
AFRICAN-AMERICAN CONSTRUCTIONS OF MASCULINITY
In addition to the issues of agency that shaped the production of AfricanAmerican and Asian-American literature in the post-WWII period, particular issues of
gender, definitions and identifications of masculinity, also shaped literary creation in this
post-war and Cold War period.
Asian-American Constructions of Masculinity
During the post-war and Cold War period, a popular version of both Japanese and
Japanese-American masculine identity was that of the “salaryman.” According to Kam
24
Louie and Morris Low’s work, Asian Masculinities: The Meaning and Practice of
Manhood in China and Japan, the “salaryman” masculine identity was one that defined
the male as the primary producer and provider in the home (118). This patriarchal role
functioned as a reflection of the militarization taking place in the Cold War period in the
U.S. That is, as Cynthia Enloe states in The Morning After, the need to protect America
from foreign attack during the Cold War required the “militarization” of masculinity at
home. In other words, the male was defined according to his role as courageous protector
and defender (Enloe 18). In addition to this militarized identity, the Japanese-American
male was also defined according to his ability to maintain a labor position as an
extremely loyal, hard-working employee in a private sector, white-collar job (Louie and
Low 120). Thus, in the post-war and Cold War period, the Japanese-American male was
primarily defined according to his ability to defend his family and his country, as well as
his ability to maintain a secure, middle-class job. This masculinity was, ultimately, one
that embodied the dominant white masculine identity or as Louie and Low put it, “the
dominant or hegemonic form of masculinity, one that is culturally privileged” (118).
However, although this “salaryman” definition of Japanese-American masculinity
was tied to the rewards of white “cultural privilege,” it was, in actuality, complicated by
the racial realities facing Japanese-American males in the aftermath of World War II.
Following the internment that took place on the U.S. West Coast during the war, many
Japanese-American males had to face the reality whereby the racialized system of power
within the U.S. denied them the ability to both defend their families and their place in the
economic market – as both their homes and their jobs were stripped away by the
25
internment process. Thus, the ideal salaryman masculine identity was called into question
as it was affected by racial exploitation. Consequently, Asian-American male writers
such as John Okada in the post-war and Cold War period, crafted representations of
Japanese-American masculinity that embodied tension. This tension dealt with the
divergence between the ideal salaryman masculine identity and the real racial
disempowerment that made the maintenance of this version of maleness unattainable for
the Japanese-American male.
African-American Constructions of Masculinity
Like the tensions contingent upon Asian-American male literary representations
of masculinity, African-American literature during the post-war period also evinced
tensions concurrent upon definitions of masculinity. Literature written by AfricanAmerican male authors including Chester Himes in the post-war period, reflected a clear
tension between two very different definitions of African-American masculinity. The first
definition of African-American masculinity was that of a hyper-sexualized, aggressive,
violent male—e.g. the gangsta or player. According to Patricia Hill Collins’ work, Black
Sexual Politics – African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism, this definition was
used by those in power, those who define themselves as white, as both a tool of
denigration that restricted African-American men from the “work of the mind” and a
reflection of desire that projected onto the black male a desirable sexual freedom and
power (Collins 153). Due to its duplicitous nature, as both a tool for discrimination and
an alternative to constrained white masculinity, this definition of black masculinity often
served as a point of conflict within African-American literature of the post-war period.
26
On the one hand, some African-American male authors embraced this masculinity as the
most natural black male identity because it was a direct contrast to the dominant white
male identity (one defined by control and moderation) (Collins 152). As Patrick Johnson,
discusses in his book, Appropriating Blackness – Performance of the Politics of
Authenticity, these black authors associated black masculinity with male strength and
power and whiteness with “effeminacy” (Johnson 58). With the literary appropriation of
this version of African-American masculinity, however, African-American male authors
also had to deal with its material consequences. That is, this version of black masculinity
was used by those in power—a majority of white readers—to define African Americans
as deviant and subsequently, invalidate their literary production and voice, the work of
the mind.
As a result of the negative literary consequences of this gangsta version of
African-American masculinity, some black male authors of the post-war period chose to
reject it. In its place, these African-American male writers asserted an asexual, moderate,
friendly version of black masculinity (Collins 154). According to Collins, this male
identity was “a highly marketable commodity” (168). That is, African-American
literature portraying this version of black masculinity was more readily accepted and
valued by those who practiced the power of whiteness because it presented no threat or
alternative to the dominant performance of white male identity. However, this portrayal
of the black male also denied any individual African-American expression or exploration
of sexuality and gender identity—especially as these categories intersected with race and
racial exploitation. Therefore, in the literature written by African-American male authors
27
in the post-war, Cold War period there exists a tension between divergent versions of
masculinity and attempts to navigate between them.
CRITICAL STAKES
I have intentionally constructed an argument that will significantly contribute to
the primary fields of academics and social activism. First and foremost, my thesis
contributes to the field of academics as it applies to the emergent area of whiteness
studies. According to Vron Ware and Les Back, in their book, Out of Whiteness,
whiteness studies, specifically cultural whiteness studies examine “whiteness” in terms of
its involvement in the “making of subjects in the formation of structures and institutions”
(Ware and Back 24). Whiteness, in this field, is examined in its role as a cultural tool of
power that is used to construct and shape the institutions of a collective society in
general, and the United States more specifically. Since the mid-1990s, looking at
whiteness in this way has become a prolific field of study in “mainstreamed and wellrespected academic gatherings such as the American Social Science Association, the
Modern Language Association, the Institute for Culture and Study, the American Studies
Association and the like” (Hill 3). Thus, constructing this thesis, I am contributing to this
burgeoning field of study that, as yet, is still in its early stages, and still in need of literary
studies, like mine, that examine the highly complex relationship between the white
system of minority exploitation and minority choices for revolution and relations
themselves.
28
Apart from adding highly unique material to the field of whiteness studies, my
study also makes academic contributions in that it automatically enters into the
controversial debates surrounding the field of whiteness studies itself. Being a work that
investigates the power of whiteness, my study enters into the mass of works that have
been charged with serving to “exacerbate the problem of white hegemony that [they]
pretend to unmask” (Hill 16). That is, by tightly focusing on the issues of whiteness, my
study – and others in the field of whiteness studies – have been charged with actually
making the symbolic power of whiteness even more significant and all-powerful by
giving it undue emphasis. However, my study refutes this controversial claim by, first,
looking at whiteness through works of fiction that are written by minority authors or
those oppressed under the white system. Thus, my study does not emphasize the
experience of those in power—praising or exalting the power of whiteness—but rather it
emphasizes the more negative repercussions and consequences of the system, itself.
Furthermore, by emphasizing this minority perspective on whiteness, I illustrate how
whiteness studies is not simply a dichotomous issue that always emphasizes a white over
non-white dialectic. Through the works of minority fiction that I have selected, the power
of whiteness operates in such a complex way that the struggle for power does not simply
center around a so-called superior white versus an ostensibly inferior non-white conflict,
but more deeply it takes place along non-white relational lines, as well. Thus, my study of
the U.S. white racist system engages with the current arguments raised against the field of
whiteness studies, by providing a perspective on whiteness that is highly complex, one
that does not simply emphasize whiteness vs. non-whiteness.
29
As my study gives voice to the minority individual and also reveals the
complexities associated with inter-minority relationships, it is my ultimate intention to
imbed a foundation for activism within my essay. It is my paramount goal, with this
literary study, to stimulate leading figures, both minority and white individuals, in the
literary and social studies fields to pay closer attention to my analytical arguments
concerning institutionalized racism and its antagonistic effects upon interracial
cooperation. By securing the attention of these leading creative and critical minds, I
ultimately intend to encourage a crucial reevaluation specifically within the area of
American cultural analyses. For, as my study indicates, past minority revolutions have
only succeeded in emulating and reinforcing the pre-existing racialized, hierarchal
system. It is, therefore, necessary that leading figures in the creative fields of literature
and cultural studies collaborate together to construct and encourage new methods of
revolution. Ultimately, my study intends to actively encourage new dialogue among
creative and critical leaders as to what new methods can be crafted in order to unite
diverse groups of all different ethnic backgrounds, deconstruct the hierarchal system of
white power, and construct a new system of equality in its place. This new system would
not be one that pits one group of people against another, but instead, would exemplify the
egalitarian, cooperative principle upon which America was founded: that under God we
are all created equal, and, subsequently, ought to treat each other as such.
CRITICAL ARGUMENTS
30
Finally, having highlighted all the necessary background information and stakes
involved in the construction of my essay, I will indicate the central critical arguments of
the two chapters of my study.
Chapter 1
In the first chapter, I will closely analyze two very specific scenes within John
Okada’s No-No Boy. The significance of this analysis is two-fold. In both passages,
Okada highlights instances of minority conflict between groups of African Americans
and Japanese Americans that he implicates as stemming from a desire to garner greater
acceptance into and value from the white system of economic power. In addition to
illustrating the economic root of many minority conflicts, these scenes also point to the
tendency toward internalization, whereby minority individuals support the white system
of power rather than uniting and fighting against it. In my first chapter, I ultimately argue
that Okada paints internalization as a process in which minority individuals (after much
internal wrangling) choose to support the white economic system of power over their
own alternative visions of cooperation and solidarity, not because they are self-absorbed
or gullible, but because the white economic system appears to be the only pragmatic way
to achieve even the most basic economic rights and benefits.
Chapter 2
Within the second chapter, I will focus my analysis upon two very specific scenes
in If He Hollers Let Him Go, in order to emphasize Himes’ representation of the
phenomenon of the minority internalization of a system of white economic power. In my
31
analysis, I will focus first on how both scenes highlight economic competition as the root
of conflict and disunity between minority groups—particularly Japanese American and
African American groups. Ultimately, by emphasizing this minority disjuncture I will
further analyze both scenes to highlight what Robert Lee, in his essay, “Violence Real
and Imagined: The World of Chester Himes’ Novels,” terms the process by which
continual external destruction by the white racialized system produces an internal “selfdestruction” (15). That is, continual oppression by an unfair white economic hierarchy
produces a response within the individual in which the competitive, oppressive
tendencies of the dominant system are internalized and individual modes of revolution
and action are repressed. Ultimately, in this chapter, however, I argue that Himes
illustrates the process of minority internalization of whiteness as one motivated not by
selfishness or ignorance on the part of minority individuals or groups, but rather by the
apparent pragmatic reality that even the most basic economic rights (those associated
with labor, housing, and social power) could not be achieved apart from a white
economic system.
32
Chapter 2
[T]he Negro who was always being mistaken for a white man become a white man and he
becomes hated by the Negroes with whom he once hated on the same side. And the young
Japanese hates the not-so-young Japanese who is more Japanese than himself and the
not-so-young, in turn, hates the old Japanese who is all Japanese, and, therefore even
more Japanese than he….(Okada 135-36)
At the center of John Okada’s novel, No-No Boy, there lies a continual thread of
interracial or minority economic conflict. However, Okada does not simply tie this
interracial conflict between Japanese Americans and African Americans to a monolithic
tendency toward mutual animosity as if each group just inexplicably disliked the other.
Instead, he implicitly ties this central theme of minority struggle to an underlying, highly
complex, often paradoxical phenomenon: the minority internalization of a system of
white power manifested through economic conflict. Okada investigates and complicates
the process of minority internalization of the power of whiteness by highlighting scenes
of conflict between groups of Japanese Americans and African Americans. That is, he
explains the struggle that often accompanies the tendency of groups of color to displace
alternative power structures of interracial cooperation and unity with an imitation of a
racist power system that is built upon hierarchy, competition, and minority
disempowerment. Ultimately, this focus upon the tumult of internalization, rather than
highlighting weakness (emotional or intellectual) on the part of those classified as nonwhite, primarily points to the extremely unjust and debilitating effects of a system of
power that distributes the most basic economic rights and rewards according to a narrow
categorization of whiteness.
33
In this chapter, I argue that economic conflict between minority groups often
stems from the complex, often paradoxical internalization of the oppressive practices of a
racist power structure. However, before engaging in a close literary analysis, I address a
few theoretical, historical, and biographical frameworks. In the first segment of this
chapter, I highlight a few major cultural and theoretical concepts. First, I describe how
whiteness rather than just being a physical designation, more importantly functions as a
performative category based upon an individuals’ performance of traits categorized as
white (i.e. moderation, political conservatism, and Christianity); second, I emphasize the
material and internal implications of a system of whiteness that distributes access to
economic rights and rewards based upon the performance of whiteness; and finally, I
illustrate the conflicted phenomena of minority internalization that often accompanies
this system of whiteness (and was articulated specifically in Okada’s post-war novel).
Following this section, I provide a brief overview of the following historical points that
are relevant for my literary analyses: the internment of Japanese Americans during
WWII, acts of Asian-American agency in the labor market during the post-WWII and
Cold War periods, and issues of Asian-American masculinity and militarization
following the war. Then, I focus specifically on John Okada’s personal experience and
development as an Asian-American author, thereby connecting the broader historical
context with Okada’s individual cultural production.
