![]() How, then, do Asians and Asian Americans fit in a broader history of race and racism at UVA? Both Asians and Asian Americans in the 19 th and 20 th century are linked by their shared fate of labor exploitation, cultural marginalization and exclusion from the privileges of legal immigration and naturalized citizenship. and established the foundations of the Asian American communities that thrive today. Ironically, many of these Asians who thought of themselves as temporary “sojourners” remained in the U.S. While this history is of particular interest to UVA’s current Asian American students, staff and faculty, it is also unclear whether these early Asian students would be legible as Asian American by today’s standards, since students like Yen not only held themselves distinct from other Asians in the U.S., but ultimately returned to their home countries for their careers and families. To recount the history of Asians at UVA, we must keep in mind this constant-yet-shifting triangulation of Asians between Black and white. 2 Jim Crow segregation would regularly group Asians alongside whites, yet others like Harlan saw whites and African Americans as united against the intrusion of these “strangers from a different shore.” 3 Ferguson (1896) contrasts the loyal and patriotic African American with the Chinese, a “race so different from our own that we do not permit those belonging to it to become citizens of the United States,” and goes on to lament how the Chinese could ride in a railcar in Louisiana with whites while Blacks remained segregated under force of law. Justice Harlan’s famous dissent against the “separate but equal” doctrine in Plessy v. Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan made a striking comment that reminds us of the role Asians and Asian Americans have always played in the U.S.’s otherwise binary, Black-white racial system. To borrow a term from contemporary sociologists, Yen may have even been seen as an “honorary white.” 1īut only four years before Yen’s graduation from UVA, U.S. Based on his social class, education and relative assimilation, Yen had little in common with the Chinese laborers being derided at the time as “coolies,” “strike breakers” and even replacements for slaves. In Virginia, without a large influx of Asian immigrants, Asians were mostly an afterthought in the racist laws of the era, and were barely mentioned in the implementation of the Virginia Racial Integrity Laws and Sterilization Laws of the 1920s. While Pinn would seem a natural rejoinder to these disavowed eugenicists, serving as a living reminder of the failure of their predictions about African Americans, Yen is a more ambiguous case. Vivian Pinn, a 1967 graduate of UVA’s medical school who went on to become the first female African American chair of Howard University’s Department of Pathology. Jordan Hall became Pinn Hall, named for Dr. Yen went on to serve five terms as the premier of China during its republican era. Yen (also known as Yan Huiqing), the first Chinese to graduate from UVA, in 1900. Lewis House was renamed Yen House after W.W. In 2017, the University of Virginia renamed two buildings on Grounds that had associations with prominent eugenicists: Lewis House, a dormitory at the International Residential College named after biology professor and College of Arts & Sciences Dean Ivey Foreman Lewis, and the School of Medicine’s Jordan Hall, named after anatomy professor and medical school Dean Harvey E. Find all of the stories in this series published to date at UVA Today. Today’s story, “A Race So Different,” explores the experiences of Asians and Asian Americans at UVA and more broadly in the U.S. The project reflects UVA’s educational mission and the commission’s charge to educate, and to support the institution as a living laboratory of learning. “UVA and the History of Race” – a joint project of UVA Today, the commissions, and faculty members and researchers – presents some of them, written by those who did the research. The president’s commissions on Slavery and on the University in the Age of Segregation were established to find and tell those stories. As Baptist minister and former Southern Christian Leadership Council leader Fred Shuttlesworth once said, “If you don’t tell it like it was, it can never be as it ought to be.” Some are inspiring, while the truths of others are painful, but necessary for a fuller accounting of the past. Editor’s note : Even an institution as historic as the University of Virginia has stories yet to be told.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |