Kornel Chang

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Kornel Chang | Circulating Race and Empire: Transnational Labor Activism and the Politics of Anti-Asian Agitation in the Anglo-American Pacific World, 1880–1910 | The Journal of American History, 96.3 | The History Cooperative

Circulating Race and Empire: Transnational Labor Activism and the Politics of Anti-Asian Agitation in the Anglo-American Pacific World, 1880–1910

In January 1907, labor leaders and activists from across the Pacific Northwest converged on the city of Tacoma for the annual convention of the Washington Federation of Labor. At the gathering, they discussed and debated issues related to the social and material welfare of the region's working class. The conference attracted, in addition to its U.S. contingent, a number of participants from across the border. One of the convention speakers, the Canadian delegate M. A. Beach, representing the Vancouver Trades and Labour Council, spoke on the collective experiences and aspirations of the region's working class, explaining how they transcended the boundaries of the nation-state. In his remarks, Beach told the audience that he felt "quite at home here, in your beautiful city, in fact have spent a number of years on this side of the imaginary boundary line. I say, imaginary boundary line, because I suppose from a national standpoint we are divided, but from a wage-earners' standpoint we are not divided." He claimed that American and Canadian laborers were "brothers working for a common cause ... bettering conditions for the wage-earner," and insisted to the largely American audience that "what is good for you is good for me, and what is good for me is good for you."¹	1
This imagining of a transnational working-class community was, however, not a statement of universal solidarity but a racialized vision predicated on white racial unity. Beach asserted a transregional white working-class identity in explicit opposition to Asian "coolie" labor: "We in British Columbia have existing conditions which are very dangerous to the welfare of the white wage-earners of this country, namely the Japanese, Chinese, and Hindoo," he declared. "They are a people totally unfit for the conditions of this country." Such anti-Asian sentiment was expressed in politics, especially in organized efforts to curtail and regulate Asian migration to North America. These efforts facilitated the development of a racialized class consciousness among white Euro-American and Canadian workers in the Pacific Northwest borderlands. Beach continued, "We have succeeded in a measure in getting the ears of a capitalistic government to listen to our cries when we got the head tax on the Chinese increased from $50 to $500, but we shall not rest until we get total prohibition of the yellow evil." The "Oriental Problem," he contended, "are just as important to you as they are to us on the other side of the border," and in this struggle "there is a bond of friendship, a fraternity, existing between us that no imaginary line can sever."²	2
Beach's speech reminds us of the extent to which anti-Asian racism defined working-class politics and culture in the Pacific Northwest during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The racialization of Asian migrants as degraded foreign labor mobilized a diverse array of Euro-American and Canadian workers into a transnational white working class. White labor leaders and workers crisscrossed the western U.S.-Canadian frontiers to engage in race riots, lobby for immigration restriction, and establish anti-Asiatic organizations, forging racial and class bonds across national boundaries. But if white working-class formation took shape through these border crossings, it was also animated by a world beyond the Americas. This pattern of racialization, I argue, drew on larger circuits of movements that linked the proletariat racism and xenophobia in the Pacific Northwest to Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. White labor leaders and activists circulated the empire carrying with them their accumulated racial knowledge of "coolie" labor and the "yellow peril," forging intercolonial connections and relationships through which certain sites became nodes in a racialized geography, coalescing at points in space of dense white working-class migration and contact.³	. . .

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