In the advent of U.S. President Barack Obama’s 2008 election win, a news columnist states: “We have just boldly ushered in a new, post-racial era. Once again, we have proven ourselves a nation of leaders: A representative democracy in its truest sense.” (Morris, 2008, para. 11). At the crux of his statement belies the logic that achieving a post-racial and colorblind social terrain warrants national exceptionalism due to the country’s “remarkable” ability to overcome a checkered past. However, such a celebratory discourse is put in jeopardy when considering Frantz Fanon’s claim that “it is clear that what divides this world is first and foremost what species, what race one belongs to,” even when considering the “economic reality, inequality, and enormous disparities” that characterize settler colonial nation-states (Fanon, 2005, p. 5). Juxtaposing the two perspectives unveils an essential precariousness in American race relations: Although the U.S. was founded upon racial subordination, the dominant discourse implores us to “forget” race. As part of this recent shift, we must ask: How has race maintained cultural hegemony as the fundamental organizing principle of Western life, even when status quo sentiments insist upon “not seeing race?” 

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The racial contradictions that undergird our turbulent times can be traced to the substantial demographic shifts in the post-World War II era. While the historical archive remembers the Cold War geopolitical terrain for the upheaval of European refugees, the annals of displaced peoples across Asia are relegated to the periphery. Yet, dissecting the underlying nuance of Asian refugee life in this landscape unveils how new constructions of race were aggregating into ambivalent modalities that continue today. In the postwar period, The U.S. government's racialization of Asians was the distinguishing factor between the treatment of Asian and European refugees. Whereas European refugees were generally granted membership in the national body politic, the racial articulation of Asianness was rapidly digressing from the paranoia-ridden “yellow peril” discourse toward a celebratory “model minority” stereotype that included Asians into the national fabric in order to redress America’s racial reputation. Ultimately, this shift in the Asian racial subject position profoundly influenced the scaffolding upon which political and military postures in Asia were executed by aligning the nation with the narrative of “progress” that delivered a celebratory and exceptionalist rendering of the U.S. 

The U.S. government’s move to abruptly extend inclusive gestures toward Asian refugees marks a turning point in the nation’s racial order from one defined by vehement exclusion to one of conditional inclusion, which deviates from European refugee life. Granted, racial discrimination barred certain European refugee populations from entering the nation; yet, when viewed through a structural lens, immigration quotas such as the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 were generally welcoming of European refugees (Ngai, 1999, p. 70). Nevertheless, authorities perpetually negotiated whether to grant membership to Asians according to a racial barometer. In particular, this barometer deeply pronounced itself in the context of Chinese populations; updated immigration quotas implemented by the Eisenhower administration signified a profound deviation from the exclusionary paradigm instituted through the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The nation sharply included Chinese refugees on the condition that they subscribed to achieve the  “model minority” stereotype, which served to revise the nation’s racial reputation. In her essay, The Disappearance of America’s Cold War Chinese Refugees, Madeline Hsu succinctly describes how, through President Eisenhower’s immigration quotas, “Chinese Cold War refugees were to demonstrate that America did not discriminate racially by acquiring suburban homes, middle-class and professional employment, and citizenship in the U.S.” (Hsu, 2012, p. 14). Indeed, Chinese inclusion through updated immigration policy directly functioned as the key foothold for the nation to “own up” to its past and “right its wrongs” by supplying immigrants with the signifiers of American success. The model minority not only relied on Chinese immigrants’ capacity to forget histories of racial exclusion but opened the door for a celebratory discourse of the nation-state by framing Chinese success as the effect of U.S. equality, liberty, and freedom, which ultimately obscures the legacies of racial exclusion enacted upon Asians.  

Although the nation granted Chinese immigrants membership, it still sought to simultaneously exclude and deprivilege Asians through various political maneuvers. Specifically, Asian racial subjection guided policy decision-making in the United Nations (UN) by significantly affecting debates on the definition of “refugees” in the international legal terrain. As Laura Madokoro explains in her chapter Written Out: The 1951 Convention and Refugees in Asia, UN diplomats such as Robert Rochefort sought to create a definition of “refugee” that was limited to European refugees in order to carve out Asians who increased the risk of xenophobia in the West (Madokoro, 2016, p. 28). By presenting Asian inclusion as undesirable due to its potential capacity to spark racial tension,  the category “refugee” was constructed in order to secure democratic “peace” and “equality” in the national body politic by applying only to Europeans facing political persecution. However, in a more draconian vein, Rochefort’s comments unveil that at the exact moment that Chinese inclusion was an enzyme for celebrating the U.S.'s exceptional status, the broader global terrain ultimately sought to render Asianness as “inalterably foreign” and underscores the rudimentary ambivalence characterizing the Asian subject position.   

Beyond international political apparatuses, Asian racialization also intrinsically steered military operations in the Cold War. For instance, American intervention in Korea showcases the variety of racial assumptions deployed by armed forces in order to validate the biopolitical management of refugees. In his essay Beyond No Gun Ri: Refugees and the United States Military in the Korean War, Sahr Conway-Lanz unearths a document from the Department of the Army in 1952 that pictures how the “passage of [Korean] civilian hordes through combat areas troubled the Americans” which spilled out into a “shoot anyone who moved at night” military posture (Conway-Lanz, 2005, pp. 60-61). In order to spatially debilitate Korean populations, U.S. forces relied on a racially homogenizing maneuver to assign all Koreans as constitutive of “contagion” and “yellow peril,” which necessitated a “must die” military strategy. The U.S.'s carceral drive to debilitate Korean populations exhibits the biopolitical and racial scaffolding imparted upon Asian refugees. Although inclusionary gestures were extended toward Asians in order to historicize America’s racial record, the nation ironically still sought to exclude and manage Asians under the guise of a “human rights” framework that ultimately registered Asianness as terminally Other.  

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By retracing the historical archive, differences in the treatment between Asian and European populations operate under a profusely racial grammar, even if the dominant narrative claims otherwise. Whether it appears through rapid incorporation into the racial body politic, debates surrounding the definition of the term refugee, or Cold War military strategy, the Asian racial subject position uniquely functioned as the premise for national celebratory exceptionalisms and the proliferation of Empire. Thus, at stake in this historical genealogy is a more profound reexamination of the Asian racial subject position as a backdrop for problematizing modern shifts toward the post-racial terrain. The ambivalence of Asianness in the Cold War landscape unveils a critical subtext that urges us to remain skeptical of neoliberal post-racialism and, precisely, how it may obscure, rather than resolve, racial violence.