Immediately following this initial section, I move into the literary analysis and
critique of Okada’s No-No Boy. First, I analyze a scene in which Okada illustrates a
conflict between a group of African-American individuals and his main character, Ichiro,
34
a Japanese American. Through this passage, Okada initially illustrates that minority
conflict tends to arise from a struggle to garner greater acceptance into and material
benefits from a white system of economic and racial power. Alternately, however, within
this same passage, Okada also points to the tendency toward internalization whereby
minority individuals experience fierce internal struggle between their own economic
alternatives of unity and cooperation and the pragmatic denial of basic economic rights
and benefits contingent upon refusing to perform whiteness. After analyzing this first
scene of minority conflict within No-No Boy, I turn to a second argument in the novel. In
this passage, Okada represents a situation in which a group of Japanese Americans
initiate conflict with a group of African Americans. This scene initially illustrates that the
root of much minority conflict is a fight for greater access to the economic rights tied to a
white system of economic power. However, in addition, the interracial conflict in this
second passage also points to the underlying process of internalization. Ultimately,
through both of these scenes, Okada underscores that minority groups and individuals
generate a vast resource of alternative economic practices such as cooperation and
acceptance. However, these practices often fail to come to fruition not due to undue
minority weakness or selfishness, but primarily due to a an economic system of whiteness
that restrictively controls and regulates nearly every attempt to access even the most
economic rights and resources.
35
CULTURAL AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK – ASIAN-AMERICAN
INTERNALIZATION OF WHITENESS AND ITS REPRESENTATION IN POSTWWII LITERATURE
Building upon the work presented in the introduction, here I specifically focus
upon three theoretical concepts that underlie Okada’s novel. First, I highlight the concept
of whiteness as a performative category utilized to negotiate power. Secondly, I describe
the major external (access to the most basic economic rights and rewards) and internal
(sense of self and individual voice) consequences of performing whiteness experienced
by many Asian Americans in the immediate post-war and Cold War years. Finally, I
emphasize the literary representation of the tension incumbent upon the Asian-American
process of internalization.
The concept of whiteness as a performative category implicitly informs No-No
Boy. As current American cultural studies scholars have argued, race is not merely a
phenotypical category, one based on outward appearance or color. Instead, outward
appearance simply serves as an initial marker of categorization, making it easier to
relegate an individual to a non-white or white category, on the spot (Omi and Winant 55).
This phenotypical categorization of race primarily functions to make racial assignments
appear more tangible, stable, and reliable. So, in one sense, race is, as Kandice Chuh
argues in her work, Orientations: Mapping Studies in Asian Diaspora, a bodily
“inscription,” in part, a categorization that is based upon one’s physical appearance (12).
This working definition of race would help to explain the enormous surge in AsianAmerican eyelift surgeries—eradicating the bodily inscription of Asianness—in both
36
Japan and the U.S. in the early- and mid-twentieth century. However, as Eric Lott points
out in his article, “Racial Cross-Dressing and the Construction of American Whiteness,”
racial categories are in actuality much more fluid and performative in nature than basic
phenotypical assignments. That is, an individual is categorized as white based on his or
her performance of specific cultural traits (Lott 1). Particular traits associated with the
performance of whiteness include moderation, self-control, purity, political conservatism,
a Puritan work ethic, proper English, and the practice of Christianity. In the same vein, an
individual is categorized as black or other based on the performance of traits that are
counter to these traits of whiteness. For example, wildness, an alien tongue, and a
different religion or mode of practicing Christianity might be considered by many whites
to be counter to their social and cultural values. Ultimately, this performative
categorization of whiteness functioned within the Asian-American community to both
externally and internally oppress and exploit. Matthew Jacobsen argues that a
performance of whiteness is connected with the accumulation of social, political, and
economic “capital.” It has material benefits and the power to enact political and social
change (110). Thus, the systematic categorization of whiteness performance functions to
redistribute both material and social resources, both monetary rewards and deeper
internal ones.
As Cheryl Harris argues, in her essay, “Whiteness as Property,” whiteness as a
form of symbolic property “is accompanied by the right to exclude” (110). Thus,
whiteness is not only used to mark who is white, but more importantly who is not. That
is, those who are categorized as white (who perform the traits of whiteness) have access
37
to a particular right—a privilege of power validated by the law—to socially and
economically exclude those classified as non-white. According to George Lipsitz, in his
work, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, by using whiteness as a mode of racial
exclusion “European Americans” who have classified themselves as white have
constructed a system in the U.S. in which “all new racial hierarchies …[revolve] around
applying race labels to ‘nonwhite’ groups in order to stigmatize and exploit them, while
at the same time reserving extra value for whiteness” (Lipsitz, Possessive 3). As Lipsitz
suggests, by attributing a certain symbolic value to “whiteness,” members of a particular
group, those who classify themselves as white and perform the traits associated with this
categorization, are able to degrade (stigmatize) and ultimately, exploit, or unfairly utilize
the resources of, other groups of people, those categorized as non-white. Thus, whiteness
in the United States primarily functions as a means of accumulating and preserving
economic labor rights and benefits. In his work, The Wages of Whiteness, David
Roediger, writing about the symbolic function of whiteness within the post-Civil War
institutionalized systems of the U.S. (particularly economic production and politics),
argues that “whiteness was a way in which white workers responded to a fear of
dependency on wage labor and to the necessities of capitalist work discipline” (13). More
specifically, Roediger expresses that whiteness as a symbolic category developed as a
means of protecting the economic privileges and rights belonging to those categorized as
white from the competition and power of wage labor and the working classes from those
individuals classified as non-white minorities.
38
Under this institutionalized system of whiteness, many Asian Americans on the
Pacific West Coast during the immediate post-war and Cold War period experienced
several external repercussions. Foremost, many Asian Americans experienced the loss of
land and goods experienced in the internment. This tangible loss of material resources
resulted in not only a struggle to relocate and regain jobs following the war, but also in
what Chuh refers to as an “ethico-political” struggle (80). That is, with a loss of material
goods and rights, many Asian Americans came to doubt American law as an effective
means for achieving social change. Thus, the political and social action of Asian
Americans immediately preceeding World War II was deeply inscribed with the “less
than honorable treatment” that they received under a U.S. law that did not deliver “equal
justice for all,” but rather only equal justice for all who were categorized as white (Chuh
87). Situated outside a national sense of identity, Asian Americans from the post-war
period into the Cold War faced a continual struggle to unite their own individual actions
and conceptions of self with a larger faith in the surrounding social structure. They could
no longer believe that what they did individually to produce positive social change would
actually manifest itself in the nation.
Experiencing the very real internal and material consequences of the system of
whiteness in the U.S., many Asian Americans in the post-war period experienced a
process of internalization characterized by a tension between the desire to create an
alternative system of distributing power and the material draw of the system of whiteness,
itself. Within the literature of the period, this tension of internalization is a focal point of
representation. As George Lipsitz indicates in Time Passages: Collective Memory and
39
American Popular Culture, many pieces of minority literature in the 1940s and 1950s
represented the tension of internalization through the juxtaposition of what he terms
“counter-memory” and dominant history. According to Lipsitz, “counter-memory” is an
alternative way of looking at history through the personal perspectives of minority or
marginalized individuals (Lipsitz, Time Passages 213). However, alongside this countermemory, a viewpoint that offers a new alternative mode of looking at history and one’s
place in the world, many Asian-American writings of the post-war period also illustrated
the strong pull of the system of white power, itself. This tense struggle between countermemory alternatives and the tangible power of whitenes indicated the inherent
contradictions of the process of minority internalization.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND – ASIAN-AMERICAN ISSUES OF AGENCY IN
PRE- AND POST- WWII SEATTLE
In order to appropriately contextualize Okada’s literary representations, a brief
historical overview of Japanese-American agency in pre- and post-war Seattle is also
essential. In this section, I define the primary characteristics of Japanese-American
political and economic agency, the means of exerting power or influence, as it appears in
pre- and post-war Seattle.
Japanese-American agency in pre-war Seattle was facilitated largely by the social
and communal structures that were established by the Issei—first generation Japanese
immigrants to the United States. Viewing life in America, for themselves, as something
temporary rather than permanent (due in large part to the fact that they were restricted
40
from owning their own land according to the 1920 Alien Land Act) many Issei in pre-war
Seattle emulated the communal traditions and social constructions of Japan rather than
seeking immediate assimilation into the United States (Fugita and Fernandez 15). As
Fugita and Fernandez have found, most significant among these social constructions was
the central position of the ken network (17). In Japan, the ken (extended family unit)
served as the foundation for all community structures.1 With this social structure the
name and needs of the family (interpersonal harmony) were paramount over individual
needs (autonomy). Transplanting this social tradition of family networking to the United
States, the Issei in pre-war Seattle set up very tightly knit ethnic enclaves. Although these
ethnic enclaves were also heavily shaped by racialized economic factors that kept
Japanese-Americans from accessing specific housing zones and even owning their own
land, these enclaves with names like “Little Tokyo” or Japantown (Nihonmachi)—
known as the heart of Japanese-American life in the Pacific Northwest—also recalled a
close connection to Japan and a cultural tendency toward Japanese-American community
in pre-war Seattle (Fugita and Fernandez 19).
Through the initial ethnic enclaves that they established within the city, Japanese
Americans in pre-war Seattle created a powerful tool for political agency. By
emphasizing the needs of the community as top priority, as well as maintaining a social
network that concentrated individuals of similar background and economic expertise and
resources (those with similar struggles, points of interest, and levels of income to invest),
1
The muras (villages) in Japan were built around a particular family network – with multiple generations
residing together and assisting each other in both the domestic and public work of the community (Fugita
and Fernandez 17).
41
Japanese-American enclaves facilitated the organization of several grassroots
community-improvement clubs and institutions.2 All of these groups, in turn, were
represented under the arm of the Seattle Japanese Association, a branch of the prominent
Japanese Association of Washington State. The Seattle Japanese Association, founded in
1910, was a group devoted to “assisting new arrivals, fighting anti-Japanese legislation,
supporting social and educational programs, acting as quasi-Japanese government offices,
and promoting the immigrant community’s economic interests” (Fugita and Fernandez
24). Thus, the role of the Japanese American Association in Seattle was to act as a
political agent not just in Japanese American and U.S. relations, but also in relations
between Japanese-Americans and the Japanese. In other words, it was set up to serve both
a national and international political role. Finally, in addition to the Japanese American
Association, the Japanese American Citizens’ League was founded in Seattle in 1930, as
an organization through which Japanese-American businessmen could pool their
resources and fight for greater economic rights and rewards for their labor (Fugita and
Fernandez 25).
In addition to fostering political agency, the communal structure of pre-war
Japanese-American Seattle also generated specific modes of economic agency. The
primary social structure, the ethnic enclave, established by the Japanese Americans in
pre-war Seattle facilitated the establishment of their role as economic “middleman
minorities” (Bonacich and Modell 4). According to Bonacich and Modell, in their work,
The Economic Basis of Ethnic Solidarity: Small Business in the Japanese-American
These clubs included the Seattle Japanese Youth Club, the Japanese Chef’s Friendship Association, and
the Japanese Businessmen’s Club (Fugita and Fernandez 24).
2
42
Community, “middleman minorities” are groups that “occupy a position not at the bottom
of the social structure, but somewhere in the middle, typified by a concentration in
independent small business” (4). Some of the Japanese-American population in pre-war
Seattle established its economic position between the American upper and middle classes
(primarily white) and the working populous—mostly disenfranchised minority groups
(5).
Due to a highly efficient structure of social networking and community
cooperation (an alternative to the white system built upon economic competition,
exploitation, and hierarchy), many Japanese-Americans in pre-war Seattle were able to
concentrate in the small business or agricultural fields. The social networking set up in
the Japanese-American enclaves was a system in which older, established Japanese
Americans, Issei, utilized their economic resources and labor positions to secure
employment for incoming or younger generation Nisei Japanese (Bonacich & Modell
35). Many of these older Japanese Americans owned their own small businesses within
the ethnic enclaves of the city and they primarily served as go-betweens between the
general American populous and the Japanese-American community selling mainstream
goods to a primarily Japanese-American clientele. As Miyamoto remarks, “In speaking of
the economic activities of the Japanese in Seattle, we must take special note of the
overwhelming dominance in their lives of the ‘small shop’ (Miyamoto 39).3 In addition,
many Japanese Americans also established themselves as independent farm workers
primarily working as sharecroppers or leasers for white farmers or, in the cases of
3
By World War II, nearly three fourths of the Japanese-American community members were working in
small business (Bonacich and Modell, 37)
43
American-born Japanese, buying their own lands.4 Through this middleman position (not
serving in commercial industry but also not part of the working-class masses), the
Japanese-American communities of Seattle had greater power and freedom within the
processes of hiring. Many Japanese-American business owners hired only newly-arrived
Japanese employees and many chose to give back to their communities and fund the
economic endeavors of the newly-arriving or younger generation Japanese Americans.
These systems of economic and political agency in post-war Seattle remarkably
changed following the forced removal and internment of over 120,000 JapaneseAmericans living on the West Coast in 1942. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941,
and due to the increasing animosity and sense of impending economic competition felt by
many white Americans living in the Pacific Northwest, the federal government on
February 19, 1942 issued Executive Order 9066, which “authorized the exclusion of all
persons of Japanese descent—citizens and aliens alike—from designated areas of
Washington, Oregon, California, and Arizona”(Inada xii). The internment of Japanese
Americans crucially affected the social and communal structures that had been
established in pre-war Seattle. First and foremost, the internment did not necessarily
separate people based on kinship lines and families were mostly kept together. However,
the internment did destroy the social networks that had been established along communal
lines. That is, the strong sense of community and family-first was shattered as families
4
Also by World War II, Japanese-Americans farmed 56% of the land in Kings County, Washington (Fugita
and Fernandez 19).
