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The global scope of American military power has been described in many ways: hegemony, primacy, and unipolarity. Brooks, Ikenberry, and Wohlforth (2012)1 cover the nuances of the terminology well, and I agree with their preference for the term “Deep Engagement” that Joseph Nye coined in a 1995 article.2 The complex patterns and nuances of engagement remain poorly understood, with a focus on conflict that ignores the preponderance of cases, where U.S. forces have been peacefully based for decades. In short, foreign policy has focused on the heat instead of the light – countless studies, essays, and books on Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq stand in contrast to the negligible attention given to countries where the U.S. maintained large-scale and long-term troop basing such as Belgium, Korea, Turkey, and Kuwait.

Is the United States an empire? We may just as well debate whether an elephant most closely resembles a Tyrannosaurus Rex or Triceratops. Some will point to the imperial characteristics that are reflected in the United States force posture. But characteristics of dinosaurs or empires (size, martial strength, breadth) really have no meaning in a world where that entire order is extinct. The 21st century is filled with a new order of nation-states, markedly different from eras prior to 1945.

Thanks to the U.S.-led order, for decades, most countries have not had to fight for market access, guard their supply chains, or even seriously defend their borders. The U.S. Navy has kept international waterways open, the U.S. market has provided reliable consumer demand and capital for dozens of countries, and U.S. security guarantees have covered nearly 70 nations. Such assurances have benefited everyone: not just Washington's allies and partners but also its adversaries. U.S. security guarantees had the effect of neutering Germany and Japan, the main regional rivals of Russia and China, respectively. In turn, Moscow and Beijing could focus on forging ties with the rest of the world rather than fighting their historical enemies. Without U.S. patronage and protection, countries would have to get back in the business of securing themselves and their economic lifelines.

Such a world would see the return of great-power mercantilism and new forms of imperialism. Powerful countries would once again try to reduce their economic insecurity by establishing exclusive economic zones, where their firms could enjoy cheap and secure access to raw materials and large captive consumer markets. Today, China is already starting to do this with its Belt and Road Initiative, a network of infrastructure projects around the world; its "Made in China 2025" policy, to stimulate domestic production and consumption; and its attempts to create a closed-off, parallel Internet. If the United States follows suit, other countries will have to attach themselves to an American or a Chinese bloc – or forge blocs of their own. France might seek to restore its grip on its former African colonies. Russia might accelerate its efforts to corral former Soviet states into a regional trade union. Germany increasingly would have to look beyond Europe's shrinking populations to find buyers for its exports -and it would have to develop the military capacity to secure those new far-flung markets and supply lines, too.

