The War Against Chinese Restaurants

Chinese restaurants are a cultural fixture—as American as cherry pie. Startlingly, however, there was once a national movement to eliminate Chinese restaurants, using innovative legal methods to drive them out. Chinese restaurants were objectionable for two reasons. First, Chinese restaurants competed with “American” restaurants, thus threatening the livelihoods of white owners, cooks, and servers and motivating unions to fight them. Second, Chinese restaurants threatened white women, who were subject to seduction by Chinese men taking advantage of intrinsic female weakness and nefarious techniques such as opium addiction. The efforts were creative. Chicago used anti-Chinese zoning, Los Angeles restricted restaurant jobs to citizens, Boston authorities denied Chinese restaurants licenses, and the New York Police Department simply ordered whites out of Chinatown. Perhaps the most interesting technique was a law, endorsed by the American Federation of Labor for adoption in all jurisdictions, prohibiting white women from working in Asian restaurants. Most measures failed or were struck down. The unions, of course, did not eliminate Chinese restaurants, but Asians still lost because unions achieved their more important goal by extending the federal immigration policy of excluding Chinese immigrants to all Asian immigrants. The campaign is of more than historical interest today. As current anti-immigration sentiments and efforts show, even now the idea that white Americans should have a privileged place in the economy, or that nonwhites are culturally incongruous, persists among some

On competitive discrete systems in the plane. I. Invariant Manifolds

Let $T$ be a $C^{1}$ competitive map on a rectangular region $R\subset \mathbb{R}^{2}$. The main results of this paper give conditions which guarantee the existence of an invariant curve $C$, which is the graph of a continuous increasing function, emanating from a fixed point $\bar{z}$. We show that $C$ is a subset of the basin of attraction of $\bar{z}$ and that the set consisting of the endpoints of the curve $C$ in the interior of $R$ is forward invariant. The main results can be used to give an accurate picture of the basins of attraction for many competitive maps. We then apply the main results of this paper along with other techniques to determine a near complete picture of the qualitative behavior for the following two rational systems in the plane. $$x_{n+1}=\frac{\alpha_{1}}{A_{1}+y_{n}},\quad y_{n+1}=\frac{\gamma_{2}y_{n}}{x_{n}},\quad n=0,1,...,$$ with $\alpha_1,A_{1},\gamma_{2}>0$ and arbitrary nonnegative initial conditions so that the denominator is never zero. $$x_{n+1}=\frac{\alpha_{1}}{A_{1}+y_{n}},\quad y_{n+1}=\frac{y_{n}}{A_{2}+x_{n}},\quad n=0,1,...,$$ with $\alpha_1,A_{1},A_{2}>0$ and arbitrary nonnegative initial conditions.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:0905.1772 by other author

Peaks and Troughs in Helioseismology: The Power Spectrum of Solar Oscillations

I present a matched-wave asymptotic analysis of the driving of solar oscillations by a general localised source. The analysis provides a simple mathematical description of the asymmetric peaks in the power spectrum in terms of the relative locations of eigenmodes and troughs in the spectral response. It is suggested that the difference in measured phase function between the modes and the troughs in the spectrum will provide a key diagnostic of the source of the oscillations. I also suggest a form for the asymmetric line profiles to be used in the fitting of solar power spectra. Finally I present a comparison between the numerical and asymptotic descriptions of the oscillations. The numerical results bear out the qualitative features suggested by the asymptotic analysis but suggest that numerical calculations of the locations of the troughs will be necessary for a quantitative comparison with the observations.Comment: 18 pages + 8 separate figures. To appear in Ap