44
were stripped of their names and given numbers instead.5 Secondly, in addition to
breaking up the communal structure, itself, the internment also facilitated a tangible loss
of the economic resources accumulated by the Japanese-American community in Seattle.6
Therefore, the social and economic base for agency in the Japanese-American community
in Seattle was radically broken apart by the internment of 1942.
When the internees could finally return back to Seattle in 1945, as former
Japanese Americans were allowed to return to Seattle for reoccupation, the modes of
Japanese-American economic and political agency in the city had to be rebuilt. In the
area of economic agency, a major shift took place, from a middleman, Issei-led economic
system to a more mainstream, commercial, Nisei-led economic structure. This economic
shift was facilitated as the Nisei took over the role of economic leaders upon their return
to Seattle in 1945. The Nisei reoccupying Seattle were more removed from the traditional
communal economic practices of Japan and were, consequently, more inclined to
embrace the bigger business practices of mainstream American capitalism.7 Furthermore,
Japanese-American economic agency also shifted due to the continued influence of a
white economic power structure. Viewing Japanese Americans as a threat to post-war
economic stability and a return to social normalcy—a stable white American identity and
5
Although, some members of each camp worked together to provide better food, education, and work
opportunities, many internees, like the Takei family of Tule Lake Camp, simply struggled to maintain a
sense of purpose and comfort amidst the monotony and complete lack of privacy at camp – “[Mama] didn’t
like the idea of people lining up outside our windows three times a day…and she complained bitterly about
the smell” (Takei 3).
6
According to the evacuation order, itself, internees could only bring with them items that they could
personally carry. The United States government promised to provide funded storage for other larger
household items – but often, this promise was haphazardly carried out. Furthermore, the evacuation order
did not provide any guarantee for the security of economic collateral such as shops, homes, and land.
Subsequently, most of these things were irrevocably lost or confiscated. (Inada 8,9).
7
Furthermore, the growth of corporations and “super” chain stores in the decade following the war, made
small business and agricultural retailers virtually obsolete (Bonocich and Modell 100).
45
economic leadership role—Japanese Americans were forced to seek economic power
through more restricted channels.8
Along with this shift in economic agency, the Japanese-American approach to
political action also experienced a marked change in the years following the war. In the
decade following World War II, the Japanese-American Citizen’s League (JACL)
chapters in Seattle continued to grow gradually and fight for political and social change.
However, they did so in an atmosphere of fear and temerity, as many of the newlyreturning Japanese-American occupants of Seattle desired to simply fade into the
background of white American life (Bonacich and Modell 101). Thus, on the one hand,
the old vehicles for political agency, the Japanese-American clubs and associations were
characterized by a new historical amnesia: a purposeful forgetting of the traumas of
internment in order to better appeal to the prominent system of white political power in
the United States.9
Counter to this new assimilationist approach to Japanese-American political
agency in Seattle, the works of many Japanese-American authors in the post-war period
took up a more radical approach. In the tense and racially charged atmosphere of postwar Seattle, the former political agency of the old Japanese-American associations—the
approach that drew its power from a continual navigation between identification as both
Japanese and American—was taken up in the more subtle form of literary representation
in the novel. Rather than simply promoting acculturation into the U.S. as the primary
8
Japanese Americans had to seek economic success through employment in American corporations – i.e.
individual desk and management jobs – and through a diversification of their own businesses – i.e. in
“Little Tokyo smarter entrepreneurs were looking to black customers” (Bonocich and Modell 95).
9
For historical amnesia in a European immigrant context see Matthew Jacobsen’s Whiteness of a Different
Color page 95.
46
mode for attaining political power, many Japanese-American writers in the post-war
period used the internment of the early 1940s as the starting point for exploring alternate
modes of identification and self-expression (social and political voice) for Japanese
Americans. For example, writers like Mine Okubo, Minoru Kiyota, and John Okada,
wrote novels that either focused on internment camp life, or life immediately
following, and utilized these fictional representations to engage in a form of political
agency that George Lipsitz, in his work, Time Passages, refers to as the construction of
“counter-memory” (213). According to Lipsitz, counter-memory is a specific way of
recalling the past that focuses not on the universal (i.e. white, hegemonized version of
history), but rather on silenced, personal narratives and perspectives—primarily those of
exploited, minority individuals (Lipsitz, Time Passages 213). By looking at the
internment and the following post-war decade through the fictional lens of personal
narrative and interrogation, Japanese-American authors in the years immediately
following the war questioned the dominant systems of political power in the U.S. and,
simultaneously, encouraged thinking about possible alternative forms of JapaneseAmerican political agency in post-war Seattle and the Pacific Northwest.
OKADA’S BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
In addition to the surrounding historical and cultural context, Okada’s personal
experiences and ideologies also shed some light on the creation of his novel. Okada was
born in the Pioneer Square area of Seattle in September 1923. He was the eldest of three
sons in a middle-class family of Japanese-American entrepreneurs, and his parents owned
and ran a boarding house (Chen 281). Raised with moderate economic resources, Okada
47
was able to pursue higher education, and he attained degrees in English and Library
Science at the University of Washington (Chen 286). Soon after graduation in 1942,
Okada and his family were evacuated under Executive Order 13660, the Japanese
Internment Order, to Minidoka, Idaho. Seeing his hard-working parents carelessly
stripped of all their economic resources, Okada developed a growing sense of pessimism
toward the ideals of citizenship—that is, security, prosperity, and normalcy—promised
by the United States (McDonald “John Okada” 9). However, despite this growing
distrust, Okada took the U.S. Loyalty Oath, answered affirmatively to both questions, and
proceeded to serve in the U.S. Air Force. He was discharged in 1946, at which time he
married and went on, under funding from the GI Bill, to gain an MA in English from the
University of Columbia. As a result of these post-war gains in education and familial
security Okada expressed that rather than being the standard for most Asian Americans
(or white Americans, in general) his success and assimilation into the categories of U.S.
normalcy was, instead, an exception to the rule: “I have been endowed with a larger
capacity for normalcy than most people” (McDonald 7). Exploring this idea of what
constitutes normal in the United States, and specifically how the power of whiteness
plays into defining that category, Okada began work on No-No Boy in the early 1950s
(Ling 142). While working on the novel, Okada also worked as a librarian and technical
writer in Detroit, Los Angeles, and Seattle. Okada finally completed No-No Boy in 1955
and published it in 1957. Six years later in 1971, Okada died of a sudden heart attack, and
soon after his wife, Dorothy, burned all of his remaining manuscripts, including the latest
version of his second novel, a story about the Issei experience in the U.S. (Chen 289).
48
WARNING AGAINST AND SOLUTION TO THE MINORITY
INTERNALIZATION OF A WHITE SYSTEM OF RACISM IN OKADA’S, NONO BOY
In the first chapter of his novel, Okada illustrates a crucial moment of interracial
conflict. He does this as he constructs a scene in which a group of African Americans
compete with a group of Japanese Americans in order to try and garner the greater
economic rewards contingent upon whiteness. In the passage below, Okada succinctly
depicts the minority conflict between African Americans who have taken over the Seattle
enclave of Little Tokyo (after the Japanese Americans who once occupied it were forced
out in the internment) and the Japanese Americans who are returning there after the war:
[Ichiro] walked past the pool parlor gingerly picking his way among the
Negroes…They were smoking and shouting and cussing and carousing
and the sidewalk was slimy with their spittle. ‘Go back to Tokyo, boy.’
Persecution in the drawl of the persecuted. (5)
The interracial persecution of the African-American men toward Ichiro (a Japanese
American) in this scene functions to illustrate two key points. First, is that the conflict is
grounded in an African-American imitation of the modes of accumulating economic
rewards that is delineated by a white power system, in which those who do not
adequately perform traits of whiteness are exploited and denied access to even the most
basic economic rights. Imitating the white example of defining the Japanese Americans
as permanent outsiders, the African-American characters in this scene call for Ichiro to
“Go back to Tokyo, boy” (5). Furthermore, pushing the Japanese Americans in this scene
49
even further outside the categorization of whiteness—associated with being extremely
superior and intellectual—the African Americans in this passage also refer to Ichiro as a
“boy” (an intellectually and socially inferior position), and one commonly applied by
whites against African Americans.
Okada goes deeper, though, than simply illustrating this surface level imitation of
an economic system that regulates access to basic financial resources and rights based
upon a performance of whiteness. He indicates that the minority imitation of white modes
of exploitation is simply a manifestation of an underlying belief in the tangible, economic
rewards contingent upon this imitation. Okada makes this connection between the white
system of power and a belief in its tangible benefits, through the specific reference to
Tokyo made in his scene of minority conflict—“Go back to Tokyo, boy” (5). By
specifically expressing their desire for Ichiro to go back to Tokyo, the African Americans
in this scene point to their deeper desire to protect their newly-acquired Little Tokyo from
its prior Japanese-American occupants. Following the internment of the JapaneseAmerican residents in 1942, African-American residents of Seattle had been able to set
up homes in that area. Previously, African Americans had been restricted from living in
this section of the city, which offered better access to businesses and better housing
opportunities. This section of the city was only made available to the economic middlemen of the Japanese-American community. Thus, with the increased access to the most
basic labor and economic resources gained through their new residence in Little Tokyo,
the African Americans in Okada’s passage wanted to protect the economic rewards that
50
had been gained through the institutionalized racism of the white system of power,
manifested through Japanese-American internment.
Subsequently, as they sought to maintain their new, basic economic assets—their
new home in Little Tokyo—the African Americans had to mix celebration over their
new economic rewards with a perpetuation of Asian-Amerian denigration and
exploitation—their “carousing” and rejoicing was placed in the same phrase with their
racially derogatory “shouting” and “cussing.” Thus, in order to even gain a taste of the
most basic economic rights and benefits, the African Americans in Okada’s scene of
minority conflict rely upon the exploitive methods of a white system of economic power.
Consequently, the streets of “Little Tokyo” are described as “slimy” with “spittle.” By
describing the streets of “Little Tokyo” as “slimy,” Okada, ultimately, utilizes a term that
comes very close to painting a mental picture of prosperity (i.e. the word “slimy” is
extremely close to the word “shiny,” which calls to mind streets of gold). However, by
utilizing the term “slimy” Okada ultimately points to the grotesque and yet very real
system of racial persecution (prejudicial “spittle”) that is necessary to attain even the
most basic financial resources.
Having illustrated the racialized struggle for the material rewards contingent upon
a white economic system, Okada moves on, in this first scene of interracial fighting, to
illustrate the larger, underlying phenomena of internalization that, ultimately, generates
these surface-level actions. Within Ichiro’s response to the derision of his AfricanAmerican counterparts, Okada illustrates the internal conflict that, in turn, produces the
external one. After being ridiculed on the street, Ichiro remarks that “the tolerance [he
51
felt] for the Negroes and the Jews and the Mexicans and the Chinese…because he was
Japanese…[was replaced by] the hate which was unrelenting and terrifying” (6). Through
this passage, Okada makes it clear that Ichiro initially supports an alternative system of
human solidarity and unity—all groups, including Jews, Mexicans, Negroes, and Chinese
joined together in a bond of tolerance and compassion. Framing this statement of a
potential alterative system of power in the words of a minority narrator who has
experienced the internment process and racial exploitation, firsthand, Okada presents the
reader with a clear example of Lipsitz’s counter-memory. By giving voice to the past
through Ichiro’s perspective, Okada presents an initial framework of literary countermemory that allows his narrator (and the reader) to imagine the “possible alternative
courses of history” and the material consequences of particular systems of power –
increased fighting and competition for resources rather than harmony (Yoneyama 30).
Thus, Ichiro’s initial statements reflect a rejection of dominant discourses and historical
viewpoints (the ones written by those in power) and, instead, embrace a perspective of
minority solidarity that runs counter to them.
However, this system of minority solidarity is brought into battle with the system
of racist power that Ichiro sees at work within the deriding acts of the African Americans
on the street. That is, Ichiro is torn between the hopeful solution of tolerance that he has
imagined and the real, tangible consequences (basic access to labor and housing rights
and resources) contingent upon performing whiteness that he has witnessed in the actions
of the African-American characters. Internally then, Ichiro undergoes a fierce battle
between his own alternative system of power and the “unrelenting” militant system of
52
white racism. This reaction embodies the “ethico-political” struggle that Kandice Chuh
theoretically defines. That is, with a loss of material goods and rights, Ichiro comes to
doubt the means by which he can enact social justice and change within his own life and
the life of his community, and he rejects the American institutions of law. Subsequently,
Ichiro does not promote the law as the means through which he can enact social change,
but rather it is the force which he must combat (fight its “unrelenting” and “fearful”
force) to enact any positive, collective action. Ultimately, though, Ichiro’s individual
ethico-political struggle is assuaged as he internalizes the racism that he witnesses
firsthand. Ichiro experiences the disempowering and exploitive effects of the white
system of power as he is mocked on the street and stripped of a place within Little Tokyo
and, by extension, the U.S. in general. Undergoing this exploitation, Ichiro comes to
associate greater power and strength with the power of whiteness than he does with his
own alternative, imagined vision. Consequently, Ichiro perceives whiteness and white”
hatred as more “unrelenting” and “terrifying” than what imaginary unity and compromise
have to offer. Contingent upon his confrontation with the harsh, pragmatic realities of the
white economic system and its discourse, Ichiro, thereby, rejects his own egalitarian
alternative of acceptance. Thus, Ichiro’s creative alternative of minority solidarity is
repressed by an internalized “dominant discourse”—one that promises tangible rather
than just ideological monetary benefits and rewards (Ling 367).