Nuclear warfare could have devastating impacts on millions of people, yet it has been suggested that regional or global nuclear conflict may be possible in the future (Toon et al., 2019). In addition to the calamitous impacts of nuclear conflict on a local level, research conducted with a range of climate models finds a global cooling in response to various conflict scenarios (Coupe et al., 2019; Malone et al., 1985; Mills et al., 2014; Pausata et al., 2016; Robock et al., 2007; Turco et al., 1983). This global cooling is driven by fires started by the nuclear weapons. These fires inject smoke into the upper troposphere, where rapid lofting can spread the sunlight-absorbing soot particles into the stratosphere (Turco et al., 1983). Recent research implies that even a small nuclear conflict may have impacts on the global climate system, affecting the state and circulation of the atmosphere (Robock et al., 2007), increasing the sea ice extent in both hemispheres (Mills et al., 2014), and reducing plant productivity and crop yields in regions far from the conflict location (Özdogan et al., ˘ 2013; Toon et al., 2019; Xia & Robock, 2013). While less studied, the potential impacts of nuclear conflict on the ocean are many. Numerous physical, chemical, and biological processes in the ocean are temperature dependent, and sunlight is a critical ingredient for photosynthesizing phytoplankton at the base of the marine food web. Using a climate model with an interactive ocean, Mills et al. (2014) evaluated the ocean physical response to a potential India/Pakistan nuclear war that lofts 5 Tg of black carbon particles into the stratosphere; they find a 0.8◦ C decrease in globally averaged sea surface temperature, with smaller temperature reductions at depth. Recently Toon et al. (2019) used an Earth system model that includes a representation for phytoplankton to evaluate the ocean biological response to nuclear conflict; they report a 5–15% decrease in phytoplankton productivity under a range of conflict scenarios. Such findings prompt further investigation into how nuclear conflict and the resulting global cooling may alter the chemical state of the ocean. Perturbations in the ocean's carbonate chemistry are of particular interest, owing to their importance for ocean acidification. Ocean acidification is an ongoing, large-scale environmental problem driven by fossil fuel emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2). Cumulatively since the preindustrial era, the ocean has absorbed 41% of the carbon emitted by human industrial activities (McKinley et al., 2017). While this ocean absorption of carbon has partially mitigated anthropogenic global warming, it has fundamentally altered the carbonate chemistry of the ocean, increasing the concentration of hydrogen ions ([H+]) while decreasing the concentration of carbonate ions ([CO2− 3 ]). Observations collected at time series sites across the global ocean find statistically significant reductions in the potential hydrogen (pH = −log([H+])) and the saturation state of the calcium carbonate mineral aragonite (Ωarag, which is proportional to [CO2− 3 ]) over the past few decades (Bates et al., 2014). These changes are a direct consequence of the ocean absorption of anthropogenic carbon; carbonate chemistry dictates that the excess carbon will react with water and CO2− 3 to decrease ocean pH and Ω (Feely et al., 2004). Both of these changes may have negative consequences for marine organisms, in particular for those that precipitate calcium carbonate shells (e.g., coccolithophores, pteropods, foraminifera, corals, molluscs, and echinoderms), as the precipitation is hindered by low pH, and because decreases in Ω favor shell dissolution (Doney et al., 2009). To date, there have been no studies of the effects of nuclear conflict on ocean acidification, though past modeling studies on the ocean's response to volcanic forcing and to proposed geoengineering schemes have intimated that ocean carbonate chemistry is highly sensitive to these types of external forcings. Using a fully coupled carbon-climate model, Frölicher et al. (2011) find that volcanic-induced cooling following the 1991 Mt. Pinatubo eruption led to immediate increases in the flux of carbon from atmosphere to ocean and consequently, increases in the total dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) concentration in the surface ocean. Eddebbar et al. (2019) demonstrate that air-to-sea CO2 fluxes are significantly enhanced following the eruptions of Agung, El Chichón, and Pinatubo in a large ensemble of simulations with an Earth system model. Matthews et al. (2009) conduct solar radiation management climate engineering simulations with an intermediate complexity model of the coupled climate-carbon system; they find changes in ocean pH and Ωarag as a result of the anomalous cooling. Similarly, Lauvset et al. (2017) indicate that radiation management geoengineering leads to changes in North Atlantic pH in a fully coupled Earth system model, but they do not explore changes in Ωarag. While these studies are suggestive of the carbonate chemistry response to nuclear conflict, the external forcing perturbations are of a different magnitude and duration than those imposed by nuclear conflict. Further, it is difficult to mechanistically understand the ocean carbonate chemistry response to such external forcing perturbations in fully coupled models, where the terrestrial response to forcing additionally influences the atmospheric CO2 concentration. Here, we use a state-of-the art Earth system model to simulate the ocean carbonate chemistry response to a range of nuclear conflict scenarios. We decouple the ocean carbon cycle from that of the terrestrial carbon cycle via a direct prescription of the atmospheric CO2 boundary condition used for air-sea CO2 flux, that is, changes in the terrestrial biosphere have no influence on the atmospheric CO2 that the ocean sees. As we will demonstrate, we find large perturbations in ocean pH and Ωarag as a result of nuclear conflict. These perturbations have relatively long duration (order of 10 years) and are driven by decreases in temperature and subsequent increases in the ocean carbon inventory. 2. Methods We analyse output generated by the Community Earth System Model (CESM) version 1.3, a state-of-the-art coupled climate model consisting of atmosphere, ocean, land, and sea ice components (Hurrell et al., 2013). The atmosphere component of CESM in our simulations is the Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model (WACCM; Marsh et al., 2013) with nominal 2◦ resolution, 66 vertical levels, and a model top at ∼145 km; it uses the Rapid Radiative Transfer Model for GCMs (RRTMG; Iacono et al., 2000) for the radiative transfer. The Community Aerosol and Radiation Model for Atmospheres (Bardeen et al., 2008) is coupled with WACCM to simulate the injection, lofting, advection, and removal of soot aerosols in the troposphere and stratosphere, and their subsequent impact on climate (Coupe et al., 2019; Toon et al., 2019). The ocean component of CESM is the Parallel Ocean Program version 2 (Danabasoglu et al., 2012) with nominal 1◦ resolution and 60 vertical levels. The biogeochemical ocean component of CESM is the Biogeochemical Elemental Cycling model that represents the lower trophic levels of the marine ecosystem, full carbonate system thermodynamics, air-sea CO2 fluxes, and a dynamic iron cycle (Doney et al., 2006; Moore et al., 2004, 2013; Moore & Braucher, 2008; Long et al., 2013; Lindsay et al., 2014). LOVENDUSKI ET AL. 2 of 9 Geophysical Research Letters 10.1029/2019GL086246 The ocean in the coupled CESM simulation is initialized from rest with World Ocean Circulation (WOCE) temperature and salinity (Gouretski & Koltermann, 2004). Biogeochemical tracers are initialized to observationally based climatologies where possible (Lauvset et al., 2016); where these were not available (such as dissolved iron and phytoplankton biomass), the model is initialized with fields interpolated from an existing CESM simulation. The new, fully coupled simulation was spun up for 4 years to an approximate steady state with a constant atmospheric CO2 mixing ratio of 370 ppm, representative of the mixing ratio in the year 2000. Due to the relatively short spin-up period, the globally integrated air-sea CO2 flux is not in steady state (drifting at a rate of 0.14 Pg C year−2) when the perturbation forcing is applied. We therefore present our results as anomalies from the drifting control integrations. Three control simulations of 20-year duration are generated using round-off level differences in atmospheric initial conditions. As each of these control simulations has different phasing of internal variability (e.g., El Niño-Southern Oscillation), we use the standard deviation across this ensemble to identify statistically significant perturbations due to nuclear conflict. We report on the anomalies generated from four simulations of nuclear conflict with varying amounts of soot injection: three India/Pakistan conflict scenarios that inject 5, 27, and 47 Tg of soot, respectively, and one US/Russia conflict scenario that injects 150 Tg of soot. The initial soot injection amounts are generated from plausible scenarios for nuclear conflict following advice from a number of military and policy experts; the reader is referred to Toon et al. (2019) for further details on scenario development. In each case, we prescribe that the conflict begins on 15 May of the 5th year of the first control simulation, and we integrate the model for a 15-year period following the injection. We assume that the smoke generated by mass fires from nuclear conflict is injected into the upper troposphere above the target sites (in the U. S./Russia case, smoke is spread evenly over the two nations), as in Toon et al. (2019). WACCM lofts much of this smoke higher into the stratosphere via solar heating of black carbon aerosols in the smoke, where the black carbon aerosols persist for about a decade. The resulting annual mean, post-conflict (May to the following April) anomalies in aerosol optical depth are shown in Figure 1a. These optical depth changes result in a 10–40% reduction in incoming solar energy (Toon et al., 2019). While we discuss the anomalies generated from all four of these conflict simulations, we describe two in greater detail throughout this manuscript: the U. S./Russia case, as it is the largest climate perturbation overall, and the India/Pakistan 47-Tg case, as it is the largest climate perturbation generated by a regional nuclear conflict. Ocean biogeochemistry in the version of CESM used for our simulations has been extensively validated in the literature (Brady et al., 2019; Freeman et al., 2018; Harrison et al., 2018; Krumhardt et al., 2017; Lindsay et al., 2014; Lovenduski et al., 2015, 2016; Long et al., 2013, 2016; Moore et al., 2013; McKinley et al., 2016; Negrete-García et al., 2019). Of particular note for our study, the simulated surface ocean carbonate ion concentration from a long, preindustrial control simulation of CESM compares favorably with reconstructed observations, albeit with lower interannual variance than has been measured at subtropical time series sites (Lovenduski et al., 2015). In Figure S1 in the supporting information, we illustrate the comparison between observationally based estimates of surface ocean pH and Ωarag (from GLODAPv2; Lauvset et al., 2016) and the CESM control ensemble mean. In this comparison, we note that the observational estimates have been extensively interpolated and are intended to represent year 2002 carbonate chemistry parameters, whereas CESM has been integrated under an atmospheric CO2 mixing ratio that corresponds to year 2000 forcing. We find high correspondence between the spatial patterns of modeled and observed pH and Ωarag, giving us confidence that CESM is capable of representing the mean state of these two variables. 3. Results Globally averaged surface ocean pH increases in response to each of the nuclear conflicts, where the magnitude of the pH anomaly scales with the amount of soot injected (Figure 1b). In each case, the pH anomaly exceeds the interannual standard deviation of pH in the control ensemble mean (gray shading in Figure 1b). We observe the largest increases in surface ocean pH in response to the U. S./Russia 150-Tg case; here the globally averaged surface ocean pH anomaly exceeds 0.05, corresponding to a ∼10% decrease in the global mean hydrogen ion concentration. Under each scenario, the pH anomaly peaks 2–4 years after the conflict and persists for ∼10 years. With the exception of the high-latitude oceans, the pH increase following the nuclear conflict is pervasive across the surface ocean (Figures 2a– 2c). In the 47-Tg India/Pakistan scenario, we observe local pH anomalies exceeding 0.06 units on average in years 2–5 post conflict (Figure 2c); the anomalies are largest in the North Atlantic, North Pacific, and Equatorial Pacific. These large, abrupt changes in surface ocean pH may have important consequences for calcifying organisms, as shell precipitation can be affected by the ambient hydrogen ion concentration in seawater (Kroeker et al., 2013). Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, global ocean pH has dropped by an estimated 0.1 units (Ciais & Sabine, 2013). The anomalies in pH generated by our simulations exceed 50% of this historical change and occur over a much shorter time period. Whether and how organisms respond to the initial and rapid alleviation of low pH, followed by an immediate return to the current pH state in the global ocean, is as yet unknown (see, e.g., Haigh et al., 2015). In contrast to our results for pH, we observe decreases in surface ocean Ωarag following nuclear conflict (Figure 1c), which should tend to inhibit the maintenance of shells and skeletons in calcified organisms. While minimal changes in Ωarag are simulated for the 5-Tg India/Pakistan case, the other three cases produce large decreases in saturation state, on the order of 0.1 to 0.3 units (Figure 1c). In each of these three cases, the anomalies exceed the interannual standard deviation of Ωarag in the control ensemble mean (gray shading in Figure 1c). The peak response in these three cases occurs 3–5 years post conflict, a year or so later than the pH response. While for pH the globally averaged anomaly is negligibly small, 10-years post conflict; anomalies in globally averaged Ωarag persist beyond our 15-year simulation time frame for all conflict scenarios. The decreases in aragonite saturation state span the tropics and subtropics, with the exception of the central and eastern Equatorial Pacific region (Figures 2d– 2f). Local decreases in saturation state exceed 0.5 units in the western North Atlantic and western North Pacific under the 47-Tg India/Pakistan scenario (Figure 2f). Importantly, the simulated decreases in saturation state are highly pronounced in regions that host diverse coral reef ecosystems (for instance, the western and southwestern Pacific and the Caribbean), and like pH, the changes in saturation state occur fairly rapidly. Projections from climate models suggest that coral reef ecosystems across the world will experience aragonite saturation state declines from their preindustrial value of 3.5 to 3.0 by the end of the century (Ricke et al., 2013); alarmingly, our simulations project similar Ωarag declines over a 3- to 5-year period, which then persist for years after the initial forcing dissipates. The opposite-signed anomalies in pH and Ωarag induced by nuclear conflict seem puzzling at first, as for "typical" anthropogenic ocean acidification scenarios, both of these variables simultaneously decrease. Why would nuclear conflict cause opposing responses in pH and saturation state? To understand these opposing responses, we need to consider the carbonate chemistry system in seawater and its sensitivity to changing temperature. Gaseous CO2 reacts with seawater to form carbonic acid (H2CO3), which then dissociates to form H+ and bicarbonate (HCO− 3 ). The hydrogen ion then reacts with CO2− 3 to form additional HCO− 3 , CO2 + H2O− ↽−−−−−−⇀−H2CO3. (1) H2CO3− ↽−−−−−−⇀−H+ + HCO− 3 . (2) H+ + CO2− 3 − ↽−−−−−−⇀−HCO− 3 . (3) The equilibrium constants for these reactions (typically expressed as K0, K1, and K2, respectively; Sarmiento & Gruber, 2006) are sensitive to changes in temperature, for example, the cooling induced by nuclear conflict. We need to also consider the dissolution reaction for mineral calcium carbonate (CaCO3) in seawater, CaCO3(s)− ↽−−−−−−⇀−Ca2+ sat + CO2− 3,sat, (4) where [Ca2+]sat and [CO2− 3 ]sat are the concentrations of dissolved calcium and carbonate in equilibrium with mineral CaCO3, and the solubility product (Ksp) for this reaction is also sensitive to temperature (Sarmiento & Gruber, 2006). Further, the saturation state for a calcium carbonate mineral in seawater (here: aragonite), can be expressed as Ωarag = [Ca2+][CO2− 3 ] Ksp , (5) where both [CO2− 3 ] and Ksp are affected by changes in temperature (Ca2+ is highly abundant in seawater, and thus changes in temperature do not affect its concentration enough to matter for CaCO3 dissolution; Emerson & Hedges, 2008; Sarmiento & Gruber, 2006). Thus, we can decompose the anomalies in pH and Ωarag into the component driven by temperature-induced changes in the carbonate chemistry equilibrium constants (K0, K1, K2, and Ksp) and the component driven by all other changes to the carbonate chemistry system, such as changes in the DIC concentration, the alkalinity, or the salinity. We approximate the temperature sensitivity of the equilibrium constants using a program developed for CO2 system calculations (CO2SYS; van Heuven et al., 2011) via finite difference approximation. The component driven by all other changes to the carbonate system is computed as the residual of the other two terms. The pH response to nuclear conflict is the sum of two opposing drivers: an increase in pH driven by a decrease in sea surface temperature that alters the carbonate chemistry equilibrium constants and a decrease in pH driven by an increase in the DIC concentration of the upper ocean. Figure 1b illustrates the temporal evolution of the components of the global pH anomalies from the India/Pakistan 47-Tg simulation driven by changes in the equilibrium constants versus all other changes in the carbonate chemistry system. The equilibrium constant-driven pH anomaly is positive, peaking 2–3 years after the conflict, whereas the “other” component of the pH anomaly is negative, peaking 3–5 years after the conflict. The resulting total pH anomaly is positive, indicating that it is more strongly influenced by changes in the equilibrium constants than other changes. In the India/Pakistan 47-Tg case, globally averaged temperature reaches a minimum 2 to 3-years post conflict; the model initially produces 3.5◦C–4◦C anomalies at the surface that rewarm toward pre-conflict values for the duration of the simulation (Figure 3a). In contrast, surface ocean salinity-normalized DIC anomalies peak 3 to 5-years post conflict (Figure 3b), mainly as a result of the enhanced solubility of CO2 in colder seawater. While decreasing biological export production also contributes to increased DIC in the surface ocean, this signal is small relative to the change driven by enhanced air-to-sea CO2 flux (e.g., Figure S2). The delay in DIC relative to temperature anomalies is a result of the long (order months to years) timescale for CO2 to fully equilibrate with the surface mixed layer (Emerson & Hedges, 2008). The cold, high DIC surface anomalies slowly propagate into the global ocean thermocline; we observe 1◦ C and 10 mmol m−3 anomalies in temperature and DIC, respectively, at a depth of 300 m that persist beyond the length of our simulation (Figure 3). As there are no significant anomalies in global mean alkalinity or salinity post conflict (not shown), we conclude that the DIC perturbation drives the “other” component of the pH anomalies. We find similar behavior for these components in the other conflict scenarios (not shown). The negative Ωarag anomalies post conflict are driven by a combination of lower temperatures and higher DIC concentrations. Colder surface temperatures tend to increase Ksp, while higher surface DIC concentrations tend to decrease [CO2− 3 ], resulting in lower Ωarag values post conflict. Figure 1c illustrates that the DIC (other) component dominates the total Ωarag anomaly for the India/Pakistan 47-Tg simulation. As for pH, the equilibrium constant component peaks earlier than the other component; this is due to the timing of the temperature and DIC perturbations (Figure 3). The spatial patterns of the post-conflict surface pH and Ωarag anomalies in the India/Pakistan 47-Tg scenario (Figures 2c and 2f) result from perturbations in local surface ocean temperature and DIC (Figure S3). Negative temperature anomalies and positive DIC anomalies are pervasive in the tropics and extratropics, with the exception of the eastern Equatorial Pacific, where a large and long-lasting El Niño-like event develops following the conflict (Coupe, et al., manuscript in review). This strong reduction in the equatorial trade winds greatly weakens upwelling in the cold tongue region, producing near-zero surface temperature anomalies and a reduction in vertical DIC supply here (Figure S3). In the Southern Ocean, temperature and DIC are not much affected by the nuclear conflict, likely a result of enhanced upwelling of warm water from the subsurface (Harrison, et al., manuscript in preparation). Taken together, the aforementioned changes in temperature and DIC lead to increases in pH and decreases in Ωarag over most of the ocean surface (Figure S4). The changes in surface ocean pH that we simulate for nuclear conflict resemble the simulated response of pH to volcanic eruptions, but are an order of magnitude larger. Figure S5 illustrates the anomaly in surface ocean pH in the first year following the eruptions of Agung, El Chichón, and Mt. Pinatubo, as estimated by the CESM Large Ensemble (Kay et al., 2015), which uses the same physical and biogeochemical ocean components as in our nuclear conflict simulations. The ensemble mean isolates the evolution of the Earth system under historical external forcing, including the aerosol loading following volcanic eruptions (Eddebbar et al., 2019), and averages across the various representations of internal variability (Deser et al., 2012; we note that ensembles are not necessary for the nuclear conflict scenarios since the much larger magnitude of forcing provides a higher signal-to-noise ratio). The anomaly in the ensemble mean shown here thus cleanly captures the response of surface ocean pH to volcanic eruptions. Here we show the anomaly in preindustrial pH (pH anomalies in equilibrium with preindustrial atmospheric CO2, which is computed simultaneously with contemporary pH at model run time), as the contemporary pH anomalies include also the response to increasing atmospheric CO2 from one year to the next. The similarity in the spatial patterns of volcanically induced pH anomalies and those produced under nuclear conflict is striking (cf. Figures S5 and 2c), suggesting that volcanic forcing produces similar temperature, DIC, and thus pH anomalies (including the El Niño-like response to volcanic forcing in the eastern Equatorial Pacific, described in Eddebbar et al., 2019). However, the eruption-driven pH anomaly is both smaller (an order of magnitude) and of shorter duration (∼2 years) than in the India/Pakistan 47-Tg simulation. Unfortunately, a similar analysis of volcanic Ωarag anomalies in the CESM Large Ensemble was not possible as preindustrial [CO2− 3 ] was not saved to disk. 4. Conclusions and Discussion We report on the surface ocean pH and Ωarag anomalies generated from four simulations of nuclear conflict using the CESM with full ocean carbonate system thermodynamics. Globally averaged surface ocean pH increases in response to each conflict, with the largest increases in the North Atlantic, North Pacific, and Equatorial Pacific Ocean. The pH anomalies persist for 10 years post conflict and are primarily driven by changes in the carbonate chemistry equilibrium constants as a result of decreases in sea surface temperature. In contrast, CESM simulates globally averaged decreases in surface ocean Ωarag in response to nuclear conflict, with the largest decreases in the tropics and subtropics. The Ωarag anomalies persist beyond the length of our 15-year simulations and are driven by a combination of changes in the carbonate chemistry equilibrium constants and the solubility-driven increases in DIC. We further demonstrate that the surface pH anomalies induced by nuclear conflict resemble those induced by volcanic eruptions in the same modeling system. The simulated changes in global and regional pH and Ωarag as a result of nuclear conflict are large and abrupt. In the most extreme forcing scenario (U. S./Russia 150 Tg), over a period of ∼5 years, global surface ocean pH increases by 0.06 units, and Ωarag decreases by 0.3 units. To put these numbers into perspective, this simulated rate of change of pH is 10 times larger than the rate of change we have observed over the past two decades as a result of ocean acidification (−0.0018 year−1; Lauvset et al., 2015). Worryingly, surface ocean Ωarag decreases more than six times faster than has been observed in the open ocean over the past three decades (−0.0095 year−1 at the Bermuda Atlantic time series; Bates et al., 2014). While the cooling associated with nuclear conflict rapidly and briefly alleviates the decline in pH associated with ocean acidification, the increase in solubility causes the ocean to absorb ∼11 Pg of excess carbon in a 10-year period, leading to a rapid drop in Ωarag. Whether and how calcifying organisms might respond to such rapid and opposing changes in pH and Ωarag is as yet unknown. In order to measure organism response to ocean acidification, a majority of laboratory studies perform CO2 bubbling perturbation experiments, which simultaneously decrease the pH and Ωarag in the surrounding seawater solution (Pörtner et al., 2014). This simultaneous change in two carbonate chemistry parameters challenges our ability to isolate the organism response to changes in pH or changes in Ωarag alone. A recent laboratory sensitivity study of marine bivalve larvae used chemical manipulation experiments to decouple these two parameters; they found that larval shell development and growth were negatively impacted by decreasing Ω and unaffected by changes in pH (Waldbusser et al., 2014). If these sensitivities are sustained in other organisms, we might conclude that calcifying organisms would be severely affected by nuclear conflict. Our findings shed light on the ocean biogeochemical response to other forms of extreme external forcing, such as volcanic eruptions (Eddebbar et al., 2019; Frölicher et al., 2011) and solar radiation management climate engineering (Lauvset et al., 2017; Matthews et al., 2009). They may further inform the study and understanding of the role of ocean acidification in marine extinction following the Chicxulub impact event (Henehan et al., 2019). Importantly, our results suggest that even a regional nuclear conflict can have an impact on global ocean acidification, adding to the list of the many, far-reaching consequences of nuclear conflict for global society.

