My wife, Jacalyn Harden, has just had her first book published. Double Cross: Japanese Americans in Black and White Chicago. The book is truly interdisciplinary: ethnography, social history, and race theory. It tells the story of a group of Japanese American political activists, now quite elderly, who were active in political struggles crossing racial, ethnic, and gender lines. It places this story in the context of the relocation of Japanese Americans to Chicago after World War II, at the same time that the Great Migration of blacks from the South to northern and midwestern industrial centers like Chicago was taking place. And it uses these experiences and this history in order to question our understanding of race in America, by showing how Japanese Americans stood in relation to both black people and white people, and how this means that race in America is more than just a question of “black and white.”
Double Cross
My wife, Jacalyn Harden, has just had her first book published. Double Cross: Japanese Americans in Black and White Chicago. The book is truly interdisciplinary: ethnography, social history, and race theory. It tells the story of a group of Japanese American political activists, now quite elderly, who were active in political struggles crossing racial, ethnic, and gender lines. It places this story in the context of the relocation of Japanese Americans to Chicago after World War II, at the same time that the Great Migration of blacks from the South to northern and midwestern industrial centers like Chicago was taking place. And it uses these experiences and this history in order to question our understanding of race in America, by showing how Japanese Americans stood in relation to both black people and white people, and how this means that race in America is more than just a question of “black and white.”