Protestant Missionaries, Asian Immigrants, and Ideologies of Race in America, 18501924 (Studies in Asian Americans)

ISBN: 9780415955836

出版社: Routledge

出版年: 2006-12-15

页数: 176

定价: USD 128.00

装帧: Hardcover

内容简介

When Chinese immigrants began to settle on the West Coast of the United States in the late 1840s, the free-soil white settlers of California, Oregon and Washington reacted violently and viciously, beginning a vitriolic cycle of racist legislation that culminated in 1924, with the legal exclusion from immigration and American citizenship of all Asians. During this period, much of the anti-Asian cant involved religion as well as race - Christianity tied to race, defining race, defending race boundaries. Christians whose Christianity emphasized inclusion rather than exclusion came under attack as friends of the enemy, race traitors who encouraged and permitted the Asian invasion. As the anti-Asian rhetoric developed against specific targets - first the Chinese, then the Japanese, then Asian Indians - Christian missionaries became a proxy target of anti-Asian groups, as Christian missionaries became the only interest group that consistently defended Asian rights to immigration and citizenship. This reality complicates (though does not completely invalidate) the academic and popular sense of missionaries as complicit in racism and imperialism. This book examines how in defending Asian rights and their own version of Christian idealism against scientific racism, missionaries developed a complex theology of race that prefigured modern ideologies of multiculturalism and reached its final, belated culmination in the liberal Protestant support of the civil rights movements in the 1960s.