The SECURE 2.0 Act was signed into law in December 2022, and it expands the requirement to cover long-term part-time (LTPT) workers in 401(k) plans and ERISA-covered 403(b) plans to start in 2025.

Background – SECURE Act and Earlier

Retirement systems that manage money for firefighters, police officers, teachers and other public workers aren’t pulling back on costly bets at a time when markets are rising around the world. Some public pension funds are adding to traditional allocations of stocks and bonds while both are expensive. Others are loading up on more private-equity or real-estate holdings that are less liquid and sometimes carry high fees. How much risk to take is a question facing all investors as they enter 2018. "Everything is overvalued,” said Wilshire Consulting President Andrew Junkin, who advises public pension funds. “There’s no magic option out there.” In the public pension world, the willingness to chase expensive assets is the product of the core challenge most funds face—how to fulfill their mounting obligations to workers and retirees. Decades of low government contributions, overly optimistic assumptions, overpromises on benefits and two recessions have left them with deep funding holes at a time when retirees are accelerating cash outflows. Estimates of their current combined funding shortfall vary from $1.6 trillion to $4 trillion. The goal of most pension funds is to pay for future benefits by earning 7% to 8% a year. After the 2008 financial crisis, many funds tried to hit those marks by lowering their holdings of bonds as interest rates dropped, and by turning to real estate, commodities, hedge funds and private-equity holdings. These so-called alternative investments rose to 26% of holdings at about 150 of the biggest U.S. funds in 2016, according to the Public Plans database, compared with 7% more than a decade earlier. That strategy has its own risks. Venturing deeper into alternative investments diversifies holdings but can also add fees, complexity and the challenge of selling illiquid assets quickly if the fund needs cash. Returns from these investments can be volatile. Only private equity outperformed stocks between 2010 and 2016, according to a study by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, while hedge-funds returns barely exceeded 1% and commodities lost money. Despite the recent embrace of alternative investments, most public pensions are still heavily linked to the ebbs and flows of global markets. Public pension funds had a median 56.69% of their holdings in equities as of September 30, according to Wilshire Trust Universe Comparison Service, as compared with 54.37% a year earlier. They also had 23.3% in bonds, down from 25% a year earlier. The stance paid off during 2017’s market rally, as public pensions had one of their best years of the past decade. They earned 12.4% in the 2017 fiscal year ended June 30, according to Wilshire Trust Universe Comparison Service, largely because the value of their U.S. equities ballooned by 43% and U.S. bonds were up 23%. It was their best annual result since 2014. But some in the pension world are predicting it won’t last. Over the next decade Wilshire Consulting is predicting a 6.25% compound return for U.S. equities and 3.5% return for core bonds. International equities have a projected compounded return of 6.45%. Most pensions’ return targets remain at 7% to 8%. Some pensions are trying to confront the challenge by changing the make-up of their investments more frequently. The board of the New York City Employees’ Retirement System has asked investment staff to re-examine the fund’s asset allocation less than two years after the previous lineup was approved, said Mike Haddad, deputy chief investment officer for public markets. The effects of high stock valuations, a U.S. tax overhaul, the Federal Reserve’s move away from quantitative easing and a rising rate environment are all new points of discussion. “It’s a unique set of market conditions that’s very challenging for a long-term pension,” Mr. Haddad said.

Ageing poses a serious challenge to OECD countries, in particular, how to pay for future public pension liabilities. And early retirement places an unsustainable burden on pension financing. There is no easy solution, but delaying retirement could help. Retiring early has become so ingrained in OECD countries that these days it is almost an individual professional goal. It is even possible to drum up economic arguments in its favour: retirees spend money rather than save it, for instance, and are valuable for such sectors as tourism. Retiring early, some argue, frees up jobs for younger recruits and helps to boost productivity. To many, retirement is a hard-earned right, and so the earlier the better. Indeed, futurists have been telling us for years that early retirement would become the norm, that thanks to labour-saving technology we would soon be spending more of our lives at play and less at work. All very well, but the reality is quite different. Early retirement may seem like a worthy individual goal, but it is a socially expensive one, and, as far as public pensions are concerned, quite unsustainable. The essential reason is that more people are retiring early and living longer. That means more retirees depending on the funding of those in work for their income. The outlook is worrying. In the next 50 years, low fertility rates and rising life expectancy in OECD countries will cause this old-age dependency rate to roughly double in size. Public pension payments, which pay 30-80% of total retirement incomes in OECD countries, are expected to rise, on average, by over three percentage points in GDP and by as much as eight percentage points in some countries. Such is the pressure on pension funds that there is a danger of today’s workers not getting the pensions they expected or felt they paid for. Action is needed, but simply aiming to reduce the generosity (and cost) of public pensions, or trying to augment the role of privately funded pensions within the system, though necessary steps, may be insufficient to deal with the dependency challenge. After years of advancing early retirement schemes to avoid redundancies and higher unemployment, many governments are now looking at persuading people to stay in work until they are older. Surely, the thinking goes, if we are healthier now and jobs are physically less strenuous and unemployment is down, then perhaps the present rate should rise anew. In fact, increasing the participation rate of persons aged 55 to 64 years is one of the main objectives of social policy within the European Union under the Lisbon and Amsterdam Treaties. The approach makes economic sense. For a start, as long as the extra labour resources from delayed retirement are put to work, then in theory the level of GDP will rise, thereby increasing the resources available for consumption. This is simplistic of course: having more old people at work is not enough to improve productivity. Indeed, some contend that the level of GDP could fall, since retiring early acts as an incentive to work hard and save more and so boosts productivity, whereas delaying it could dampen the morale and productivity of would-be retirees. However, these negative effects appear to be small, so on the whole retiring later would increase GDP in the longer term. Working people certainly pay more income taxes and social security contributions than retired people, so a later effective retirement age would generate more funds to pay for pensions. Likewise, there would be less pressure on those funds as delayed retirement means people start drawing their pensions later. Working longer also helps people to stay out of poverty, which is particularly important where pensions risk falling to low levels.

