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In the radical context, the statement ‘politics is about power’ challenges not only a perspective that neglects this insight, but one that expressly rejects it. There is a major tendency in contemporary anarchism and anarchist-influenced radicalism that explicitly presents as ‘anti-power’ (Marshall, 2010: 679; Meltzer, 1993: 11), and anti-realist (Holloway, 2005: 18). This approach proposes disengagement and defection from the status quo with the implied expectation that capitalism and the state could wither away through lack of support and without confrontation.9 Realist anarchists oppose this view and argue that realistic efforts to ‘change the world’ unavoidably entail the acquisition and exercise of some forms of power (Mueller, 2003: 128); that the state and capitalism will not disappear without confrontation (Rai, 2015: 177); and that ignoring the current mechanisms of power in the hope that they will go away is not a realistic strategy for radical social change (Malatesta, 2014 [1922]a: 425).

For a realist anarchist the statement ‘conflict and disagreement are ineradicable’ similarly holds its greatest relevance as a corrective to a mainstream position in radical thought across its history including in the contemporary milieu. Orthodox Marxism, and many of its descendants, held to a long-term vision of a communist utopia where conflict had been reconciled and politics as such had been replaced by ‘the administration of things’ (Adamiak, 1970: 16). Many contemporary anarchists share a similar vision of a post-revolutionary utopia where conflict has been eradicated and where decision-making systems that allow for ongoing disagreement are replaced with those that accept only consensus (see Graeber, 2013: 210–231). Some, like the anti-power tendency discussed above, go beyond the expectation of a future without disagreement and presume the absence of conflict even in the realisation of their utopia. Here ‘everybody’ is made aware of the pressing need for radical social change either through rational argument, or by a sudden realisation or change of consciousness based on the recognition that ‘we are all one’ and have universal shared interests.10 So the realist anarchist perspective on the idea that ‘conflict and disagreement are ineradicable’ is not that conflict is universal and inescapable as with the conservative take, but that conflict cannot be completely eradicated, and that no future post-revolutionary society will be free from antagonisms (Edgley, 2000: 73). Nor does the radical interpretation imply that we must forgo radical aims for an uneasy acceptance of pluralism under a liberal democratic modus vivendi. The realist anarchist perspective, however, is not primarily directed at these conservative defences of dictatorship, or at liberal realist pessimism. Instead it is aimed at anarchists and other radicals who see the possibility of a conflict-free utopia, and propose confrontation-free strategies for its realisation that are based either on withdrawing from political struggle, or on successfully convincing all, through education and rational argument, that the proposed radical alternative is in their best interest. The realist anarchist interpretation means that direct and active struggle for positive change, and against oppression, are necessary; that they will continue to be in any future society; and that future visions and current strategies should reflect this (Edgley, 2000: 73; Gordon, 2007: 64–68).

Of course, we recognize that these gains are not in any way revolutionary. The strategy is focused on effecting change through “small wins” (MacKay, 2021). In our pessimistic moments, we each worried that our work on these Task Forces might be reproducing a “cruel optimism” (Berlant,2011) in which a desire for paid care activities to be more visible and valued institutionally would be futile while ironically adding to the service burden of largely women members on the committees. Yet we both also believe, and in fact have written about in other contexts, that there is a need to challenge overly pessimistic views of feminist engagement in institutions as always already coopted by neoliberalism (Altan-Olcay,2020; Bergeron,2017). In the contingent, contradictory and diverse economic spaces of the neoliberalizing academy there remain openings for feminist change to occur. Also, we know from other institu-tions' experiences that if such initiatives receive support at the highest level, the space is widened for the formerly hidden scripts to become part of larger institutional narratives about the value of caring labor activities to the success of the university, without formulating it as something we do in addition to our “real work” (Clark etal.,2020) which can only lead to its depletion. A final point here is that such change is worth pursuing given that a far worse form of “cruel optimism” can occur when existing gender equality policies promise a fair outcome but fail to deliver because they do not challenge current definitions, measurements, and valuations of academic labor (Lipton,2017). Thus, universities committed to gender equality would be well-served by undertaking such activities.

However, from a practical perspective the question is whether a complete disengagement from institutions of power is feasible (Miller and Razavi, 1998; True, 2003). Furthermore, the idea of a binary of co-optation inside institutions of governance and ideological purity on the outside assumes there is/was a pure and monolithic feminist knowledge and activism outside of institutional frameworks (Calkin, 2015; Eschle and Maiguashca, 2014; de Jong, 2016). This assumption makes it difficult to recognize the complex connections between the history of feminist mobilizations and national and international institutions: behind the ability of women’s movements to influence the structure and agenda of the UN system lies a history of intricate contestations, alliances and victories (Antrobus, 2004; Hannan, 2013; Rai, 2004). Furthermore, this depiction is also less likely to account for internal conflicts and divisions in social movements and civil society (Alvarez, 1999; Alvarez et al., 2003; Eschle and Maiguashca, 2014; Maiguashca, 2011).

In recent decades, social–political literature has reflected a shift in emphasis in the construction of social justice from aspects of redistribution, such as class, equality, and economic deprivation, to aspects of recognition, such as identity, culture, and ethnicity (Garrett, Citation2010; Thompson, Citation2006). Nonetheless, while critical political theory highlights the importance of integrating recognition with redistribution (Fraser, Citation1995, Citation2003), the contemporary practice of direct social work is usually focused more heavily on recognition (Boone et al., Citation2020; McLaughlin, Citation2014). Emphasizing recognition as the main locus of social justice makes social work practice primarily relational, i.e. focused on providing respect and visibility for marginalized people and allowing their voices to be heard (Gupta, Citation2017; Rossiter, Citation2014). Nonetheless, giving precedence to relational practices of recognition over material assistance may result in social workers’ dismissal of the material aspects of service users’ unjust situations (Krumer-Nevo, Citation2020). The examination of these practical aspects of integrating recognition with redistribution is underdeveloped and requires further attention (Garrett, Citation2010). This gap between theory and practice is particularly important in the context of managerialist reforms and their consequences for the deprofessionalization of social work (Schram, Citation2015). These reforms are based on neoliberal rationality, with its commitment to reducing public spending and government intervention in the market and in citizens’ lives, and therefore promote major retrenchments in public services and assume that service users are solely responsible for their lives (Klenk, Citation2018). This basic stance is usually manifested in the undermining of distributive structural practices that challenge fundamental social orders while making personal recognition practices that focus on the individual more acceptable (McKendrick & Webb, Citation2014). The weakening position of redistribution in social work theory of practice may increase the gap between service users’ needs and the way in which social services address them. In an attempt to contribute to critical social work theory of practice, this conceptual article offers a novel model of social work practice that integrates the aspects of recognition and redistribution. In addition, this model offers a conceptual approach to the promotion of critical practice that can enhance resistance to deprofessionalization processes (Strier & Breshtling, Citation2016). I begin by elaborating on the theoretical basis of recognition and redistribution. Redistribution and recognition in social work Critical political theory constructs recognition and redistribution as basic human needs, claiming that a just society is ethically committed to providing both (Fraser & Honneth, Citation2003). Social work’s critical theory of practice adopts this construction in its practical guidelines (Fook, Citation2016). Thus, in order to portray the current positioning of recognition and redistribution in social work theory of practice, this discussion begins by asking how recognition and redistribution translate into direct social work practice. Nancy Fraser (Citation2003) and Axel Honneth (Citation1995) debate the critical commitment of both recognition and redistribution, but I will highlight here their emphasis on equality in aspects of recognition. In the framework of their claim, inequality and social suffering are based on social status and interpreted as a lack of respect, visibility, and acceptance (Fraser, Citation2003; Thompson, Citation2006). Recognition is thus presented as an essential human need that provides people with a vital experience of belonging and self-value (Houston, Citation2016). A well-known debate between Fraser and Honneth (Citation2003) portrays two interpretations of recognition, as Honneth (Citation1995) highlights recognition at the micro psychosocial level, while Fraser (Citation2003) emphasizes the fundamental role of social institutions in allowing or denying recognition. Either way, recognition may inform social work theory of practice as the commitment to providing voice, visibility, and respect to service users and promoting critical awareness of exclusionary mechanisms (Houston, Citation2016). At the other end of this scale, the Marxist critique of capitalism classically advocates equality in the distribution of material resources, emphasizing its potential to oppress workers under the power of capital owners (Horkheimer, Citation1972). In this framework, the suffering of marginalized groups is understood first as the lack of basic material needs such as nutrition and housing, and second as informing inequality, exclusion, and abandonment by society (Ferguson, Citation2008; Lister, Citation2004). In social work theory of practice, the redistribution standpoint moves between the promotion of welfare-state-oriented policies such as transfer payments and material support (Ferguson, Citation2008) to a more structural practice that addresses material inequalities at the policy level (Weiss-Gal, Citation2016). Fraser distinguishes affirmative from transformative strategies employed to counter misrecognition and misdistribution: ‘Affirmative remedies for injustice … [are] aimed at correcting inequitable outcomes of social arrangements without disturbing the underlying framework that generates them. Transformative remedies, in contrast … [are] aimed at correcting inequitable outcomes precisely by restructuring the underlying generative framework’ (Fraser, Citation1995, p. 82). This distinction relates to the concept of resistance in critical theory, which studies ways of challenging hegemonic rationalities (Strier & Breshtling, Citation2016). Thus, critical social work practice seeks feasible ways in which to promote recognition and redistribution, striving for transformative solutions, but at times managing with affirmative ones. To sum up this section, recognition and redistribution represent two aspects of human suffering and inequality and thus inform two streams of social work practice. Recognition mainly informs direct therapeutic practice that provides emotional support, while redistribution mainly informs structural practices such as the provision of material support (Garrett, Citation2010). However, this picture is too dichotomous and reveals a fundamental lacuna. First, service users’ reality is bound by interrelated needs concerning recognition and redistribution, so the formulation of social work theory of practice on only one side of this scale may hinder social workers’ ability to fully address service users’ diverse needs. Second, this picture is imbalanced, and social work theory of practice is, in fact, constructed for the most part according to the recognition stance, with most welfare agencies providing assistance at the personal or family levels. Thus, the focus on recognition highlights the provision of therapeutic emotional support, undermining the professional rationality of critical redistributive practices (Garrett, Citation2010; McLaughlin, Citation2014). Beyond being superficial and one-sided, this formulation of social work theory of practice may invalidate the material aspects of service users’ needs and hinder social workers’ conceptual ability to genuinely understand and assist service users. It is important to note the role of the managerialist context in strengthening the unintegrated formulation of recognition and redistribution (Schram & Silverman, Citation2012). First, some scholars claim that managerialist rationality does, in fact, promote recognition and redistribution, though in an affirmative manner that focuses on the micro provision of emotional and material support and thus overlooks or even strengthens exclusionary social structures (Schram, Citation2015). Yet, in the street-level formulation of social work theory of practice, the commitment to budgetary retrenchment and the stance that holds service users solely responsible for their lives translates easily into the undermining of the redistribution of material support and the favouring of relational recognition practices (Lavee & Strier, Citation2018). To address such biased interpretations of critical practice, this article offers a theoretical model that integrates recognition with redistribution.

