S. I. Hayakawa and U.S. English: Where Racial Liberalism Meets Neoconservatism

Today, Samuel Ichiye (S. I.) Hayakawa is arguably most famous within Asian American history for two reasons: He opposed the 1968–69 student strike during his tenure as president of San Francisco State College, and he advocated for English to become the official language of the United States during and after his time as a Republican senator.

But if one digs further into Hayakawa’s life, they realize he was a man of contradictions. He recognized race as a social construct, but he refused to recognize institutional racism. He supported the civil rights movement and called to eliminate racial inequality, but he became infamous for threatening more radical activists and positioning Asian Americans as “model minorities” wedged between Black and white people. He spearheaded what became known as the Official English movement to encourage assimilation as a means of resisting racism, but he came under fire from those who feared the movement would marginalize the very people he claimed to help.

How Do We Understand This Man of Contradictions?

As Hayakawa became more and more notorious, especially among progressive Asian Americans, the public would frequently oversimplify his views and his complex, winding journey, which began in English-dominated family circles and schools before bringing him into the academic and later political mainstream.

Fig. 1 outlines a common interpretation of Hayakawa as someone who would not use his platform to recognize or challenge institutional racism, let alone mobilize people against it. Consequently, as outlined in fig. 1, he failed to recognize Asian American linked fate, the means through which members of a historically marginalized racial group come together to resist racialized power dynamics.

This failure to recognize linked fate stemmed from a previous failure to recognize group consciousness, through which people with a shared identity use political action to acknowledge and critique structures that diminish their social status (Lin 1407). But Hayakawa did develop a political consciousness during his time in academia, using his knowledge of general semantics to call on the use of language to challenge racial constructs and hierarchies. And while Hayakawa did not mobilize others to oppose the structures promoting racism, his advocacy in support of Official English did reflect his academic understanding of race as a social construct.

Linked fate is built on recognizing the damage of systemic inequality and racialized power dynamics. Even as Hayakawa inserted himself into those power dynamics instead of attempting to disrupt them, and even as he refused to recognize institutional racism, he did aim to challenge systemic racial inequality with his flawed belief in Official English. Thus, one can alternatively interpret him as recognizing a colorblind “version” of linked fate — not true linked fate, but a version that nevertheless foreshadowed and provided an outline for future conservative Asian Americans pursuing initiatives that were even more controversial and consequential.

Developing a Political Consciousness… But Not a Group Consciousness

From a young age, English dominated Hayakawa’s surroundings. Hayakawa grew up in Canada, being born in Vancouver before moving to Winnipeg and thus spending his formative years in more English-dominant regions (Gutfreund 224; see fig. 2). His father, Ichiro, only spoke English to him and his siblings and passed down a love of English literature; conversely, his mother, Otoko, never became fluent in English (Gutfreund 224).

While at McGill University, Hayakawa fit in easily with non-Japanese Canadians, which ethnologist Betty Kobayashi Issenman linked to him being surrounded by people who were educated and financially secure, especially since the low number of Japanese people meant “we didn’t constitute a perceived threat to anyone” (qtd. in Haslam and Haslam 28).

However, he did not fit in when he returned to Japan, since he appreciated its culture but was “too much the skeptic, too much the congenital heretic . . . to be happy with the closely-knit feudal and family ties that bind Japanese lives” (qtd. in Haslam and Haslam 76).

Hayakawa’s upbringing made it difficult for him to “[contextualize his] family and community histories” in a way that would “encourage politicised cultural recuperations that challenged apolitical, essentialist notions of ‘Asian American,’” per Lin’s ideas on developing group consciousness (1420). Since he continually had the advantages of speaking English — and the disadvantages of not speaking English — reinforced throughout not only his childhood but also his time in college, he had few opportunities to challenge the idea that he developed as a result: that immigrants and their descendants are responsible for learning the cultures of their new home countries and assimilating into them.

