<\/a><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve had the pleasure of interviewing some impressive people as part of our research<\/a> at ChangeLab. The breadth and depth of these conversations have revealed how complex Asian American racial identity is, and how few spaces we have to talk about it meaningfully. They’ve also revealed a deep desire to approach the subject with an eye toward resistance and action, to contest white supremacy from diverse and authentic Asian American experiences.<\/p>\n

With the recent online debate over Asian American privilege<\/a>, I\u2019ve been thinking about how the quandary of facing both conditional race privilege and racial subjugation plays out in the hearts and minds of Asian American racial justice organizers. Recently, I looked back at some of the interviews I did, and realized that this quandary may in fact be useful, not only for individual organizers, but for the overall movement.<\/p>\n

Bear with me and I\u2019ll explain.<\/p>\n

Among the people I interviewed were several spoken word artists, hip hop musicians, and writers. One person offered his take on the role of Asian American racial justice organizers. Far beyond the need for demographic representation, he argued that the politics<\/i> of these organizers shaped a specific kind of movement-building approach. He gave examples of several prominent Asian American organizers leading fights for environmental justice, low-wage workers\u2019 rights, and other issues, where Asian Americans did not make up the majority of the base, but instead were part of a multiracial constituency. He hinted that there was something about Asian American identity formation that led these organizers to grasp and act on the need for expansive and transformative politics:<\/p>\n

There are particular types of strategies and projects that emanate only from our experience as Asian Americans, but that are effective because they become larger than that\u2026 That\u2019s sort of my theory of how Asian Americans fit into progressive, radical movements. We bring our unique experience and move it\u2026 in a direction that brings everybody into it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In his own work, he lamented getting asked repeatedly, by both whites and Asian Americans, why he, \u201ca nice Asian American\u201d, was part of the hip hop movement. The belief that hip hop, a black-originated artistic vehicle for personal storytelling and political critique, precluded Asian American experiences, exposed the potency of the model minority myth within both white and Asian American imaginations. In reality, he said:<\/p>\n

It\u2019s because I\u2019m Asian American, it\u2019s because I\u2019m Pacific Islander\u2026 coming from a little island in the middle of the sea, moving to the continental U.S., and beginning to understand racism and also understanding classism and hierarchy within the Asian American communities\u2026 that I [understand] Kool Herc\u2019s story not as this mythical guy who descends from a mountain in Jamaica, but as an immigrant who comes to the Bronx, is teased for the way he dresses and the way he talks, and decides that the way he is going to overcome that is to become the dopest DJ that anybody has ever met.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Are there unique aspects to Asian American organizing approaches? If so, what are they? There\u2019s an essay in Racial Formation in the 21^{st<\/sup> Century<\/span> by James Kyung-Jin Lee, on Asian American literature. In it he describes an \u201cambivalence\u201d in Asian American culture, due largely to half a century of model minority racialization. In the end he argues that this ambivalence, at its best, leads to \u201cthe commitment to discover relentlessly, both in our present, though our pasts, and into a dim future\u2026 what it means to become Asian American rather than simply to be called one.\u201d This interrogation, he says, is a powerful basis for imagining \u201ca racial future worth securing.\u201d<\/p>\n}

Ambivalence doesn’t necessarily mean uncertainty. It means having simultaneously conflicting ideas or feelings. In many of the interviews I did, I heard, often in the same breath, arguments for organizing around Asian American identity, and cautions against the pitfalls of doing so.\u00a0I heard both frustration and hope about how the model minority myth powerfully positioned antiracist Asian Americans to critique post-racialism and the limited logic of multiculturalism. On the hopeful side, one person said:<\/p>\n

There\u2019s the justice piece of it, which I think is\u2026 moving away from a rights-based and equality model of, \u201cWe just want what you all have. We… want to just expand the ranks of the privileged.\u201d \u2026A racial justice model\u2026 would be actually be talking about dismantling the whole system and saying, \u201cWe don\u2019t want to join the ranks of the privileged few\u2026 We\u2019re not trying to assimilate and be like white people.\u201d<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Maybe Asian Americans who have faced the racial bribe of model minority status, and then flatly refused it — or have had it torn away<\/a> from them — are able to discern the guiles of white supremacy in a particular way. Maybe the exercise of puzzling over what it means, politically, to \u201cbecome\u201d Asian American rather than to be \u201ccalled\u201d one leads to a profound skepticism of individualism, one that sees through the divide-and-conquer pitfalls in the world of political organizing. Maybe this is one kind of Asian American nuance to the veil and double-consciousness that W.E.B. DuBois famously\u00a0described<\/a> in The Souls of Black Folk.<\/span><\/p>\n

The flipside of conditional privilege is resistance and struggle. And contrary to the view of white political pundits, as race gets made and remade, Asian American political involvement has more to contribute to the fight for justice than sheer numbers. At its best, it offers lessons to share \u2013 about the perils of blindly accepting the conditional privileges meted out by white supremacy, the quickness with which those privileges can be lost, and the power of resisting them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve had the pleasure of interviewing some impressive people as part of our research at ChangeLab. The breadth and depth of these conversations have revealed how complex Asian American racial identity is, and how few spaces we have to talk about it meaningfully. They’ve also revealed a deep desire to approach the subject with an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1117,576],"coauthors":[1370],"class_list":["post-7669","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-asian-identity","tag-asian-privilege"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7669"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7669\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10521,"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7669\/revisions\/10521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7669"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=7669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}