Early on in the movement of Asian labor to the United States, immigrants from the Far East were viewed by the dominant Euro-American society as a peril to a white Christian nation whose manifest destiny it was to lead the lesser races down the path of moral, political, and economic development along capitalist lines. Their massive numbers contributed greatly to national economic development and helped create the unparalleled social welth of the United States in the early stages of its drive toward global ascendancy. Needed but not necessarily wanted, Asian Americans have been often viewed as a yellow blight upon the land.

While Asians were not fully welcomed by nativists and members of the white working class, their labor was nonetheless instrumental in creating the agricultural and industrial infrastructure of the Unites States as it entered the advanced stages of capitalist development. The simultaneous necessity and undesirability of Asian immigrant labor is a crucial political-economic contradiction that informs much of the past and present experience of Asians in the United States. The manner in which Asian immigrants have been dealt with historically by the receiving society has ranged from relative tolerance to outright exclusion.

As it concerns Asians in the United States, another no less important contradiction operates on the level of ideology. Liberal democratic ideals predicated upon individual freedom and equality of opportunity have existed in perpetual tension against the reality of a color-caste system wherein white Americans occupy the top rungs of a relatively rigid hierarchy based upon socially constructed racial identity. Despite the existence of a rigid color-caste system, the relative "success" of Asian Americans has been cited often by both journalists and academic commentators as "proof" that this basic social contradiction plays no significant role in a liberal democratic society characterized by a high degree of upward mobility and near-infinite opportunities for advancement.

I have argued elsewhere that it is in the nature of television drama to embody the contradictions of the larger society. In realist drama, the narrative arc-its rise, descent, and resolution-is dependent upon conflict. More specifically, it is sociocultural and political-economic conflict that form the dramatic basis of network television programs that feature Asian American characters would reveal a plethora of social contradictions that give expression, sometimes unintentionally, to the meaning of their collective presence within the larger society.

Patrician Hill Collins observes that the exercise of political-economic domination by racial elites in society "always involves attempts to objectify the subordinate group. The objectification of subordinate groups is achieved through the application of "controlling images" that help justify economic exploitation and social oppression on the basis of an interlocking system comprising race, class, and gender. The so-called mammy image prevalent in U.S. popular culture, for example, traditionally has been invoked to justify the exploitative use of African American women as a cheap source of labor in bourgeois Euro-American households and to stand as counterexample to the hypersexual Black "Jezebel."

Racist controlling images as described by Collins from part of a larger system of "psychosocial dominance," as Donald G. Baker refers to it. Along with the threat and occasional use of coercive violence, the exercise of psychosocial dominance plays a central role in the concentration and maintenance of power among ruling elites. Beyond "coercive dominance," the psychosocial form of control is subtly effective in that subordinate groups internalize the set of dominant racial meanings that cause them to "reject their own individual and group identity." In its stead, a white supremacist complex that establishes the primacy of Euro-American cultural practices and social institutions serves as the principal mechanism of subordinating or excluding those groups that do not conform to the normative profile.

Within a system of racial inequality, basic power resources such as food, education, health care, shelter, information, communication, transportation, and energy are apportioned on the basis of a given group's conformity to or deviation from the physical and behavioral norms established and enforced by the dominant Euro-American group. The gross maldistribution of power resources within a capitalist political economy is naturalized through a set of beliefs that attribute real or imagined physical and intellectual traits to "groups socially defined as races." This set of beliefs forms the basis of ideological racism.

In the postwar era, television has been the principal medium by which rituals of psychosocial dominance are reenacted daily. "The technological revolution in communications has created new and complex instruments of persuasion," Dennis H. Wrong observes in his classic treatise on the nature of political power, "access to which constitutes a vitally important power resource." Even the most seemingly benign TV programs articulate the relationship between race and power, either explicitly or through implication. In the popular culture, it is via network television programs that the related states of unfreedom comprising racial, gender, and class formations are forcibly reconciled with the master narrative of liberal democratic ideology. This marriage of convenience is inherently unstable, however, and it remains the principal challenge to the creators of television programs to mediate social contradictions once they reach a certain level of disruptive salience within the popular culture.

Racial meanings are continually being redefined and renegotiated as they meet with challenges to their legitimacy by media watchdog groups, independent artists, journalists of the alternative press, and even academic critics. Stuart Hall issues an important reminder that it would be too easy to conceive of the media as "simply the ventriloquists of a unified and racist 'ruling class' conception of the world." Although network television operates in accordance with the for-profit market imperatives of oligopoly capitalism, this is not to say that there exists a tidy one-to-one relationship between corporate-controlled media institutions and the racist undertone of many network TV programs. Not only is such a neat correlation impossible to demonstrate from the standpoint of methodology, but on a tactical level such economistic pessimism holds little hope for change and transformation. Much more fruitful is the Gramscian perspective that "allows us to view popular culture as a terrain of negotiation and exchange between classes and groups." As the following pages will, I hope, demonstrate, even the most obdurate of falsehoods crumble when subjected to the combined force of interest group activism, political agitation, civil unrest, and critical study. Alternative cultural practices can also form a counterhegemonic bloc against the dominant discourse such as reproduced in network television fare. The vibrant independent Asian American media arts movement is a current example of such counterhegemonic cultural practice. As Raymond Williams has observed, the popular culture of nondominant peoples (whom he calls "majorities") is "irrepressible" in nature. Their popular culture persists "under any pressure and through whatever forms, while life itself survives, and while so many people-real if not always connected majorities-keep living and looking to live beyond the routines which attempt to control and reduce them."