![\"gotprivilege\"](\"https:\/\/objects-us-west-1.dream.io\/racefiles\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/gotprivilege.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nThe explosion of online race talk about Asian Americans lately is enough to make your head spin. Are we progressive or conservative? Are we rich or poor? Are we privileged or oppressed? And the thorniest of all: are we allies or colluders on the question of anti-blackness?<\/p>\n
The challenge of discussing race on Twitter is that nuance gets stifled by character limits and thumb fatigue. But the short answer is: Asian Americans are all of these things. This can be seen in research on Asian American\u00a0political views<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0poverty<\/a>, and in our\u00a0reports<\/a>\u00a0on Asian Americans and race. The Asian American vote is up for grabs. We inhabit both ends of the economic spectrum. We are sometimes anti-racist and sometimes not. The problem is, this answer satisfies no one.<\/p>\n Why are these questions so hard, and the answer so unsatisfying? I think it has to do with a tendency to view race as a question of demographics rather than of politics. Because\u00a0this all begs the question of what and whom we’re talking about when we say Asian American. Is it a demographic category that includes a long list of ethnic subgroups? If so, then what holds us together racially, when segments of that category are among the poorest in the nation, and others among the most prosperous? When it includes prominent right wing politicians, as well as organizers for police accountability and worker justice?\u00a0Given these differences, how can we say anything definitive about the relationship of Asian Americans to blackness, which is an inescapable, core idea in any conversation about race?<\/p>\n We formed ChangeLab because we believe there\u2019s a need for the racial justice movement to catch up to all the slippery ways that racial politics is changing, and because we believe Asian Americans have an important role to play. Too often, the drive to have the perfect analysis gets in the way of the need just to have a conversation, to admit what we don\u2019t know, and to seek out different solutions. And struggling with our relationship to blackness throws up hard questions. After all, our very economy and political system is built on slavery and settler colonialism. Imagining our way out of that is no easy task, and recognizing our participation in it is painful. But when we wiggle our way out of the question, that makes things worse.<\/p>\n Does Asian American privilege exist? Yes it does. I get the argument that says the historically rooted structures supporting white supremacy were not intended to accrue benefits to Asian Americans, and that the primary beneficiaries of those structures are white. This is true. But this argument sidesteps another truth, that Asian Americans unintentionally benefit from or actively seek to\u00a0exploit<\/a>\u00a0those very structures. It also evades the special burden (and difficulty) that the model minority myth places on those of us who benefit from it to define ourselves politically, as either left or right of the color line. And finally, when we use this argument in response to black criticism of Asian American anti-black racism, it denies the fact that we don\u2019t just benefit from anti-blackness, but also from the\u00a0legacy<\/a>\u00a0of black struggle and resistance. Perhaps a better response would be to say, \u201cAbsolutely. It\u2019s a problem that we need to figure out. Ideas?\u201d or\u00a0\u201cYeah! We gotta work on that. Who\u2019s in?\u201d<\/p>\n In our\u00a0research<\/a>\u00a0exploring Asian American ideas about race, anti-black racism was an important theme. It often came up in comments about the construction of the model minority myth, but people also specifically critiqued Asian American participation in anti-black racism. One person said:<\/p>\n Especially educated, more middle-class Asians benefit greatly from the current structure…\u00a0 There\u2019s a great fear out there of \u2018Okay, if we identify with Blacks and Latinos, do we become like them? Does having a more progressive, racial justice Asian identity, does it help Blacks and Latinos? Or does it just hurt us?\u2019\u2026I\u2019ve heard people say Asians associate with whiteness\u2026 and sometimes I feel like\u2026 it\u2019s more a disassociation from blackness.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Such comments often attributed this to how white supremacy has shaped Asian American ideas of race. Another person said:<\/p>\n Some of it is simply you\u2019re a new immigrant here\u2026 You want to survive this structure\u2026 Even if you don\u2019t have the language for it, you understand there\u2019s a disparity between white people and black people… If you want to align yourself with the measure of success in that hierarchy, it means buying into this idea that we should dehumanize black people and play into that oppression.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The reality is that Asian American internalization of anti-black racism has special political consequence, given the resonance of model minority\u00a0thinking<\/a>. And it’s important to acknowledge that not all Asian Americans experience this in the same way. One person put it this way:<\/p>\n The larger structure has not been as\u2026 unforgiving of Asian populations, provided that they \u2018behave themselves.\u2019 And \u2018behave themselves\u2019 might mean not getting too involved in the political process, accepting the role of the junior partner\u2026 It\u2019s always contingent upon certain tacit agreements\u2026 It is the imagination that Asians, specifically Japanese Americans and Chinese Americans and maybe more recently Korean Americans, behave properly\u2026 oftentimes used in opposition to African Americans, and more recently maybe Latinos\u2026 They haven\u2019t taken into account Laotian Americans, or Vietnamese Americans, and Hmong Americans, but \u2018Asian\u2019 sort of sweeps them all up\u2026 They study hard, they work hard, they\u2019re good at math, they\u2019re good engineers, they\u2019re not too loud [and] they don\u2019t riot. This is obviously not true. But in a sense that doesn\u2019t matter, because what we imagine, or how we organize stories, need not have very much relationship to the way things really are.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Let me be clear. Anti-Asian racism is real and life threatening. White supremacy has never fully accepted the presence of Asians in America. The history of\u00a0exclusion<\/a>\u00a0and internment, the objectification and trafficking of Asian women, and current experiences of post-9\/11 policing and\u00a0hate crimes<\/a>\u00a0by Muslim, Arab, and South Asian Americans, have proven this. Moreover, the structures of poverty and criminalization, while designed to exploit and diminish the lives of black people,\u00a0affect<\/a>\u00a0us. Incarceration and deportation remove loved ones from our communities, and racial discrimination traps Asian Americans in low-wage jobs and unemployment.<\/p>\n The point isn\u2019t that Asian Americans don\u2019t experience racism, or that it\u2019s somehow less important, or that there isn’t resistance. It\u2019s that Asian American race politics are contested, and blackness is at the\u00a0crux<\/a>\u00a0of the question. And Asian American anti-black racism holds special political potency. Orientalism, an idea that\u2019s hard to break down into everyday language, drives the political utility of Asian Americans in racial discourse, and our invisibility and misrepresentation in popular media. As Michael Omi and Dana Y. Takagi put it:<\/p>\n Unlike \u2018black\u2019 and \u2018white\u2019 as racial categories, there is a greater fluidity to \u2018Asian American\u2019 that can be manipulated in particular ways\u2026 It may not matter whether specific claims about Asian Americans are empirically correct or not. In fact, much of what both the Left and the Right claim about Asian Americans is contestable. Thus, the \u2018truth\u2019 of the claims is immaterial. What matters are the kinds of rhetorical constructions, and their emotional impacts, that the Right and the Left deploy.[1]<\/b><\/a><\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n So maybe the answer feels unsatisfying because the questions don’t go far enough. Yes, Asian American race privilege exists, and yes, we participate in anti-black racism — and as Asian Americans, we need to do something about it.\u00a0What strategies and movement practices would it take to build a more visible and organized base of antiracist Asian Americans? As I said on a recent national\u00a0webcast<\/a>, we have internal and external work to do. Building an anti-racist Asian American coalition holds great potential for advancing racial justice, but it requires real, vigorous debate to determine what our political commitments are \u2013 to the most marginalized parts of that coalition, and to the broader racial justice movement.<\/p>\n