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<\/a><\/p>\nA couple of editorials\u00a0have appeared in the media recently concerning the Asian American-led\u00a0protests<\/a> of the second-degree manslaughter conviction of Chinese American NYPD officer, Peter Liang. Mr. Liang, in his role as an NYPD cop, shot and killed Akai Gurley, an innocent, unarmed African American man. The conviction is being celebrated by many racial justice advocates who have, for too long, seen police officers involved in similar shootings let off the hook in hundreds of other cases over recent years, but some Asian Americans claim justice has not been served. Predictably, the conflicting reactions have\u00a0caused a minor furor in the media which, as usual, seems to be zeroing in on the points of greatest polarization in order to drive up page views.<\/p>\n Both editorials are worthy reads.<\/p>\n First up, Jay Caspian Kang’s New York Times editorial<\/a>\u00a0suggests that it would be too easy to dismiss these protests as just<\/em> an insensitive and reactionary move on the part of a group often perceived to be relatively privileged among racial minorities. This paragraph in particular offers food for thought:<\/p>\n This is the stunted language of a people who do not yet know how to talk about injustice. The protesters who took to the streets on Saturday are trying, in their way, to create a new political language for Asian-Americans, but this language comes without any edifying history \u2014 no amount of nuance or qualification or appeal to Martin Luther King will change the fact that the first massive, nationwide Asian-American protest in years was held in defense of a police officer who shot and killed an innocent black man.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The article suggests a lot that reads as plain text to Asian American racial justice advocates, including the need to consider the\u00a0context of Asian Americans when trying to understand the protests. We are a group who were first lumped together into a single, entirely synthetic race in the U.S. in the context pre-civil rights era legally codified and explicit white supremacy, and in order to justify the super-exploitation of our labor. Regardless of rich cultural diversity, striking differences in the locations and conditions of life of our countries of origin, and equally significant\u00a0differences in what drove us to migrate from those countries, we are still, in the 21st century, categorized as\u00a0one group, by turns insulted\u00a0and exceptionalized, persecuted and excluded as such, and, for some among us, included in a fragile and entirely conditional form of whiteness<\/a>.<\/p>\n Asian Americans are among the most privileged of immigrants, and among the most destitute. Most arrive in the U.S. with no awareness we\u00a0are\u00a0Asian to begin with, making the fraught and dehumanizing\u00a0process of race-making part and parcel of our integration into America. There is no organic pan-Asian\u00a0racial or regional identity that contains us\u00a0outside of the western societies dominated by the descendants of the Europeans who\u00a0originally invented Asia as the Orient for the purposes of colonial plunder.<\/p>\n So, given this peculiar condition, it seems reasonable that Asian Americans, particularly new immigrants, would struggle to find a place for themselves in the United States.<\/p>\n