HONORARY MENTION OF 2006 SUNTA GRADUATE STUDENT PRIZE: Race, Class and the Politics of Multicultural Learning: Chinese Immigrant Workers and the Brokered American Dream in Chicago

This paper examines interactions between a largely middle class-operated social service agency in Chicago's Chinatown, the Chinese American Cultural Center (CACC), and its new Chinese immigrant clientele. Using ethnographic data obtained from the agency's Chef Training Program, the research explores middle class Chinese-Americans' role as cultural brokers in initiating new immigrants into the dominant U.S. race and class system. I argue that CACC's management of recent Chinese immigrants' racial learning is grounded in a middle class racial ideology of strategic colorblindness, which ends up perpetuating new immigrants' racialized position at the bottom of the American labor hierarchy.