In her multigenerational study of women and labor migration in the United States, Evelyn Nakano Glenn correctly observes that substantial differences separate the experiences of European ethnic groups and those of immigrants or indigenes of color. Unlike "white ethnics," Asians, Chicanos, Native Americans, and African Americans have been held in check by a color-caste system that has placed them at or near the bottom of the labor employment ladder. Whereas women of color have found it difficult to move out of lowpaying, low-status domestic labor, women of European immigrant groups have held such jobs as only the first step in their economic ascent.

According to Glenn, the "two-tiered" labor system is characterized not only by class and patriarchal oppression, but by institutional racism as well. Physical identifiablility and ethnic-racial distinctiveness have helped to create and maintain a two-tiered labor system whereby "later cohorts of non-white immigrant groups had different labor market experiences from later cohorts of white immigrant groups." The differential treatment of nonwhite ethnic-racial groups must be kept in mind, for many liberal/conservative ethnicity theorists such as Nathan Glazer, William Julius Wilson, and Charles Murray cite the example of successful European immigrant groups as an argument for the abondonment of social welfare programs that serve large numbers of the non-white underclass. But as E. San Juan, Jr., observes, such mean-spirited arguments deny the key role of "race and racism as casual factors in the making of the political and economic structure of the United States. Racial identity remains the basic dividing line in U.S. society.

Whereas liberal theorists tend to overstate the uniform nature of social discrimination supposedly endured by all immigrant groups as they move through the Parkian "race relations cycle," theorists on the left also have minimized the very real forms of racial oppression endured by non-white ethnic and racial minorities. Until recently, leftist sociocultural critics have favored some variant of traditional Marxian class analysis in explaining racial oppression. For too long, both liberal and radical theorists have given short shrift to the detailed study of nonwhite groups and their subordination according to ethnic or racial social identity.

Like many left-liberal commentators who discuss race and ethnicity in American society, conservative thinkers such as Michael Novak have argued that white ethnics have also suffered social discrimination. Catholic Polish Americans, Italian American, and Jewish Americans are given as examples of European ethnic groups that were once held at bay by the Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment through discriminatory practices. But the larger agenda of Novak's The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics (1972) was to blunt demands for redress by African Americans, who led the equality revolution of the 1960's. In a sense, the Novak book was an early warning sign of the full-blown white backlash that was to be unleashed with furious vengeance during the "Reagan Revolution" of the 1980s. Erstwhile left-liberal opinion leaders such as Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz joined with the traditional conservative establishment to fabricate ideological justification for the war against economic, cultural, and political democracy led by nonwhite Americans. Racial minorities (African Americans in particular) were called upon to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, just like other groups have done in the past. In an era of shrinking resources, it was argued, the state could no longer guarantee entry into the middle class through its already strained social welfare provisions.

The assumption of a basic uniformity and commensurability among all ethnic groups regardless of color obscures the crucial role of race and racism in the production and maintenance of inequality in American life. Ethnic and racial difference extends far beyond superficial "cultural" trappings such as is currently being touted by liberal multiculturalists. Rather, nonwhite groups such as Asian Americans are cast into the role of ethnic-racial "other" by the dominant society on the basis of arbitrary somatic norms and social behavior.

The social construction of Asian American "otherness" is the precondition for their cultural marginalization, political impotence, and psychic alienation from mainstream American life. Elaine H. Kim has described the way in which the orientalia articulated through popular literature written by whites has helped construct Asian otherness, and Eugene Franklin Wong has brought similar insights to bear in his study of the commercial cinema. Just as popular literature and the cinema performed important ideological functions in their day, in the postwar era it is television that has been instrumental in the symbolic mediation of conflicts between competing claimant groups that seek to realize the substantive equality promised by American social democracy. The remainder of this chapter will offer an introductory survey of racist controlling images imposed upon Asian Pacific Americans by network television.