Until you’re ready to retire, that is. That’s when a 401(k) (or 403(b) or traditional IRA) suddenly becomes the worst possible retirement plan, from a tax perspective, a saver could have. Here’s why:

1. Every distribution you take will be taxed at your highest rate.

Are there other requirements that a domestic relations order must meet to be a QDRO?

Yes. There are certain provisions that a QDRO must not contain:

YOU’VE HEARD ABOUT BOOMERANG KIDS—ADULT CHILDREN in their 20s and 30s who have returned to live in their parents’ homes. Well, get ready for boomerang parents, formerly independent middle-aged people who—ten, fifteen, twenty years hence—will have no choice but to move into their adult children’s homes because they cannot afford to maintain their own.

While politicians and journalists have been distracted for years by a faux crisis in Social Security, a very real crisis has gathered momentum and threatens to undermine the plans and hopes for a secure retirement of tens of millions of today’s workers.

Today’s 65-year-old can expect to live another 20 years, according to the Social Security Administration. This unprecedented gift of longevity brings with it exciting opportunities—and a price tag. Unlike their parents and grandparents, today’s pre-retirees and retirees face a vastly different retirement security landscape. The traditional three pillars of retirement income are changing.

NCOA worked with the LeadingAge LTSS Center @ UMass Boston to examine both the challenge and potential solutions.

The reality is that mutual aid has its roots in community resistance by Black and Indigenous people, who have been criminalized for these exact practices that are now celebrated by the white mainstream. ¶ Criminalization of mutual aid in BIPOC communities¶ In so-called Canada from 1885 until 1951, Indigenous communities of the North West coastal regions – like the Haida, Nuxalk, Tlingit, Makah, Tsimshian, Nuu-chah-nulth, and Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw – were forbidden from practising their gift-giving ceremony of Potlatch. Under the Potlatch ban, Indigenous communities were punished for their anti-capitalist tradition with mandatory jail sentences if caught practising potlatch. Even so, many communities continued the tradition underground. ¶ On December 25, 1921, 25 Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw community members from ‘Mimkwamlis were arrested and charged under the Criminal Code for breaking the Potlatch ban. Twenty Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw people were sent to Oakalla Prison in the Lower Mainland and served two- to three-month sentences for practising their tradition. It is important for non-Indigenous people to understand that the criminalization of our ceremonies is a tool used by colonizers in our ongoing genocide. ¶ When Black and Indigenous people work to end their communities’ dependency on the settler state through community care, they threaten the foundations of settler colonialism and capitalism. ¶ It is no coincidence that our inherently anti-capitalist ceremonies are seen as a threat to the colonial status quo: they prove that alternative lifeways are possible. Mutual aid invites community members to take care of one another through shared respect and accompliceship, ending our dependency on waged labor and profit. It ushers in community sufficiency, challenging us to share – rather than hoard – wealth and land. The belief that land can be owned is inherently colonial, and a lack of access to the resources of the land is why communities need mutual aid in the first place. In the settler-colonial state’s drive to dismantle and destroy Indigenous Peoples’ ability to be self-sufficient, the theft of land is its most obvious tactic. ¶ For a more recent example of government interference in mutual aid efforts led by people of colour, we can look to COINTELPRO’s infiltration of the Black Panther Party in the so-called United States. COINTELPRO was a series of secret projects in which the FBI spied on, infiltrated, defamed, and murdered members of political organizations from 1956 to 1971. COINTELPRO specifically targeted individuals and groups that the FBI deemed subversive, including feminists; anti-Vietnam War organizers; and activists of the civil rights movement like the Black Panthers, American Indian Movement, and the Young Lords. ¶ The Black Panthers were infiltrated and violently dismantled – and a number of their members were murdered – specifically to destroy their mutual aid efforts, which included free food, education, child care, health care, and legal aid programs. The Black Panthers even offered sickle cell screening programs, and were so successful that they opened 13 free health clinics across the country. ¶ These mutual aid programs were perceived as a threat to the U.S. government. In a 1969 memo, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover wrote that the Black Panthers’ Breakfast for Children Program “represents the best and most influential activity going for the BPP and, as such, is potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities [...] to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for.” ¶ We are being quite literal when we say that mutual aid, when practised by people of colour, has led to community members being targeted, incarcerated, and murdered by the government. ¶ To try and undercut the Breakfast for Children Program’s success, the U.S. Department of Agriculture launched a breakfast pilot program in 1966, giving free meals to children whose families were below the poverty line – but without the radical political education the Panthers’ program provided. Former Black Panther Norma Amour Mtume said in an interview, “I really do believe that the government [expanded] their program because of the work we were doing.” ¶ The Black Panthers were committed to a decolonial and anti-capitalist lifeway, and their efforts were systematically destroyed by the federal government. We are being quite literal when we say that mutual aid, when practised by people of colour, has led to community members being targeted, incarcerated, and murdered by the government. It is imperative for those who are practising mutual aid to know these histories.