Not only would this belief in assimilation dominate once Hayakawa transitioned into being a political conservative, but it would also shape the actions of many future Asian American conservative activists, creating a stark contrast to those who truly developed linked fate in solidarity against systemic racism.

The rise of Hitler built Hayakawa’s interest in semantics, an interest that intensified after he read The Tyranny of Words by Stuart Chase in spring 1938 (Haslam and Haslam 98). Alan Hayakawa would reflect on his father writing the bestselling book Language in Thought and Action using his expertise on general semantics to deconstruct “symbolic strategies used to manipulate and control human thought” (132).

S. I. Hayakawa hoped an understanding of general semantics would enable people to facilitate time binding, or the ability to both “organize social cooperation at a distance” and “accumulate knowledge over generations of time,” as a means for survival (243). Hayakawa hoped time binding would, in turn, create an environment in which “groups, classes, and even nations begin to listen to each other with the specific intent of finding even small areas of agreement” (253).

This understanding of general semantics acknowledges the connection between language and racial oppression in a way that enabled Hayakawa to create signs of a “[critique] of systemic racialised class inequality” necessary for a group consciousness (Lin 1420). However, his acknowledgement of race as a social construct stopped short of being a full-on critique of the systems that promoted that construct and the racism that came about as a result.

Lin also specified that these critiques needed to replace “individual shame around [one’s] experiences,” and while Hayakawa’s connections between individualism and assimilation are not inherently rooted in shame, they do not embrace the collective identity and need for collective action central to group consciousness (1420).

Furthermore, group consciousness counters “dominant narratives of colourblindness and meritocracy” (Lin 1420). And even earlier in his career, Hayakawa did not necessarily challenge either of those concepts. In fact, he viewed colorblindness as the goal, writing the following in a May 1943 opinion piece for the Chicago Defender: “Nobody thinks about ‘race’ at a co-op meeting. They cease to be ‘white’ or ‘Negro’ or ‘yellow’ or ‘brown,’ and become just simply ‘co-operators’” (qtd. in Yan-Gonzalez 28).

Building Mainstream Popularity in (Non-Asian) America

Beginning with his 1939 departure from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, his PhD-granting institution, until his hiring for a tenured position at San Francisco State College (SFSC) in 1955, Hayakawa lectured and took part-time jobs at various other colleges, existing in a state that was both liminal and transitory. He spent his time in this space lecturing; contributing to publications like the Chicago Defender to express stances on race like those seen above; and writing on a wide range of subjects for his general semantics journal, ETC — with some subjects, like Scientology, only vaguely being related to general semantics, “separating [Hayakawa] from purists but endearing him to generalists” (Haslam and Haslam 212).

From that point, Hayakawa would spend much of his life immersed in and pursuing mainstream popularity, whether he was relishing in the headlines related to the SFSC strike or introducing the English Language Amendment as a last-ditch effort for a Senate reelection campaign he eventually decided not to pursue. It was this pursuit of the mainstream that hindered him from truly embracing the effort to challenge racialized systemic inequality, because instead of trying to resist “racialized power dynamics” in recognition of linked fate, he was trying to ascend within those dynamics (Rogers and Kim 288).

 

Throughout his life, Hayakawa would also embrace the doctrine of racial liberalism, a view in which America was a just nation for all, immigrants included. In some ways, he thus resembled Dalip Singh Saund, who became the first Asian American elected into Congress — almost two decades before Hayakawa — and combined his “cultural authority as a formerly excluded immigrant” with his elite status as a “fully assimilated citizen” and newly elected politician to maintain a “racially liberal order” without challenging the status quo (Sohi 84–85).

Both politicians, having assimilated into American political systems, found that their elite status mostly protected them from the exclusion that affected others in lower positions than them. Hayakawa’s pursuit and embrace of mainstream popularity throughout his life would have made him especially prone to using his elite status not to mobilize against the status quo but to promote assimilation into it.

