The fight against fascism during WWII brought U.S. contradictions into sharp focus. The victory of Allied Forces symbolically marked Western liberalism’s victory over fascism, but the United States continued to embody deep hypocrisy in its rhetoric of freedom and democracy on the one hand, and its brutal policies of racial segregation on the other. Overtly racist policies like Jim Crow and Asian Exclusion were no longer defensible in a world that had defeated fascism, and in a nation that sought to exert international dominance.
The Black-led Civil Rights Movement built multiracial alliances to take advantage of this political opening and to end legal segregation and exclusion based on race and gender. U.S. oligarchs seeking to secure America’s place as a global leader also seized on this opportunity to leverage racial liberalism — the dismantling of explicit racial barriers like legal segregation — as a way to counter criticism of U.S. racism following World War II.
The model minority myth, the belief that Asian Americans transcend the color line through correct behavior, took root during this period as a powerful tool of coercion in U.S. racial politics. The myth maintains systems of racialized advantage and disadvantage by rewarding assimilation to whiteness and by justifying criminalization of black protest and radical dissent. Transforming Asian Americans from despised Orientals into model citizens took decades of effort beginning in the late 1930s by U.S. government institutions, media, and philanthropy, and by Japanese and Chinese American civil rights organizations and scholars. It promised powerful material incentives to a population that had faced exclusion from citizenship, land ownership, jobs and housing; and myriad forms of racial violence, including the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.
At the same time that the United States was criminalizing black protest at home, it was engaging in illegal military operations abroad leading up to what became known as the Vietnam War. America viewed Asia as a strategic site for Cold War containment. During Nixon's secret bombing of Laos and Cambodia, the United States dropped over 2.7 million tons of explosives. All told, U.S. aggression would lead to the deaths of 4 million Vietnamese and fully one-fourth of the population of Cambodia. The refugees of war in Southeast Asia would be resettled into some of America's poorest neighborhoods, with scant access to the benefits of model minority status that America had constructed to justify its brutal actions both at home and abroad. Meanwhile, 1965 changes to U.S. immigration law had ended Asian exclusion, but favored the entry of highly educated professionals from other parts of Asia. As a result of U.S. wars and immigration policy the Asian American population came to include both ends of the economic spectrum: the well-off and the extremely poor.
The Civil Rights Movement never fully achieved racial equality. However, the sweeping gains it made fueled white resentment, which Republican strategists exploited to lure white Democratic voters in the South to the Republican Party, uniting downwardly mobile white Southerners with Christian Evangelicals around an agenda that attacked people of color, women, and LGBT people. This rightwing coalition would come to dominate Republican politics—and to heavily influence mainstream politics—for decades.
Learn more about resistance in this time period.