Claire Jean Kim’s influential article, “The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans” (Citation1999) was only one piece of a larger body of work that sought to establish her concept of a “field of racial positions” as a starting point for understanding race. Particularly important, and still deserving of a wider readership, were her articles “Playing the Racial Trump Card” (Citation2000–Citation2001) and “Unyielding Positions” (Citation2004) along with her monograph on Black-Korean conflict in New York City, Bitter Fruit (Citation2000). Reading racial triangulation theory in the context of Claire Jean Kim’s broader oeuvre makes clear Kim’s intention to provide scholars and activists with something more than a theory of racial formation: a guide to developing a multiracial politics rooted in solidarity. Though Kim offered a powerful conceptual grounding for Asian-Black solidarity, in this article I argue that her interventions were limited in assuming that racialization was the most important determinant of group interest. Such an assumption closed off other ways of conceptualizing multiracial solidarity, which comparative race scholars today would do well to recuperate. The basis of solidarity: from commonality to difference Kim’s commitment to multiracial solidarity fits solidly within a longer tradition of thought emerging from Asian American Studies. From the field’s beginning at the end of the 1960s, the activists and scholars associated with Asian American Studies sought to situate Asian American politics within the larger dynamics of a multiracial society. Amy Uyematsu’s widely read Citation1969 essay, “The Emergence of Yellow Power,” argued that Chinese and Japanese American socioeconomic mobility led members of those communities to disavow the racism they faced. This produced, in Uyematsu’s opinion, both an accommodation to the racial status quo and a projection of “their own frustrated attempts to gain white acceptance onto black people. They [Asian Americans] nurse their own feelings of inferiority and insecurity by holding themselves as superior to blacks” (9). Despite this internalized racism, Uyematsu believed that “the blacks and yellows have suffered similar consequences as Third World people at the hands of the American capitalist power” (10) providing the foundation for a multiracial alliance. In Uyematsu’s article, there was a tension between the belief that Asian Americans occupied a distinctive place in the U.S. racial order and the belief that they were also victims of the white power structure, analogous to other racially oppressed groups. Ultimately, Uyematsu assumed that multiracial coalitions could be built firmly on the basis of Asian Americans’ status as “Third World people,” a status shared with other communities of color. Kim’s insights would come from challenging this assumption of shared status. In “The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans” (Citation1999) and her other works from the late 1990s and early 2000s, Kim argued that the necessary starting point for theorizing multiracial solidarity was a grasp of the “field of racial positions” (106). Kim’s conceptualization of race as a field emphasized how racial groups were racialized in ways that were both distinct and inter-related. The political implications of this approach were often discomfiting. Bitter Fruit (Citation2000) argued that the different positions of racially subordinate groups within a racial order could lead one group to defend the racial status quo when another group sought to transform or overthrow it, while “Unyielding Positions” (Citation2004) argued that political efforts by any specific racial group to rearticulate its racial identity as a means to advance its interests would always implicate the racialization of other groups, sometimes with deleterious consequences. Failure to grasp race in terms of a complex field, and ignorance of the inter-relationship of racial positions, meant groups might become complicit in the racial oppression of other communities as they sought self-empowerment. If Kim’s work insisted upon the diverging positions and experiences of communities of color, racial triangulation theory also ultimately promised to reconcile this reality with Asian Americanists’ larger commitments to both building multiracial solidarity and opposing anti-Asian racism. This was accomplished by linking the two axes that determined the relational racialization of whites, Asians, and Blacks. The positioning of Asians as relatively superior to Blacks depended upon the positioning of an alleged Asian culture, and ultimately Asian people, as foreign and other. Within this framework, attempts to improve or defend the position of Asian Americans by relying on the group’s positioning as relatively superior to Blacks would ultimately backfire, by reinforcing Asian Americans’ exclusion from the imagined U.S. civic community. The long struggle for full inclusion, therefore, also required for its success a simultaneous struggle against notions of racial inferiority that primarily targeted the Black community. In this way, racial triangulation sutured the long-term interests of Asian Americans and Blacks and provided the theoretical grounds for linking opposition to anti-Asian racism with the cause of Black liberation. It did this, moreover, by emphasizing rather than diminishing the differential racial positions occupied by Asian and Black communities. Because the struggles of various communities of color are no longer understood as analogous, as they were in the late 1960s, Kim’s work remains an essential reference point for contemporary practices of multiracial solidarity (Hong Citation2017; Liu Citation2018; Weik Citation2020). What I want to highlight, however, is how the theory of solidarity embedded in Kim’s work implicitly assumes that group interests emerge from and are largely determined by processes of racialization. In other words, it is primarily because Asian racialization and Black racialization are inter-related processes that the struggles to rearticulate those racializations and Asian and Black political interests are also inter-related. What if, however, this assumption made other possible groundings of solidarity invisible? Race, reification, and class In Citation2001, sociologist John Lie reviewed Kim’s Bitter Fruit. Though the review was generally positive, Lie was skeptical about “her emphasis on the racial dynamic.” He continued, Needless, to say, it would be foolhardy to discuss just class and political economy, but they do matter a great deal not only in the singular case of the Red Apple boycott [that Kim studied in Bitter Fruit] but the very articulation of the Black-Korean conflict, which is really a subset of conflicts between poor African Americans and immigrant business communities across urban America. (1127) When I first came across Lie’s review, I was puzzled by these lines. Most of Bitter Fruit’s second chapter is dedicated to a discussion of class and political economy, as the necessary context for understanding the racial order in New York City. What Lie objected to, I now believe, was Kim’s insistence on understanding class and political economy in terms of racial positions. As she put it, “the racial order is a shared cognitive map that stands at the intersection of the discursive-ideological and social structural realms. That is to say, it is discursively constructed and reconstructed with social structural consequences that, in turn, fuel these constructions” (20). For Kim, then, the field of racial positions mapped onto the actual social location of racial groups: the discursive construction of Blacks as inferior to Asians implied that “they are subject to more numerous and comprehensive forms of exclusion than are Korean immigrants” (20). For Kim, this reality lay at the heart of Black-Korean conflict. Lie’s approach to race was different. He approached racial discourse as a form of reification that obscured the heterogeneous social positions of the members of any particular racialized group. That is why, in part, he objected to the very use of the term “Black-Korean conflict,” which he believed reinforced the model minority myth by erasing a wide range of Korean American class positions and subjectivities, including those of Korean immigrant workers who sympathized with the post-verdict uprising in Los Angeles (Abelmann and Lie Citation1995). Both sides of the argument had merit. Racialization shapes the distribution of power and resources in precisely the ways Kim indicated. Yet racialization is, to be sure, also a form of reification that obscures diverging interests within racialized groups; the Bay Area mathematician and theorist Harry Chang, who influenced an entire generation of radical Asian American activists, compared racial categories to Marx’s commodity fetish (Reed Citation2013; Wing Citation2007). The main challenge for developing a theory of multiracial politics was, and continues to be, accounting for and incorporating class and other power relations within racial and ethnic groups, relations that produce divergent sets of interests unaccounted for by the framework of racial politics understood in terms of racialization and rearticulation. To be clear, I am not an adherent of what Kim termed the “antiessentialist position” in her “Unyielding Positions” (Citation2004) essay; I do not believe that activists should jettison racial identity politics simply because racial identity is inevitably a reification of complex social relations, nor do I believe that class relations are somehow more “real” than racial power structures. Let me use, as an example, a piece of Asian American history that Kim refers to in her articles on multiracial politics (Kim Citation2000–Citation2001, Citation2004, Citation2018). In 1994, a group of Chinese American parents filed suit against the San Francisco Unified School District because it classified students according to racial identity in order to achieve racially desegregated schools (Robles Citation2009; Quinn Citation2019). No racial or ethnic group was permitted to comprise more than 45 percent of the student body at any given school, leading some Chinese American students to be turned away from their first choice school. Most famously, the one academically selective high school in San Francisco Unified, Lowell High School, required Chinese Americans to achieve an academic index score – based on students’ GPA and standardized test scores – higher than individuals from any other ethnic or racial group. The plaintiffs in the case, Ho v. SFUSD, pursued a fairly straightforward legal case, arguing that the school district did not have a sufficiently compelling interest to justify racial classification of students. But the case also produced widely diverging understandings of the “ethnic cap” policy among Asian American intellectuals and community advocates. Some legal scholars understood such a policy in terms of the legacy of anti-Asian racism in the US, and specifically the yellow peril idea (Dong Citation1995; Kang Citation1996). For them, the ethnic cap reinforced the sentiment that the San Francisco schools had “too many Chinese,” leading to a stigmatization of Chinese Americans and Asian Americans more generally. Others, such as Chinese for Affirmative Action director Henry Der, saw the policy as beneficial to Chinese Americans. Der noted that low-income Chinese lived primarily in Chinatown and the southeast neighborhoods of San Francisco, while middle-class Chinese Americans tended to live and attend schools on San Francisco’s west side. For Der, this produced a situation in which low-income and limited English proficiency Chinese Americans were isolated from other ethnic groups as well as middle-class Chinese Americans in San Francisco. The district-wide desegregation policy, Der believed, was an important tool in remedying this isolation. By contrast, Der found that Chinese American applicants to Lowell High School overwhelmingly attended either private middle schools or middle schools in San Francisco’s west side.Footnote1 Building upon Der’s analysis, one could argue that the effort to construe the desegregation policy as racist against Chinese was not only, as Kim described it, an attempt to reduce Asian American issues to those affecting Chinese Americans, one that was bound up in the further subordination of Black and Latinx students in San Francisco. It was also part of constructing a class hegemony within the Chinese American community that depended upon a class-inflected understanding of ethnic group interest. This is not to deny that some number of low-income Chinese Americans might have also benefited from the removal of disparate entrance requirements at Lowell or may have worried about the broader significance of the ethnic cap as the Chinese population in San Francisco grew. In fact, hegemony is only successful when dominant groups develop ideologies that partially address the concerns of subordinate ones, while simultaneously foreclosing other subaltern world views. Nevertheless, an analysis of the class nature of the SFUSD lawsuit allows us to grasp how multiracial solidarity, in this instance, would have had to start from a recognition of class division within the Chinese American community rather than the framework of racialization and rearticulation. I do not want to imply that the alignment of interests in this instance meant that the experiences of low-income and limited English proficiency Chinese students in San Francisco were or are comparable to those of Black and Latinx students. Far from it. Recent research suggests that large numbers of second-generation Asian Americans from low-income families are able to achieve social mobility through educational attainment, while low-income Black and Latinx students confront additional obstacles within (and without) the educational system (Lee and Zhou Citation2015).Footnote2 Political organizing, however, is the art of emphasizing proximities and potential alignments while managing contradictions in order to cohere a social force strong enough to win meaningful change. In Boston, for instance, the “pro-access, pro-diversity, and pro-affirmative action” Massachusetts Asian American Educators Association (MAAEA Citation2010) has supported efforts to diversify admissions to Boston’s exam schools. At the same time, it has argued: “Fundamentally, we want all students to have a high-quality education regardless of the school they attend, exam school or not” (MAAEA Citation2010). Organizing Boston’s predominantly working-class Asian American students, most of whom will never sit in the exam school classrooms, around that vision is likely the best way to prevent the issue of educational access from polarizing along strictly racial lines. For such organizing efforts, fine-grained analyses of political interest that eschew ideas of a coherent racial group or ethnic group interest, while holding onto the belief that racism profoundly shapes the distribution of power and resources, may open up new possibilities for multiracial solidarity. For scholars, such analyses may also provide insight into what Lai (Citation2021) has described as the “emerging political contours” (235) of Asian American politics, in which intra-community economic disparities produce conservative as well as progressive panethnic and multiracial coalitions. Because of how deeply intermeshed anti-Black racism is with the U.S. political economy, about which Kim has written eloquently in Bitter Fruit, my own hunch is that the viability of a multiracial politics committed to Black liberation will depend upon the strengthening of class politics within Asian American communities and U.S. society more generally. If Kim’s “field of racial positions” generated an entirely new sense of what it meant to be race-conscious, then comparative race scholars are overdue for another reorientation that incorporates Kim’s insights but more fully integrates the issue of intra-ethnic class relations.

Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary defines triangulation as "finding a position or location by means of bearings from two fixed points a known distance apart., 3 ' Those who subscribe to the theory of the racial triangulation of Asian Americans argue that Asian Americans are racially triangulated against Blacks and Whites because they occupy a position on the racial field with reference to the two other (Black and White) points. 32 "Racialization by association with [B]lackness and [W]hiteness endures .... Asian Americans have stood on unstable ground between '[B]lack' and '[W]hite,' falling under the honorary [W]hite category in anti-affirmative action arguments, but considered constructive [B]lacks for the purposes of school segregation or antimiscegenation laws. 33 The theory of the racial triangulation of Asian Americans is best understood by exploring the ideas behind racial triangulation. According to Claire Kim, racial triangulation of Asian Americans occurs through the processes of "relative valorization" and "civic ostracism" 34 The process of "relative valorization" is characterized by a dominant group assigning values to and constructing the identity of one subordinate group in relation to another subordinate group. The relationship between the subordinate groups is based on racial and cultural differences, and by constructing the identity of the subordinate groups in a way that furthers its own interests, the dominant group is able to be superior to both subordinate groups. Where Whites are the dominant group, they use relative valorization to dominate both Asian Americans and 30, Kim, supra note 6, at 106. 31. Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/ triangulation (last visited Oct. 11,2007). 32. Kim, supra note 6, at 107. 33. Kim, supra note 2, at 2395. 34. Kim, supra note 6, at 107. [VOL. 13:309 Education and Labor Relations Blacks, but especially to dominate the latter.5 For example, in the 1800s White lawmakers constructed Chinese immigrants as "alien, despotic, and backward"3 " (although they were still "lauded as superior to Blacks on cultural-racial grounds") 37 while simultaneously constructing Blacks as "infantile, imitative, and cultureless.,38 These racial constructions allowed Whites to oppress and to assert their domination over both groups. In "civic ostracism," the dominant group (Whites) constructs one subordinate group (Asian Americans) as perpetual foreigners incapable of assimilating with Whites on racial and cultural grounds in order to ostracize that group.39 Asian immigrants were characterized as both unfit for and uninterested in the American way of life, and "were also constructed as immutably foreign and ostracized from the body politic on these grounds." 40 Civic ostracism also aids in the furtherance of White hegemony. Claire Kim argues that the two processes of relative valorization and civic ostracism work together to wedge Asian Americans in between Whites and Blacks and thus racially triangulates them. "Triangulated between Black and White, Asian Americans have been granted provisional acceptance for specific purposes, but they have never been embraced as true Americans."" 35. Id. 36. Id. at 109. 37. Id. at 110. 38. Id. 39. Id. at 107. 40. Id. at 112. 41. Id. at 129. FALL 2007] Michigan Journal of Race & Law FIGURE I RACIAL TRIANGULATION [VOL. 13:309 VAhits -*. B ac ks FOREICNER INSIDER FIELD OF RACIAL POSITIONS = Civic Ostracism -- = Relative Valorization Graph taken from Kim, supra note 6, at 108. As demonstrated on the graph, the two processes of relative valorization and civic ostracism are linked to and affect each other. "Functionally, the two ... processes of relative valorization and civic ostracism work in a complementary fashion to maintain Asian Americans in a triangulated position vis-i-vis Whites and Blacks. 42 A change in either process would fundamentally shift the position of Asian Americans within the racial playing field.43 Claire Kim notes, "the field of racial positions (and racial triangulation specifically) reinforces White dominance in various ways and... White opinionmakers sometimes deploy it quite strategically in defense of their own group's interest. 4 4 I agree with Kim that the jockeying for racial positions on the battle field serves to maintain and further White hegemony and that the dominant group takes steps to fuel tensions between minority groups to further the majority group's own interests. However, because the theory of racial triangulation posits that the position of Asian Americans is defined only with respect to and in relation to the position of Whites and Blacks, I do not agree that the status of Asian Americans and Blacks on today's multi-dimensional and multi-axial battle field can fully be explained by the racial triangulation of Asian Americans against Blacks and Whites. Asian Americans and Blacks have always been racialized relative to each other and have been characterized as polar opposites in various categories. In the realm of education and intellect, Asian Americans are stereotyped and classified as a superior race while Blacks are classified as the inferior race. In the realm of labor relations, Asian Americans are stereotyped as the most diligent and hard-working race, while Blacks are stereotyped as a lazy race that lacks discipline. Therefore, Kim's triangulation theory which establishes Blacks andWhites as the two bookends on a spectrum and then positions Asian Americans between these two groups fails to adequately define the relationship among the three groups. Part II will discuss how, in reality, the racialization of Asian Americans and Blacks in the areas of education and labor relations actually results in these two groups occupying positions as the polarized ends on a multi-axial spectrum. Whites occupy a position in the middle, and the positioning of Asian Americans and Blacks as the two bookends serves to strengthen the "Whiteness" in between which expands to consume any gaps along the racial battlefield.