While a professor at San Francisco Stage College (SFSC), Hayakawa continued to expand the definition of “political” by supporting liberal efforts to advance causes like desegregation and affirmative action (Yan-Gonzalez 28–29). However, he eventually became skeptical of student activists representing specific ethnic groups, feeling that interracial “practical negotiation” around a common cause would be more effective than the Asian American student protesters’ use of direct action (qtd. in Yan-Gonzalez 28–29; Gutfreund 230). This stance pitted him at odds with the students who, unlike him, had developed a group consciousness by converting their disdain for systemic injustice and feelings of collective solidarity into direct action.

 

Fig. 5. S. I. Hayakawa defends his response to the SFSC student strike; Hayakawa, Samuel I.; interview with ABC News; ABC Evening News, 3 Dec. 1968; YouTube, uploaded by danieljbmitchell, www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYeCIaVGM9E.

This ideological conflict would climax in 1968, when Hayakawa became president of SFSC in the middle of an unprecedented strike by students in the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) opposing Eurocentric education programs. On the ABC News interview seen in Fig. 4, Hayakawa reiterated his support for Black civil rights, as discussed above, and he claimed he was attempting to maintain unity and peace. However, Lawrence B. Rosenfield, a contemporary professor at Pennsylvania State University, characterized Hayakawa’s rhetoric during such confrontations as “coercive semantics,” citing a quote in which the college president compared protestors to “troublemakers” and “savages,” among other names, in an effort to maintain the status quo (qtd. in Rosenfield 21).

Although Hayakawa had expanded the “political” throughout his career as a linguist and academic, he was now using language to quash activism, not to promote it. Hayakawa partly did so by forwarding an image of Asians as “intermediaries between the white and the black” in public lectures (qtd. in Yan-Gonzalez 35). Thus, he invoked the model minority stereotype in his shift toward an emerging political ideology: neoconservatism grounded in racial liberalism.

Throughout his career, Hayakawa expressed hope that his work would empower Asian Americans and other people of color to overcome barriers and racism; whether he was genuine with these statements, he still demonstrated the power of embracing his voice as an Asian American politician, ironically by using his identity to downplay its importance. His combination of racial liberalism and neoconservatism contrasted him with more radical student protestors, who displayed a group consciousness that enabled them to believe in linked fate, and his beliefs provided a foundation for the viewpoints some future conservative Asian Americans would use for more exclusionary ends.

Hayakawa did not emphasize his stance on the ethnic studies programs for which his students were advocating, but his response to the increased calls for diversity on campus somewhat mirrored that of various Asian parents whom Brian Su-Jen Chung studied in Fremont, California, as they sought to limit access to the best schools in their suburban town. Similar to Hayakawa and Saund with their beliefs in racial liberalism, those parents embraced liberal multiculturalism, desiring descriptive representation without connecting “everyday lived practice” to “new radical knowledges of addressing structural inequality” (Chung 53).

For many conservative Asian Americans, diversity through descriptive representation thus became a colorblind means for ignoring systemic racism and promoting the individual — whether in terms of assimilation or, with the parents of Fremont, self-interest in defense of the suburban “freedom of association” (qtd. in Chung 49).

Hayakawa demonstrated the early potential to combine descriptive representation with colorblindness and individualism. One could validly claim that he set the example for future conservatives who refused to recognize linked fate; however, Hayakawa also set an example for twisting the concept of linked fate to justify perceived threats to individual freedom, straying away from the emphasis on the collective to nevertheless create his own form of political engagement and, eventually, mobilization.

Envisioning a Monolingual America

After his controversial response to the San Francisco State College student strike shifted his political allies and amplified his celebrity status, he maintained an interest in running for political office (Haslam and Haslam 314–15). His mainstream fame following the dramatic SFSC student strike paid off for him, influencing his election to the United States Senate in 1976 as a California Republican (Haslam and Haslam 318).

