Rationale
I teach in an urban city school system, and my students are predominately African Americans. They are acutely aware of any prejudice that may be aimed their way. They also possess an understanding, at least at a cursory level, of the horrific history of prejudice and discrimination toward blacks in this nation. Yet my students remain woefully ill informed about the horrendous acts of injustice that have been aimed at people of other ethnic origins. My purpose will be to expand that knowledge base; to produce an empathy for Asian Americans; to create an interest in reading the novel; to provide background information that will assist my students in their understanding of the characters in the novels we will be reading; if possible, to reduce racial prejudice against Asian Americans as we see that fundamentally, we share similar struggles and goals no matter what our race.
Chinese immigration to this nation is a shameful chapter in our history. Knowledge of this history of discrimination against the Chinese and changes resulting from Supreme Court decisions will serve as an important basis for better understanding two novels that I plan to teach: Bone by Fae Myenne Ng and Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan. Chinese men flocked to our western coast in search of gold in the 1840s and in search of work on the railroads later in the century. Many were lured under false pretenses, and streets paved with gold and opportunity were not to be found as expected. Again in the 1940s another wave of immigration occurred, prompted by the coming of communism in China. Discrimination was awful and intense. Many of the injustices were addressed by the courts. For example, is it acceptable for a law to be applied arbitrarily to one group while another group continues to defy the law with impunity? Also, do aliens have equal protection under our constitution? Such was the basis for a case that eventually made it to the Supreme Court late in the nineteenth century of Yick Wo vs. Hopkins.
In both Bone and Joy Luck Club, we meet young women attempting to bridge the expectations of their elders to continue traditional ways of life and the desire to be more completely assimilated in modern American culture. The backgrounds and history of their ancestors is key in both works to the emotional development of the four daughters in Joy Luck Club and in Leila in Bone. Just as the young women gradually come to better understand the lives of their parents and grandparents, so too will my students better understand the history at play and the constitutional struggles of one of our important ethnic groups in this nation. They will be able to see how these issues are still of great concern today. We will also examine the Fourteenth Amendment and its implications for all groups in our society. For example, how willing are my students post 9/11 to afford these same rights and privileges to Arab Americans or other immigrants coming to our shores today?
As we trace the United States in the nineteenth century, we find a progression from a nation that welcomed outsiders to work and settle its land to that of a "gatekeeping" nation. We became a nation that used many excuses to practice exclusion, including that of national security, but in fact practiced a form of racism aimed particularly at the Chinese and Mexicans. In the early twentieth century, we extended the definition of "race" to included people of Southern and Eastern Europe as well. And in the mid-twentieth century we even went so far as to intern our own citizens of Japanese descent. Through a system of laws, a bureaucracy was created that continues to this day. Yet in the last 150 years, has this system ever accomplished its stated or even its non-stated goals? Some of the questions we will consider include the following: Aren't employers looking the other way, and in that sense encouraging this migration to American because they want cheap labor? Aren't thousands of immigrants risking their lives every year to this day to come to America, and living lives as aliens, illegals, and undesirables? What rights are we willing to grant to minorities in our midst? Is our attitude toward immigrants any different today than it was over 150 years ago?
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