Ultimately, by juxtaposing the hope offered by a creative, new historical
perspective and the real repercussions of not ascribing to the perspective of whiteness,
Okada points to the inherent tension of minority internalization of racist politics. This
53
internalization is characterized by a highly complex conflict between a desire for a new
system of power distribution, one that is more communal and egalitarian—and the desire
to acquire and maintain the tangible material and social rewards offered by the
institutionalized system of white power. Consequently, in his first scene of interracial
conflict, Okada indicates that the tumultuous internalization of white racism is very often
the underlying factor that motivates external minority confrontations that aid in the
preservation rather than the destruction of white power within the United States.
Nonetheless, it is important to note, that Okada does not highlight this process of
internalizing “white” racism as an homage to the power of whiteness or as an illustration
of excessive minority weakness and gullibility. On the contrary, Okada illustrates the
tumultuous phenomenon of internalization in order to serve as a sharp warning. This
warning expresses that the system of institutionalized racism in the U.S. is excessively
exploitive and destructive. It is a system that restricts access to even the most basic
economic rights and seeks to crush all healthy alternatives of community and
cooperation. Furthermore, Okada’s warning also communicates that all those who desire
to see the system of racist power changed need to act upon the alternatives of tolerance
and hope that already exist (in the mind) and fight to gain them a tangible social and
economic voice.
In the latter portion of his novel, Okada continues to emphasize this theme of the
conflicted internalization of racism and the preservation of white power through minority
conflict—although Okada now performs a slight reversal as he no longer focuses upon
black Americans who are identifying with white racist power but Japanese Americans. In
54
the following passage, Okada describes the conflict that emerges at an Asian-American
bar, the Club Oriental, as one of the Japanese-American patrons tries to bring two
African-American individuals into the bar:
A Japanese…shouted out sneeringly: ‘Them ignorant cotton pickers make
me sick. You let one in and before you know it, the place will be black as
night.’
‘Sure,’ said Jim Eng, ‘sure. I got no use for them. Nothing but trouble and
I run a clean place.’ (134)
Initially, this passage reverses the roles in a tendency to imitate the modes of minority
disempowerment modeled by a white economic system. Now, in this passage, this
tendency is seen in the terms and arguments used by Japanese Americans against the
African Americans. In the very first line of the quoted passage, the Japanese-American
patron of the bar refers to African Americans as “ignorant,” thereby, imitating the white
argument that African Americans are intellectually inferior individuals. Furthermore, the
African Americans are referred to as “cotton pickers,” a term that refers to their former
status as slaves and sharecroppers and alludes to their inferior social and economic
position in comparison to white middle and upper class Americans. Finally, the JapaneseAmerican owner of the bar, Jim Eng, implies that African Americans are dirty and illmannered and will make his place unclean. This idea is derived directly from the white
imagination that the black individual is animalistic and uncivilized. Ultimately, this
argument justifies treating the African American as less-than human and exploiting his or
55
her labor and resources—a treatment that is initially practiced by the system of whiteness
in the U.S.
Within this passage of interracial conflict, Okada also illustrates a desire to reap
and protect tangible economic rewards. In the passage, Okada imbeds a sense of
Japanese-American fear over losing the material benefits contingent upon a white system
of power. That is, the Japanese-American bar owner fears losing his white patrons if he
serves black ones: “let one [African American] in…before you know it, the place will be
black as night”(134). This phrase initially indicates the underlying tension concerning
social exclusion – being sent away from the illumination of the white power system. This
tension over access to a sense of white social belonging was an internal struggle that
Asian Americans in the post-war period continually faced. As Dorothy Ritsuke
McDonald expresses, in her essay “After Imprisonment: Ichiro’s Search for Redemption
in No-No Boy,” it was not enough for an Asian American to undergo a procedure and
racially re-write his or her body, but he or she also had to fully perform whiteness –
enacting traits such as moderation, practicing Christianity, and speaking proper English
that are associated with being white. McDonald indicates that, “being an American is a
terribly incomplete thing if one’s face is not white and one’s parents are Japanese of the
country Japan…It is like being pulled asunder by a whirling tornado” (emphasis added
“After Imprisonment” 21). Thus, those Japanese Americans (like those in Okada’s bar
scene) living in the post-war and Cold War period faced a continual struggle due to the
fact that a sense of racial belonging or acceptance into the category of whiteness was
56
contingent upon both the tangible body and the intangible performance of character
traits—those not designated as belonging to “the country Japan” (22).
While connecting his passage to this tense struggle for white social belonging and
power, Okada also ties it to a fear of economic recession or loss. Connecting the
symbolic phrase “black as night” to a specific business condition—the bar serves as a
symbolic marker for individual ownership and entrepreneurship—Okada makes an
implicit connection between blackness and a fear concerning the loss of economic
privilege and prosperity. This connection between “blackness” and economic success
plays upon the post-war readers’ reference back to the very recent Great Depression
(1930s and 1940s) and the negative monikers of “Black” Tuesday and “Black
Wednesday” which were days of catastrophic economic loss. By utilizing the term
“black” to refer simultaneously to race and to allude to an economic state of recession
and collapse, the Japanese-American bar owner in this scene connects a tolerance of nonwhites, more specifically, those who do not adequately perform whiteness, with business
failure and a complete loss of access to the most basic economic rights such as the ability
to function as an entrepreneur and run a small business that generates enough capital to
be successful. Consequently, the phrase “black as night” subtly communicates the fear
over economic recession and loss of tangible material rewards associated with the
exploitive practices of the white economic system.
Illustrating the after-effects of the conflict between the Japanese Americans and
African Americans in the bar, Okada, ultimately, highlights the larger, internal turmoil—
57
internalization of racism that stimulates the external fighting. In the aftermath of the bar
confrontation, Okada focuses upon the internal musings of Kenji, a Japanese-American
war veteran who observed the entire scene unfold. Initially, Kenji responds to the
interracial fighting by reflecting that:
One hears the voice of the Negro or Japanese or Chinese or Jew, a clear
and bell-like intonation of the common struggle for recognition as a
complete human being (134).
Through these thoughts, Kenji, like Ichiro in the earlier scene, similarly asserts an
alternative viewpoint that unites all humans—especially those minority groups exploited
by the white system—together in a common struggle. This struggle is not one that pits
one group against another, or exclusively fights for the civil rights of one specific
minority group, rather it is a struggle for humanity, an egalitarian fight for equal
recognition and value for all individuals. This viewpoint of human solidarity and unity
serves as a sharp contrast to the hierarchal system of white power that pits whiteness
against all others in order to garner greater social and economic rewards. Thus, Kenji’s
initial musings serve as a bright and hopeful alternative to the power of whiteness.
However, this alternative does not emerge without sharp opposition. Soon after
presenting his new egalitarian system of power distribution, Okada illustrates Kenji’s
tense struggle to maintain it in the face of the harsh realities of the system of whiteness.
Observing the interracial conflict in the bar, Kenji’s alternative system of power is placed
into conflict with a belief in a “world full of hatred” (136). Ultimately, through this
expression, Kenji indicates his internal condition of being torn between two
58
diametrically-opposed ways of viewing the world: one affirms the power of all human
beings and the other cuts all ties of intimacy and compromise. Struggling between these
two worldviews or versions of history, Kenji rejects the way in which a dominant
perspective of history, one that only favors and gives voice to those individuals
categorized as white, excludes and disempowers him. However, at the same time,
Kenji also acknowledges its inescapable power. As Lipsitz expresses, Kenji can neither
accept a dominant perspective of history, “but neither can he escape its consequences”
(Lipsitz Time Passages 225). Thus, while proposing an alternative construction of power,
one that is characterized by a community of voices that represent the oppressed or the
marginalized rather than simply the powerful white voice, Okada’s novel also represents
the very real power of the dominant white system.
The resolution of this conflict finally results in Kenji’s choice to invest his belief
in the power of a hierarchal white system of power, as the voice of human unity is
symbolically drowned out by a world “full”—without room for any alternatives—of
hatred and division. Subsequently, Kenji rejects his own system of power, as he invests
the power of whiteness with greater tangible social power and rewards. In this passage,
Okada makes it clear that Kenji, as a representative of a group classified as non-white, is
not motivated in his internalization process by a sense of incredible selfishness or
gullibility. Instead, it is quite the opposite. Kenji clearly constructs and imagines the
“clear, bell-like intonation” of an alternative of minority tolerance and cooperation. He
desires this alternate power system and economic structure or else he would not imagine
it and hear its call so vividly. However, this alternative is stripped of its effectiveness (its
59
ability to produce sound for all to hear), by the exploitive and destructive force of an
economic system that distributes the most basic, tangible economic rights and resources
based upon a performance of whiteness. Thus, it is not that minorities do not want a
different system of economic access, rather it is that the white system that is already in
place is so restrictive and oppressive. That is, even the most basic right of being able to
run a small business and make a profit is regulated by one’s performance of whiteness.
Under the extreme, disempowering force of a white system of distributing economic
rights and rewards, Kenji’s internal turmoil (an internalization of the power of white
racism), ultimately, registers in the external production of minority conflict. In this final
internalization of the power of whiteness, Okada illustrates what Stan Yogi, in his article,
“You Had To Be One or the Other: Oppositions and Reconciliations in John Okada’s NoNo Boy,” refers to as the conflicted phenomena that leads to “the perpetuation [of] a
racial hierarchy… elevating the status of European Americans” (Yogi 68). As this quote,
and Okada’s second scene of minority conflict illustrate, the embattled process of
internalizing white racism often leads minority groups to fight with one another and
preserve the power of whiteness rather than uniting together creatively to destroy it.
CONCLUSION
In the final, climactic scene of his novel, Okada concisely drives home his
warning concerning a system of power that denies so many minorities access to basic
economic resources based on the performance of whiteness, as well as the danger of
internalizing this system. Furthermore, Okada also communicates a vision for hope in
which an alternative of cooperation and unity is substituted for the dangerous white
60
system of exploitation and competition that currently exists. In the closing passage, a
Japanese-American war veteran named Bull picks a fight at a bar with a much smaller,
former Japanese-American internee named Freddie. Refusing to let Freddie gain service
at the bar, Bull drags him outside yelling that he “wasn’t fightin’ my friggin’ war” for
Japanese-Americans who refused to serve in WWII (i.e. “Jap-boys”). Chased by Bull,
Freddie jumps in his car, speeds away, and consequently, crashes head-on into an
oncoming vehicle and is instantly killed as his body is shorn in two. This part of the
closing passage serves as a powerful implicit warning against the phenomena of
internalizing the racism of a white economic system. That is, Okada connects Bull’s
actions, which deny Freddie’s access to the bar on the basis that he is not part of the
white American populous who can refer to WWII as “my,” personal war, but is instead
an unwanted outsider, a “Jap-boy,” with terrible death and destruction. This terrible death
is not only a literal loss of life (as in the novel), but also a symbolic unmanning or
dehumanization, which is symbolized through the way in which Freddie not only dies but
is utterly cut in two: he is completely demasculinized, dismembered, and emotionally and
physically cut down to size. Ultimately, with the haunting scene of Freddie’s death
burned into the imagination and Okada’s implied invectives against a white economic
system and its internalization ringing in the ears, the reader is left with a final
exhortation: do something! This something comes in the form of acting upon the
imagined alternatives of unity and cooperation that have been articulated within each
scene of minority conflict in the novel. Therefore, after witnessing Freddie’s crash, Ichiro
61
does not react by internalizing and acting upon interracial hatred, but rather he reaches
out and,
[P]ut a hand on Bull’s shoulder, sharing the empty sorrow in the hulking
body, feeling the terrible loneliness of the distressed walls, and saying
nothing…A glimmer of hope – was that it?...in the darkness of the alley of
the community that was a tiny bit of America, he chased the faint and
elusive insinuation of promise as it continued to take shape in mind and in
heart (251).
It is in acting upon the sorrow and loneliness that he shares with Bull—as a fellow
minority exploited by the economic power of whiteness and as a fellow human being—
that Ichiro is able to produce a glimmer of hope in contrast to the destruction and
disempowerment of a white power structure. Therefore, Okada’s finale— tragic,
haunting, and yet also, hopeful—serves both to illustrate the consequences of allowing a
white system of power to continue unchanged, as well as the positive alternative of
tolerance and community that already exists to counter it. Such an alternative just waits to
be collectively acted out.
