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The American Melting Pot and Asian Dating
The American Melting Pot and Asian Dating
Due to globalization and the resulting organic assimilation of ethnic minority communities, non-white groups across the United States have seen a certain gradual loss of their cultures and sense of individuality. This phenomenon can be linked to the concept of the American melting pot as coined by French American author, Hector St. John de Crevecouer. He believed that “people of all sorts come to America, contribute their part, intermarry, create a new mixed people, and enjoy the unprecedented liberty of life in this place.” Essentially, rather than remaining separate, immigrant cultures blend to make a new unique American culture. Per Crevecoeur’s vision, as the “American identity” becomes less rigidly defined and wanders further away from the formerly synonymous idea of the Anglo-Saxon, or more current Anglo-American, identity as generations go on, there is less emphasis placed on national, religious, and racial differences when it comes to social and marital mixing. This is because the belief is that after a certain point, everyone becomes an American, thus there is no need to discriminate.
That being said, being American means different things to different people and this identity is not limited to nativity, skin color, or legal citizenship status. Even the white Anglo-Saxon-descended young Americans of today are divided into two distinct categories: the thrift flipping, severe mental food intolerance and dietary restriction types who have already evolved and established themselves to the point of having their distinct dialect that can only be described as the modern equivalent of a regional accent that sees them neglect the “-ing” suffix in favor of saying “-een,” and on the opposite spectrum, the truck driving, Blake Shelton fanatics who genuinely believe he deserved to be People’s “Sexiest Man Alive” and like Atlantis’ Cookie, believe that the four basic food groups are made up of “beans, bacon, whiskey, and lard.” In reality, broken English and remarkably inconsistent diets aside, white people and Western customs are still the global standard for civilization. To be an American can mean anything from having an “American” name, learning and using American or Continental table etiquette, to having bleached hair, a taste for California rolls, and a concerning pattern of exclusively dating white men named Zach from Tennessee. Because of this diversity, it is important to clarify that in this paper, “American” refers to the identities and cultures commonly associated with the blueprint Anglo-Saxon-descended Hallmark white American population, as opposed to any minority group.
Before sushi orders differentiated people, they were divided by colored racial categories: red, yellow, black, brown, and white. Native, Asian, African, Southern and Central Asian, and European. These large phenotypic categories were then further divided by ethnic subgroups. While the usage of colorist language was and still is, fairly universal, the smaller ethnic categories tended to vary. In the United States, the 1980 Census was divided into white, black, Hispanic, Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Vietnamese, American Indian, Asian Indian, Hawaiian, Guamanian, Samoan, Eskimo, Aleut, and Other categories while the British Census was divided into white, West Indian, African, Arab, Turkish, Chinese, Indian, Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, and Other categories. The large number of ethnic minorities in the US is due to high rates of immigration from all over the world, especially throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This is despite the many exclusionary anti-immigrant laws put in place throughout the 1800s. This paper will specifically focus on East Asian immigrants: Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, and begin with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The Chinese Exclusion Act was the first major law restricting immigration into the US. It prevented Chinese immigrants from entering the US or becoming naturalized citizens for ten years and was designed to prioritize white Americans in the job market. The act was passed by Congress after years of American citizens complaining about increased competition in the job market due to Chinese immigrants who were somehow simultaneously inherently racially inferior but also enough of a threat to take all the available jobs from more deserving or capable white people. The jobs in question were undesirable in the railroad and mining industries where the pay was low and physical demands were high. Their primary fear was that Chinese people would establish themselves enough in the States to the point of becoming a permanent American underclass like the Jewish and Irish were beginning to do.
Flash forward a few years, and Japanese people became the new target. A series of anti-Japanese and Japanese-excluding laws were passed throughout the early 20th century under similar pretenses. Congress passed the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907, which was meant to address anti-Japanese discrimination in California, and the Immigration Act of 1924 which toughened the rules regarding immigration from multiple Asian countries. These laws remained in place until the famous American civil rights movement in the 60s. Until that point in history, orientalism portrayed Asians as a hyper-superstitious, exotic race inferior to whites; Asian people’s use of chopsticks, traditional lack of furniture, and practice of living in multi-generational households were seen as primitive and backward practices that threatened good American values. The civil rights movement, and more specifically, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, represented a turning point in Asian American history in the way that Asian Americans were inspired to stand up for themselves which was especially important for Japanese Americans at the time who were still dealing with the aftermath of being held in internment camps along the west coast.