Basing an ethics on our capacity to identify with the suffering of others rather than, say, on a priori principles of human rights, carries some risks, the first of which is that the failings of identification are so endemic that such an ethics might end up being unacceptably erratic. Though I wholeheartedly agree with Butler’s contention that global power imbalances make it hard for Westerners to acknowledge the equal humanity of non-Westerners, I do not think that the matter is quite this simple, for if Americans have a hard time mourning the Iraqis and Afghans killed by the United States military, Iraqis and Afghans might also have a hard time mourning those who are far away from them, including each other. Butler suggests that we identify with the suffering of some people more than others because their names and faces are familiar to us in the sense of being culturally and ethnically similar to us, and undoubtedly this is true. But there are other ways that alliances based on familiarity are forged, ways that cut across cultural and ethnic differences. For instance, that my friend is black, my colleague is Chinese and my downstairs neighbour is Muslim does not change the fact that if this friend, colleague or neighbour is harmed or killed, I – a white atheist woman – will mourn more intensely than I would mourn another white atheist woman harmed or killed somewhere in Sweden. In other words, there seems to be an important link between familiarity (and thus our ability to mourn), on the one hand, and intimacy, proximity and shared history, on the other, that is not necessarily in any way based on similarity of culture or ethnicity. From this perspective, the ability to mourn the other may be too haphazard, too random a basis for ethics.

The second risk that accompanies an ethics based on our ability to identify with the suffering of others is that it can replace political action with paralysing grief. Grief can be privatising, and thus potentially depoliticising, because it tends to result in a retreat from the social world. This retreat may, in part at least, be a defence against our own vulnerability, for grief reminds us of the immensity of our dependence on others: the fact that we can be undone by the loss of others highlights the flimsiness of our fantasies of sovereignty. Indeed, besides acute bodily suffering, there are few things in life that ‘interrupt’ the coherence of our being more than the anguish we feel when we have lost someone who feels irreplaceable to us. If desire, intimacy and sexuality already challenge our aspirations of autonomy, grief often results – at least momentarily – in the utter dissolution of the self. As Butler correctly remarks, we ‘cannot invoke the Protestant ethic when it comes to loss’ (Precarious Life 21); we cannot decide how the task of grieving is to be performed or when it is going to come to an end. Rather, we are forced to ride waves of sadness that mock our attempts at self-mastery, that call us back to prior experiences of dispossession. Some of these experiences relate to losses we can name, but, ultimately, what grief touches is the unnameable core of melancholia that connects us to our constitutive inability to attain closure (to disavow our dependence on others). Butler describes such melancholia as a kind of timeless enigma that ‘hides’ in each loss we mourn, as an indelible trace of a primary vulnerability that we can no longer access directly but that our losses touch indirectly. In a more Lacanian vein, one could say that every loss reanimates the primary loss – the loss of das Ding (the primordial non-object of desire) – that constitutes the melancholy core of our being. That is, when we lose another person, we not only mourn that loss but we also mourn, with renewed energy, our own incompleteness, our own helplessness, even if we are not aware that this is what we are doing.

The legacy of the 2019–21 biennium is yet to be fully grasped and processed, and often the urgency of chasing the next affective imperative (be it fear, terror, concern, relief, or indignation dictated by the virus’s iterations) can distract from looking back at how rapidly this period has transformed the world in ways unacceptable before 2019. Superficially, corporate capital in the form of techno-giants, big pharma, and the surveillance industry has managed to do the unimaginable: extract, evade, and profiteer even more than before, enabled by governments and central banks—the same governments and central banks advocating for the resilience, self-reliance, and autonomy of welfare states, individuals, and real economies. All the while, in many countries, the mantra of “public health on the brink of collapse” echoed as the best and most insistent advertisement for private healthcare in decades.

As more inhabitants of the planet seemed to empathize with experiences of being immobilized, terrified, and collateralized, the assassination of George Floyd in Minneapolis generated the Abolitionist Summer, with unprecedented multiracial and internationalist resonances. This was the most affirmative legacy of the biennium, alongside the activation of mutual aid infrastructures and all the practices of reciprocal nurture that kept most alive.

The next question raised by Cox’s argument that critical theory must limit the range of choices to ‘alternative orders which are feasible transformations of the existing world’ is how we assess feasibility, or on what basis we are to ‘reject improbable alternatives.’72 More specifically, referring back to the continuum of transitional justice possibilities (Table 1), the question is whether any of the outlined alternatives can rightly be rejected as ‘improbable’ or ‘infeasible.’ The short if unsatisfying answer is that much depends on the particularities of context, including the legal, political, economic and cultural dynamics with which a particular approach to transitional justice might be expected to engage (and of which it is a part). In assessing whether a thinner or thicker approach to transitional justice is possible or probable, and whether that approach is likely to have much of a chance of disrupting the postconflict status quo, one would need to look at a range of context-specific factors, including: the nature of existing elites and their resistance to change; whether there is a history of democracy and strong institutions; the level of economic development and the nature of the economy; the nature of the victims of conflict, their perpetrators and the abuses that were suffered; and the strength of victim and civil society networks.

Thus, for example, even if critical theorists are correct that the ‘constructed invisibility’ of the economic within paradigmatic transitional justice is a matter of deepseated neoliberal ideology,73 the question of whether and to what extent an embrace of economic justice is possible will still require careful analysis of these and other contextual factors. Such factors may in turn suggest the feasibility of a comparatively broad approach to economic justice involving fundamental questions of redistribution, or perhaps only a narrow approach to economic justice involving the selective prosecution of economic crimes of corruption and violations of economic and social rights that rise to the level of a war crime.74 For this reason, abstract debates about the value of paradigmatic transitional justice versus one of the other possibilities outlined in Table 1 are unlikely to advance the discussion at this stage. To move forward, the current critical theory debates need to do more to engage with the difficult tradeoffs, policy choices and contextual realities that would inevitably be associated with efforts to implement an alternative vision of transitional justice.

The next question raised by Cox’s argument that critical theory must limit the range of choices to ‘alternative orders which are feasible transformations of the existing world’ is how we assess feasibility, or on what basis we are to ‘reject improbable alternatives.’72 More specifically, referring back to the continuum of transitional justice possibilities (Table 1), the question is whether any of the outlined alternatives can rightly be rejected as ‘improbable’ or ‘infeasible.’ The short if unsatisfying answer is that much depends on the particularities of context, including the legal, political, economic and cultural dynamics with which a particular approach to transitional justice might be expected to engage (and of which it is a part). In assessing whether a thinner or thicker approach to transitional justice is possible or probable, and whether that approach is likely to have much of a chance of disrupting the postconflict status quo, one would need to look at a range of context-specific factors, including: the nature of existing elites and their resistance to change; whether there is a history of democracy and strong institutions; the level of economic development and the nature of the economy; the nature of the victims of conflict, their perpetrators and the abuses that were suffered; and the strength of victim and civil society networks.

Thus, for example, even if critical theorists are correct that the ‘constructed invisibility’ of the economic within paradigmatic transitional justice is a matter of deepseated neoliberal ideology,73 the question of whether and to what extent an embrace of economic justice is possible will still require careful analysis of these and other contextual factors. Such factors may in turn suggest the feasibility of a comparatively broad approach to economic justice involving fundamental questions of redistribution, or perhaps only a narrow approach to economic justice involving the selective prosecution of economic crimes of corruption and violations of economic and social rights that rise to the level of a war crime.74 For this reason, abstract debates about the value of paradigmatic transitional justice versus one of the other possibilities outlined in Table 1 are unlikely to advance the discussion at this stage. To move forward, the current critical theory debates need to do more to engage with the difficult tradeoffs, policy choices and contextual realities that would inevitably be associated with efforts to implement an alternative vision of transitional justice.

“Where are you really from?” “You all look the same.” “Go home.” There are myriad social, cultural, and political ways that Asian Americans are reminded that they don’t really belong in the US. For Asian Americans, we’ve both hoped for and lamented the US as both a site of liberation and of oppression – simultaneously. We, also, constantly negotiate our many different experiences of power and privilege. Asian Americans have a long, ongoing history of struggle in order to belong politically and culturally in the US. Yet, sometimes, those struggles have also come at the expense of those within our communities and, also, other communities we don’t belong to. We must move away from politics that cry out “me first.” Many of us have a complicated relationship with this country. For those of us who have class privilege, and hold the privilege of US citizenship, and call the US home, we must find new ways to continue fighting for freedom and justice for ourselves and each other. And we have to do this in ways that don’t only rely on “American-ness” and “America.” In Trump’s inaugural address, he said, “From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first, America first.” To Trump and his followers, “America first’” means building a wall at the US-Mexico border. It means banning Muslims from entering the US. Putting “America first” means repealing DACA and other policies that protect undocumented immigrants from deportation. It means increasing American militarization at home and abroad, expanding stop-and-frisk policies, and continuing construction of the Dakota Access pipeline. The concept of “America first” comes at the expense of Black and Brown people, queer folks, disabled people, immigrants, poor and working class people, rural communities, and—well—basically everyone unless you’re part of (or represent the interests of) a white, wealthy elite. The “America first” mentality will continue to expand the US empire while, simultaneously, patrolling and enclosing our own borders. While “America first” is not a completely new sentiment, the implications of the current administration makes it urgent for East Asian Americans to rethink what our “American-ness” means. Our critique of “American-ness” presents possibilities and illuminates obstacles in dismantling white supremacy. Through our ability to rethink and critique, we can consider the linkages between anti-Black racism, settler colonialism, and xenophobia. Yes, we rely on the state to ensure particular material conditions. But if we start letting go of the idea that those are the only possibilities towards freedom, perhaps, then we can imagine new pathways to freedom that binds us to the movements for Black lives, Native sovereignty, and immigrant rights. We must focus our attention on the very specific ways US policies have shaped political and economic structures that have enabled some Asian American communities to thrive. Transnational feminism has offered one way for us to think about how our own lived experiences in the United States connects to the experiences of others around the world. In approaching transnational feminism from a decolonial perspective, we must be willing to be more vulnerable and ask ourselves questions about our multiple complicities in different structures of power. We must ask: What is really at stake when we align ourselves with the US as a state power? As Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Young write, decolonization is not a metaphor. In what ways do we benefit from Native land and resource dispossession? How our own own political and economic opportunities limited, yet also enabled by settler colonization and US imperialism? With this in mind, we must ask, what then does American-ness mean for us as East Asian Americans? While there’s not one specific answer to that question, below are several points of reflection that I’m working through. 1. Compromised ‘Citizenship’ That Relies on Continued Oppression From Yellow Peril to Islamophobia, xenophobic specters of “dangerous hordes” from Asia loom in US discussions around who is considered a “good” (or good enough) citizen. The dual racialization of some Asians as “model minorities” and “perpetual foreigners” simultaneously allow for our exclusion and assimilation in the US. Immigration policies select certain people for inclusion and exclusion. For example, the 1965 Immigration Act allowed Asians of a certain educational and class background to migrate to the US. After 1965, low-wage and perceived low-skill labor immigration stalled, making room for “high-skilled,” higher class professionals to enter the US. Under Trump’s administration, citizenship – as defined by the state – will become more unstable with policies focused on increasing deportation and detention while simultaneously decreasing green cards and visas. Often, our freedom as dependent on the US nation-state is dependent on perceptions of our Asian-ness as “good” or “bad.” The Trump administration circulates ideas about the “right” kind of citizen. For Asian Americans, moral dichotomies of good versus bad – good/bad immigrant, model minority/perpetual foreigner, can be mapped along our particular usefulness to the federal administration at a given historical moment. White elites offered us a promise – that if we behaved and assimilated as “not Black,” then maybe some of us could inch closer to the so-called American Dream. Of course, the American Dream is only available until you become a threat – then we can be spied on and detained. In the US, popular media narratives create a national imagery of “good” Asians as those that hold professional positions like doctors, engineers, or business managers. Yet, the “good” Asian that follows the rules and assimilates as a “good, quiet, model citizen” also contradicts ideologies around American individualism. While we might be valued as good for the economy, we’re never seen as real Americans. As Ellen Wu has written, the model minority myth was also a specific strategy by some Asian American communities – to be accepted and recognized as human beings during a time when their access to resources was restricted by law. They attempted to prove they were worthy of citizenship – that they were “good” immigrants. These strategies for survival were then popularized by white politicians that used the “hard-working” Asian as a convenient tool to: Promote the country’s democratic and anti-racist image; and Maintain the racial hierarchy that casts Black Americans as a “problem minority,” riddled with crime and poverty The story of Asian American success went hand-in-hand with media narratives of so-called Black failure. In this way, the US government could dismantle social welfare programs and deny future initiatives towards racial justice under the guise of racial equality. Our citizenship status is often leveraged against other immigrants, Native people, and Black people. Our position in US society has often relied on enforcing boundaries along race and class. While the material benefits of citizenship are important to wellbeing, do we want it in a way that coerces and forces assimilation, not just of ourselves, but of our other communities? While assimilation may be a strategy of survival for some, for Native communities, assimilation has meant cultural genocide. We must refuse to be used as pawns in White America’s war against Black and Indigenous communities. 2. Rethinking Our Categories of Belonging I went to college in mid-Missouri and during my time as an undergraduate, “Asian American” was my most salient identity. I was in the Asian American Association and one of the first major programs I remember participating in was a week-long series of events framed along the theme of visibility. Yet, visibility is a double-edged sword. For example, for some who also identify as Asian Americans, being visible may suggest increased surveillance by the state. While Asian American, as a category, has been a politically strategic unifying term, we must pay attention to the multiple histories and experiences across our many communities. As we grapple with our positionality in different communities, language plays a considerable role so we don’t end up co-opting and appropriating other struggles. Now, as I incorporate and claim woman of color as a category of belonging, I can’t confuse my own experiences of racial violence as being equivalent across all communities of color. Again, while “people of color” and “woman of color” strategically offer unity against white supremacy, we can’t conflate experiences under one umbrella. Also, using labels, such as AAPI (Asian American Pacific Islander) or APIA (Asian Pacific Islander Americans) may seem like it offers more inclusive language, yet the experiences and material needs of Pacific Islanders are often ignored and erased. If Asian American is going to be our call to community, then we must center those in our communities who experience the most vulnerability under current regimes of the state. This includes Indigenous and Black Asians, queer and trans folks, and low-income Asian groups. For non-Black and non-Indigenous Asian people, we have to acknowledge that our own experiences of racism and of oppression are different from anti-Black racism and Indigenous disenfranchisement. Additionally, as Mark Tseng Putterman writes, often pushing against our own invisibility shifts attention away from demands for material justice by Black and Indigenous communities. These demands for attention fall into an oppositional trap where we perceive the visibility of other communities of color as eclipsing our issues, rather than attempting to relate to them. 3. Reflecting on the Land We’re On, the Land We’re From, and Other Lands in Between I’ve been trying to pursue politics that are both more intergenerational and transnational, such as reaching out to my family as an intimate form of activism. As a child of Taiwanese immigrants who support Taiwanese independence, I feel emotionally and politically attached to Taiwan – even though I’ve only spent summers and short trips there. And though I’m not Chinese, I’m disgusted by Trump’s xenophobic accusations of China as robbing the US (and doing so by using the metaphor of sexual assault). As Asian Americans, how do we navigate our desires and yearnings to connect to ideas of home – either overseas or our current homes that occupy Indigenous land? My parents own a house in the suburbs. In many ways, America works for us. My parents can now easily navigate different institutional structures – like the DMV to replace identification or the bank to get a mortgage. And when they do, white employees express how impressed they are with their mastery of English. Or my parents spend half of the year apart, because my mom can’t find work writing and teaching in the US because her accent is too broken – so she pursues her career in Taiwan. Is such a compromise worth it? In addition, is it worth ignoring the reality of others for the sake of guarding our own wealth and resources? We can begin grappling with our past as a way towards the future. We can reconcile that our presence and citizenship comes out of colonial and racist institutions and histories. We must get to know what land (and whose land) we are on and our own family history of how you got here. This includes knowing the policies that have made it possible or impossible for some members of families to migrate. Our exclusion operates alongside the elimination of Native people as the US exerts power over people of color and Indigenous communities as a way to maintain control over land and labor. Immigration policies work to exclude citizenship, voting, and property ownership. Additionally, US interventions abroad helped create a global market that relies on an exploitative migrant labor system. Part of understanding these histories allows us to better connect anti-Black racism and settler colonialism to our communities. Also, it helps us become more aware of our families’ struggles and investments in the US and abroad. 4. Practicing Accountability at Home and Fighting in Solidarity In locating the interconnectedness of local, national, and global struggles, we have a role in fighting against Trump’s administration and larger social justice struggles. As we look to confronting what it means to live on stolen land, one way for us to be accountable is to work with with Native-led movements on their terms and upholding Native cultures, beliefs, and values. For example, we can work to decolonize the environment through sustained efforts to be in solidarity with the water protectors at Standing Rock. After Trump’s executive order, drilling has begun underneath the Missouri River and directly underneath Indigenous burial grounds. As we re-envision our place and contributions in social justice movements, we must be open to rejecting the settler state as our site of liberation, while centering Black liberation and Indigenous futurity. xoài phạm’s piece reminds us that, for different members across Asian American communities, the structures that harm us – militarization, surveillance, the prison-industrial complex, policing, immigration detainment and deportation – harm Black folks the most. This means that we benefit from Black liberation movements. It also means that we must fight alongside Black activists and organizers. Or, as Sasha W. puts it, “while our experiences of state violence aren’t the same, they’re connected” – necessitating a practice of selfish solidarity (not self-centered). In organizing for the survival of Black and Indigenous lives, we organize for our own survival, too. *** For many Asian Americans, the future seems uncertain. Even so, we must take up the challenge to become specifically accountable to Native people and Black people (who are also part of our communities!). White supremacy and settler colonialism have done centuries of work attempting to make it harder for our communities to come together and fight back. We must consider letting go of our futures as only tied to the US and as tied to so-called freedoms granted by US sovereignty. We must question or commitment to accessing property and wealth on land that isn’t ours and has never been ours. We have a lot of uncomfortable, messy work to do and more difficult questions to ask.