Claire Kim’s (Citation1999, Citation2000) seminal works on racial triangulation offer important clarity to the ways race is understood and practiced in the US. Kim elucidates the impossible location of Asian Americans between white and Black Americans on the racial hierarchy. She argues that Asian Americans are triangulated through two processes. The first is “relative valorization,” where whites valorize Asian Americans in comparison to Black Americans on both cultural and racial grounds; that is, Asians are considered racially closer to white than Black. The second process is “civic ostracism” where Asian Americans are excluded from American civic life due to their racial and cultural “foreignness,” in comparison to both white and Black Americans “insiders”. As a result, Asian American political interests are ignored. Though Kim’s theory offers grounds for scholars of race and ethnicity to recognize the ways white supremacy structures American society, I argue that the “foreigner/insider” axis of racial triangulation does not adequately account for the depths of cultural and civic anti-Blackness in the US. Black people may appear to have more civic acceptance than Asian or Latinx Americans via their ability to avoid the “forever foreigner” status, but, since anti-Blackness is the organizing principle of American politics (to update Omi and Winant Citation2014), Black people cannot have insider access to Americana due to the constant denigration of both Black culture and citizenship. We can improve upon Kim’s framework by identifying opportunities to resist the racial hierarchy in mutual “sites of harm,” which I define as the overlapping mechanisms and institutions by which minority groups structurally experience white supremacy. Specifying sites of white supremacist harm demonstrates how the racial hierarchy functions for marginalized groups and also highlights opportunities for political collaboration. By naming common risks in identifying as non-white, people of color can more clearly tackle various forms of racial domination. Then, multi-racial coalition building can happen by embracing a mutual status of racial marginality. The precarity of the Black “insider” status: culture and citizenship The “insider/ foreigner” plane offers grounds for critique from a Black politics perspective. Although Kim herself rightly asserts that Asian American culture is utilized to malign Black Americans, the term “insider” elides the continuum of cultural and political exclusion that Black Americans have experienced in the US over time – even as Kim carefully names and acknowledges this exclusion. While Native Americans are erased – located completely outside of the hierarchy – and Asian and Latinx groups are both racialized and coded as foreign, Black Americans are also still culturally and civically ostracized, rendering any benefit of their “insider” status hollow. I do not intend to argue that Asian and Latinx people in the US are not ostracized based on their perceived “foreignness.” Instead, I assert that, although Black Americans elicit relative familiarity and visibility in the US, this should not be conflated with a meaningful or safe(r) comparative status. The “insider” label could be misread as the easier cultural incorporation of Black Americans in the body politic, even as inferior members. Subsequent research builds upon the notion of Black American insiders, positioning Black Americans as more culturally “American” than culturally foreign, since Black people are presumed to be born in the US, speak English, and possess American citizenship (Zou and Cheryan Citation2017). Yet, each of these assumptions are fraught in practice and context: Black people may be born in the US but may also contend with a history of slavery that muddles ancestry and a sense of belonging; Black Americans have their own cultural barriers with white Americans; finally, Black American citizenship is continually contested. Though she locates Black Americans on the “inside,” Kim is in fact pointing out an anti-Black sentiment rooted in ideas of Black cultural inferiority. She writes that, in the past, Black people were only seen as assimilable because white Americans believed that their intelligence and social lives were not “crystallized” in comparison to Asian immigrants (Kim Citation1999, 110). If one pushes further, then, Kim’s juxtaposition of Asian Americans’ foreigner status to Black Americans’ insider status actually highlights the white supremacist perception that Black Americans lack a valid culture, language, political practices, or even a distinct country of origin. The culture that is attributed Black Americans through a lens of racial hierarchy is often denigrated and seen as deviant in American society. Black hair, music, and aesthetics receive co-optation, criticism, and even theft in the white power structure (Rodriquez Citation2006; Chaves and Bacharach Citation2021). I would also argue that American familiarity towards Black people is often rooted in cultural stereotypes, which makes way for hypervisibility in a “white” nation and enables racial profiling and bodily harm (Reddy Citation1998). With regard to civic life and political belonging, research has found that Black Americans see themselves as more American in comparison to immigrant groups, but this view comprises, as Niambi Carter writes, a “conflicted nativism” due to the constraints of white supremacy and the incomplete civic incorporation of Black Americans (Carter Citation2019; Perez and Enya Kuo Citation2021). This conflict demonstrates that civic “insider” is an incomplete label for the precarious nature of Black American citizenship. In fact, anti-Blackness is the very crux upon which American society is structured, the other with whom one could not risk being labeled and politically aligned. Scholars have noted the “exceptional” nature of Black exclusion (Sears and Savalei Citation2006). Kim (Citation1999), for example, writes of Chinese immigrants’ past efforts to avoid associating with Black Americans and appeal to whiteness (112). In addition, early twentieth-century conversations about Mexican immigration were also structured by anti-Blackness, rendering anti-Black racism as “multivalent” and “contour[ing] the racialization of other ‘non-whites’” (Aragon Citation2016, 61). Aragon (Citation2016) argues that the “continual act of aligning or contrasting African Americans with immigrants and aliens … simultaneously reproduced and re-entrenched racist constructions of the ‘presence of blacks’ as a national affliction” (61). Anti-Blackness, then, informs how the US has treated subsequent immigrant populations, questioning whether they are a better or worse problem than Black Americans. The insider label also obscures Black people’s own diasporic struggles with immigration and belonging in the US, even as Kim (Citation2000) herself discusses the struggles of Haitian migrants (Greer Citation2013). Though Black Americans were legally included into the American body politic years before Asian Americans received those protections, Black citizenship and civic life was and is still circumscribed. It is true that Black American citizenship status is not questioned in the exact way that Asian American citizenship is questioned (and these differences are important); however, Black citizenship writ large has always been contested, from struggles to transition from slaves to citizens, fights for representation, protests against state violence via policing and mass incarceration, as well as ongoing struggles for voting rights protections. No appeal to whiteness or proximity to whiteness could exist for Black Americans. Black people in the US must take on major risks to make their codified rights a reality. And codified rights are easily undone or weakened, as can be seen with the 2013 “gutting” of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby V. Holder (Pérez Citation2020). For these reasons, studies of the racial hierarchy should not position Black Americans as cultural or civic “insiders” relative to Asian and Latinx “outsiders.” This term flattens the ways that Black Americans experience their location in the racial hierarchy. The full benefits of citizenship and belonging are simply reserved for white Americans, and understanding anti-Blackness as the organizing feature of American politics opens up an opportunity for all of those outside of the white power structure to link fates by embracing their mutual, though differently experienced, marginal political status. Black and Asian people share long histories of political resistance and joint advocacy work, including international feminist of color struggles, as well as anti-colonial groups like the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organization (Armstrong Citation2016; Wiley-Yancy Citation2021). To think through the racial hierarchy, then, we should consider how Black and Asian Americans might politically align through the recognition of both common struggles and their particular experiences of white supremacy. Sites of white supremacist harm The way we think about the racial hierarchy can do more than acknowledge racial subjugation in relation to whiteness in the US. A more dynamic approach, building upon the contributions of racial triangulation, would recognize the racial hierarchy as functioning according to a range of social, political, and economic “sites of harm” rather than a static ordering of power and people. Thinking through race in the US should incorporate both the “history and agency” of people of color (Rogers and Kim Citation2021) and move away from paradigms that locate whiteness as a cultural and political pinnacle. A primary focus on racial disparities as harm places the onus of the disparity on white supremacy and avoids rectifying essentialist differences – even if the aim is to make sense of racist categorizations. Following Sen and Wasow (Citation2016), thinking through the racial hierarchy using a more constructivist approach circumvents the “immutable characteristics” of the racial hierarchy. In this way, those who study race and ethnicity can focus more on how white supremacy hoards resources and reduces life chances, rather than how and why it orders and reorders people of color – a method bound to paper over the depths of issues as well as differences within and across groups. Politically, naming sites of harm can eschew a “zero-sum understanding of interests and power” (HoSang Citation2019, 64). A sites of harm framework names opportunities for resistance and how they can be meaningful for both Asian and Black Americans. For example, Carter, Wong, and Guerrero (Citation2021) find that Black Americans are highly supportive of liberal immigration policies, even as these policies are not directly beneficial to most Black Americans. This support is attributed to a political perspective that begins with racialization and is “rooted in political connections to racial minority groups in the United States” and an understanding of “centuries of state sanctioned oppression” (Carter, Wong, and Guerrero Citation2021, 14). Another example of sites of harm perspective includes the ways young Asian American activists resist the carceral state in support of the Black Lives Matter movement (Wong Citation2021), even as Black and Latinx communities are at more risk for police violence. While Black support for liberal immigration and Asian advocacy against the carceral state may seem like benevolence, these positions are in fact self-interested and rooted in a politics that emphasizes how people of color “share space” along the axis of white supremacist subordination. This prompts each group to lend their support for the other’s struggles in resistance to a racial hierarchy that harms everyone (Perez and Enya Kuo Citation2021). This stance acknowledges that white supremacy is behind each of these mechanisms (strict immigration enforcement, the carceral state) and recognizes that such tools could easily be deployed against one’s own community. This approach to politics links group fates and produces grounds for meaningful solidarity work. What is solidarity? Collaboration and linking fates Once we have identified sites of white supremacist harm, how can Asian Americans and Black Americans build functional solidarities? Solidarity must mean more than simply supporting disparate fights; rather, solidarity first means fighting for complex, multifaceted movements that recognize that white supremacy must be challenged, as should resulting anti-Black, anti-Asian, anti-Latinx, and anti-Native systems. In the spirit of Kim’s Bitter Fruit, people of color movements must specifically articulate the anti-Black foundation of US systems of racial domination. Movements can then resist racial domination from margin-to-center and move with those most acutely affected and excluded by the racial hierarchy in mind. Asian Americans and Black Americans must act as accomplices, linking fates such that they act in tandem against structures that harm both communities. Of course, solidarity work is not easy. It requires building mutual trust and the understanding that when anti-Blackness and anti-Asian violence come for one of us, it inevitably comes for us all. This, to quote civil rights activist Bernice Johnson Reagon, “is coalition building. And if you feel the strain, you may be doing some good work” (Reagon Citation1983).

