Asian American Experience

Asian American Experience:
The History of Asians in America
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Asian American Experience:
The History of Asians in America
Transnational History of Asian American Racialization
The attached newspaper article, published on the 12th of March in 1899 in The Denver Post, discussed the protests against the annexation of the Philippines to the United States of America. In the said article, annexation was opposed because it was viewed by the Philippine laborers as the "white conqueror`s" pass for achieving cheaper labor costs and for a greater sense of impunity in the Asian islands. Indeed, the article discussed that with annexation, the working masses of the United States can be easily brought into the Philippines, and the said working masses can then enjoy higher pay with greater benefits, especially including immunity from Philippine laws. On the other hand, annexation would allow US employers to ship off cheap Filipino and Asian laborers to other US lands, at cheaper costs and salaries. Such a set-up would then destroy the balance that maintained the wages of the country on a living scale. More importantly, at the heart of the annexation lay the threat of a possible coolie trade in the Philippines, wherein millions of coolie laborers will be forced to compete with white American labor in their very own country.
The article mainly explored the context and complexities of the coolie trade. In a sense, the coolie trade became somewhat comparable to the apartheid of Africa, wherein laborers were either coerced or deceived into cheap labor. Indeed, although living and working conditions were now more acceptable as compared to the period of the apartheid, most coolie laborers were still deprived of their basic rights for equality and respect. Most coolies were paid beyond their real value, although such an unbalanced scale is most commonly attributed to the coolies` lack of any particular marketable skills. Coolie traders, including those in the Philippines, "compensated" these low wages with several benefits, including the promise of assistance for immigration towards the United States and other foreign countries. Although most of the promised assistance has been given top the coolie laborers, those who immigrated were later forced into poverty when their contracts ended because of the difficulty of acquiring work in the United States, as well as the difficulty of applying for a passage back to their countries. To make matters worse, shipping conditions for coolie laborers were sometimes so bad that millions of the laborers being shipped died during the trip CITATION Ron98 \l 1033 (Takaki, 1998).
The coolie trade, along with the annexation discussed in the article, was significant in the transnational history of the racialization of Asian American. Drawing from a long-ingrained mindset of "white supremacy", most Asian races allowed the white...