We can first trace Asian American critiques of US empire to the 1968–1969 Third World Strike at what was then San Francisco State College. The Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) brought together African American, Asian American, Latino/a, and American Indian campus groups demanding an autonomous ethnic studies program and community control over curricula and hiring, and the TWLF drew critical connections between domestic civil rights struggles in the United States and international human rights struggles in imperial wars being fought in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. As an historical event linking racism in the United States with US imperialism, the Third World Strike reminds us that ethnic studies was founded on conceptions of shared struggles on a global scale. There is another dimension to the Third World Strike that Asian American critical inquiry must consider. At the same time that the Third World Strike was taking place, American Indians were engaged in the second occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay. Asserting American Indian title to the federal facility by right of discovery, American Indian activists at Alcatraz initiated the Alcatraz-Red Power movement (ARPM) which led to 70 property takeovers in the following nine years (Johnson et al. 1997). Similarly, in 1976, Kanaka ‘Oiwi were engaged in struggles to reclaim Kaho ‘olawe, an island that had been used since the Second World War as a site for bombing target practice by the US military. These struggles illustrate that although American Indians and Kanaka ‘Oiwi were allied with people of color on civil rights issues and against US imperialism, their primary struggle was to reclaim their ancestral lands from the United States. Although Asian Americans, particularly Japanese Americans who were critical of the US political system after their internment during World War II, supported American Indians at Alcatraz and Hawaiians at Kaho‘olawe in important ways, they used a framework of race and class struggle that did not account for the uniqueness of indigenous land dispossession or their own positions in a settler colonial context (Johnson 1996: 118; Gidra 1970; Tanioka and Yamaguchi 1970; Kudaka 1970; Kotani 1985: 168–169).4 As I have argued elsewhere, Asian American studies as a discipline has also historically had a stake in claiming America in ways that are ideologically at odds with indigenous critiques of US settler colonialism (Fujikane 2005). Asian American studies has generally focused on Asian American civil rights and immigrant rights, histories of racial, ethnic, heteropatriarchal and class oppression and literary, cultural and political forms of resistance to those interlocking axes of oppression, interracial and interethnic conflicts and alliances, movements of people to and from the United States in terms of Asian American critique and Moana Nui 2011 193 immigration, diaspora, transnational mobility and the international divisions of labor, and multiple forms of imperialisms in Asia. In a multicultural ethnic studies framework, claiming America often inadvertently ends up reproducing the settler colonial claims to Native lands made in white settler historiography. Kanaka ‘Oiwi leader and scholar Haunani-Kay Trask first identified Asian Americans in Hawai‘i as settlers who benefit from the dispossession of Hawaiians. Trask writes, Our Native people and territories have been overrun by non-Natives, including Asians. Calling themselves ‘local’, the children of Asian settlers greatly outnumber us. They claim Hawai‘i as their own, denying indigenous history, their long collaboration in our continued dispossession, and the benefits therefrom. Part of this denial is the substitution of the term ‘local’ for ‘immigrant’, which is, itself, a particularly celebrated American gloss for ‘settler’. As on the continent, so in our island home. Settlers and their children recast the American tale of nationhood: Hawai‘i, like the continent, is naturalized as but another telling illustration of the uniqueness of America’s ‘nation of immigrants’. (Trask 2008: 46)5 Kanaka ‘Oiwi are genealogically connected to Hawai ‘i, their kulaiwi or ancestral lands, through Papahanaumoku, ‘She who births land’ (ho‘omanawanui 2008: 125; Kamahele 2008: 79; Trask 2008: 45). Under the US occupation of Hawai‘i, Asian Americans are settlers who do not have this genealogical relationship to land in Hawai‘i. As Trask points out, the failure to identify immigrants in settler states as settlers makes possible the teleological fantasy of settler states evolving into ‘multicultural’ nations (Trask 2008: 47). The effects of Asian American settler colonialism become even more visible when we examine indices that register political power in Hawai‘i, such as the ethnic breakdown of the 2009 Hawai‘i State Legislature (see Table 1). According to these figures, Japanese constitute only 21.9% of the population of Hawai‘i, but they are 40% of the Senate and 38% of the House of Representatives (Okinawans are included in statistics for ‘Japanese’, but separately they are about 4% of the population, 12% of the Senate and 6% of the House). Whites constitute 21.1% of the population, 16% of the Senate, and 20% of the House. By contrast, Hawaiians constitute 22.1% of the population compared with 16% of the Senate and 14% of the House. Overall, Asian Americans make up about 44% of the population, 64% of the Senate and 72% of the House. The conditions of Asian American settler colonialism are only made possible by the US settler state and its occupation of Hawai‘i. The United States has acknowledged that its military unlawfully invaded Hawai‘i and backed the overthrow of the Hawaiian government by a white American oligarchy on January 17, 1893. In 1993, President Bill Clinton signed US Public Law 103-150, apologizing for the United States’ role in the military invasion and overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom. In the Apology Resolution, the United States acknowledges that Kanaka ‘Oiwi have never relinquished their sovereignty: ‘The indigenous Hawaiian people never directly relinquished their inherent sovereignty as a people or over their national lands to the United States, either through their monarchy or through a plebiscite or referendum’. The document also acknowledges the illegal seizure of Hawaiian national lands: ‘The Republic of Hawaii also ceded 1,800,000 acres of crown, government and public lands of the Kingdom of Hawaii without the consent of or compensation to the Native Hawaiian people of Hawaii or their sovereign government’. The Apology Resolution has been cited to argue that the sovereign state of Hawai‘i continues to exist, and Kanaka ‘Oiwi can assert their claim to 1.8 million acres of crown and government lands called the ‘ceded’ lands, half of all land in Hawai‘i seized at the time of the overthrow and now administered by the State of Hawai‘i.6 During the week of the APEC meetings, Kanaka ‘Oiwi occupied ‘Iolani Palace to call international attention to the US occupation of Hawai‘i and increased settler state security regulations that closed ‘Iolani Palace to the public in preparation for the APEC meetings.