The Asian American Foundation (TAAF) is setting up a nationwide effort for national and local advocacy groups to work together as violence and hate crimes against Asians and Pacific Islanders persist. Why it matters: Stop AAPI Hate has tracked over 9,000 self-reported anti-AAPI incidents since March 2020 — half of which occurred in the first six months of this year alone. More federal and state attention has been directed toward Asian Americans, the fastest-growing racial group in America, since the pandemic-fueled attacks began. The details: Through direct partnerships and funding, TAAF’s new Anti-Hate National Network aims to connect the foundation with organizations fighting the issue and bridge them to one another. The efforts begin with the Chinese American Service League in Chicago, the Asian American Federation in New York City and Asian Health Services in Oakland leading the network's first pilot “action centers." Each group, which also received a $500,000 grant from TAAF, will expand their existing anti-hate services and create new ones led by the foundation. Separately, the foundation will also partner with GoFundMe to set up an AAPI Emergency Relief Fund for victims of hate crimes and their families, with an initial $500,000 investment. What they’re saying: “What we've heard from the organizations … is that they want to be a part of a national network so they can learn from each other,” Sonal Shah, president of The Asian American Foundation, told Axios. TAAF's efforts will also allow the AAPI community to "speak with one voice on a national scale," Paul Luu, CEO of the Chinese American Service League, tells Axios. The big picture: “We have this time, this moment, to use the horror of what's been going on in our communities to try to try to mobilize change,” longtime Asian American activist Helen Zia told Axios.

The past few years have seen an uptick in hate incidents against Asian Americans, with the organization Stop AAPI Hate reporting they received nearly 3,800 reports of hate incidents between March 19, 2020 and February 28, 2021. The study found that women report incidents 2.3 times more than men, and that the reported incidents include both verbal harassment and shunning, as well as physical assault. While these reports show potentially frightening trends, there are several reliable, well-established nonprofit organizations devoted to supporting the rights and safety of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. To celebrate these groups and their accomplishments, we’re recognizing seven of the top Asian American and Pacific Islander organizations whose work supports AAPI people and their communities. 1. Asian Americans Advancing Justice–Atlanta Originally founded in 2010 as the Asian American Legal Advocacy Center, Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta (AAAJ) is the first nonprofit legal advocacy organization dedicated to protecting the civil rights of Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders, as well as Arab, Middle East, Muslim, and South Asian communities in Georgia and the Southeast. Since its founding, AAAJ joined the national Asian Americans Advancing Justice affiliation in 2014 to focus on advancing Asian American civil rights with their work in policy advocacy, organizing and civic engagement, impact litigation, and legal services. Ultimately, AAAJ’s vision is to build “a social movement in which communities of color are fully empowered, active in civic life, and working together to promote equity, fair treatment, and self determination for all.” 2. National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum’s (NAPAWF) mission is to empower AAPI women and girls to gain full agency over their lives through their work on core issues, such as reproductive rights, anti-Asian violence, economic justice, and immigration rights. NAPAWF’s vision is to “build a movement for social, political, and structural change for Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) women and girls.” Their policy platform is directly informed by the experiences of their members and their families, ensuring their actions represent grassroots concerns. 3. Asian American Advocacy Fund Based in Georgia, Asian American Advocacy Fund’s (AAAF) mission is to advocate for Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, and Native Hawaiians in Georgia. Through policy advocacy aimed at all levels of government and endorsing candidates whose values align with their mission, they fight to protect their constituents’ human and civil rights. Through these actions, the AAAF aims to build “a Georgia where Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, and Native Hawaiians voices are represented in elected leadership and progressive policies across the state.” 4. Center for The Pacific Asian Family Center for The Pacific Asian Family (CPAF) provides a 24-hour multilingual helpline and emergency shelter and transitional housing for AAPI domestic violence survivors. These services forward their mission of addressing the root causes of family violence to build healthy and safe communities, all while providing services that understand the cultural and language needs of AAPI women and their families. In their mission to prevent violence and help survivors, CPAF provides consulting services and hosts prevention initiatives targeted at parents, youth leaders, and community partners. Through these programs, they aim to fulfill their vision of “an Asian and Pacific Islander community that embraces healthy relationships and works in partnership with other communities to eradicate all forms of violence.” 5. The Asian/Pacific Islander Domestic Violence Resource Project The Asian/Pacific Islander Domestic Violence Resource Project (DVRP) provides AAPI domestic violence survivors with support and resources that meet their language and cultural needs. In pursuit of this mission, the organization provides a confidential helpline and case management services for those affected by domestic violence, as well as resources to help educate community members on issues related to domestic violence. Today, DVRP’s programs have served over 1,300 survivors in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, DC. With a survivor-created and driven structure, DVRP has empowered community leaders and their communities to speak out against violence and promote cultural understanding. 6. Coalition of Asian American Leaders The Coalition of Asian American Leaders (CAAL) is a Minnesota-based organization dedicated to uplifting Asian Americans, regardless of their background by providing opportunities and community connections. They recognize the diverse needs of Minnesotan Asian Americans and advocate on behalf of their communities for improved economic conditions, educational opportunities, immigration policies, and prevention of anti-Asian racism. 7. The Asian American Women’s Political Initiative The Asian American Women’s Political Initiative (AAWPI) is the only organization dedicated to advancing AAPI women’s political leadership in the United States. Their programs designed for low-income and immigrant AAPI women seek to give them a voice in our democracy. With only 1% of state legislators being AAPI women, the AAWPI seeks to advance the authority of AAPI women in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Georgia with over 90% of their alumni going on to work for political campaigns or run for office themselves.

President Biden signs into law the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act on Thursday in the East Room of the White House. Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images Following overwhelming support from both chambers of Congress, President Biden signed legislation Thursday that addresses hate crimes throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, with particular emphasis on the increase in violence against Asian Americans. At an event in the East Room of the White House, Biden thanked lawmakers for coming together to pass the legislation. He said standing against hatred and racism, which he called "the ugly poison that has long haunted and plagued our nation," is what brings Americans together. "My message to all of those who are hurting is: We see you and the Congress has said, we see you. And we are committed to stop the hatred and the bias," he said. The legislation, introduced by Rep. Grace Meng, D-N.Y., and Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, aims to make the reporting of hate crimes more accessible at the local and state levels by boosting public outreach and ensuring reporting resources are available online in multiple languages. It also directs the Department of Justice to designate a point person to expedite the review of hate crimes related to COVID-19 and authorizes grants to state and local governments to conduct crime-reduction programs to prevent and respond to hate crimes. "This violence — it did not come from nowhere, and none of it is new. In my life, my lived experience, I have seen how hate can pervade our communities," she said. Harris, who is the first Asian American vice president, added, "I have seen how hate can impede our progress. And I have seen how people uniting against hate can strengthen our country." Harris noted the work to combat racism doesn't end with the signing of the bill. "Here's the truth: Racism exists in America. Xenophobia exists in America, antisemitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia — it all exists. And so the work to address injustice wherever it exists remains the work ahead," she said. PBS NewsHour via YouTube The signing comes two days after the House of Representatives passed the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act by a vote of 364-62; all 62 votes against the bill were from Republicans. The Senate approved the legislation last month, with near-unanimous support; Missouri Republican Josh Hawley was the sole senator to vote against the bill. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., attended Thursday's ceremony along with a number of Democrats, advocates, families of victims of hate crimes and others. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who helped co-author a key provision that paved the way for the bill's passage, was also in attendance. Sponsor Message Asian Americans have faced a dramatic spike in violence throughout the pandemic. The organization Stop AAPI Hate documented 6,603 hate incidents from March 2020 to March 2021, and leaders said the true number is much higher as many hate crimes go unreported. Democrats have pointed to former President Donald Trump's frequent use of racist phrases such as "kung flu" to describe the coronavirus as a link to the increase in anti-Asian sentiment in the country. Stop AAPI Hate praised the legislation for investing in "community-centered solutions and provisions to mitigate anti-Asian rhetoric" but said further legislation is needed to address the "root causes of systemic racism and oppression." "Because the Act centers criminal law enforcement agencies in its solutions, it will not address the overwhelming majority of incidents reported to our site which are not hate crimes, but serious hate incidents," the coalition said in a statement after the House passage. Attorney General Merrick Garland called the bill signing an "important step toward protecting everyone in our country from acts of hate and intolerance." "The Department of Justice is proud to play a central role in implementing this legislation," he said in a statement following the signing. "Investigating and prosecuting hate crimes is a top priority, deeply rooted in the department's founding. We will use the new law to enhance the aggressive measures we are taking to combat crime motivated by bigotry and discrimination."

Before the 2020 elections, CIRCLE’s youth survey found signs of substantial civic participation among Asian American youth. Young Asian Americans reported that they were working to register their peers and encourage them to vote, and a majority expressed that they felt they had the power to make change. That youth energy appears to have translated into electoral participation: according to the Census Bureau Current Population Survey Registration and Voting Supplement, November 2020 data, Asian American voter turnout (for all ages) reached a historic high of 60% in the 2020 presidential election, and preliminary analyses of the Asian American vote suggest that Asian American voters had increased voter turnout in multiple states. In addition, our analysis of the CIRCLE post-election poll finds that, despite lower levels of contact from political campaigns, young Asian Americans took to the ballot box to express their concerns about racism and the COVID-19 pandemic. Census data suggests that Asian American youth voter turnout increased and nearly closed the stubborn gap that has existed between their electoral participation and that of young people of other races/ethnicities. In CIRCLE’s 2020 survey data, we also find that Asian American youth are ready to continue taking action on social and political issues: 73% of Asian American youth have talked to their friends about political issues or elections, and 30% have attended a march or demonstration about an issue they care about. Our top findings include: According to our analysis of voter file data, 47% of eligible young Asian Americans (ages 18-29) reported voting in 2020, and Census data suggests Asian youth turnout may have increased the most of any racial/ethnic group Young Asian Americans remain relatively neglected by political campaign outreach Asian American youth utilized vote-by-mail and ballot drop-off voting methods more than in-person options Young Asian Americans identified racism as a one of their top three issues that determined their vote for President A comprehensive federal response to the COVID-19 pandemic important to young Asian Americans About Data on Asian Americans: Although analyses of the Asian American electorate often does not distinguish Asian Americans by ethnic group, differences in educational attainment as well as income suggest that the collection and publishing of disaggregated data on Asian Americans is needed to fully understand the community’s civic participation. In addition, data on Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders is often aggregated within data on Asian American respondents under the category “Asian American and Pacific Islander” (AAPI). Due to the low numbers of Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander youth respondents in our sample, we have not included them in this analysis.Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (NHPI) communities have been disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, and disaggregated data on NHPI communities is needed to further understand the challenges faced by NHPI youth as well as their civic participation. The data cited in this analysis includes young people ages 18-29 who self-identify in part or exclusively as Asian American. This population does include those who identify with one or more other racial/ethnic groups. The other racial groups analyzed (white, Black, Latino) also include young people 18-29 who self-identify in part or exclusively as members of those groups, and multiracial individuals are included as members of each group with which they identified. About the Poll: The CIRCLE/Tisch College Post-Election Poll was a web survey fielded from November 3 to December 2, 2020 By Gallup, Inc. The survey covered adults between the ages of 18 and 29 who were eligible to vote in the United Stated in the 2020 General Election. Sample was drawn from the Gallup Panel, a probability-based panel that is representative of the U.S. adult population, and from the Dynata Panel, a non-probability panel. A total of 2,645 eligible adults completed the survey. Of the total completes, 1,138 were from the Gallup Panel (stratified panel) and 1,507 were from the Dynata (opt-in) Panel. Unless stated otherwise, for the sake of this analysis, ‘youth’ refers to those ages 18- to 29-years old. The margin of sampling error, taking into account the design effect from weighting, is ± 3.7 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. Margins of error (MoE) for racial and ethnic subgroups range from +/-7.6 to 9.4 percentage points, with Asian MoE being =/-9.4 points. Asian American Youth’s Voter Participation in 2020 In 2020, young Asian Americans narrowed the gap between themselves and young voters from other racial/ethnic groups. According to CIRCLE’s analysis of 2020 Catalist voter file data, an estimated 47% of Asian American youth voted in 2020, compared to 61% of White youth, 48% of Latino youth, and 43% of Black youth. (Note: this turnout estimate includes Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander youth as “Asian American”. The rest of this analysis is based on CIRCLE polling data which did not include Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander youth in the “Asian” category.) Although different data sources produce different estimates, they can also enable us to examine the turnout gap between white and nonwhite youth. In addition to voter file data, the Census Current Population Survey (CPS) allows us to analyze historical trends of youth turnout by race & ethnicity. The historical trendline below, based on that Census data, highlights that youth voter turnout increased among every racial/ethnic group in 2020, but may have increased the most among Asian-American youth. (In these estimates, “Asian” also includes Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander youth.) In their responses to our post-election poll of young voters (ages 18-29), Asian American youth respondents indicated that they took advantage of non-Election Day voting options at a higher rate than other youth. Among the Asian American youth respondents who said they voted in the November 2020 elections, nearly half (46%) of reported that they voted by mail, a much higher rate than young people of other races/ethnicities, and 21% said they dropped off their ballot at a dropbox or voting location, compared to approximately one in ten Black and Latino youth who used that voting method. Conversely, just 17% of young Asian American voters reported voting in-person on election day, while approximately 40% of Black, White, and Latino youth said they voted using this method. That may be due, in part, to the geographic distribution of this population: Asian American youth are concentrated in the Western United States, and approximately 40% of young Asian American eligible voters resided in states that mailed ballots to all registered voters for the November 2020 election. In our pre-election survey, we found that 35% of young Asian Americans reported they had experience with voting by mail. Overlooked by Political Organizations, Asian American Youth Connect Informally Despite their interest and engagement in the 2020 elections, Asian American youth reported lower levels of contact by political campaigns and youth organizations than other young people of color. Just 43% of Asian American youth said they were contacted by someone on behalf of President Joe Biden’s campaign or the Democratic Party in the month leading up to November 3, 2020, lower than the 61% of Black youth, 55% of Latino youth, and 46% of white youth who said they were contacted. This trend also applied to contact from the former President Trump’s campaign or the Republican Party: 25% of Asian American youth indicated they were contacted by a Republican outreach effort in the month before the November election, while roughly a third of Black youth and white youth, and Latino youth reported contact from Trump’s campaign or the GOP. In addition to political parties and campaigns, community organizations often reach out to young people to encourage them to participate in elections. Our post-election poll indicates that Asian American youth were also contacted by these organizations (34%) at lower rates than Black (50%) and Latino youth (41%). About a third of white youth (35%) said they were contacted by a community organization in their area in the month leading up to the November 2020 election. Although they were contacted at relatively lower rates by political parties and local organizations, our survey revealed that many young Asian Americans shared conversations about elections with people close to them, like peers and relatives. About two-thirds (67%) of Asian American youth reported that other young people reached out to them about political issues or elections in 2020. Among all youth, friends and family were one of the most common sources of information about the election, but Asian American youth reported that was the case at a higher rate than Black and Latino youth. Just over two-thirds (69%) of Asian American youth said they heard information about the 2020 elections from family, a similar rate to white youth (71%) but much higher than Black youth (60%) and Latino youth (61%). 63% of young Asian Americans responded that they had heard information about the 2020 elections from friends or roommates, compared to 62% of white youth, 55% of Black youth and 56% of Latino youth. Concerned About COVID-19 and Racism—And Prepared to Take Action Many young Asian Americans have been negatively affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, and their responses to our post-election poll indicate that these experiences may have played a major role in their 2020 vote. Approximately seven in ten (71%) Asian American youth indicated that COVID-19 has had a moderate or very significant impact on their economic situation. Recent analysis of data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics conducted by Mathematica found that Asian American youth were heavily affected by a COVID-19-related increase in unemployment in 2020. Asian American youth took their feelings about the pandemic to the ballot box. Two in five said “getting the country back to ‘normal’ after COVID-19” was one of the top three issues determining their choice for President. In addition, approximately three in ten (32%) young Asian Americans said how leaders dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic was a top-three issue in determining their vote. An overwhelming majority (79%) of Asian American youth said that making a COVID-19 vaccine widely available should be a somewhat or very high priority for the next President of the United States. In both pre- and post-election surveys roughly a third of Asian American youth ranked racism as one of the top three issues that would be influence to their vote for President, second highest of all eleven priorities to choose from, only after providing a COVID-19 vaccine. In other responses, young Asian Americans highlighted the salience of racial equality and emphasized action. Nearly nine in ten (87%) Asian American youth agreed or strongly agreed that it is important to correct social and economic inequalities. In addition, 85% agreed or strongly agreed that certain racial or ethnic groups have fewer chances to get ahead, higher than the 70% of White youth, 74% of Black youth, and 73% of Latino youth that said the same. Asian American youth also connected their concerns about racism in the United States to electoral action and their expectations for elected officials. Seven in ten young Asian Americans said that combating violence against people of color should be a priority for the President. In addition, nearly four in five (77%) Asian American youth agreed or strongly agreed that voting and elections play a role in stopping violence against people of color, higher than the 67% of white youth who said so. In addition to elections, Asian American youth expressed an expansive view of their role in addressing racism and other issues: 86% agreed or strongly agreed that the work to improve their communities is not limited to elections and voting every two or four years. Nearly four in five (77%) Asian American youth agreed that “people like me should participate in the political activity and decision-making of our country.” In our pre-election poll, 29% of Asian American youth said they had attended a march or demonstration about an issue they care about. In this post-election poll (fielded in November and December 2020) that figure remained high, at 30%, with another 24% of young Asian Americans reporting that they might do so if given the opportunity. Three in ten Asian American youth also reported that they had taken concrete action for racial justice before 2020, and 40% said they took concrete action for racial justice in 2020 though just 29% had done so before 2020. However Asian American youth trailed Black youth (55%) and Latino youth (52%) who reported taking concrete action for racial justice in 2020. When analyzing the concerns and attitudes voiced by Asian American youth in this post-election poll, it is important to note that this poll was fielded before the killings of Asian and Asian American women in Georgia on March 16, 2021. However, anti-Asian incidents and violence toward Asian American communities had become widely visible throughout the COVID-19 pandemic since 2020. On April 22, 2021, the U.S. Senate approved anti-hate crime legislation geared towards protecting Asian American and Pacific Islanders. Looking Back and Marching Forward Driven to participate by their concerns on a variety of issues such as racism, the COVID-19 pandemic, and healthcare, Asian American youth made their voices heard in the 2020 election cycle. Although they enjoy relatively lower levels of contact by political parties, young Asian Americans are hearing information about elections from friends, family members, and other young people. This peer-to-peer outreach also provides an opportunity for young Asian Americans to make a difference in their communities. Despite the diversity of languages spoken by Asian Americans, fewer than 50 counties in the U.S. are federally required to provide bilingual voting assistance under Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act. In our pre-election poll, Asian American youth indicated their willingness to serve as poll workers and translate resources for their communities. Peer-to-peer and intergenerational forms of outreach by Asian American youth may reduce the impacts of low levels of formal political party and campaign outreach to Asian American voters. Some Asian American youth may also be encouraged by the increase in descriptive representation of Asian Americans in some of the nation’s highest offices. On January 20, 2021, Kamala Harris was inaugurated as the first vice president of South Asian and Asian American descent. Following the elections, Filipino American Rob Bonta was appointed as California’s Attorney General. In April 2021, Indian American Vanita Gupta was confirmed as the Associate Attorney General in the Justice Department, becoming the first woman of color to hold this position. Despite these appointments, President Joe Biden has been criticized by multiple Senators for the Presidential Cabinet’s lack of Asian American members. Due to the wide disparities in income, education, and poverty rates among different Asian ethnic groups, disaggregated data on Asian American youth is required to further understand this community and their civic engagement. As the fastest-growing racial group in the U.S., young Asian Americans are well-positioned to continue to express their views on social and political issues and create change.

Anti-Asian racism isn’t new in the U.S. From the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the Japanese internment camps, the U.S. has a long history of racism against Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities.

The past year, however, has seen an alarming spike in anti-Asian racism largely due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic—and stoked by then-President Donald Trump’s use of the derogatory terms “China virus” and “kung flu.”

***Can also be a TvA centered around social security/guaranteeing certain workplace protections and securities

The boldest vision of Asian American politics is that our true arrival, our accomplishment, is defined not by rivalry in a stratified labor market, not by a contest over racial supremacy, but by our ability to build collective power – power with, not power over. This is the core teaching of Black feminism, the theoretical core of Black Lives Matter. To paraphrase the legendary Barbara Smith, Black feminism is simply about creating a place on this globe that is fit for human life. We cannot do that alone. We can only do that together.