Different Racisms and the Differences They Make: Race and “Asian Workers” of Prewar Hawai`i

Abstract

In the past two decades, the scholarship on prewar Hawai`i, particularly of its workers, took a much needed critical turn toward the study of racial and class confl icts, challenging the long-standing dominance of the assimilationist framework. However, an anachronistic deployment of a pan-Asian racial category and an attenuated conceptualization of racism have impeded the turn, an important consequence of which has been an inadequate grasp of the racial inequality and division between Japanese and Filipino workers. I argue that a key to overcoming these shortcomings is the abandonment of a unidimensional conceptualization of racism that underlies not only the study of Hawai`i but also much of the sociology of race. Focusing on the 1920s and 1930s, this essay seeks to demonstrate why and how Japanese and Filipino workers faced different racisms, different not only in intensity but in kind, and what differences they made in relation to the production and reproduction of working-class racial inequality and division.