The Chinese Freedom Schools

Historicizing and intersecting Lau with Brown

Bibliographic Data

ID12834252
AuthorsTrish Morita-Mullaney (0000-0001-5324-500X, Purdue University West Lafayette, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume23
Issue4
Pages365-391
Publication date2024-09-23
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLanguage Policy (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1568-4555 • E-ISSN: 1573-1863
PublisherSpringer Science+Business Media (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1007/s10993-024-09709-3
OpenAlexW4402723365
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited37

The Chinese of Chinatown, San Francisco largely opposed the city-wide racial integration plan that would bus their children across the city beginning in 1971. Claiming that it was a violation of their language rights, a need for cultural preservation and continued autonomy from the San Francisco that had long excluded them, Chinatown instituted its own school system called the Chinese Freedom Schools. With this boycott of the public schools, the Chinese were constituted as oppositional to the aims of racial integration, searing constructions of them as being pro-White, anti-Black, and separatist. Yet, such a simplistic and binary argument omits the long history of exclusion including employment, schooling, housing, and voting discrimination as evidenced by the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882–1965), the only law to exclude a specifically named ethnolinguistic group. To historicize and understand the Chinese Freedom Schools, I analyze this phenomenon using a racial matrix where Asians have long occupied a liminal, in-between space as perpetually foreign, unassimilable, and as a suspect class. Drawing from the theories and concepts of LangCrit, raciolinguistic ideologies and Asian American studies, I examine how agents, institutions, the press, and policies imposed, assumed, or negotiated specific identities of the Chinese during the development, implementation, and dissolution of the Chinese Freedom Schools. I analyze how the Chinese were constructed as uncooperative, creating a competitive cleavage among Asians and Blacks, while dismissing the centrality of White families who largely moved out of the system, avoiding critique. Implications for language-in-education policy are proposed for Lau’s 50th anniversary

Linguistics · Sociolinguistics · Sociology · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Hong Kong and Taiwan Politics · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy · Philosophy

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