![\"Marvin](\"https:\/\/objects-us-west-1.dream.io\/racefiles\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/Marvin-Joseph-The-Washington-Post.jpg\")
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Over the past year, growing numbers of Asian Americans have taken up the call\u00a0for\u00a0#ModelMinorityMutiny<\/a>, rightly pointing out the falsehood of Asian American uplift, but more importantly,\u00a0rejecting the very idea that chasing after\u00a0such a precarious and inhumane notion\u00a0of success is something even worth doing.\u00a0<\/em>In reality, Asian Americans have been mutinying for a while now. In this spirit, several people asked me to\u00a0share the following remarks, given\u00a0during a recent panel discussion\u00a0titled, \u201cWhat Can Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders Do About Racial Justice?\u201d at the National CAPACD<\/a> conference in Washington, D.C. Hopefully they can shed some light on the work that\u00a0grassroots Asian American and Pacific Islander organizers are doing, and have been doing for decades, to\u00a0advance a politics of humanity and inclusion over the divisive politics of American exceptionalism\u00a0and white supremacy. The panel featured Naroen Chinn of 1Love Movement<\/a> in Philadelphia; Deepa Iyer<\/a>, Senior Fellow at the Center for Social Inclusion and author of the forthcoming book, We Too Sing America: South Asian, Arab, Muslim, and Sikh Immigrants Shape our Multiracial Future<\/span>; Mike Murase<\/a> of the Little Tokyo Service Center in Los Angeles; and Leotele Togafau of\u00a0FACE<\/a> (Faith Action for Community Equity) in Hawaii.<\/em><\/p>\n \u2022\u00a0\u2022\u00a0\u2022<\/p>\n Good morning! It\u2019s my great honor to moderate this panel of incredible activists. First, I\u2019ve been asked by National CAPACD to take 10 minutes to provide some framing from ChangeLab\u2019s perspective. Then we\u2019ll dive into the panel discussion for about an hour. Finally, we\u2019ll take some time for Q&A with all of you. Afterwards, there will be a workshop to continue the conversation, for those interested.<\/p>\n A quick note: I\u2019m going to use \u201cAPI\u201d sometimes, and \u201cAsian Americans\u201d at other times, because I want to be historically accurate and intentional about how and when we\u2019re talking about Pacific Islander communities and experiences.<\/p>\n What can APIs do about racial justice? It\u2019s not a new question. I want to start with a few quotes \u2013 first from Daryl Maeda, chair of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado, on the Asian American movement of the 1960s and \u201870s:<\/p>\n The Asian American movement created a multiethnic alliance [of] Asians of all ethnicities [inspired by the ideas behind] the Black Power and anti-war movements\u2026 as well as decolonization movements around the globe\u2026 Coalitional politics was\u2026 foundational to understanding the United States as a capitalistic and imperialistic system that exploited people of color both within and outside its borders.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n He\u2019s talking about the Asian American movement in 1968. Now, a few quotes from interviews I’ve done with today’s Asian American activists:<\/p>\n Twenty or 30 years ago, to say \u2018I\u2019m API\u2019 [had] a political commitment that [came] with it\u2026 Today, what does it mean when one counts oneself as API? \u2026Is it a political identity? Do we think it\u2019s a cultural identity? Do we think it\u2019s a biological identity somehow?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Another person asked:<\/p>\n Do we really share common experiences and common histories and common concerns? \u2026We\u2019ve really strayed from the initial work and rhetoric that started to occur when the [Asian American] movement was being shaped and formed\u2026 I think we lost something.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n How did we get from a multiethnic Asian American movement clearly committed to interracial solidarity and to ending capitalism and war, to this moment of questioning the very meaning of API identity\u00a0and politics? I\u2019ll try to give a very rough<\/em> sketch of some key shifts over the last 50 years or so, to help surface the historical conditions shaping these\u00a0questions about APIs and race.<\/p>\n National CAPACD was born out of the struggles of low-income APIs, so I\u2019m going to assume a basic point of unity here is a desire to build power for the most marginalized APIs \u2013 Native Hawaiians, Pacific Islanders, Southeast Asians, Muslims, Arabs, and South Asians, queer and transgender people, youth, low-wage workers, and women. The question is: how do we do that? And,\u00a0what are we building power for<\/em>?