The Immigrant and Nationality Act also made it possible for the spouses and families of working immigrants to join them in the US. They were then able to settle down and start families finally; the first generation of Asian Americans. This first generation of Americans still had close ties with their cultures though they were Americans on paper. Due to previous years of mistreatment, ethnic minority communities held onto their cultures and values tighter and it was important for them to have the same sense of community that they would have had they stayed in their home countries. These first generations typically went on to marry people with similar, if not the same, identities. Part of this is because Asian Americans were still being treated differently in society due to the prevalence of old Orientalist ideas and the new stereotypes that stemmed from them. As white people gained more exposure to Asians and younger generations of white people grew up alongside them and witnessed the cultural differences firsthand, the misguided Orientalist beliefs of their parents and other older generations evolved into modern harmful stereotypes and microaggressions. It was from there that the model minority myth originated.
There is some truth in the model minority myth in the way that Asian parents pushed their children to do things similarly to how they did them in their childhood. This included instilling more traditionally Eastern values and habits. These children would then grow up doing things the Eastern and Western way, from rotating between eating traditional hearty breakfasts and sugary cereals, holding their chopsticks improperly, speaking both languages and celebrating a wide variety of holidays. As time went on and these first-generation Americans grew up to marry and have children of their own, they had a very wide range of potential partners to choose from. This generation was growing up in the years after Loving v. Virginia and while interracial marriages were still far from being considered typical, they grew up knowing they had the choice to marry outside of their culture if they wanted to. At this point, Asian Americans and whites attended the same schools, went on to work in similar fields, and even had some of the same friends. The only thing standing in the way of full assimilation into American culture was marriage. For Asian Americans, they still resonated with the American identity and while marrying into an all-white family would have come with some culture shocks, it was nothing they were not used to seeing in their daily lives as Asian Americans constantly surrounded by white people. White people marrying into Asian families on the other hand would have experienced significant culture shocks as they were not familiar with Asian culture and at this point in history, most people still chose to marry members of the same communities.
Their children, the second-generation Asian-Americans, were then raised by parents who did things the Eastern and Western way; people who went through American school systems, celebrated American holidays, grew up eating American foods and spent their entire lives surrounded by white people. These second-generation Americans were then immediately exposed to more of their American culture and it is through this cycle that people naturally moved further away from their ethnic cultures as they assimilated and melted into the American melting pot. As new generations begin to resonate more and more with Western culture, they become “Americanized” and while stereotypes and microaggressions still followed them based on their appearances, they were no longer seen as exotic “others”. White children raised by white parents who had more exposure to Asians and other minorities grew up to be more tolerant and eventually, “that Asian kid” became “that kid.” Aside from their appearances, Asian-American kids were hardly different from American kids. They all grew up eating chicken nuggets, taking photos with Santa Clause, and crying over math homework with their dads.
By 1990, 25% of married Asian women between the ages of 18-30 had white husbands while 45% of unmarried but cohabitating women in the same age range had white partners. That is a very significant number and it looks like the statistics will only continue to rise as more and more people educate themselves and move away from labeling everyone they meet. Among Generation Z, interracial relationships are becoming more and more popular; to the point where it is fairly typical and nothing noteworthy. Of course, there are many defining factors that I have not considered in this 2,500-word multimedia project like the experiences of adopted children and the internal racial identity conflict that they experience or racial fetishization but that is because identity is already a deeply personal thing, and those who were adopted already face significant judgment from close-minded people who think they are not really ethnic or not really white. Unfortunately, these toxic mindsets are still prevalent even among younger generations. For some, their ethnic identities are a core part of who they are while others think of it as more of an afterthought: people who for example, immediately think “I am Korean,” vs people who are people who happen to have Korean parents. The concept of assimilating vs being “white-washed” is also a point of contention here because saying someone is “white-washed” is typically meant to be an insult. Calling someone “white-washed,” uncultured, or “not a real ____” is just as harmful as perpetuating the damaging racial stereotypes rooted in Orientalism. This is all to say that the idea of the American melting pot made interracial relationships and interracial marriage a possibility over time, but also worked to push people away from their ethnic cultures and “Americanize” them. While the idea of the multicultural American melting pot was a pleasant idea in the beginning, we as a society have to be conscious of cultural erasure.
About the Author
Irene Shin is a woman who dons many hats: accent-less Minnesotan, student, educator, and life-long learner.
She has a passion for sharing under-told stories and is using that passion to study history and international relations at BU. Though she currently works as a pre-k/early elementary summer-school teacher, her hope is to go from teaching shapes to re-shaping our understanding of history to highlight the interconnectedness of law and politics within conflict.
Outside of school, her favorite things include reading, watching dramas (she has a soft spot for romance), and taking advantage of being a resident of the land of 10,000 lakes by going on boat rides and walking along the shores with friends.
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