Racial solidarity cultivates better resistance strategies than racial triangulation. Racial triangulation is pessimistic and forecloses progress

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