Race in a “Civil” Frontier: The Chinese-Story Western of the Civil Rights Era
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Today, when we think of the Western, we think of a genre dominated by white heroes conquering the obstacles of the frontier from daunting terrain to indigenous peoples. What we tend to forget – most likely because the most famous westerns did not show – is how Chinese immigrants played an important role in that history. The civil rights era film ‘Walk like a Dragon’ (James Clavell, 1960) is the only high-profile western which focused on the experiences of Chinese immigrants in the west. While Hollywood films of the 1950s and 1960s all but omitted Chinese immigrants from their vision of the frontier west, almost every television western included at least one ‘Chinese-story’ episode centered on Chinese immigrants and featuring Asian American actors. The representation of Chinese immigrants was not heterogeneous nor always progressive with some television westerns recycling out-moded tropes from decades past. What made the civil rights era film ‘Walk like a Dragon’ significant and unusual, even in the midst of the Chinese-story heyday on television, was its presentation of a Chinese immigrant through the visual iconography of the white western hero as a gunslinger and romantic victor.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".