Further still, it should be noted that such an epithetic charge against Yang has only extended the perpetual inattention to the rich history of collaboration and alliance between people of color, which, as I suggested earlier, is locatable in the term “Asian American” itself. In a longer version of this essay, I discuss the prospects of conceptualizing Yang as an AfroAsian figure. Let me briefly sketch this argument: those in power are committed to having us believe, by way of the model minority myth, that Asian Americans and African Americans are in perpetual and irresolvable conflict and that Asian Americans are somehow inherently coded as white-allied and anti-Black, even though our history at every turn has said otherwise. The post-1965 framing of Asian Americans as the model minority was perpetuated by the white elite in order 1) to inaugurate the notion that Black and brown and red Americans constitute the non-model minorities, and 2) to peg Asian Americans as a pathologically white-desiring outgroup. In this way, it became clear throughout 2019 that rather than reflecting Yang’s supposed inability or incapacity to discuss race, it was much more so the case that the media and much of the American electorate had no antiracist idiom to discuss an Asian American man as a presidential candidate.

Let me add three brief points of participant-observer detail that further illuminate the absurdity of calling Yang a “bad” Asian American for his supposed derogation of his own community. First, the campaign was funded, especially in its earliest stages, not by an established Democratic Party donor base but by Yang’s own Asian American social networks in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle, and his fundraising chair was the Asian American actor Brian Yang; that is to say, Andrew Yang represents an entire elite Asian American social world that most of the media simply had no idea existed at all and that possesses the pride, collegiality, political conviction, and discretionary income to propel a candidate, whom most of the electorate had never heard of before, all the way through the New Hampshire primary.

Critical race theory emphasizes the social, political and historical implications and contexts of race and racism in the USA, centralizing the perspectives of people of color (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995). This approach has made useful interventions into public discourses, originally appropriated from the field of legal research. Since 1995, this theoretical framework has provided much needed insight into the lived experience of race and racism through the use of ‘counter-narratives’. These first hand accounts of racialized experiences subvert mainstream knowledge because the latter has rarely acknowledged institutional investments in race and racism. Counter-narratives by racial minorities not only help subjects to ‘name one’s own reality’ but they provide alternative, sometimes contradictory perspectives to Eurocentric or White American views. In addition to centralizing marginalized accounts of the effects of race and racism, critical race theorists recognize the larger social and historical landscape that informs these experiences. Social policies, however, have increasingly incorporated these narratives about disenfranchisement and inequality to further educational reform agendas that extend, rather than challenge, the logic of racism in the US educational system. For instance, data on racial disparities in schools have been used to support NCLB, which researchers have argued does not rectify but, instead, exacerbates inequalities. Although stressing the importance of counter-narratives from marginalized students is a critical challenge to the history of racial subjugation in education, the fact that these narratives can be incorporated institutionally, or worse co-opted, may be a red herring, necessitating critical discussions.3 Perhaps in lieu of narrating from the position of the racialized subject to demonstrate the effects of racism, an approach that centers on the formative role of the state and its policy mandates in shaping these racial identities may be more helpful.4 More directly, I advocate for an analysis of the constitutive relationship between racial fantasies, state policies and racial formations. Fantasies, Verhaeghe (1999) explains, are the means by which reality——including our perceptions and relationships——is constructed. That is, they do not merely operate as escape mechanisms from difficult worlds. On the contrary, they shape worlds. In this sense, it is important for policy pundits and scholars not only to evaluate the effects of policy on racial groups per se, but also to critically analyze the racializing effects and racial motivations behind educational policy. Scholars should analyze not only the material effects of racism and race, but also the effects of racial ideology. Leonardo (2005) writes about the pervasive role that ‘racial ideology’ plays in shaping subjectivities and social relationships (p. 406). Every subject is informed and constituted through the inescapable ideology of racism. Emphasizing the role of racial ideologies challenges race-conscious scholars to examine race as part and parcel of racial ideology, beyond reason, unconsciously adopted and performed. This type of emphasis does not discount the empirical data on racial inequalities in education, but explores how race is not only a social or historical construct, but one inscribed by language and projections. Traditional discourses on race and schooling draw from concepts of race that are often based upon fossilized conceptions of race, what David Marriott (2007) calls, ‘racial imagos’ (p. 208). When one looks at the ideological machinations of critical race theory in education, racial subjects are presumed to pre-date racist acts. However, Marriott’s attention to ‘racial imagos’ challenges this approach to move beyond materiality and to analyze the centrality of racial fantasies, particularly the anti-Black fantasies which he argues are inextricably haunted by the history of slavery. Adding Lacanian psychoanalysis to theories of race and educational policy may help to elucidate how racial fantasies and legal mandates inform one another and their effects.

