The Race Card. Tara Fickle
by disaggregating inequality’s on-screen symptoms from the racial ideologies encoded within, but contributes to a broader conversation in social and cultural studies about media as a doubling or “modalization” of the world carried on through the literary formalist approaches of Mark Seltzer’s The Official World and N. Katherine Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman.57 At the same time, it offers a corrective to the implicit assumption that the overwhelming amount of data we all produce and consume on a daily basis is somehow, in its “rawness” or virtuality, free from the concrete inequalities and highly stratified social systems through which these streams of zeroes and ones flow. The book thus charts a new course in game scholarship, directing our focus away from games as empowering vehicles that allow people to inhabit new identities, and toward how games themselves are used as instruments of “soft power” to advance political agendas and discipline national subjects.
But what of the reader who does not read the foregoing pages and who will, therefore, remain ignorant of the intricate ludic logic underlying its structure? What will they miss—and what, in turn, is the reward for those who have taken the time to read these pages? The same thing lost or gained by those who know that the opposite sides of a die add up to seven. That knowledge is, from one perspective, meaningless: it has no effect on a player’s ability to roll dice or the dice’s ability to generate random numbers. This is because dice are like the ludic and racial technologies this book looks at as a whole: operating systems that obviate the need (and, in many cases, the ability) for the user to understand the system’s internal workings. That is precisely how such systems are able to function semiautonomously, to “autocorrect” and update, to endure so long as the hardware allows. To be ignorant of a die’s (or this book’s) formal organization is thus, in that sense, simply to allow these systems to perform their disciplinary work as quietly and invisibly as they always have.
To be aware of a die’s underlying logic, on the other hand, is to be counterintuitively drawn further into the game, seduced by a rationale that seems objective and inevitable: of course that makes sense, we think; the numbers must be arranged that way, otherwise they would not add up to seven. The internal consistency created by the system itself, in other words, comes to signify as evidence of its nonarbitrariness. This is the ludo-Orientalist dynamic we will see repeated throughout this book: in the “obvious” kinship between Asian Americans and Asian nationals; the perception of Occident and Orient as antithetical yet complementary cultures; and, of course, in the way the book itself draws our attention to the overlooked symmetry between seemingly divergent cultural forms. The payoff, then, lies in recognizing all of these as equally arbitrary discursive fictions that nonetheless powerfully shape the way we think about race and games. Even more, they reveal how gamification and racialization work in tandem as mutually constitutive ways of orienting ourselves to and through difference. These are the technologies we use to make things add up, seem equal, and otherwise distribute value across the borders of the magic circle.
PART I
Gambling on the American Dream
The Pitch
Fair Play
1
Evening the Odds through Chinese Exclusion
Does any one suppose the Geary bill, prohibiting Chinese immigration, would ever have passed into law had the Mongolians taken kindly to poker? It was not fear of the introduction of idolatry by these heathens that impelled the congress of the United States to set up a fence against them. To be sure, that was the alleged reason, but members of congress … afterwards confessed that they had been spurred to action mainly by the assertion of the lobbyists that unless Chinese immigration was speedily checked, “fan-tan” would inevitably supplant our national game.
And hence the Geary law … stands as a sort of notice to the world that immigration which might retard the growth of our poker industry, is not wanted in this free country.
—Garret Brown, How to Win at Poker
The above passage, taken from Garrett Brown’s enormously popular How to Win at Poker (1899), is facetious but not entirely fallacious.1 In the late nineteenth-century United States, Chinese immigrants’ affinity for games of chance rendered them not only alien but an active threat to U.S. identity and destiny. Indeed, in the years leading up to the 1882 Exclusion Act—the first in a series of federal laws that barred the immigration of Chinese laborers and denied Chinese Americans naturalization rights—it would be difficult to overestimate the frequency with which the trope of Chinese immigrants as “inveterate gamblers” was invoked in magazine articles, newspaper op-eds, literary fiction, and even official legislation. For example, in the 1877 report of a joint congressional committee convened specifically to investigate “the character, extent, and effect of Chinese immigration into this country,” and whose findings directly contributed to the successful passage of the Exclusion Act, witness after witness testified to the Chinese’s “natural passion” for gambling—an “incurable” addiction, the committee concluded, unmatched by any except the “darker races,” specifically Mexicans and Indians, from whom East Asians, as “Mongolians,” had been distinguished in scientific and popular racial taxonomies since the eighteenth century.2
It was not simply Chinese immigrants’ pursuit of games of chance, but the foreignness of the particular games they played, which became additional evidence of their alien status. From fan tan (番摊) to pai gow (牌九) to baak-gap-piu (白鸽票, later called keno), such ludic alienness could be used not only to support arguments for Chinese exclusion, but, interestingly, to argue for the ideological inclusion of other, non-Asian minorities. Such, in fact, was Brown’s broader intent in the passage quoted above, in using the “Chinese question” as a contrast to an equally irreverent meditation on what, in the postbellum United States, had come to be called the “Negro question.” “If anything were lacking to show the negro’s adaptability to American citizenship,” Brown mused, “his innate love of poker would settle the question. Too much praise can not be bestowed upon those negroes who have progressed from abject slavery to ‘craps’ to complete emancipation by poker.”3 Emancipation by poker is at once as absurd and as cogent as Exclusion by fan tan; for, as this book reveals, games of chance and racial legislation share a far greater intimacy than we might expect, and one that extends far beyond the nineteenth century. Particularly noteworthy in the Brown example, however, is that Asian Americans’ penchant for “foreign” rather than American games turns them into the illegitimate, negative analogue to African Americans, whose “patriotic” embrace of poker can be used to argue for their fitness to be free and full American citizens.4 The triangulation of black, Asian, and white, then, was in fact one crucial way gaming rhetoric was shaped by, and in turn sought to subtly critique, the broader political and social terrain of U.S. race relations.
Scholars in Asian American studies have been somewhat too quick to assume that the consistent invocation of the Chinese as “inveterate gamblers” was as baseless as it was racist, and to dismiss it in favor of focusing on racialized labor as the primary issue in exclusion debates. Yet gambling was minor neither to early Chinese American experience nor to debates over immigration and exclusion. In 1878, San Francisco alone boasted forty exclusively Chinese-run and -patronized gambling houses. In Fiddletown, California, a trading center for mining camps with one of the largest Chinese American communities in the state, a full 10 percent of Chinese residents in 1880 reported their occupations as related to gambling or lottery.5 In addition to gambling houses, lotteries were popular and familiar enough that even in smaller Chinatowns drawings were made twice daily, and the winning numbers posted at all major Chinatown restaurants and storefronts.6 Although, for obvious reasons, the exact number of Chinese American gamblers is difficult to obtain, the industry was sufficiently large and profitable enough to engender specialized Chinese “Gamblers Unions”7 with a roll of dues-paying members and extensive tong protection networks.
While the prevalence of Chinese American gambling was in part the inevitable outcome of bachelor societies comprising young, unattached men with a limited number of recreational outlets, it was also a regular and even expected pastime in the frontier communities in which they resided. Elaine Zorbas