In the Twilight Zone between Black and White: Japanese American Resettlement and Community in Chicago, 1942-1945

Charlotte Brooks

In July 1943 four Japanese American men got into a knife fight with a group of Filipino sailors at the corner of Clark and Division streets in Chicago. A Hearst-owned newspaper with racist proclivities dubbed the altercation a "riot" and blamed it on "jobless Japanese Americans who were roaming around at will late in the evenings." Noting such coverage, Chicago Nisei (American-born Japanese Americans, as distinguished from Issei, their immigrant parents) feared a public outcry. News stories about Japanese army atrocities in Bataan later that year triggered similar feelings of anxiety. Still, neither incident created noticeable anger against Japanese Americans among other residents of the city. This lack of antagonism is a puzzle. During the war, Chicago replaced the West Coast as the center of Japanese American life in the United States. Of the 60,000 internees who left camp by war's end, almost 20,000 settled in Chicago; Salt Lake City, the second most popular destination, attracted only 3,000. Yet despite this influx into a city with only 400 Japanese American residents before the war, Chicagoans demonstrated little active hostility toward their new neighbors, whom the United States government dubbed "resettlers."1	1
The Nisei escaped specifically anti-Japanese persecution because to the Chicagoans they encountered, they were nonwhite first and Japanese second—if at all. Whites on the West Coast discriminated against all Asians but singled out Japanese Americans for particular abuse. Most Chicagoans, ignorant of the internment and of Japanese Americans in general, proved as likely to label the Nisei "oriental" or Chinese as Japanese American.2	2
Though the resettlers' "enemy" ethnicity lost much of its importance in Chicago, physical markers of difference always limited Nisei opportunities in the city. When a white churchman described his ideal of assimilation for Chicago resettlers as "complete incorporation or absorption into our every community social activity where only the difference in physical features are noticeable," he unwittingly isolated the root of Nisei difficulties.3 That "difference in physical features" was the first thing other Chicagoans saw, and many inquired no further. The employers who turned down Nisei and the landlords who slammed doors in their faces seldom asked if they were Japanese; not being white was enough.	3
Still, the reactions of the many Chicago residents who reconstructed their mental hierarchies of race to accommodate the Nisei revealed that not being white did not mean being black. As the social scientists Michael Omi and Howard Winant have noted, most Americans' "ability to interpret racial meanings depends on preconceived notions of a racialized structure." In 1943, at least 85 percent of Chicago's 3.5 million residents were African American or white, a fact that shaped the racial perceptions of city residents. Chicagoans also knew that the city's white population enjoyed economic and educational opportunities, residential mobility, and political power that blacks could only dream of. The appearance of Japanese Americans challenged those accustomed to this biracial hierarchy of color and privilege. In response, some Chicagoans—co-workers, landlords, employers, or officials—attempted to shoehorn Japanese Americans into the existing racial scheme. Others sensed and expressed the inadequacy of a biracial approach. In the end, most of those involved, including the Nisei themselves, came to see Japanese Americans as occupying an inbetween position in the city's racial hierarchy—a position lacking easy definition.4	. . .