62
Chapter 3
I had to know that Negroes weren’t the lowest people on the face of God’s green earth. I
had to talk it over with somebody, had to build myself back up. The sons of bitches were
grinding me to the nub, the white meatless bone. (Himes 78)
Like Okada, Chester Himes in If He Hollers Let Him Go, interweaves a continual
theme of interracial or minority conflict. This interracial conflict, or more specifically
conflict between minority groups over economic rights and benefits, primarily involves
the African-American community and their Asian-American counterparts residing in
post-WWII central Los Angeles. However, Himes clearly indicates throughout his work,
that the conflict arising between these two minority groups has a greater underlying cause
than simple animosity or dislike. Throughout his novel, Himes indicates that one minority
groups’ fierce desire to assert itself over another—prove that it was not the lowest group
on the planet—derives from the unjust and oppressive internalization of a much larger
system of white exploitation. This exploitation of a system of whiteness, a system which
utilizes the category of whiteness to exploit and disempower economically those who are
labeled as non-white, ultimately forces many minority groups into a financially-strapped
position. In this economically restrictive position, there often appears to be no practical
way up and out except to yield to and imitate the competitive and vicious financial
practices of whiteness itself. Through several scenes of minority conflict between African
Americans and Japanese Americans in his novel, Himes complicates and questions the
tense process of internalization through which minority groups are cruelly pushed to
replace their own individual, egalitarian concepts of economical power distribution with
63
the annihilating methods of a system of whiteness that utilizes racial categorizations to
enforce a destructive financial hierarchy.
In this chapter, I argue that economic conflict between minority groups often
stems from the complex, often paradoxical internalization of the oppressive practices of a
racist power structure. However, before engaging in a close literary analysis, I address a
few theoretical, historical, and biographical frameworks. In the first segment of this
chapter, I highlight several major cultural and theoretical concepts. First, I describe how
whiteness in pre- and post-WWII America, rather than just being a physical designation,
more importantly functions as a performative category based upon an individuals’
performance of traits categorized as whiteness (i.e. moderation, political conservatism,
and Christianity)10; second, I emphasize the material and internal implications of an
economic system that distributes access to economic rights and rewards based upon the
performance of whiteness; and finally, I illustrate the conflicted phenomena of minority
internalization that was articulated specifically in Himes’ novel, whereby many minority
groups tend to replace a cooperative alternative of behavior with that of the oppressive
white economic structure. Following this section, I provide a brief overview of the
following historical points that are relevant for my literary analyses: pre-WWII AfricanAmerican entrepreneurship, housing, and activism in Los Angeles and acts of AfricanAmerican agency in the Los Angeles labor market during the post-WWII and Cold War
10
It is important to keep in mind that during this WWII period and in the following years there was a
radical white reaction to these traditional traits. According to Howard Winant, in his work The New Politics
of Race, the 1940s saw the beginning of a new radical series of movements whereby white individuals
sought to act in opposition to every one of these traditional characteristics of whiteness, thereby creating a
new norm and eradicating social and racial boundaries (68).
64
periods. Then, I focus specifically on Himes’ personal experience and development as an
African-American author, consequently, connecting the broader historical context with
Himes’ individual literary representations.
Following this initial overview section, I analyze and critique two very specific
scenes in If He Hollers Let Him Go. The first scene is one in which the main female
character, Alice, is discussing housing conditions within a section of Los Angeles called
Little Tokyo, a section of the city that had been stripped from its Japanese-American
inhabitants due to internment (Himes 83)11. Ultimately, as I analyze this scene of
interracial, economic conflict, I highlight what Robert Lee, in his essay, “Violence Real
and Imagined: The World of Chester Himes’ Novels,” terms the process by which
continual external destruction by the white racialized system produces an internal “selfdestruction” (15). That is, continual oppression by an unfair white economic hierarchy
produces a response within the individual in which the competitive, oppressive
tendencies of the dominant system are internalized and individual modes of revolution
and action are repressed. It is essential to note here, though, that Himes clearly indicates
that this internalization is not due to any extreme emotional weakness or psychological
unsteadiness on the part of minority groups, but rather can be tied directly to the
destructive pragmatic realities of a white power structure that severely limits the actual
economic success of alternative or cooperative modes of power.
11
“Little Tokyo” was a section of L.A. officially known as Bronzeville. It housed approximately 50,000
Japanese-American middle-class to low-income individuals before WWII, giving it the nickname “Little
Tokyo.” Following the internment of Japanese Americans in 1944, the area of Bronzeville was used as a
housing district for the rapidly-growing African-American working-class population in L.A. (Waldinger
305).
65
After emphasizing this scene of minority conflict within the novel, I analyze a
second scene that indicates Himes’ proposal for an alternative solution to the oppressive
system of institutionalized racism. In this second scene, in which Himes’ main character
Bob Jones reflects upon having observed a scene in which a family of JapaneseAmericans is forcefully evicted from their home as a result of internment, “Himes
critiques the tendency of the black community to blame the poor migrants…rather than
accusing the actual perpetrators” (Itagaki 73). That is, Himes critically explores and
questions the process whereby African-American individuals undergoing the annihilating
economic pressures of the system of whiteness tend to conflict with one another and
perpetuate the oppressive white system of economic power, rather than identifying and
overturning the destructive system itself. I, ultimately, conclude my study then by
analyzing Himes’ alternative solution to destructive minority competition for white
economic power—human unity and cooperation against the white hierarchal system or
perpetrator itself.
CULTURAL AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK – AFRICAN-AMERICAN
INTERNALIZATION OF WHITENESS AND ITS REPRESENTATION IN POSTWWII LITERATURE
Beginning with this brief theoretical section, I specifically focus upon three key
concepts. First, I focus upon the concept of whiteness as a performative category utilized
to negotiate power. Second, I define the major financial, social, and psychological
consequences of performing whiteness experienced by many African Americans in the
66
immediate post-war and Cold War years. Finally, I illustrate the literary representation of
the tension that accompanies the African-American process of internalization.
First, the concept of whiteness as a performative category implicitly underlies If
He Hollers Let Him Go. This phenotypical categorization of race primarily functions to
make racial assignments appear more tangible, stable, and reliable—they have something
seemingly concrete to attach themselves to. However, as Eric Lott points out in his
article, “Racial Cross-Dressing and the Construction of American Whiteness,” racial
categories are in actuality much more fluid and performative in nature than basic
phenotypical assignments. That is, an individual is categorized as white based on his or
her performance of specific cultural traits. Some key traits included moderation, proper
speech, and the Christian religion (Lott 1). In the same vein, an individual is categorized
as black or other based on the performance of traits that are counter to these traits of
whiteness. Traits of otherness or non-whiteness included any performance of wildness, an
alien tongue, a different religion or mode of practicing Christianity. Therefore, even
though the law in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s, classified any individual as
black who had 1/16th African ancestry, or at least had a great-grandparent who was of
African descent, performative characteristics often served as a more readily observable
racial marker (Kuenz 172). Consequently, an individual was classified as black according
to their performance of blackness or otherness—in addition to physical characteristics
and legal bloodline. As Lott points out, in his essay, this performativity of blackness was
a highly conflicted one. On the one hand, it was an act of rebellion against those in power
or those who perfectly performed whiteness. At the same time, due to its very
67
rebelliousness, it was an act that represented exclusion and isolation from the hierarchal
system of power that designated rewards and benefits according to one’s performance of
whiteness. Therefore, for those who performed blackness, both African-American
individuals and white individuals who engaged in blackface, the performance was both
one of fear over losing power and one of desire to break rules and escape the staunch
boundaries of whitenes (Lott 3). Continually vacillating between fear and desire, then, the
African American living in the post-war and Cold War period faced a continual struggle
to achieve a sense of social belonging and power while at the same time trying to retain a
margin of independence as a social actor. These African-American individuals were,
subsequently, pulled between the desire to maintain the liberties and relative freedom of
behavior contingent upon blackness without losing the tangible economic and labor
rewards of whiteness.
Ultimately, the performative categorization of whiteness functioned as a legallysanctioned (institutionalized) means of exploiting and oppressing many members of the
African-American community within the U.S. As Martin Carnoy indicates in his book,
Faded Dreams: The Politics and Economics of Race in America, the performance of
whiteness is tied to a very real process of denationalization, whereby individuals are
either empowered or disempowered by the federal government based upon their mode of
performativity—“the government legally defined a part of the U.S. population as
different from the majority…and [consequently] put it outside the national community
and outside the norms of equal protection (2). As a result then, through the institution of
the law and federally mandated programs the government of the U.S. redistributed
68
resources, both economic access and protection and an internal sense of social belonging
or national identity, based upon the performance of whiteness.
Under this institutionalized system of whiteness, a system undergirded and
supported by the law, African Americans during the immediate post-war and Cold War
period experienced financial repercussions. First were the strict labor and housing
restrictions that were placed upon African-American individuals during this period.12
With these heavy restrictions, African-Americans were primarily relegated to manual,
low-paying labor positions and overcrowded, under-funded housing locations (Avila 3455). As a result of both of these factors, African-Americans in the post-war decade also
endured inadequate education opportunities and an inability to save capital and invest for
the future of themselves and their children (Carnoy 176). This tangible restriction,
ultimately, left many African Americans trapped for “even if they [African Americans]
never accepted the script that white society had written for them, they were not able to
develop economic alternatives that would allow them to get the capital and education
needed to write a different script” (Carnoy 178). It is this very economic system, under
which the African-American individuals in post-WWII America were disempowered
economically and cruelly left without a pragmatic means of countering this condition that
Himes critiques within his novel.
According to Eric Avila in his work, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight – Fear and Fantasy in
Suburban Los Angeles, prevalent housing restrictions included the denial of Federal Housing Authority
(FHA) loans to those in concentrated urban areas (African-American workers in L.A.), the designation of
minority housing centers as urban “blights” to be ignored or rejected, and the focus on corporatization of
minority housing areas rather than attempts to actually fix and improve public housing (34-55). Coupled
with these housing restrictions, many African American individuals in post-WWII L.A. also had to deal
with labor restrictions that included a lack of access to education for higher-paying positions, a denial of
basic labor benefits such as equal pay and humane work hours and conditions, and an inability to
accumulate savings for posterity.
12
69
The denial of resources to African Americans resulted in not only a struggle to
economically survive following the war, but also in a deeper “ethico-political” struggle,
similar to that endured by Asian Americans in the same decade (Chuh 80). That is, with
the lawful denial of material goods and rights, many African Americans came to doubt
the means by which they could enact social justice and change (produce a “different
script”) within their own lives and the lives of their communities. For these AfricanAmerican individuals, the institutions of law were imbued with doubt. This loss of belief
in the American judicial system manifested itself, most powerfully, in the literature of the
time, including in many of Himes’ writings—both in his short stories and If He Hollers
Let Him Go. For example, Himes represents the African-American ethico-political
struggle in a 1944 short story entitled “All God’s Chillun Got Pride.” In this story, Himes
writes that,
Having been educated in America, he [the African-American protagonist]
had learned of course that living and breathing unaccompanied by certain
unalienable rights, such as liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, was of no
small consequence; but he had learned also that this ideology did not apply
to him. He never really sat down and thought about it for any length of
time, because he knew that if he ever did living in America would be
impossible. (24)
As implied through this passage, the internal struggle to unite conceptions of self with a
larger faith in the surrounding social structure was a fierce one as many AfricanAmerican individuals had to fight hard to believe that who they were and what they did
70
individually to produce positive social change would actually manifest itself in the
national fabric.
Hand-in-hand with the external economic and social exploitations and the internal
ethico-political struggle that they endured, many African Americans in the post-WWII
period also experienced a process of internalization characterized by a tension between
the desire to create an alternative system of distributing power and the material draw of
the system of whiteness itself. Within the minority literature of the period, this tension of
internalization is a focal point. Using Himes’ If He Hollers Let Him Go, as a case study,
George Lipsitz in his work, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s,
illustrates the primary ways in which African-American literature represents
internalization in the 1940s and 1950s. Lipsitz indicates that Himes’ work represents the
tensions of African-American internalization through its juxtaposition of counter memory
and the dominant white version of history. According to Lipsitz, “counter-memory” is an
alternative way of looking at history through the personal perspectives of minority or
marginalized individuals (213). This definition of counter-memory is further articulated
in Walter Benjamin’s term “historical materialism.” Benjamin defines “historical
materialism” as a version of history that “takes into account omitted, unfulfilled
promises” (the experiences of the disempowered or marginalized) (Benjamin 48).
Furthermore, as Lisa Yoneyama expresses, in her work, Only What We Could Carry,
both Benjamin and Lipsitz’s historical concepts, ultimately, “compel us to imagine
possible alternative courses of history” (Yoneyama 30). That is, by looking at history
through the lens of the disempowered or marginalized, one is better able to see the social
71
structures that bring about the marginalization of particular groups and, in turn, to
imagine alternatives to these oppressive structures. Therefore, both historical materialism
and counter-memory offer an alternative mode of looking at history and one’s place in
the world. An alternative that supports a more critical view of existing systems of power,
and in turn, supports new, more egalitarian solutions to combating systemic injustices.
Alongside this alternative historical perspective, however, Himes’ novel also
clearly illustrates the strong pull of the system of white power itself. That is, while
Himes’ main character, Bob Jones, rejects the way in which a dominant perspective of
history, one that only favors and gives voice to those individuals categorized as white,
excludes and disempowers him, he also acknowledges its inescapable power. The novel
particularly illustrates this very real power of whiteness through its definition of
masculinity. Throughout his entire novel, Himes’ main characters are severely restricted
and often oppressed by staunch post-war white constructions of gender presenting men as
strong, stable, masculine, protectors of history and economic resources. Due to their
restriction from access to economic and social resources that would allow them to be
fully masculine according to white standards, the African American male characters
within Himes’ novel are never able to be fully masculine according to white standards.