Freud’s theory of melancholia provides a provocative model to consider how processes of assimilation work in the United States and how the depression that characterizes so much of our contemporary culture at the turn of this century might be thought about in relation to particularly marked social groups. In the United States today, assimilation into mainstream culture for people of color still means adopting a set of dominant norms and ideals—whiteness, heterosexuality, middle-class family values—often foreclosed to them. The loss of these norms—the reiterated loss of whiteness as an ideal, for example—establishes one melancholic framework for delineating assimilation and racialization processes in the United States precisely as a series of failed and unresolved integrations. Let us return for a moment to Freud’s (1917) essay, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in which he attempts to draw a clear distinction between these two psychic states through the question of “successful” and “failed” resolutions to loss. Freud reminds us at the start of this essay that “[m]ourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on. In some people the same influences produce melancholia instead of mourning and we consequently suspect them of a pathological disposition” (p. 243). Mourning, unlike melancholia, is a psychic process in which the loss of an object or ideal occasions the withdrawal of libido from that object or ideal. This withdrawal cannot be enacted at once; instead, it is a gradual letting go. Libido is detached bit by bit so that, eventually, the mourner is able to declare the object dead and to invest in new objects. In Freud’s initial definition of the concept, melancholia is pathological precisely because it is a mourning without end. Interminable grief is the result of the melancholic’s inability to resolve the various conflicts and ambivalences that the loss of the loved object A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia 671  or ideal effects. In other words, the melancholic cannot “get over” this loss—cannot work out this loss in order to invest in new objects. To the extent that ideals of whiteness for Asian Americans (and other groups of color) remain unattainable, processes of assimilation are suspended, conflicted, and unresolved. The irresolution of this process places the concept of assimilation within a melancholic framework. Put otherwise, mourning describes a finite process that might be reasonably aligned with the popular American myth of immigration, assimilation, and the melting pot for dominant white ethnic groups. In contrast, melancholia describes an unresolved process that might usefully describe the unstable immigration and suspended assimilation of Asian Americans into the national fabric. This suspended assimilation—this inability to blend into the “melting pot” of America—suggests that, for Asian Americans, ideals of whiteness are continually estranged. They remain at an unattainable distance, at once a compelling fantasy and a lost ideal. In configuring assimilation and melancholia in this particular manner, it is important to challenge Freud’s contention that melancholia ensues from a “pathological disposition”—that it emerges from the disturbance of a one-person psychology rather than the disruption of an intersubjective relationship. In our model, the inability to “get over” the lost ideal of whiteness, we must emphasize, is less individual than social. For instance, Asian Americans are typically seen by the mainstream as perpetual foreigners based on skin color and facial markings. Despite the fact that they may be U.S.-born or despite however long they may have resided here, Asian Americans are continually perceived as eccentric to the nation. At other times, Asian Americans are recognized as hyper “model minorities”— inhumanly productive—and hence pathological to the nation. In both scenarios, mainstream refusal to see Asian Americans as part and parcel of the American “melting pot” is less an individual failure to blend in with the whole than a socially determined interdiction. Indeed, Freud (1917) suggests in “Mourning and Melancholia” that melancholia may proceed from “environmental influences” (p. 243) rather than internal conditions that threaten the existence of the object or ideal. Freud (1917) goes on to delineate the debilitating psychic consequences of melancholia. When faced with unresolved grief, he tells us, the melancholic preserves the lost object or ideal by incorporating it into the ego and establishing an ambivalent identification with it—ambivalent precisely because of the unresolved and conflicted nature of this forfeiture. From a slightly different perspective, we might say that the melancholic makes every conceivable effort to retain the lost object, to keep it alive within the domain of the psyche. However, the tremendous costs of maintaining this ongoing relationship to the lost object or ideal are psychically damaging. Freud (1917) notes that the “distinguishing mental features of melancholia are a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment” (p. 244). In identifying with the lost object, the melancholic is able to preserve it but only as a type of haunted, ghostly identification. That is, the melancholic assumes the emptiness of the lost object or ideal, identifies with this emptiness, and thus participates in his or her own selfdenigration and ruination of self-esteem. Freud (1917) summarizes the distinction between mourning and melancholia in this oft-quoted remark: “In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself” (p. 246). He contends that melancholia is one of the most difficult of psychic conditions both to confront and to cure, as it is largely an unconscious process. “In yet other cases,” Freud observes, one feels justified in maintaining the belief that a loss of the kind occurred, but one cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost, and it is all the more reasonable to suppose that the patient cannot consciously perceive what he has lost either. This, indeed, might be so even if the patient is aware of the loss which has given rise to his melancholia, but only in the sense that he knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him [p. 245]. Freud tells us that the depression often accompanying melancholia is extremely dangerous, characterized by the tendency to suicide (p. 252). Here, we must add, suicide may not merely be physical; it may also be a psychical erasure of one’s identity—racial, sexual, or gender identity, for example.

There was a time, not too long ago, when race in America was synonymous with the black-white dichotomy. But since the United States reformed its immigration policy and reopened its borders to newcomers, immigrants and their children have transformed the racial landscape of this country. In the past decade or so alone, the immigrant population has grown tremendously, from thirty million at the turn of the twenty-first century to over forty million today. The Pew Research Center’s comprehensive study of Asian Americans, titled “The Rise of Asian Americans,” surprised many by pointing out that Asian Americans, not Latinos, constituted the fastest growing racial group, and much of the growth is due to international migration. More than a third (36 percent) of the new immigrants who came to this country in 2010 were of Asian American or Pacific Islander descent, compared to 31 percent of Latino origin. Over the past half century, Asian Americans grew from fewer than one million (or 0.6 percent of the total US population) in 1960 to more than nineteen million (or 6 percent of the US population) in 2013.1 Although Asian Americans compose a tiny proportion of the US population, they form an increasingly visible racial minority group. Many Americans assume that Asian Americans congregate along the coastal states of the Pacific West, but in fact their numbers have increased most rapidly in new destinations of the US South, a region considered to be the “geographic center of black-white relations.”2 Asian Americans have now complicated Americans’ notions of race. By virtue of their presence all over the country, it is now impossible for nineteen million people of Asian origins to remain unseen. As the contributors of the following chapters demonstrate, Asian Americans have carved out niches and made themselves visible within many arenas of American life—schools and colleges, community-based organizations, suburbs and ethnoburbs, neighborhoods and “gayborhoods,” political movements, and even professional sports leagues. Asian American immigrants and their children work in every echelon of the mainstream and ethnic labor markets— professional occupations, service sectors, hospitality industries, and health care and medicine—and have achieved measureable positive socioeconomic outcomes. Unlike the European and Asian immigrants of yesteryear, they excel in the education arena and fare well in American society on economic terms. They also have more resources and technology to intimately and economically tether themselves to the home countries they left behind. The emerging popularity of social media has helped democratize American pop culture, and Asian Americans have used the Internet to raise social consciousness (e.g., 18millionrising. com, Hyphen magazine), blog about Asian American racial injustices (e.g., Angry Asian Man), and build a fan base for their music and comedy (e.g., The Fung Brothers of Monterey Park, CA). Historically touted as “forever foreigners,” Asian Americans throughout the United States are weaving themselves into the tapestry of American society and continue to be lauded as “the model minority.” Yet despite significant advances in social mobility, Asian Americans have yet to achieve a social status in the United States that is on par with that of their European counterparts of yesteryear. In spite of the widespread popularity of the “model minority” trope, there are Asian Americans who are poor and struggle to make ends meet, who barely make it into community colleges because of both academic and financial challenges, who live in the shadows because of their legal status, and who continue to be subject to overt and covert forms of racial discrimination on a daily basis. No matter what their levels of cultural and economic assimilation, they are still considered the racial other because of their phenotype, even those who are adopted by and raised in white families and communities for their entire lives. They continue to face a bamboo ceiling that blocks their mobility to leadership positions. Their representation in upper-level management in corporations, college and university administrations, Hollywood televisions and films, and even the US Congress remains negligible. Despite the fact that American society is more open than ever before, and an Asian American basketball player in the NBA has evolved into a national news sensation, Asian America is still on the margin of mainstream America. As French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr famously declared, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” Even the Pew Research Center report about the “rise” of Asian Americans was rife with controversy. To the credit of the organization, they consulted with several of the leading Asian American social scientists in the country; however, it was their reporting of the data that brought tremendous angst to Asian American leaders around the country. At its heart, the report seemed celebratory in nature—in total congruence with the model minority stereotype. In opting to highlight the successes, the report marginalized the segments of the community that were most in need. For every Asian American success story, there are many more Asian American families and communities who continue to suffer through the indignant effects of racism, sexism, homophobia, violence, and poverty. Given the scarcity of think tanks that address Asian American issues, the Pew Research Center report was a missed opportunity. In the eyes of many Asian American activists, scholars, and policymakers, they were “blindsided” by a one-dimensional depiction of what they know—and have proven with their life’s work—to be a culturally and socioeconomically heterogeneous population.3

That Asian American success has traditionally been characterized in terms of economically-productive capitalist labor practices rather than “purposeless” play is in some sense unsurprising, for historically, the group has often been defined exclusively in terms of its capacity for work.1 But insofar as Asian Americans continue to be culturally cast as “good workers: industrious, focused, dependable, accommodating, serious-minded, eminently useful” (Wong 210, emphasis omitted), it is more important than ever to recognize how their identities as good players have been and can be used to either challenge or reinforce the domesticating and disciplining discourse of the model minority stereotype. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has observed that the seductive capacity of games lies in their ability to create an “imaginary universe of perfect competition or perfect equality of opportunity . . . without heredity or acquired properties . . . so that at each moment anyone can become anything” (241). The stereotypical immigrant fantasy that, as the main character in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club puts it, “you could be anything you wanted to be in America,” is thus simultaneously the game player’s fantasy. And in the American cultural imagination, as Viet Nguyen and others have observed, Asian Americans have proven themselves to be some of the most accomplished game players out there: the stereotype of the model minority, after all, is of an individual who, unlike other non-white communities that “would demand changes from the system,” instead “strive[s] to succeed by [that system’s] rules.”2

Serious Play asks after the terms of this fundamental relationship between games and racial difference by exploring a host of mainly Asian American literary works which, across a multitude of genres, grapple with J.C. Friedrich von Schiller’s famous assertion that “man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays” (Letter XV). For those who have historically been treated as less than human—and especially in the case of Asian Americans and African Americans, for whom, as David Eng has pointed out, questions of ontology so often get cast as questions of masculinity3 —playing, whether in the realm of aesthetics, athletics, or parlor games, is always something more serious than “mere” child’s play. Serious Play therefore considers gameplay not merely as a literary trope but as a formal and thematic vehicle that allows minority authors to articulate their relationship to the American nation-state, to history, to language, and to what it actually means, as a racialized subject, to be “in the game” at all.

