Attitudes Towards Race

While there were many reasons white Americans were racist towards Filipinos and other immigrants in the first half of the 20^th century, one of the biggest complaints was the mixture of white women with non-white men.  Anthropologists saw this as a rampant social problem.  Researchers on the subject noticed: “A considerable amount of social tension has been created in some communities where such interracial relationships have occurred” (Kirk, 47).  This is in reference to Filipino men and their white wives as they attempted to move into predominately white communities in the 40s.  The more that these relationships came about, the bigger a problem it seemed.  But if the “problem” seemed to be growing, why did the relationships continue to flourish?  Many laws were passed forbidding certain ethnic groups from marrying whites, and social convention certainly looked down on mixing races.  By the 1940s, Taxi Dance Halls and the relationships they produced had been ongoing for a few decades.  Sociologists by this time conducted a lot of research to identify the impetus of the problem.  They pointed to the economic situations, which were not ideal, of the Filipinos as the reason for their relationships with American women.  “At present, circumstances force these young men into a situation which is thoroughly undesirable in every respect, a situation which they themselves would scarcely elect under conditions of freer choice. Underpaid and without permanent employment, they have been exposed to little more than the most seamy side of American life” (Kirk, 48).  The Filipinos, because they were not white, were not given high paying jobs in most situations.  Therefore, they were unable to return home to marry with Filipino women, who were scarce in the U.S.  Because of the lack of Filipino women, they fell in love with the Taxi Hall dancers who flirted with them and made them feel at home, for a price.  The white Americans seemed to hate that Filipinos vied for the American lifestyle and American women, but could not concede to allowing them to have one instead of the other.  That is of course if the reason the Filipino men really wanted American women was because Filipino women were unavailable to them.       Although there were other women (Mexican, African-American, etc) that were available to Filipino men, interracial relationships were only a problem when they took place with White women and Filipino men .  “Although the Marriage License Bureau study did not separately record interracial marriages not including whites, it may be estimated that, if these were included, the total rate of intermarriage of racial groups would be somewhere near 65 per 1o,ooo, or nearly two-thirds of 1 per cent of all marriages” (Burma, 587).  Interracial marriage was occurring between all races, and not only between whites and non-whites.  However, the fact that those unions not including whites were not recorded shows how the government viewed the “problem” of interracial marriage.  It seems that there were two races: white, and everything else.  These numbers show that Filipinos were not simply” preying” on white women, but that all races were mixing with one another to some extent.  However, it was only when these marriages included a white American that  sociologists addressed the problem.

Filipino Workers