Both Edges of the Margin: Blacks and Asians in Mississippi Masala, Barriers to Coalition Building

Both Edges of the Margin: Blacks and Asians in Mississippi Masala, Barriers to Coalition Building Taunya Lovell Bankst Asians often take the middle position between White privilege and Black subordination and therefore participatein what Professor Banks calls "simultaneous racism," where one racially subordinatedgroup subordinates another. She observes that the experience of Asian Indian immigrants in Mira Nair'sfilm parallels a much earlier Chinese immigrant experience in Mississippi,indicatinga pattern of how the dominantpower uses law to enforce insularityamong and thereby control different groups in a pluralisticsociety. However, Banks argues that the mere existence of such legal constraintsdoes not excuse the behavior of White appeasement or group insularityamong both Asians andBlacks. Instead,she makes an appealfor engaging in the difficult task of coalition-buildingon political, economic, socialandpersonallevels among minority groups. "When races come together, as in the present age, it should not be merely the gathering of a crowd; there must be a bond of relation, or they will collide...." -Rabindranath Tagore1 "When spiders unite, they can tie up a lion." -Ethiopian proverb I. INTRODUCTION In the 1870s, White land owners recruited poor laborers from Sze Yap or the Four Counties districts in China to work on plantations in the Mississippi Delta, marking the formal entry of Asians2 into Mississippi's black © 1998 Asian Law Journal, Inc. I Jacob A. France Professor of Equality Jurisprudence, University of Maryland School of Law. The author thanks Muriel Morisey, Maxwell Chibundu, and Frank Wu for their suggestions and comments on earlier drafts of this Article. 1. Rabindranath Tagore, On Education, in A TAGORE READER 216 (Amiya Chakravarty ed., 1961). 2. The use of the term Asians is problematic as I indicate elsewhere in the text of this essay. ASIAN LAWJOURNAL [Vol. 5:7 belt. 3 The Chinese farm workers quickly became middle-class merchants, servicing Black Delta communities. Briefly, there was the possibility of a racial coalition between the Chinese immigrants and the native-born Black residents, but soon the legal and social structures prevailed, and this opportunity for coalition was lost. Ultimately, the Mississippi Chinese came to represent an odd mixture of victim and oppressor, a phenomenon called simultaneous racism where one "racially" ' 4 subordinated group simultaneously subordinates another racial group. 5 Forced to exist at the margins of a society whose laws openly perpetuate an ideology of White supremacy, the Chinese in Mississippi were denied the rights and benefits granted Whites. Although classified by the dominant society as non-White, Asians were not Black, and they often capitalized on this legal and social distinction. Many also adopted the anti-Black attitudes of the dominant society to obtain better treatment by Whites. In this way the Mississippi Chinese community contributed to the racial subordination of Blacks in the Mississippi Delta. In the past, formal legal barriers, such as Jim Crow laws, denied "non-White" groups the privileges that "Whiteness" conferred, while also providing a nexus for racial coalitions between Asians and Blacks. The experiences of Chinese people in Mississippi during the Jim Crow era illustrate this point. Mira Nair's 1991 film, Mississippi Masala, portrays the entry of a second group of Asians-Asian Indians or South Asians-into the Mississippi Delta one hundred years after the entry of Chinese workers. Unlike the Chinese immigrants, Asian Indians in MississippiMasala arrive in the Delta as educated, formerly middle class immigrants. 7 Director Nair porThis is especially true when the term is applied to Indians, who also are called "East Indian" and "South Asian" in this country and "Asian" in parts of Africa like Uganda. In this essay the term Asian is used most often when referring to Indians as opposed to other ethnic groups like Chinese or Japanese. 3. JAMES W. LOEWEN, THE MississiPPi CHINESE: BETWEEN BLACK AND WHITE 27 (2d ed. 1988). 4. I use the term race in this essay as a social as opposed to a biological or scientific label to denote legal and social classifications sometimes used interchangeably with ethnicity or national origin. The issue of whether there are legally significant differences between the terms race, ethnicity and national origin, however, is beyond the scope of this essay. 5. Eric K. Yamamoto builds on Michael Omi's theory that members of a racially subordinated group may be differently racialized resulting in different levels of racial status and power within the group. He argues that "differential racialization occurs between as well as within racially subordinated groups." Thus, it is possible for one racially subordinated group to simultaneously subordinate another racially subordinated group. Eric K. Yamamoto, Rethinking Alliances: Agency, Responsibility andInterracialJustice, 3 ASIAN PAC. AM. L. J. 33, 61 (1995) ("[Michael] Omi explains how differences within a group, class cleavages for example, differentially racialize members of the group, cre- ating different levels of racial status and power for subgroups."). 6. See infranotes 11-48 and accompanying text. 7. Loewen speculates that the Chinese workers came from peasant and artisan families, not from the lowest classes of poor peasants or landlord class. Most were illiterate. They also could not speak Mandarin, the language of the educated class in China. Some workers came directly from China while others stopped first in California or Chicago. The later arrivals came with some financial re- 1998] BOTH EDGES OF THE MARGIN trays the Asian Indian immigrant community, like the Chinese community before it, as consciously occupying a middle racial position between Blacks and Whites. The film opens in 1972 as Jay, a Ugandan-born Asian Indian lawyer, is leaving Uganda along with other Indians, taking his wife, Kinnu, and daughter, Mina, from their comfortable upper-middle class home.8 The family leaves Uganda during the anti-Indian fervor encouraged by General Idi Amin. By the early 1990s, the film's setting, Jay and his family are settled in Mississippi after a brief stay in England. They come to the United States as working-class immigrants, living in a Mississippi Delta motel owned by a relative. Kinnu supports the family by operating a liquor store in a Black neighborhood, and Mina works as a maid in the motel. Jay, obsessed with returning to Uganda and reclaiming his property, writes petitions to the Ugandan government. Mina, now in her twenties, meets Demetrius, a native-born Black man who runs a carpet cleaning business. A romance ensues. When the couple are discovered in a motel room, Jay, supported by his Asian Indian relatives and friends, forbids Mina to see Demetrius. The Asian Indian motel owners boycott Demetrius' business, and the White-owned bank recalls his loan. The film ends with Mina a (...truncated)