Racial triangulation is flattening and fails to account for the cultural nuances and history of Black and Asian culture

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).