Racializing Ethnic Entrepreneurship: Chinese Entrepreneurship in the Deep South

Abstract

The research on ethnic entrepreneurship is prolific. Yet very rarely have scholars examined ethnic entrepreneurship through the lens of race and racialization. By using the example of Chinese-owned grocery stores in the Mississippi Delta region during the Jim Crow era, this article attempts to bridge the studies on migration, race, ethnic entrepreneurship, and place. Neither middleman minority nor ethnic enclave economy alone, the two main paradigms within the literature of ethnic entrepreneurship, fully explains the phenomenon of Chinese grocery stores in the Black communities in the U.S. South. By examining ethnic entrepreneurship through the lens of race and racialization, this article also explores the interracial relationships between Asian and Black communities by comparing and contrasting the Korean–Black relationship in Los Angeles and Chinese–Black relationship in the Delta. Despite the institutional barriers against interracial solidarity under the regime of White supremacy, which places Asian and Black communities in opposition to each other, certain historical and geographical contexts that facilitate interracial coembeddedness contribute to intercultural communications among communities of color and thus a more intimate interracial relationship.