Why Asians were White, then Yellow, then White-Adjacent, and now are White again

In sixty years, Asian-Americans have gone from being effectively a “gray” race that could marry white or black people when interracial marriage was illegal to a group that by most objective standards is more privileged than white Christians.

Though there’s some precedent for the idea of race before 1680—in some places, nobles were literally thought to have “blue blood” that marked them as a superior group that should not breed with commoners—race was invented and legally maintained in the Americas after Bacon’s Rebellion as a way to divide black and white workers. Fitting indigenous Americans into the original racial model was fairly easy, but Asians were a challenge. As noted in On Color by David Scott Kastan and Stephen Farthing, even as late as 1860, some Europeans still saw Asians as white.

When Europeans had little involvement with Asia, they only interacted with Asians as trading partners, a relationship of equals. But when Europe’s capitalists began to exploit Asia, Asians had to be downgraded from whiteness because, during the age of race, conquerors rationalized conquest as due to racial superiority, just as…