In April 1981, near the end of a mostly unremarkable term, Hayakawa introduced the English Language Amendment — which declared English as the official language of the United States — as a political move to aid a potential reelection campaign that never went through (Haslam and Haslam 348).

The English Language Amendment did not pass, nor did similar proposals from other congresspeople. However, Hayakawa would go on to found U.S. English in 1983 to continue his work. By 2016, as shown in fig. 6, thirty-two states had passed laws making English their official language.

As previously discussed in terms of Lin’s ideas on group consciousness, Hayakawa would have already struggled to contextualize his upbringing in areas dominated by English. When a young Hayakawa traveled to Montreal, he called it “a city divided along language lines” because of the predominance of French speakers in that area and wrote, “You can’t be a Canadian and not be concerned about the effect of having two official languages” (qtd. in Haslam and Haslam 37). In August 1982, while advocating before Congress to make English the official language, S. I. Hayakawa again referenced the French-speaking minority in Canada, describing those people as “paranoid” over their status and “picked upon and abused by the English-speaking majority.”

Yet in doing so, Hayakawa displayed his own version of what Bai called “transpacific misunderstanding” among conservative Chinese immigrants: Although Hayakawa moved a lesser distance, he too “failed to recontextualize [his] pre-existing perceptions of social convention and power dynamics to a new political reality” (60). The marginalization he failed to recontextualize did not concern him directly, but by falsely equivocating bilingualism in Canada and the United States, he ignored what Official English opponents noted were the harmful effects of Canadian efforts to restrict French and other minority languages (Aleman et al. 6). Opponents feared the amendment would instead limit access to healthcare, voting rights, and other services for non-English speakers (Aleman et al. 6).

Hayakawa thus demonstrated a misplaced sense of so-called “linked fate.” Instead of challenging systemic attacks on the livelihoods of people within certain racial groups, he worked to maintain the racialized power dynamics within which he managed to thrive, and he continued to champion an individualistic, colorblind society in the process.

Whether or not future conservative Asian American activists were directly influenced by him, they remain indebted to his ability to simultaneously downplay systemic racism and recognize race as a social construct in order to create a deceptive sense of group consciousness and mobilize people using the aforementioned colorblind view of “linked fate.” The work of these conservative activists can translate into tangible legislative changes, whether through the aforementioned Official English-related laws or successful restrictions on affirmative action.

Yet whereas Hayakawa seemed to operate from a genuine desire to unite people, even as he became consumed by his quest for the mainstream, some of the conservatives who followed him appear to be acting more in their self-interests with the intent of dividing. Those people may have adopted his playbook, but they are using it with different intentions.

Works Cited

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Chung, Brian Su-Jeng. “‘We Think About Our Children First’: Asian Skilled Professionals, Liberal Multiculturalism and the Borders of Educational Inequality in Fremont, California.” Amerasia Journal, vol. 48, no. 1, pp. 44–57. Taylor and Francis Online, doi:10.1080/00447471.2022.2152271.

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Haslam, Gerald and Janice Haslam. In Thought and Action: The Enigmatic Life of S. I. Hayakawa. U of Nebraska Press, 2011. Internet Archive, archive.org/details/inthoughtactione0000hasl/page/n5/mode/2up. Accessed 19 Nov. 2023.

Hayakawa, Alan R. “Remembering Don Hayakawa.” ETC: A Review of General Semantics, vol. 50, no. 2, Institute of General Semantics, summer 1993, pp. 131–35. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/42577432. Accessed 15 Oct. 2023.

Hayakawa, Samuel I. “The Aims and Tasks of General Semantics: Implications of the Time-Binding Theory.” ETC: A Review of General Semantics, vol. 8, no. 4, Institute of General Semantics, summer 1951, pp. 243–53. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/42580980. Accessed 18 Nov. 2023.

———. Speech to Congress in support of an amendment to S. 2222. U.S. English, www.usenglish.org/legislation/hayakawa-speech. Accessed 8 Dec. 2023.

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