For example, Bob Jones in If He Hollers Let Him Go continually struggles with feelings
of impotence due to his degradation by white men and especially white women in the
workplace. This inability to achieve white masculinity leaves Himes’ African-American
characters, including Bob, with feelings of powerlessness that counteract their alternative
cooperative approaches to economic power distribution. This juxtaposition of the
72
ideological hope offered by a creative, new historical perspective and the very real power
of whiteness gender constructions finally points back to the inherent tension of minority
internalization.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND – AFRICAN-AMERICAN ISSUES OF AGENCY
IN PRE- AND POST- WWII LOS ANGELES
In order to appropriately contextualize Himes’ literary representations, a brief
historical overview of African-American agency in pre-and post-war Los Angeles is also
essential. In this section, I define the primary characteristics of African-American agency,
the means of exerting power or influence, as it appears in the areas of economics and
politics in pre- and post-war Los Angeles.
Before the war, economic and social conditions for African Americans in Los
Angeles were primarily defined by heavy restrictions. Economically, African Americans
were confined to lower-paying, non-skilled labor. In their work, Seeking El Dorado:
African Americans in California, Lawrence De Graaf, Kein Mulroy, and Qunitard Taylor
indicate that the job restrictions placed on African-American workers in Los Angeles
during the early 1940s—and other minority workers, as well—were the result of two
major factors. The first factor was the white fear concerning labor shortages that lingered
following the Depression years in California. This white fear was chiefly the product of
concern that if minorities took all the higher-paying jobs with benefits there would not be
enough left for white workers. Secondly, there was the desire of those who classified
themselves as white to establish their place at the top of a hierarchy of power in the urban
73
center of Southern California—a desire that characterized those who classified
themselves as white ever since the California shift from Mexican rule in the midnineteenth century (27). Due to these two factors, white Los Angeles labor leaders were
motivated to establish hiring guidelines that restricted African Americans from access to
higher paying, skilled labor, particularly those jobs that required training and provided
greater monetary and social benefits.13
Due to these labor restrictions, African Americans were relegated to an economic
position that John Butler, in his work Entrepreneurship and Self-Help Among Black
Americans, defines as a “truncated African-American middleman” (245). Butler ties the
African-American economic position to that of the Asian American using the term
“middleman,” and yet he also differentiates it. According to Butler, African-American
economic agency in pre-war Los Angeles resembled that of Asian Americans in Seattle
since it was characterized by a strong element of community and self-help. In the 1930s
and early 1940s many African Americans developed community assistance projects in
Los Angeles such as those encouraged by Father Divine and Daddy Grace, that provided
financial assistance and spiritual encouragement to struggling black members of the city
(De Graaf, Mulroy, and Taylor 25)14. Furthermore, due to housing restrictions that
precluded blacks from many urban neighborhoods, many black individuals also resided in
independent ethnic enclaves. For example, the city of Watts was an independent annexed
13
Many industrial plants made “hiring Negroes” a breach of “company policy” (De Graaf, Mulroy, and
Taylor 28). Furthermore, many shipyard unions relegated blacks to basic “auxiliary unions” where African
Americans were “the last to be hired and only for low-skill jobs” (De Graaf, Mulroy, and Taylor 28).
14
According to August Meier in his article, “Negro Protests and Organizations,” both Father Divine and
Daddy Grace were leaders of “pentecostal and chiliastic sects” in L.A. during the 1940s (1). Both pastors
led active community involvement and assistance programs within their congregations.
74
section of Los Angeles in the early 1940s where many African Americans resided.
Through this factor of ethnic community assistance, Butler characterizes the economic
position of African Americans in pre-war Los Angeles as “middlemen”—between the
lowest working classes and the white middle and upper classes.
However, the financial agency of black Los Angelians was not able to flourish as
readily as the Asian Americans in Seattle due to the heavier social and employment
restrictions placed upon them. That is, unlike the Asian Americans of Seattle, whose
independent financial success was due, in large part, to their freedom to navigate between
their own ethnic identity and white economic rules, and subsequently, own and operate
their own businesses as Asian Americans, the majority of African Americans were denied
both economic success and ethnic identity based on whiteness. Due to segregation and
institutionalized racism, African Americans were not permitted to be both black and
successful entrepreneurs. Segregation denied African Americans ready access to white
consumers, and, therefore, most African-Americans in the business world could not
effectively occupy an economic mediator role. Furthermore, through institutionalized
racism, which heavily targeted African Americans in the United States,15 AfricanAmerican business owners were denied access, not only to white consumers, but also to
proper housing, education, and job training that would enable the accumulation of capital
necessary for entrepreneurship and the sponsorship of financially independent ethnic
enclaves. Thus, only a small percentage of African Americans living in pre-war Los
15
For example, in 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson legally sanctioned segregation by declaring whites and blacks
“separate but equal.” This court ruling remained firmly institutionalized until 1954 with the Brown v. Board
of Education ruling.
75
Angeles were able to achieve independent economic prosperity and attain higher job
training and success in privately owned business or other labor positions. Thus, unlike the
actual success of the Asian-American middleman position, African-American
entrepreneurial and business success based on a strong community base remained largely
a myth rather than a prevailing reality (249).
Nonetheless, although the African-American community base in pre-war Los
Angeles could not facilitate powerful economic agency, it did help build a strong
foundation for political activity. Reacting to the unfair hiring and housing practices that
they experienced themselves, many members of the African-American communities in
Los Angeles formed community-based action groups in the pre-war period.16Although
these social organizations were often split along class lines—between the black working
class laborers and the middle to upper class black elite—, they all built upon the idea of
communal action for social change. This construct of African-American political agency
was further extended in the pre-war years to include other disempowered minority
groups. Following the Zoot Suit riots of 194317, African-American and MexicanAmerican community leaders joined forces to create the Los Angeles Commission on
Human Regulations (LACCHR), in order to take action against interracial labor
16
Examples of these groups included the African-American Urban League, the Congress of Industrial
Organization (working classes), the Los Angeles chapter of the NAACP, and the Negro Victory Committee
(founded by members of the black elite) (De Graaf, Mulroy, & Taylor 30).
17
In 1943, an altercation took place in the Port of Los Angeles between several U.S. navy members and
Mexican-American laborers – who during their off hours wore “zoot suits.” In response to this conflict –
which, ultimately stemmed from increasing labor tensions and war-time anxieties – a series of riots took
place throughout the city as the police of L.A. began attacking and arresting anyone wearing a zoot suit.
76
injustices.18 Through this interracial and communal approach to labor rights, African
Americans were able to achieve tangible economic rewards. By 1943, more than 30,000
African Americans had been hired in Southern California war defense plants, and they
constituted 12% of Los Angeles’ enrollees in job training programs (DeGraaf, Mulroy,
and Taylor 28). Therefore, in the pre-war years in Los Angeles both African-American
and interracial community-based action groups served as a powerful means of political
agency.
During WWII and immediately following it (the post-war period), AfricanAmerican economic and political agency within the city can be chiefly defined as
paradoxical. On the one hand, African Americans made tremendous financial and
political gains while America was in the war, and yet, entering into the post-war years
many of these gains were significantly reversed. African-American economic agency in
the post-war years was primarily shaped by two key factors: migration and
decentralization. Due to the boom in industrial jobs during the war and the subsequent
availability of manual and skilled work in war defense plants, thousands of African
Americans from the Southern United States migrated to the urban centers of the West
Coast.19 During the war, jobs were so prevalent that many of these migrants received
ready employment, many in positions that came with training, and were moderately
skilled and paid. However, with the end of the war, many war production plants in the
Los Angeles area either shut down or were converted back into industrial parts
18
As expressed in a 1943 issue of the Los Angeles Eagle, the LACCHR viewed Mexican-American and
African-American discrimination as “indistinguishable.”
19
By 1943, Los Angeles was receiving 10,000 African American migrants a month (De Graaf, Mulroy, &
Taylor 27).
77
manufacturers or shipping plants that required very little trained labor or personal labor,
in general, due to technological advancements in production made during the war.
Therefore, on the heels of the economic advancements in labor made during the war,
African Americans in post-war Los Angeles found themselves either out of jobs or stuck
in employment that offered little in terms of benefits and advancement.
Along with the economic fluctuations that met the incoming tide of AfricanAmerican migrants, the trend of decentralization also reversed the positive strides in
home ownership that blacks had been making during the war. During the war, African
American migrants took part in the “bungalow boom” that characterized much of the
country—i.e. they bought or rented cheap housing that had been set up for war workers in
Los Angeles (De Graaf, Mulroy, and Taylor 26). Thus, the war facilitated a temporary
trend of independent home ownership. Many of the migrants who came to Los Angeles
concentrated in the annexed city of Watts, establishing a growing community of AfricanAmerican homeowners.
Unfortunately, these positive housing gains were overturned by the trend of
decentralization that characterized the post-war period in Los Angeles. According to Eric
Avila, in his work, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight—Fear and Fantasy in
Suburban Los Angeles, decentralization was a federal policy that encouraged white
industrial and population movement to the suburbs in post-war Los Angeles (Avila 34).
This policy—also termed “white flight”—was instituted in an attempt to take back the
city from increasing racial diversification and power, and to reestablish a condition of
“white homogeneity and safety” (Avila 30). Decentralization policies encouraged the
78
movement of industrial control, independent business and management to the suburbs,
and the development of corporatization or big business development within the urban
core (55). This policy, in particular, left residents of the downtown or urban centers of the
city without access to private business ownership or management positions within the big
business sector. That is, they remained excluded others. Furthermore, decentralization
also operated to ensure that those who remained disempowered residents of the urban
core were primarily minorities. By precluding home ownership within urban
neighborhoods and redlining20 all residential districts defined as “African-American” or
“racially diverse,” the FHA and HOLC of Los Angeles forced African Americans into an
urban living situation characterized by instability, over-concentration, and “ghettoization”
(Avila 31, 34). Watts, in particular, was transformed from a burgeoning, independent
community to an over-crowded, poverty-line ghetto district. Urban centers like Watts
were characterized as blights whereas, the all-white suburbs were a place characterized
by peace and safety.
Along with the tumultuous shifts associated with economic agency in the postwar years, African Americans in Los Angeles also experienced a marked transition in
their modes of political action. During the war, interracial alliances were still on the rise
in Los Angeles, and they became one of the most significant forms of political agency for
African Americans living in the city. One of the most prominent examples of this type of
20
Redlining is a process whereby the FHA sets up residential lines around a particular area ensuring that
property values within that area remain low and only those of a particular economic class and racial
designation reside in these areas. Through practices like redlining, the federal government created poorer
“ghetto” areas that were defined by a concentration of minority individuals, and also legally sheltered “an
inclusive white identity on the fringes of the urban core” (Avila 41).
79
political action at work was the publication of the magazine Common Ground (O’Brien
and Parsons 40).21 Although the magazine did not encourage its writers to voice negative
or critical opinions of American politics, it did not refuse to publish articles that critiqued
American policy toward Japanese American internment and educational and labor
policies toward African Americans (O’Brien and Parsons 47).
However, following the war, this interracial, cooperative approach to achieving
political change was markedly repressed. With the increasing decline of job availability
and the growing restrictions of decentralization, many African Americans turned to a
political policy of African American civil rights protests. In a pragmatic attempt to gain
better access to better jobs and basic housing rights, many African Americans engaged in
fierce “turf wars” with other ethnic minority groups occupying the urban center (Avila
31).22 In addition to civil rights labor and housing protests, African Americans in the
post-war period also reflected the civil rights approach to political agency in their
writings. Although many African- American writings briefly mentioned their empathy for
the similar exploited conditions of other minority groups in Los Angeles—particularly
Japanese Americans and Mexican Americans—they primarily focused on the issue of
African-American rights. For example, Common Ground became a magazine that
focused exclusively on the writings and concerns of African Americans or “people of
21
This magazine, founded in 1941 in L.A., was funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York in hopes
of promoting solidarity between all Americans during the war. Throughout the course of its publication, the
magazine devoted itself to representing “diversity,” and it published articles by several minority writers
such as Langston Hughes and Mine Okubo (O’Brien and Parsons 42).
22
In the same vein as these “turf wars,” African Americans immediately took over the Japanese district of
“Little Tokyo” after it was evacuated during the war, seeking to establish a more stable housing community
for themselves – i.e. desperately escape from under the social label of urban “blight” (Avila 30).
80
color,” rather than interracial “diversity” (O’Brien and Parsons 50). In the writings of
authors such as Chester Himes, Langston Hughes, and Ralph Ellison this focus on
African-American rights and issues also became a central concern. Thus, political agency
for African Americans in post-war L.A. became an issue of black vs. white rather than a
systemic, minority struggle. Paradoxically then, as O’Brien and Parsons express in their
work, The Home Front War: World War II and American Society, WWII and the
following decade both initially promoted interracial unity and then “set in motion forces
that intensified fragmentation” (55).
