Thinking Orientals is a groundbreaking study of Asian Americans and the racial formation of twentieth-century American society. It reveals the influential role Asian Americans played in constructing the understandings of Asian American identity. It examines the unique role played by sociologists, particularly sociologists at the University of Chicago, in the study of the "Oriental Problem" before World War II and also analyzes the internment of Japanese Americans during the war and the subsequent "model minority" profile.
This volume explains how Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans came to be lumped together as orientals and how this eventually led to their understanding of themselves as Asian Americans.