By drawing attention to ethnic variation in our analysis of the experiences of AAPI subgroups (CARE, 2013), we hope to refute the model minority stereotype and call for additional research on how immigration, socioeconomic status, and schooling experiences contribute to disparities in educational outcomes. Omi and Winant (2015) describe this type of analysis as a process of ‘‘rearticulation’’ of racial groups and suggest that redefining racial categories is one way to counter the effects of racial inequality: This process of rearticulation produces new subjectivity by making use of information and knowledge already present in the subject’s mind. [. . .] we define rearticulation as a practice of discursive reorganization or reinterpretation of ideological themes and interests already present in subjects’ consciousness, such that these elements obtain new meaning or coherence. (p. 165) In the following sections we investigate if and how a disaggregated analysis of discipline patterns among AAPIs can facilitate the process of rearticulation. Central to rearticulation is the acknowledgement of how power manifests in the racial order. As previously stated, the seemingly arbitrary process of categorization is a social manifestation of White dominance, a way in which White has retained its place at the top of the racial hierarchy by shifting who is considered White and who gains the privileges of that Whiteness. Thus, while we advance rearticulation of race categories in order to ‘‘highlight racial differences and particularities’’ (Omi & Winant, 2015, p. 260), this process also ‘‘acknowledges the social structures and practices of race and racism: the vast fabric of inclusion and exclusion, advantage and disadvantage, and power and powerlessness that are built into the social system’’ (Omi & Winant, 2015, p. 261). As critical race theory highlights, it is necessary to challenge ‘‘the traditional claims of [. . .] objectivity, meritocracy, color and gender blindness, race and gender neutrality, and equal opportunity’’ (Solorzano, 1998, p. 122); thus examining racial categorization is not only a practice in pointing out unseen disparities but also an effort toward challenging the dominant ideology of a racial hierarchy that maintains White dominance. In education, critical race theory has pointed out the contradictory ways educational systems operate, with potential to oppress and marginalize coexisting with potential to emancipate and empower (Ladson-Billings, 1998; Tate, 1997). By rearticulating racial categories through the examination of a mechanism that oppresses and marginalizes—school discipline—we seek to facilitate a greater understanding of contesting systemic racial inequality in education. While racial formation theory is useful for understanding why and how existing racial categories misrepresent the experiences of AAPI subgroups, it does not explain the presence of disparities between groups that may be evident when a more detailed analysis is possible. For this reason, we draw on Carter and Welner’s (2013) framing of opportunity gaps to illuminate the discipline gap further. Departing from the conventional academic focus on achievement gaps between groups—captured by disparities in test scores, graduation, and failure, among other outcomes—Carter and Welner advance a theoretical shift to opportunity gaps, which they write, draws ‘‘our attention from outcomes to inputs—to the deficiencies in the foundational components of societies, schools, and communities that produce significant differences in educational—and ultimately socioeconomic—outcomes’’ (p. 3). Within these systems, an ‘‘education debt,’’ or ‘‘forgone schooling resources that we could have (should have) been investing in (primarily) low income kids, which deficit leads to a variety of social problems’’ (Ladson-Billings, 2006, p. 6), accrues that produces disparities. From this point of view, racial gaps in achievement—between broader racial groups, and between smaller subgroups—are influenced by a long history of exclusion from public education, unequal opportunities to access quality schooling, and uneven investment in students of color, to name but a few (Ladson-Billings, 2006). In this article, we examine another component that produces achievement gaps—school discipline. Determining whether particular groups are disproportionately affected by school discipline practices is essential to ensuring that all students have access to educational opportunities (Losen & Gillespie, 2012), thus equitable opportunity to achieve (Ladson-Billings, 2006). As we show in this analysis of state-level data, patterns of ethnic differentiation in school discipline can expose gaps in educational opportunities. In illuminating these gaps in opportunity, our hope is that our study will contribute to efforts to rearticulate the boundaries of race in ways that make it possible to better understand discipline disparities and easier to address evidence of discrimination and mistreatment.