<\/strong><\/p>\n The original Asian American movement was committed to multiracial solidarity not because it was the right thing to do, but because its leaders understood that Asian American struggles were shaped by white supremacy, that they had shared interests<\/em> with Black people and other people of color. They understood that their very presence in the United States, and the conditions they faced here, were the results of capitalism and imperialism, the driving forces of white supremacy.<\/p>\n But demographic and political changes since then have created questions for the API movement. Asian Americans once included primarily poor and working class Filipinos and East Asians. But due to U.S. wars and immigration policy, the population came to include Southeast Asian refugees, growing numbers of South Asians, and high-skilled professionals and entrepreneurs from various parts of Asia. We at some point got included statistically with Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders. The broad category of API now includes not just ethnic and linguistic diversity, but also vast differences in class, color, religion, and migration stories.<\/p>\n This raises questions like:<\/p>\n If Asian American, or now API, politics is by definition coalitional, are we operating in a coalitional way? If not, how can we build genuine unity?<\/em><\/p>\n And:<\/p>\n What do capitalism and imperialism look like now? Who\u2019s being affected, what are the key fights, and how do we build solidarity across ethnicity and race?<\/em><\/p>\n The institutions that came out of the movements of the \u201860s and \u201870s \u2013 some of which are represented in this room today \u2013 were and are critical, to \u201cserve the people.” But they weren\u2019t set up to address some of the biggest challenges facing APIs now \u2013 criminalization, deportation, post-9\/11 surveillance, anti-Muslim hate violence, and U.S. militarism and economic exploitation in Asia and the Pacific.<\/p>\n Also U.S. race politics have changed. During the \u201880s the political right waged a huge backlash against civil rights and multiculturalism that continues today, creating the belief that we are \u201cpost-racial\u201d. Meanwhile, massive disinvestments from the public sector and massive in<\/em>vestments into incarceration and national security apparatuses have created immense suffering, especially in Black communities, but also for other people of color.<\/p>\n U.S. elites needed to justify this suffering. They did that through ideas like the model minority myth, a social engineering project that U.S. liberals undertook during the Cold War, in response to Soviet criticisms of American racism. The myth is more than offensive. It has broad impacts. It uses Asian Americans as proof that America is a legitimate world leader, a democratic nation where minorities can thrive if they work hard enough. It\u2019s a smokescreen for war and for the realities of Asian Americans in struggle, lifting up only those who are successful, while reinforcing false ideas about Black criminality. The myth makes no sense, really. If hard work really brings material reward, then why aren\u2019t the descendants of enslaved Black people wealthy?<\/p>\n Over the past five years, I\u2019ve heard API activists share different ideas about what today\u2019s API movement should look like, but one thing people agree on is that because of all these changes, we need new conversations to build a new politics, an upgraded version of that \u201csomething\u201d that \u201cwe lost\u201d.<\/p>\n Obviously, capitalism, war, and racism haven\u2019t gone away. But as an API movement, are we still talking about these forces? Today the richest 80 people in the world own as much as the poorest 3.5 billion people, or half the world\u2019s population. In 1967 Dr. King called the United States \u201cthe greatest purveyor of violence in the world\u201d. Today, U.S. taxpayers pay $8M every hour, or $600 billion just in 2015, to support war \u2013 compared to $63 billion on housing, for example. Forty years after illegal U.S. bombings in Southeast Asia fueled the rise of the Khmer Rouge, the ensuing genocide and a refugee crisis, we now face a Syrian refugee crisis, fueled by U.S. war in the Middle East. These forces still shape the world, causing profound violence and suffering in communities of color here and abroad.<\/p>\n And what about race?\u00a0Well, what is<\/em> race?<\/p>\n Most of us think of race as demographic categories of people with shared characteristics. We\u2019re taught to think this way. But race isn\u2019t natural or fixed by ethnicity or language or culture; it\u2019s the outcome of political and economic systems that divide humanity into winners and losers, creating freedom for some and suffering for others. We are \u201craced\u201d in relationship to one another, and our racial position can change over time. Asian Americans went from being despised Orientals to model minorities in a matter of decades.