White racist ideology has long been a part of the American historical narrative, historian Alexander Saxton said Thursday in a speech sponsored by the Asian-American studies program.
“I could identify a moment when I thought ‘I am a part of this society, I am a part of this history.’ We are all part of history,” Saxton told a group of 60 Northwestern students and faculty members in Harris Hall 108.
He said “mainstream” history ignores many of the hardships of 19th century immigrant populations and their roles in building the American frontier.
The story of U.S. history that is normally told allows immigration to play only minor roles, he said.
“We are seeing only a facsimile of the real racial history,” said Saxton, who wrote “The Indispensible Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California.”
Saxton, a former railroad worker and a retired professor of history at the University of California-Los Angeles, has written several other books on class and race in America, often focusing on racial movements against 19th century Chinese immigrants.
Speaking Thursday, he recounted his struggles and triumphs helping to pioneer an ethnic studies program at UCLA in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.
He said the fight to include the program in the UCLA curriculum was won because of the enormous amount of politicking and energy displayed by communities around the campus and by the student body.
But his struggle was not over when the program was instituted. The biggest challenge was establishing its legitimacy as a field of scholarship.
Prof. Dorothy Wang, one of two core faculty members in NU’s Asian-American studies program, said she sympathizes with Saxton’s battle to establish non-mainstream history as a serious field.
“It’s so important to recognize Asian-American studies as a serious field of intellectual endeavor,” Wang said. “It’s integral to American history. It’s not separate and it’s not marginal.”
Asian-American studies has been offered as a minor at NU since Fall Quarter. The program was created in 1999 after a series of student protests.
Xiao Wang, a Weinberg junior, currently is enrolled in a Chinese-American literature class and likely will minor in Asian-American studies. But she said she worries that there is too little enthusiasm about the field among many academics.
“I never had much exposure to much of any Asian-American anything in high school. I felt my education was lacking in that area,” she said. “But we need to get that spark and enthusiasm to be a stronger force, like Saxton had in the late ’60s.”
These inter-generational differences are because of what Saxton said is a change in the nature of the American consciousness.
“It’s up to you individually to care,” Saxton said. “Everyone must then collectively see it as important and want to collaborate to make things happen.”