HIMES’ BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
Living within this tumultuous time of shifting economic and political agency,
Chester Himes’ own personal background also shaped the creation of his novel. Born
July 29, 1909 in Jefferson City, Missouri, Himes was raised in a home that can be best
defined as a racial battleground. On one side was his father Joseph, who taught
mechanical skills such as blacksmithing and metal work at several African-American
trade schools in the Midwest and South and who Himes’ described as having “adopted
the slave mentality…[which] accepts the premise that white people know best” (7). In
sharp contrast to this accommodating racial position, Himes’ mother was the embodiment
of “indignation and impatience” (Sallis 8). Ultimately, the central racial conflict within
the Himes’ home, became Chester’s, as well, and powerfully shaped his life and his
writings. It was this “fundamental conflict within himself—of white versus black values,
81
but just as importantly of patrician versus egalitarian—[that] became perhaps the central
theme of Himes’ life” (Sallis 10).
In addition to his childhood in a racially tumultuous household, Himes also
experienced certain events in his adulthood that influenced his writings. Like his
childhood, Himes’ adult life was characterized by a contradictory, as Himes’ terms it a
“schizophrenic” tendency, as he fluctuated between multiple racial ideas and social
identities. For example, while attending Ohio State University from 1925-1927, Himes
fluidly moved between roles as an “introverted brooder” and a socially adept and
charming young man (Sallis 50). Ultimately, although he enjoyed writing and the
intellectual rigors of university life, Himes’ rebelled against its social constraints and was
expelled due to his increasing involvement in shady activities such as robbery and fraud.
As James Sallis indicates, in his work, Chester Himes: A Life, this time in Himes’ life
represents his propensity to wear multiple African-American identities at once—the mask
of African-American literary man and scholar and, simultaneously, the mask of a “the
black hardened criminal” (Sallis 36). In 1928, Himes was sentenced to 20-25 years in
prison for his involvement in an armed robbery. Following his release, Himes worked for
various state writing projects and then sought steadier work in the industrial promised
land of Los Angeles in 1942. While living in Los Angeles, Himes held twenty-three
different jobs in three years, and, as a product of his own labor frustrations and his own
continued inner racial conflicts, he wrote and published his first novel, If He Hollers Let
Him Go in 1945. Himes’ novel embodied his own paradoxical inner struggles as it
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represented clashes between not only whites and blacks but also blacks of different
classes, as well as various different minority groups.
WARNING AGAINST AND ALTERNATIVE TO THE MINORITY
INTERNALIZATION OF A WHITE SYSTEM OF RACISM IN HIMES’ IF HE
HOLLERS LET HIM GO
Having laid the necessary theoretical, historical, and biographical foundations, I
will now analyze just how Himes’ novel explores and questions the tense process of the
minority internalization of a system of economic power based upon the performance of
whiteness. In the following passage, Himes begins his exploration as he illustrates a
scene of minority conflict between African-American economic and social interests and
those of the Japanese Americans of central Los Angeles. This scene is one in which the
main female character, Alice, and some of her friends are discussing housing conditions
within a section of Los Angeles called Little Tokyo, a section of the city that had been
stripped from its Japanese-American inhabitants due to internment.
‘What they [new African-American migrants to L.A.] need down there
more than anything else is public housing,’ Polly said bluntly, ‘Have you
seen some of those places that those people live in? Twelve people in a
single room and not even any running water…That place is a rat hole.
Without adequate housing you can’t even start a programme of
integration…’
83
‘What do you think, Mr. Jones...what is your opinion as to the problem
arising from the conditions of Little Tokyo?’
‘All kidding aside,’ I said ‘ if I knew any solution for the race
problem I’d use it for myself first of all.’ (83)
Initially, this passage illustrates a minority conflict that stems from a desire for a very
basic economic resource, in this case, public housing benefits. Unfortunately, as these
foundational housing rights are contingent upon a performance of whiteness, an
enactment of the competitive practices of exploitation and disempowment practiced by
those classified as white, the competitive conflict in this passage takes the very form of
those modes of disempowerment utilized by the white system of power against those
minorities classified as nonwhite. For example, Little Tokyo exists for the AfricanAmerican social workers in this passage as if it never had any past owners or occupants.
Thus, the name Little Tokyo simply refers to a location of available housing; it has been
entirely disconnected from its role as a home for those who navigated between dual
identities as Japanese still remembering “Tokyo” and Americans creating an entirely new
Japanese subculture within the United States. The only reference that is made to the
former Japanese-American residents is through the vague pronoun “they,” which could
refer to any group of people and does not appear in this passage with a specific noun
antecedent. This invisible status mirrors what Amy Kaplan refers to as “historical
amnesia,” a method in which the white system of power in the U.S. has justified the
taking of land and resources from a colonized people by writing a version of history that
purposefully forgets these people and glosses over their rights and struggles (Kaplan 10).
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Along with this purposeful forgetting, the white power structure also justifies the
taking of resources from those classified as nonwhite by relegating these individuals to a
non-human role without any economic claims or rights. In the passage above, the African
Americans employ this means of disempowerment by referring to the conditions of Little
Tokyo as those of a “rat hole.” Utilizing this particular term, the African Americans
imply that the former Japanese residents of the enclave were solely to blame for making
the conditions within it so bad. That is, the Japanese Americans were on the level with
vermin in their ability to construct a home for themselves. Although this was not in
actuality the case, as the Japanese-American residents were often denied even basic
access to the necessary economic funding and housing benefits necessary to escape Los
Angeles ghettoization, Himes constructs this scene to illustrate how a desire for economic
rewards under a system of whiteness often motivates minority conflict and competition
while simultaneously crushing alternatives of cooperation and egalitarianism.
Notwithstanding their engagement in economic conflict with the former JapaneseAmerican residents of Little Tokyo, the African Americans in this first scene are not
completely tension-free. This tension is evident even in the use of the vague pronouns
“they” and “them.” Although the use of these particular pronouns points initially to the
invisible status assigned to the Japanese Americans, they also point to the underlying
union between minority groups. “They” and “them” can simultaneously refer to the
Japanese American former residents and the current new African-American migrants,
thus intermingling both groups together indiscernibly. This vague reference strategy
enables Himes to point to the disjuncture that takes place in this passage between external
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interracial conflict and the recognition of internal interracial unity that underlies this
conflict. As this passage hints at, the Japanese Americans who once occupied Little
Tokyo had to face the same struggle for adequate housing conditions and rights through
white public policy that the African Americans who occupy the neighborhood now face.
Consequently, the former Japanese-American residents also lacked “adequate housing”
and had to live in conditions without “running water” or livable space.
Experiencing the tension contingent upon relating to the oppressed experience of
a fellow minority group while also desiring something better than a bare economic state,
Chester Himes’ character Bob Jones articulates the following: “All kidding aside,” I said
“if I knew any solution for the race problem I’d use it for myself first of all” (83).
Through these words, Himes initially indicates that Jones deeply desires a “solution” to
the larger “race problem.” That is, Jones desires to rectify the inequalities and
exploitation experienced by all those classified as non-white, and, for that reason, he
refers to the “race” problem not just the African-American problem. Lynn Itagaki writes
in her essay “Transgressing Race and Community in Chester Himes’ If He Hollers Let
Him Go,” that this scene highlights Himes’ underlying argument that the economic
inequality experienced by African Americans was not something that could be overcome
by individual civil rights efforts. Instead, overcoming economic exploitation would
involve uniting with both those disempowered by the system of whiteness and those
complicit in it, and fighting the actual system of institutionalized racism itself (73). And
yet, Jones is torn between this desire to find a real solution and the practical economic
realities inscribed by the white system of power. Due to the severe restriction from even
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the most basic economic rights and privileges, a non-white individual is placed within a
debilitating position, in which the only way in which it appears to get out and get ahead is
by thinking of him or herself first. Therefore, the process of internalizing whiteness is not
represented as a simple, complicit act, but rather it is inscribed with tension and turmoil
due to the destructive and dehumanizing power of a white economic hierarchy.
This inherent paradox built into the process of minority internalization is further
explored within the second scene of interracial interaction between Japanese-Americans
and African-Americans in the novel. Having personally observed a young JapaneseAmerican boy being evicted from his home in Little Tokyo due to internment, Bob Jones
makes the following reflections:
I’d seen them send the Japanese away…Little Riki Oyana singing ‘God
Bless America’ and going to Santa Anita with his parents next day. It was
taking a man up by the roots and locking him up without a chance.
Without a charge. Without even giving him a chance to say one word. It
was thinking about if they ever did that to me, Robert Jones, Mrs. Jones’s
dark son, that started me to getting scared. (3)
This scene, unlike the earlier housing conflict passage, does not initially seem to focus
upon interracial conflict, rather it appears primarily to highlight an alternative of human
solidarity and community. That is, rather than justifying the disempowerment of the
evacuated Japanese Americans in order to further the economic interests of the AfricanAmerican community of Los Angeles, Bob Jones empathizes and personally connects
with their exploitation—“thinking that if they [the white power structure] ever did that to
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me…that started me to getting scared.” Through this passage, Himes indicates a deeper
interracial solidarity that is based upon a shared experience of exploitation and complete
disempowerment under a white system of economic power. Furthermore, by presenting
this cooperative, interracial solidarity that is based upon a shared human desire to combat
a debilitating system of economic injustice, Himes presents an implicit critique of “the
tendency of the black community to blame the poor migrants…rather than accusing the
actual perpetrators” (Itagaki 73). Thus, this passage initially presents an alternative to the
oppressive methodologies of the white system of power—an alternative that favors
humane compassion and a fear of injustice that has the potential to motivate action for
change.
Digging a bit deeper, however, reveals that underneath this initial presentation of
a hopeful communal alternative to the system of white power, lies a complex web of
contradictions and tensions—those that continually accompany minority internalization.
First and foremost, there is the tension between the ethico-political struggle that Bob
Jones undergoes and the heavy, very real consequences of a system of law that is
dominated by racism. In the passage above, Jones specifically references the law when he
laments a system that would take a man up by the roots and lock him up without a
“charge” or a “chance.” This initial lament is Himes’ literary representation of the
African-American ethico-political struggle, as he makes it clear that the current status of
American law is not one that is conducive to allowing African Americans to create
cooperative alternatives, establish community roots, and pursue opportunities or
“chances” for success. Thus, Himes does not promote the law as the means through
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which his African-American characters can enact social change. In fact, scenes of
violence and dreams of intentional lawbreaking such as murder, rape, and robbery recur
frequently in the novel (Himes 19,70,126,149). Thus, rather than embracing the law as
the means for social change Himes actively questions, challenges, and fights against it.
At the same time, though, this ethico-political circumvention of the law as the
best means for achieving social change and justice is juxtaposed with a fear of the
tangible consequences of breaking the laws of a system of institutionalized racism in the
U.S.. Bob Jones remarks that he feels afraid of a system of justice that can charge and
lock up an individual simply based upon his or her racial classification: it “started me to
getting scared.” At a later point, toward the very end of the novel, Himes articulates this
fear more directly as Jones goes before a court on false charges of raping a white woman.
As he faces the court, Jones reflects that “now I was scared…Not of the violence. Not of
the mob. Not of physical hurt. But of America, of American justice…knowing that I was
innocent and that I didn’t have a chance” (187). In this passage, Himes indicates that the
greatest obstacle for achieving change for minority individuals is not the threat of
physical violence, but rather the destructive capacities and disempowerments enforced by
the American legal system. Thus, although circumventing the law is seen as the most
effective way of achieving real social justice and change for disempowered minority
groups, both African Americans and Japanese Americans, this circumvention is restricted
by the real consequences contingent upon this very system.
In addition to emphasizing the tensions concurrent with seeking to establish an
interracial alternative to the white system of justice, Himes also highlights the
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contradictions inherent in the process of a minority internalization of a white or dominant
version of history. Initially, in the second passage of conflict, Himes imbeds an emphasis
upon counter-memory within the voice of his main protagonist, Bob Jones. By simply
narrating the observation of Japanese-American evacuation through the voice of an
African American who is also excluded from the system of whiteness and enmeshed in a
labor system that continually restricts access to a better labor position and benefits,
Himes demands that society and history acknowledge a marginalized version of history,
its “whole bitter memory…the indignity of it, the gutting of… pride” (Himes 76). By
highlighting this alternative or counter-memory version of history, Himes draws the
reader to see history in a different light that is not dominated by the white winners, but
instead focuses upon human indignities and injustices towards those classified as nonwhite in the U.S.. In turn, he seeks to encourage readers more fully to empathize with and
change these exploitive conditions.
Himes does not just stop here though, with his alternative counter-memory.
Instead, he illustrates that this alternative comes linked with its powerful, paradoxical
opposite: the view of history that is dominated by and written by those who occupy the
white system of power. Particularly, Himes illustrates the counter-memory version of
history (embodied in the voice of Bob Jones) in fierce conflict with a dominant version of
history that favors a particular construction of white masculinity in the post-WWII
period. As Lipsitz argues “Himes’ assumptions about the need for men to protect and
possess women undermined any possibility of forming an effective oppositional critique
of the ways in which racism becomes sexualized, how it becomes rendered a product of
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‘nature’ rather than of history” (38). Ultimately, Himes’ view of masculinity is derived
from a powerful pre- and post-war concern of those who defined themselves as white.