To live in the world that Black, Indigenous, and other people of color dream about requires a complete stop, utter end, total destruction of anti-Blackness. And I say this not as someone who has unlearned anti-Blackness but is unlearning, with the knowledge that the end of my oppression is bound up with Black liberation and with the knowledge that Black folks deserve unconditional freedom regardless. There is no quick-and-easy microwaveable version of unlearning anti-Blackness. It is a lifelong, necessary commitment. Here are some things I’ve noticed while unlearning. 1. Non-Black Asians Create Distance from Blackness One of the ways that we Asian Americans attempt to show that we are valuable under the Euro-American gaze is by distancing ourselves from what we perceive to be Blackness – meaning we draw ourselves in stark contrast to the narrow stereotypes that non-Black people have already assigned to Black people. In the context of the beauty industry, this results in non-Black folks finding ways to bleach our skin, color our eyes and hair, and do our makeup in ways that not only reaches towards whiteness but also distances us from Blackness. For Asian Americans, the lighter the skin, the more beautiful you perceived to be. And across the Asian continent, lighter skin is a mark of beauty, while darkness is equated to ugliness. Girls, especially, have their bodies policed to make sure they conform to anti-Black ideas of beauty. As for income, Asian Americans often struggle to attain financial and political wealth in order to move out of poor, Black neighborhoods and prove to white people that we are not “like the Black folks.” As a result, we willfully buy into the “model minority myth,” which is the puke-inducing idea that Asian Americans are the good, hardworking example of what a minority should be. The term was coined by sociologist William Petersen in 1966 to describe the success of Japanese Americans in the face of anti-Japanese sentiment. Despite the fact that he was only describing a single ethnicity out of the many ethnicities in Asia – go read a map to remind yourself of how fucking big Asia is – people then began using the term to refer to Asian Americans as a whole. Yeah, people started using this model minority myth while talking about all immigrants from the entire continent of Asia – that shit was ridiculous to say the least. This myth only holds true if Asian Americans are willing to maintain that Black folks are a “bad minority.” The assigned value of non-Black Asian Americans is entirely dependent on the lack of value they assign to Blackness. But the truth is that in 2015, many communities of Asian Americans have begun to access the privileges that have been traditionally associated with white Americans. The danger is in saying that Asian Americans, as a whole, are a successful minority by capitalist standards, because there are many Southeast Asians, for example, disproportionately living in poverty and with mental illness. There are many undocumented Asians, too, who are not even taken into account in the rare cases that Asian Americans are even included in race-oriented surveys. There are also South and West Asians who are being victimized by the onslaught of Islamophobic hatred. The thing is that this model minority myth did not consider at all that Black Asians exist, and that Black Asians are facing the inconceivable violence of anti-Blackness, too. The colonial imposition of racial categories was not made to uphold the complexities of bodies and identities. Where do Black Asians fit in the context of anti-Blackness and a model minority? 2. Black Asians Exist and They Will Not Be Erased The most dangerous way that non-Black Asians distance ourselves from Blackness is by conceptualizing the Asian American as completely devoid of Blackness. When people hear “Asian,” the majority immediately think of a pale-skinned person with straight, black hair – someone who looks like Lucy Liu. The image that Asians and non-Asians have in their heads about who Asians are is not just woefully monolithic, but also removed from Blackness. When Asian identity – how Asians understand ourselves in relation to the world as racialized people – makes no room for Blackness, it results in the violent erasure of Black Asians from the face of the earth. If Black Asians aren’t known to exist, there is no consideration for the violence they face. There is no consideration to the multiplicities of Blackness that are reduced by non-Black folks. When Black Asians are erased, non-Black Asians have an easier time creating distance between ourselves and Blackness, gaining illusory value at the expense of Black people. One of the functions of white supremacy and anti-Blackness is to simplify the histories, ancestries, and identities of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color. This is why many people don’t know about Blackness in Asia and among the diaspora. It’s much more convenient to believe that Blackness has no place in Asian identity in order to more easily participate in the capitalist dynamics of whiteness. As a result, misinformed accusations of cultural appropriation, for example, ensue. South Asians have accused East Africans of appropriation for wearing headpieces, henna, and jewelry that are commonly associated with South Asians. Despite being separated only by the Indian Ocean, the ties that connect South Asians and East Africans are strained by non-Black Asians’ inclination to set the terms and conditions of how they want to use Blackness. All ties to Blackness are erased when non-Black Asians feel the need to monopolize our cultures, but there is no hesitation when non-Black Asians across the world want to appropriate Black American cultures. What space can Black Asians find in Asian communities when Blackness is unwanted and mistreated yet simultaneously stolen and parodied? How can Black Asians, and Black folks as a whole, feel safe with non-Black Asians when the perpetrator of the Charleston massacre wrote on his website that East Asians “are by nature very racist and could be great allies of the White race?” Dear non-Black Asians, it has long been time to shift our priorities. 3. Getting Our Social Justice Priorities Right When the Black Lives Matter movement was beginning to be derailed by those who were using #AsianLivesMatter, it was clear that these non-Black Asians didn’t realize that Black Asians exist too and that if they actually gave a fuck about Asian people at all, they would support Black Asians and Black Lives Matter. But aside from that self-serving reason, the derailing of Black Lives Matter also hurts non-Black Asians because white supremacy relies on anti-Blackness to survive. A white supremacist world is not sustainable without anti-Blackness fueling it. And because white supremacy, and oppressive systems in general, rely on erasure, non-Black Asians forget that before Europeans started the Atlantic slave trade, there was the Arab slave trade of East Africans. Grappling with our anti-Blackness as Asian Americans has to take place both within and outside of a white supremacist context, because non-Black people committing anti-Blackness predates European anti-Blackness. This is not to say that non-Black Asians are more responsible than Europeans for anti-Blackness; rather, I am pointing out the fact that non-Black Asians certainly did not need white people to instruct them on how to be anti-Black. Claiming that anti-Blackness is a result of white conditioning is shirking responsibility. White supremacist politics of erasure makes us forget that the crux of white supremacy is anti-Blackness. When we forget this, and proceed to be anti-Black, we only support the white supremacist structure that we long to destroy. My call to action for my fellow non-Black Asians is to re-envision our place in racial justice. Rather than simply claiming allyship to Black justice movements we need to understand that Black liberation is crucial to any foreseeable future for racial justice, which means it is our duty to contribute to Black liberation too. White supremacy will never end if non-Black people of color continue, whether consciously or not, to uphold white supremacy by hurting Black folks. It’s time to stop believing that we’ll be safe by accessing some white privileges. We need to be vigilant and understand that the settler state called America, founded on stolen Indigenous territories, will never be here to benefit us. Remember when the government decided that they would be more blatant with their racism and rounded up tens of thousands of Japanese American families to incarcerate them? The United States could do the exact same thing again to South Asian and Arab Americans as Islamophobia grows, and it’ll again be for “national security.” The Southeast Asian refugees who thought they could find safety in America are being deported once again. As we speak, the imperialist American military is wreaking havoc all across Asia, resulting in the deaths of marginalized people like our trans sister Jennifer Laude, a Filipina trans woman killed at 26 by a US Marine. Reaping the benefits of white supremacy may be appealing, but it is ultimately poisonous. Fighting anti-Blackness gets everyone closer to real justice. How We Can Create the World We Deserve Many of the structures that harm Asian Americans, like law enforcement, the prison system, and the military industry, harm Black folks the most, and that includes Black Asians. The efforts of Black Lives Matter, in resisting structures that harm us, will benefit all people of color, whether that’s intended or not. Among Asian communities, Black Lives Matter will benefit both Black Asians and non-Black Asians. But we can’t expect Black folks to do all of the work for non-Black people. We can’t let justice be achieved off the backs of Black people. To ask Black activists and organizers to do all of the work is in itself anti-Black. This is everyone’s battle. Beyond supporting Black Lives Matter because of how the movement helps us, let’s support Black Lives Matter simply because Black Lives Matter and the whole damn world needs to know. We need to reframe our discussions around racial justice and recognize that ending anti-Blackness should be a top priority. Whether we’re committed to Black liberation, the end of anti-Asian oppression, the abolition of white supremacy, or the possibility of a better world at all, we need to prioritize ending anti-Blackness. Now what does that mean? It means centering Black people in our racial justice struggles. It means unconditionally demanding justice for Akai Gurley, who was murdered by Peter Liang of the NYPD. It means centering Black Asians in any and all discussions about Asian identity, since Black Asians would largely be the most victimized of all Asians. And it means redistributing financial, political, and emotional resources to Black folks, especially Black femmes. Ultimately, it can mean the abolition of anti-Black structures like police and prisons, and the decolonization of land owned by anti-Black settler colonial governments.

I would like to observe that in my own life, here in South Carolina, the first person to reach out to me on the morning of March 17 was my friend Dr. Jermaine Johnson, state house representative for District 80 and the first African American to hold this seat. He was on his way to the state legislature that morning to fight against the open-carry bill:

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Against this dominant anemic understanding of anti-Blackness, I argue that a proper understanding of racial ontology in an anti-Black world would mean that anti-Black violence actually includes the vulnerability to harm of low-income and otherwise vulnerable Asian Americans. 

In other words, there is no current public framework to discuss anti-Asian violence within an anti-Black world. Toward that framework, I submit to you today that anti-Asian violence must be understood as an effect and feature of anti-Blackness, a constitutive feature of an anti-Black world that requires all manner of racist violence for it to house racial capitalism. I will then briefly discuss the political liabilities of this epistemic gap in our intellectual culture, contextualizing it within the academic-theoretical regime of Asian American Studies, whose signature affect is shame and whose theoretical ambition has been defined by willed self-erasure. Then I will discuss how the academic abandonment of the identity and group-concept of “Asian American” has, in my view, directly contributed to this political morass, as this is the feature shared by both the academic voices as well as the reactionary ones in Asian America. Finally, I will close with my own AfroAsian and Black-feminist prognostication toward a proper understanding of how we comprehend and respond to anti-Asian violence.

The purpose of this study has been to understand how Filipino American and Korean American young people negotiate two seemingly oppositional racial stereotypes. It has sought to understand the differential implications of racial stereotypes for internalizing and externalizing behavioral outcomes based on important social positions. Informed by racial triangulation theory (Kim, 1999) and Coll et al.’s (1996) integrative model, four questions were addressed: (1) Are there identifiable patterns of racial stereotype profiles among samples of Filipino American and Korean American adolescents and emerging adults? (2) Are there relations between racial stereotypes and behavioral outcomes? (3) Are there interaction effects between two subdomains of MMS and PFS? And (4) Do the moderating relations examined in (3) further vary by social position? The current study advances knowledge in three ways. First, unlike previous research that investigates how other racial groups consider Asian Americans in regard to PFS and MMS, this study explores the perceptions of Asian American young people themselves. Identifying the patterns of internalized racial stereotypes has important implications for advancing our understanding of Asian Americans as active agents who respond to an unsupportive environment that imposes conflicting stereotypes (Bronfenbrenner, 1999). Secondly, this study is the first to explore the concurrent effects of these two racial stereotypes and their interaction effects on both internalizing and externalizing behavioral outcomes. Racial triangulation theory (Kim, 1999) provides strong theoretical grounds for investigating the concurrent impacts of PFS and MMS on Asian American young people. In addition, there is strong empirical support for investigating simultaneously both internalizing and externalizing behavioral outcomes for Asian American young people with a pattern of paradoxical developmental outcomes (Choi, Park, Lee, et al., 2020). The knowledge gained from the current study contributes to the etiology of the so-called Asian American youth paradox and to an understanding of how racial stereotypes may shape behavioral patterns. Thirdly, this dissertation considers how concurrent effects of racial stereotypes vary by salient social positions. No prior study has investigated how the interaction effects of PFS and MMS vary by developmental stage (adolescence vs. emerging adulthood), place of birth, or gender among Filipino American and Korean American subgroups. Findings from the current study show that in order to develop appropriate and effective public health or school interventions that aim to support Asian American young people suffering from the harmful effects of racial stereotypes, these nuances and specificities need to be thoroughly understood.