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In his May 2014 commencement speech to Yale’s Asian-American alumni, jazz musician and Harvard professor Vijay Iyer said, “To succeed in America is, somehow, to be complicit with the idea of America — which means that at some level you’ve made peace with its rather ugly past.”
He was referring to the upward mobility of large numbers of Asian Americans, which, he argued, came at the expense of other people of color.
A few months later, this sentiment was echoed by the online forum ChangeLab, which announced a new social media campaign, #ModelMinorityMutiny, designed to identify and reject the insidious construction of Asian Americans as a “good” minority, a designation that has been used as a means to justify and perpetuate racism against blacks in particular.
These statements have been part a growing push among younger Asian Americans to name and decry the participation of Asians as a racial group in white supremacy. This line of inquiry, which has sharpened in the wake of the high-profile, black-led protests against police violence, has so far resulted in several ongoing discussions and at least a few powerful shows of on-the-ground solidarity in the aftermath of Ferguson under the banner #Asians4BlackLives.
New York-based organizations like CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities and DRUM – South Asian Organizing Center have mobilized small demonstrations explicitly in support of black families affected by police brutality in Queens and Manhattan. On the opposite coast, the Oakland-based group Seeding Change launched an online “Selfie Action” in April to collect photos of Asian Americans holding signs declaring their support for the indictment of Chinese-American NYPD officer Peter Liang, who had shot and killed 25-year-old Akai Gurley during an unauthorized vertical patrol in East New York.
The criticism of Asian Americans’ complicity in a power structure that disregards black life has emerged as a significant theme among young activists eager to ally with the Black Lives Matter movement. Underlying this turn seems to be the desire to expose the shortcomings of what scholar Jared Sexton has called “people of color blindness,” or the tendency among progressives to flatten or elide the experiences of all non-white people under one umbrella.
As Sexton notes, this move may obscure or appropriate the specificities of black suffering. Claiming that police violence and mass incarceration affect “people of color,” for example, diminishes the fact that blacks remain the primary and most disadvantaged targets of both — Latinos on average receive shorter sentences than blacks, even as their rates of imprisonment steadily climb, and Asians have the lowest incarceration rates of any group, whites included.
Similarly, at the end of 2014, Hyphen magazine published “An Apology to Black Folks,” in which Taiwanese-American author Kai-Ming Ko excoriated both himself and his fellow Asian Americans for acts of state violence against black communities, including the failures to indict the policemen who had murdered Eric Garner and Michael Brown. Lamented Ko, “We messed up.”
He went on to cite the ways in which he believed Asian Americans had bolstered a system of white supremacy, including “pay[ing] taxes which support mass incarceration” and making the choice to “eat, shop, work, own businesses, study, and live in communities where white supremacy is the dominant operating racial framework.”
Indeed, global capitalism induces Americans to participate in one unjust system or another — buying sweatshop-manufactured clothes or eating produce harvested by poorly paid migrants comes to mind — which largely rely on the exploitation of non-white workers. However, like appeals to ethical consumerism, Ko’s condemnation of “complicit” everyday actions such as eating and shopping places its emphasis on individual behaviors, offering little in the way of suggesting how Asian Americans might collectively mobilize to confront and attack racism and inequality.
Historically, the term “Asian American” didn’t emerge until the 1960s, and since then, has been an extremely fluid category — shifting from narrow to capacious in line with political and economic trends. As a Census designation, “Asian” accounts for less than 5 percent of the US population, but currently encompasses individuals from over forty-five national origins, speaking over a hundred languages and dialects.
According to a recent report from Third Way, the rate of Asian political participation in the US remains relatively low, though the fever pitch of Republicans’ xenophobic rhetoric around immigration over the last few decades has swayed them somewhat toward the Democrats. While Asians tend to support a range of progressive causes like health care and (contrary to popular perception) affirmative action, they currently hold limited political power and are the targets of little campaigning outreach.
What, then, has given rise among progressives to the idea of Asians as unique collaborators in the state oppression of the black population? One potent source is the model minority narrative, which is precisely what groups like ChangeLab are criticizing and hoping to overturn. Founder Scot Nakagawa, who calls the model minority myth one of the many “levers” of white supremacy, notes that a number of Asians “have internalized the myth, and along with it, negative stereotypes about Black people, making the case through their experiences that the model-minority myth is the flip side of anti-blackness.”
Inflamed in the twenty-first century by cultural commentators like Amy Chua (of Tiger Mom and Triple Package fame), the idea that Asians’ rigid cultural values have enabled them to bootstrap their way out of hardship has been in circulation at least since the end of World War II. The Color of Success, a recent book by historian Ellen D. Wu, locates the roots of this insidious mythology in the postwar rise of racial liberalism as the dominant framework for addressing matters of race in the United States.
The United States’s struggle for global ascendency after World War II and through the Cold War prompted liberals to argue for the loosening of racial restrictions on Asian Americans in order to better forge ties with Asian nations and model the kind of egalitarian democracy they claimed to promote overseas.
Following the internment of Japanese citizens during the war and the Red Scare of the 1950s that cast Chinese immigrants as potential communists, liberal Chinese- and Japanese-American groups fought hard to combat the “yellow peril” stereotype that branded Asians as perpetual foreigners and subjected them to violence and exclusion from jobs and neighborhoods.
Groups like the Japanese American Citizens League encouraged their constituents to participate in actions that would reinforce the idea of Asians as assimilable model citizens, including enlisting in the military and suppressing youth delinquency. Such groups pressed for positive representations of Asians by releasing texts that extolled the virtues of Asian culture and trotting out respectable spokespeople to serve as ambassadors of the race.
By the 1960s, the state was eager to contain the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement and, among other tactics, found a racial foil in the “successful” Asian immigrant, a trope that could be brandished to discredit the movement and attribute blacks’ disenfranchisement to a “culture of poverty.” The infamous Moynihan Report, for instance, credited the “close-knit family structure” of the Japanese and Chinese with their uplift in society, and juxtaposed this with “black matriarchy,” arguing that the latter had been responsible for the entrenchment of blacks in poverty.
In addition to providing crude justification for anti-black racism, such narratives also made it possible for liberals to conveniently dismiss the horrors of internment and Chinese Exclusion. As Wu notes, “Japanese American ‘success stories’ of the mid- to late 1950s redeemed the nation’s missteps and reinforced liberalism’s tenets, especially state management of the racial order.”
A 2014 report by Asian Americans Advancing Justice LA found that Asians were overrepresented not just in STEM fields, but also in “personal care and service occupations,” including nail salons, garment production, and taxi and livery drivers. That these roles sound like stereotypes indicates how business continues to use powerful racist stereotypes to segment and exploit workers and how sweeping categories like “Asian” hide deep class divisions.
As the evolution of capitalism continues to reset color lines in the US, fighting inequality will entail not simply challenging stereotypes and unlearning racism at the individual and community level, but attacking the economic system that requires racist civic hierarchies to construct and maintain divisions of labor.
