Perm do Both – anti-black ontology must be understood through a lens of asianness

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.

Anti-Black and Anti-Asian Propaganda

Accompanying the recent boom in Asian American cultural and political representation has been the highest-ever visibility of Asian American expertise on race, whose nominally progressive or even radical antiracism is attached to access to giant public megaphones. Along with many of my family and friends, I have been gladdened by the proliferation of thoughtful expositions and reflections in the last two weeks. As the Korean American hip-hop legend Jonathan Park, a.k.a. Dumbfoundead, tweeted that weekend: “Welcome, born again Asians, better late than never.” Until two weeks ago, while familiar tropes of diseased yellow hordes were rehearsed by the ruling elite and many others for the past year, the Asian American intelligentsia had no sense of Asian American solidarity to offer as a public-facing response to, among countless other harms and atrocities, the murder of Mr. Ratanapakdee. Consider the cruelty of the timing of Asian American intellectual silence and self-erasure that coincides with the current onslaught of anti-Asian sentiment, bigotry, and violence during the coronavirus pandemic.

Model-minority mirage, myth, and propaganda — and often my own class’s complicity in cosigning or falling prey to them — have now fully naturalized the notion that Asian Americans and African Americans are inherently in opposition. This notion is historically, and at present, false. The notion that Asian Americans, seemingly across all class strata, naturally despise Black folks—because of internalized white supremacy, perceived economic competition, or both—is one vicious form of what Michael Omi and Howard Winant famously argue as the “racial project” of  “making people up” through rendering racial ideology a part of our Gramscian “common sense.” This ideological naturalization is simply a neoliberal update to the American racial project devised to divide people of color and ultimately all of us.

Generally speaking, it is true that Asian American thinkers have failed to claim our own voice through our own racialized status within an anti-Black world. A historically determined desire for white liberal approval has made some of us truly believe that we are protected under white supremacy. This notion is also historically, and at present, false. Ironically, even the contemporary language of antiracism is now mobilized by some academically comfortable Asian Americans to side with elites rather than to defend the most vulnerable Asian Americans in our society.

To echo Claire Jean Kim’s idioms for the Asian American presence within a system she calls “racial triangulation,” some economically comfortable Asian Americans are choosing permanently inferior yet “relatively valorized” status in a world constituted by anti-Blackness:

My second argument is that Asian Americans have been racially triangulated vis-à-vis Blacks and Whites, or located in the field of racial positions with reference to these two other points. Racial triangulation occurs by means of two types of simultaneous, linked processes: (1) processes of “relative valorization,” whereby dominant group A (Whites) valorizes subordinate group B (Asian Americans) relative to subordinate group C (Blacks) on cultural and/or racial grounds in order to dominate both groups, but especially the latter, and (2) processes of “civic ostracism,” whereby dominate group A(Whites) constructs subordinate group B (Asian Americans) as immutably foreign and unassimilable with Whites on cultural and/or racial grounds in order to ostracize them from the body politic and civic membership (see Figure 1). Processes of relative valoriza-

It is as if the “civic ostracism” portion of Kim’s thesis has been maligned by our intellectual elites, and that our status as an “immutably foreign” Other, which makes all of us vulnerable to racist violence, especially in eras defined by xenophobic sentiment in general and Sinophobia in particular, has been lost on us as we continue doing our part on behalf of the white-supremacist work of naturalizing a presumptive division between Blacks and Asians in America.

Once this naturalized division is the starting-point for analysis, a white-supremacist notion of people-of-color intramural racism takes over our discourse, and our uniquely Asian American voice gets scripted toward what Jared Ball calls “message force multiplication.” Our recent language reveals how fundamentally committed we have been to the spurious idea that Asian Americans are complicit in anti-Black racism if 1) we demand justice for Mr. Ratanapakdee’s murder and 2) name that murder accurately as racist violence. Consider, for instance, how silly a pronouncement it is to declare first, as so many of us tend to do these days, that “anti-Black racism is ‘real’ in Asian American communities.” Even the consistently progressive Asian Americans Advancing Justice Atlanta promoted *this* workshop, just days after the March 16 murders, that framed Asian American anti-Black racism as a central issue:

As a researcher in anti-Blackness, allow me to respond in unequivocal terms: Where isn’t anti-Black racism “real” in an anti-Black world? Asian American intellectuals and organizations now speak as if anti-Blackness needed to hear our recognition of its realness, of its ontological animation, as if it cares, and as if our recognition of it would stop its violence. We speak that pronouncement as if Asian American communities are more anti-Black than white ones, which is absurd on its face given the historical linkages between all expressions of white supremacy in an anti-Black world, beginning from the racialized class exploitation that pits the most desperate and vulnerable Black folks in our society against precarious Asian immigrants often rendered the middleman minority beneath the petite bourgeoisie. It is more than strange that anti-Black racism in Asian America has become a central trope during this period of our heightened vulnerability to violence, and rather than defense against Twitter racists, I argue that this racist trope is being expressed, even by some of our own, because we have not had the courage to articulate antiracist cultural and political frameworks of our own in this moment.