<\/p>\n Race, this division of humanity into deserving and undeserving, began with blackness and whiteness, to justify chattel slavery and the fundamental contradiction between capitalism and democracy. White supremacy, which affects us all, is, in its origins, anti-Black, which makes Black liberation a strategic goal<\/em> if we are committed to building a truly inclusive democracy.<\/p>\n Blackness isn\u2019t separate from us. We can see it in every issue, including immigration. When President Obama uses the phrase, \u201cfelons, not families\u201d to justify the deportation of immigrants with criminal convictions, that\u2019s sorting \u201cgood\u201d immigrants from \u201cbad\u201d immigrants. It\u2019s asking us to believe that it\u2019s natural to see people with criminal convictions as less than human, as disposable people who somehow don\u2019t have families, rather than as loved ones, mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters with complex human lives and stories. That kind of criminalization has its roots in the enslavement of Black people. Today\u2019s police forces are descendants of fugitive slave patrols meant to protect not us, not people of color, but white property owners. The legacy of that now affects not just Black, Latino, and Native people, but also APIs who are criminalized and deported.<\/p>\n So race isn\u2019t the same as demographics. In fact, different APIs are \u201craced\u201d differently. APIs include the very wealthy and the very poor; assimilated U.S. citizens and people who are criminalized and deported and killed; and those fighting for sovereignty against U.S. imperialism. These fault lines show us how systems like immigration, mass incarceration, economic exploitation, and war shape real differences in racial experiences even within a demographic category like API.<\/p>\n But this is an opportunity! How powerful would we be if we insisted on moving together as an API family, and if we acted in genuine kinship with other people of color, leaving no one behind despite these fault lines? We could do political jujitsu on white supremacy!<\/p>\n The Movement for Black Lives has brought more national attention to issues of race than we\u2019ve seen in decades. It\u2019s very much our fight. There are grassroots API groups that are, as we speak, redefining what it means to be API by organizing across ethnicity against violence, poverty, and criminalization from a racial justice lens \u2013 groups like PrYSM, CAAAV, the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, Freedom Inc., 1Love Movement, VAYLA, AYPAL, Desis Rising Up and Moving, Khmer Girls in Action, Mekong, the Chinese Progressive Association, and more. These groups are united through networks called Grassroots Asians\u00a0Rising<\/a> and the Southeast Asian Freedom Network<\/a>, and have been committed to solidarity with Black communities from jump. They do racial justice work rooted in their own experiences, but in a way that understands that there\u2019s no way<\/em> we can imagine justice for APIs without solidarity with Blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans \u2013 because we are one human family, struggling to get whole in the face of white supremacy.<\/p>\n So, there\u2019s some framing from ChangeLab\u2019s perspective that our brilliant panelists can now expand on…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Over the past year, growing numbers of Asian Americans have taken up the call\u00a0for\u00a0#ModelMinorityMutiny, rightly pointing out the falsehood of Asian American uplift, but more importantly,\u00a0rejecting the very idea that chasing after\u00a0such a precarious and inhumane notion\u00a0of success is something even worth doing.\u00a0In reality, Asian Americans have been mutinying for a while now. In […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":9631,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1277,382,1337,229],"coauthors":[1370],"class_list":["post-9626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","tag-modelminoritymutiny","tag-anti-black-racism","tag-asian-american-studies","tag-model-minority-myth"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/Marvin-Joseph-The-Washington-Post.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9626","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=9626"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9626\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11252,"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9626\/revisions\/11252"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9631"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9626"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=9626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}