This concern was founded upon a desire to protect the country’s economic resources
against foreign enemies and the dominant white history from increasing minority voices
within the urban centers of the U.S. Within the second passage of minority interaction,
Himes imbeds this view of masculinity as Bob Jones refers only to his fear of a “man”
being torn up by the roots due to a system of white legislative power – a word choice that
connects white exploitation with a concurrent fear of demasculization. Furthermore,
Jones specifically refers to himself as “Mrs. Jones’ dark son” when he describes the onset
of his fear over degradation under the white justice system (Himes 3). This clear
reference back to his mother reveals a simultaneous fear over being considered a
“mama’s boy” that coincides with Jones’ fear of being stripped of all his material
resources. Thus, due to the fact that Himes fails to address that an extrication from the
racial disempowment of a white economic system also requires an extrication from white
definitions of gender, and in particular, masculinity, he never fully frees his characters
from an internalized version of white history. Consequently, the second scene of conflict
in If He Hollers ends not with a lived out system of interracial alternatives, but a
continual tension between these alternatives (or at least, the hope contained within them)
and an internalized belief that the most practical way to achieve even a modicum of
financial security is only possible through the destructive practices of a system of white
power.
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CONCLUSION
With the epigraph contained at the beginning of this chapter, Himes concisely
drives home his warning concerning a system of power that denies so many minorities
access to basic economic resources based on the performance of whiteness, as well as the
danger of internalizing this system. Furthermore, Himes also communicates a vision for
hope in which an alternative of cooperation and unity is substituted for the dangerous
white system of exploitation and competition that currently exists. In the following
passage, Bob Jones reflects upon both the exploitive and annihilating effects of a white
economic system, and, in turn, the alternative of human cooperation and unity that can
overcome this system of power:
I had to know that Negroes weren’t the lowest people on the face of God’s
green earth. I had to talk it over with somebody, had to build myself back
up. The sons of bitches were grinding me to the nub, the white meatless
bone. (Himes 78)
Himes implies that the system of exploitation that leaves the African American feeling
like one of the “lowest people” on earth is one that is symbolically based upon whiteness.
This whiteness is not simply a phenotypical characteristic, though. It is also part of a
larger system of power. The system of whiteness is one that excludes, exploits, and
disempowers all those who are defined as nonwhite or as inadequate performers of the
designated traits of whiteness, such as moderation and self-sufficiency. It is a system in
which the performance of whiteness ensures that only a few, nameless white “sons of
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bitches” remain at the top of the economic hierarchy and all those characterized as
nonwhite are relegated to the bottom, consumed, and spit out as “white, meatless bone.”
Having illustrated the destructive and dehumanizing power of the economic
system of whiteness through the metaphor of human bone, Himes also makes a
conclusive call to action for countering this dangerous economic system by using this
self-same metaphor. Himes uses the image of bone to point to an alternative system of
distributing economic resources. This alternative system grounds the distribution of
resources upon the perspective that the inside of all human beings is made of the same
essential material and is, therefore, equal—i.e. all human beings are composed of the
same colorless “meatless bone” on the inside. Thus, Himes concludes his novel by
hopefully asserting that the dangerous system of whiteness which continually fuels a
minority perspective and approach to action defined by a sensation of being “the lowest
creatures on God’s green earth” can be overcome. The solution is simple enough: it
simply requires turning the foundation of the economic system of whiteness inside out
(just like Himes turning the metaphor of human bone around upon itself). Turning the
system of whiteness inside out, one then chooses action that is grounded upon the
recognition that God has actually created all human beings purely and inherently equal.
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Chapter 4
CONCLUSION
Conflict over cooperation and battle over brotherhood. What induced many
minority individuals to choose the latter over the former of these two options when
seeking even a modicum of financial security and success in post-WWII United States?
Was it a lower sense of self-esteem, or perhaps just the opposite, a heightened sense of
competition and aggression? As both John Okada and Chester Himes point out in their
novels, No-No Boy and If He Hollers Let Him Go, written and set in the immediate postWWII period of U.S. history, neither is the case. Instead, through literary representations
of minority economic conflict, Himes and Okada point to a much larger and more
devastating system of whiteness or institutionalized racism in the United States as the
root of many interracial struggles between different minority groups for economic power.
It is this system of whiteness which assigns even the most basic economic rights such as
housing and labor rights according to an individual’s performance of specific white traits
of moderation, independence, and traditional Christianity. Unable to perform these white
traits adequately—and as most minority individuals are institutionally denied access to
the economic resources that would make the performance of such traits as independence
not even feasible—minority individuals are labeled as economic outsiders and
subsequently exploited and disempowered. In this exploited and degraded economic
state, many minority individuals must choose between the two options in italics above:
whether to cooperate with other minority groups to gain even the most basic economic
rights or to internalize the economic pressures of an oppressive white system and imitate
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its model of competition and exploitation. Ultimately, as both Himes and Okada point
out, minority individuals tend to replace alternatives of cooperation with a repetition of
the competitive economic methods of a white system of power, not because of weakness
or aggression, but simply because the white system is so extremely destructive. Thus,
Himes and Okada both offer a powerful warning against allowing the white system of
economic power to continue one more day unabated and unquestioned. This warning
serves as the foundation for the solution of egalitarian cooperation that both authors
imbed in their works, and also, in turn, serves as the foundation for contemporary
American minority authors who are not merely questioning and warning against the
larger economic system of whiteness, but are now interrogating the racialized term
whiteness, itself.
Okada and Himes’ warning against a destructive system of economic power built
upon the performance or non-performance of particular traits associated with whiteness,
is grounded within a very specific theoretical and historical context. Theoretically, the
literary warning is illuminated by three key theoretical concepts. First, there is the
concept that racism is an institutionalized system within the United States. That is, within
the very operations of the law within America in the post-WWII period, there was a racial
bias. As Himes points out in his novel, this racialized bias made American justice
something more fearful than even physical violence or pain because it was the
institutionalized racism within the law that most often left the minority or non-white
individual with the following judicial resolution: “knowing that I was innocent and that I
didn’t have a chance” (Himes 187).
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Operating under this unjust umbrella of institutionalized racism in the U.S., there
is the specific economic system of whiteness. This is the second underlying theoretical
concept: that whiteness is a specific system of delegating power. The basic tenets of this
concept are that whiteness in post-WWII U.S. is not just an external designation based on
phenotype but also a symbolic category referring to a specific mode of behavior—a
performance of specific white traits such as moderation, proper English, conservative,
Christianity, and independence. This performance is, in turn, attached to a tangible
economic value. That is, those who adequately perform whiteness gain economic rewards
and benefits and those who do not are classified as non-white and financially exploited
and disempowered (Harris 104-115).
Underneath this system of whiteness in which a performance of specific white
traits is attached to a pragmatic monetary value, the minority individual is often pulled
asunder. This internal conflict, or a minority internalization of whiteness, is the third key
underlying concept. Ultimately, the minority individual experiences an internal struggle
as he or she must decide whether to oppose the exploitive system of whiteness with
alternative economic practices of equality and cooperation or to replicate the exploitive
but pragmatic practices of the white system itself. This struggle, as both Himes and
Okada point out, often ends in the minority individual replicating the competitive and
oppressive tendencies of the white system. The minority individual does not come to this
resolution because of weakness or moral corruption, rather it is because the annihilating
system of whiteness often appears the only pragmatic means to gain even the most
elemental economic rights necessary for basic survival in the U.S.. Therefore, the
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internalization of the system of whiteness, which distributes economic resources based
upon the categorization of white vs. non-white, serves as a point of tense internal struggle
that tends to result in minority perpetuation of white competitive practices. More so, the
process of internalizing white racist practices also serves as a key point of warning. As
Himes and Okada both go on to indicate, the tense struggle over internalization is only
one symptom of the all-consuming lifelong struggle the minority individual will face as
he or she continually remains at least marginally non-white or incomplete within a white
system of power.
Both Himes and Okada’s literary critique of the economic system of whiteness is
grounded not only upon key theoretical concepts, but also upon a very specific historical
and biographical context. For Okada, writing in the immediate post-WWII period in
Seattle meant writing in a time heavy with change. Following the war and the internment
of Japanese Americans on the Pacific West Coast during the war, Japanese Americans in
Seattle struggled to establish a new sense of social identity and a new economic
infrastructure (Bonacich and Morell, 90-110). This new social and economic re-creation
had to take place amidst an overarching sense of doubt and despair incumbent upon the
internment of hundreds of thousands of Japanese Americans, who had been forcibly
removed from their homes and stripped of everything, with the full support of the
American justice system (Inada 8,9). Along with his Japanese-American counterparts on
the Pacific West Coast, Okada struggled to come to terms with what it meant to be
Japanese American in the new post-WWII era, and he interrogated whether it was
possible for Japanese Americans to access any of the rights contingent upon being
97
American at all—having just been blatantly denied these rights of private property,
protection, and freedom of speech through internment. This historical context of social
and internal turmoil plays itself out powerfully throughout Okada’s novel, No-No Boy, as
it explores, questions, and warns against a white economic infrastructure that not only
exploits minority individuals financially but also destroys their very sense of human
value and community.
Like Okada, Himes also wrote within and about the tumultuous times
immediately following World War II. During this period, African Americans living in
Los Angeles also experienced extremely marked and rapid changes. Following the war,
the burgeoning African-American migrant-worker community in Los Angeles shifted
from a society marked by communal solidarity, interracial community labor
organizations, and renewed hope in equality and victory sparked by the war, to an
African-American society torn apart by increasingly strict labor restrictions, forced
ghettoization, and unfulfilled U.S. government promises (De Graaf, Mulroy, and Taylor
1-40). These rapid shifts resulted in a marked movement toward a more exclusive and
restrictive African-American civil rights approach to economic rights—an approach that
singled out labor and housing issues as specifically African-American issues rather than
systemic problems due to the minority disempowerment of a white economic structure.
Affected by these historical shifts, as well as his own personal biography as a man
constantly torn and conflicted, Himes constructed a novel, If He Hollers Let Him Go, that
interrogates and warns against an economic system that tears down human bonds as it
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builds exclusive financial strongholds for only those who can adequately perform
whiteness.
Ultimately, within their novels, Okada and Himes both present a clear warning
against, as well as a powerful solution to the occurrence of interracial conflict that stems
from an internalization of a destructive white system of economic power. Initially,
through scenes of minority conflict between Japanese Americans and African Americans,
both authors illustrate that this conflict arises not from mutual animosity or selfishness,
but rather from the destructive power of an economic system of whiteness. Through the
institutionalization of a system that delegates even the most basic business and labor
rights based on the performance of white traits, the minority groups in both Himes and
Okada’s scenes of conflict are left to struggle deeply between their desire for basic
financial survival and their desire for an economic system that is much more egalitarian,
humane, and cooperative. Ultimately, both authors illustrate that it is due to the extreme
annihilating power of the system of whiteness, a system that leaves no apparent practical
means of economic survival accept through cutthroat racialized competition, that the
minority groups in their initial scenes of economic conflict choose to reject collaborative
economic solutions and compete with one another instead.
Building from these initial scenes of interracial economic conflict, both Himes
and Okada deliver poignant warnings against and solutions to the destructive nature of
the white economic hierarchical system. Both authors conclude their novels with pivotal
scenes that imbed a clear warning against the destructive consequences of allowing the
system of white economic exploitation of minority individuals to continue. In Okada’s
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concluding scene, minority perpetuation of a white economic system results in not only a
repetition of economic exploitation and disempowerment, but more importantly a
complete annihilation of human value and human life. In this concluding scene, economic
conflict between minority groups climaxes in a fiery dismemberment and death. The
same destruction of human value and life is emphasized in a pivotal scene in Himes’
novel, as well, as the root of both minority financial disempowerment and disembodiment
(tearing meat from bone) is highlighted as the systemic exploitation of a white economic
hierarchy. Ultimately, then both authors conclude their novels with a powerful warning
against the extremely destructive internalization of whiteness and its further perpetuation.
However, rather than just leaving the reader with this lingering critique of the
degrading effects of the white economic system, both Okada and Himes, end their novels
by presenting a solution. Ultimately, both authors present nearly identical resolutions to
the destructive continuation of a white system of financial distribution of resources: to
simply act upon its opposite. That is, both authors urge their readers, racial designations
notwithstanding, to reject white competitive practices of attaining financial rights and
rewards, and instead to value the inherent equality of each human being. By valuing the
inherent equality of one another and acting upon that valuation, each author indicates that
a new economic structure of cooperation and community can be built up instead: a
system that reaffirms human life while redistributing economic resources cooperatively
and upon equal horizontal rather than hierarchal lines.
Having set this pattern of questioning, critiquing, and, ultimately, rejecting the
dominant system of economic power within the United States in the post-WWII era,
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Himes and Okada set up a framework, not just for their readers to build and act from, but
also for future American authors—particularly, those writing from a minority experience.
For example, writers like Himes and Okada, established the early groundwork for
contemporary authors to interrogate not only how the system of whiteness operates
within the United States today, but more significantly to dissect the very terms that it uses
to operate. Ultimately, within their works, these present-day authors point out the
destructive consequences of allowing a system that distributes economic and social
resources based upon a performance of whiteness to continue. However, these authors
also move beyond this point. They leap from the starting mark set out by Himes and
Okada to illustrate the arbitrary and ultimately, meaningless, nature of the very terms that
allow the white system of power to exist at all—terms like “white,” “other,” and “race.”
Thus, from the early works of John Okada and Chester Himes to the works of
contemporary authors, literary representations of the economic system of whiteness have
sought to bring readers closer and closer to an actual reality that one day affirms
cooperation over conflict and brotherhood over battle.
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