At – Libinal economy – aff is a pre-req

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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As Dr. Johnson tweeted, the traumatic experience of racist violence provides an opportunity, as tragic as such opportunity is, to think together about what minoritized groups have in common, and just this tweet, I would argue, gives lie to the scandalous, propagandistic notion that Black Americans and Asian Americans are related primarily by antagonism and misapprehension.

Now, allow me a brief historical and personal reflection on the political economy of the American racial project since 1965, the year that the anti-Asian immigration quotas were, at last, abolished. Even as 1965 would, in turn, start to skew the Asian American population, in the words of Christopher Fan, as the country’s most “occupationally concentrated,” and even if it is the case that the political economy of Asian immigration has aligned the majority of the most visible and privileged Asian Americans with the white well-to-do, our common-sense framework for understanding our racial consciousness misses key components of what Asian American professional-managerial-class experiences look like.

So for instance, it is certainly the case that Asian Americans in the corporate sector, including in academia, are privy to the anti-Black sentiments, remarks, and hostilities of our white peers in ways by and large kept secret from our African American counterparts. This has been an abiding feature of my own life since I arrived in this country at the age of six. It has been an unceasing and predictable psychic violence that has actually gotten worse as I develop my academic career and become further siloed into academicization.

White colleagues will comment to me about Black colleagues or students or staff or other everyday people in ways that presume my alliance with their racist anti-Black assumptions. This goes on in my life despite my professional positioning as a professor of African American Studies and as someone affiliated with some of the best-known Black scholars of our day, including my friends in this room. Having lived in liberal college towns most of my life, one irony I have traced—again, since the age of six—is that these views and presumptions come from white people who consider themselves virtuous, educated, woke, and above racism altogether, even though by the sociological data, as Adolph Reed always reminds us, it is they who live the most segregated lives of anyone in the United States. Rather than the racist presumption that Asian Americans in these situations simply mimic and reproduce this anti-Black racism, it occurs to me that we need a much more complex framework for how this particular phenomenon affects Asian American consciousness regarding anti-Blackness. So, for instance, if a white person spews anti-Black sentiment to an Asian American because of their racist presumption that Asian Americans are “white adjacent” or “honorary white” or whatever, then why do we not call this what it is: anti-Asian racism?

In this way, it seems to me that the now common-sense presumption that Asian Americans function as preternaturally anti-Black needs to be exfoliated against the counternarrative of the surplus of both anti-Black and anti-Asian racism that saturates the professional (and other social) experiences of even the elite Asian Americans. Relatedly, there has always been a racist presumption that even in the professional-managerial class, Asian Americans and African Americans have little in common and that the model minority myth drives a wedge between them. Yet since it is the case that the Black segment of the professional-managerial class has quadrupled in size between 1965 and 2000, parallel to the occupational concentration of their Asian American counterparts, there are clear sociological connections between their experiences, especially in terms of opportunity structures, capital access, non-white professional communities and networks, in addition to workplace racism, the lack of established professional pipelines, and the precarity and pressures of wealth accumulation. I think of my own POC staff and faculty friends, predominantly Black and Asian American, from the tony private high school in west Los Angeles where I taught for a year before my current job, and how deeply we remain bonded from our shared experiences professionally as well as extramurally. Even while we were catering largely to extreme wealth, there was more pro-Black consciousness in that space than any public or private university English department I have worked in.

This is all to say that we also speak as if we have not reckoned with the Ontological Turn in Black Studies, specifically the theoretical tendency and field of thought known as Afropessimism that has singlehandedly amplified the precise notion that anti-Blackness is axiomatic to reality itself. Once white-liberal vacuity takes the place of an organic analytic derived from shared people-of-color consciousness, our response can become distorted as well, as people of all colors begin to believe that African Americans cannot see the difference between shallow white-defined gestures of allyship and true shared integrity in the demand for justice. The Black Radical Tradition, for one, has always required such integrity. And it is, again, simply a matter of naturalized anti-Blackness that makes us think that Black folks can’t easily discern the difference between lethal anti-Asian violence and systemic anti-Black racism.

Anti-Blackness does not need anyone to be aware of it. Anti-Blackness structures reality itself. Anti-Blackness, in addition to its constitutive violence first and foremost to Black people, also expresses itself to other racialized people. Further still, consider just how many Asian Americans, already affected by the threat and reality of racial violence against ourselves, began navigating and addressing anti-Blackness to impressive effect during the pandemic: in September 2020, 69% of Asian Americans reported supporting Black Lives Matter, in contrast to 55% of the country overall. The general intelligence is rich—and appears, in fact, to be growing, against the grain of false narratives regarding perpetual, irresolvable Black-Asian conflict and administered white-Asian proximity.

Echoing the chorus, Vince Schleitwiler sagely reminds us that renewed Asian American political consciousness ought to begin from solidarity with the Movement for Black Lives, since we only know ourselves as “Asian American” in the first place from this historical alliance: “As the first Asian American movement demonstrated, the development of such a consciousness cannot end anti-Blackness in itself. But it can remind us that no one, including Asian Americans, will be free until Black people are free, and so solidarity against anti-Blackness must be fundamental to our collective self-definition. Because without it, we wouldn’t even know who we are.” What it means for Asian Americans to know ourselves—and to love ourselves—is to align our unique racial being with Blackness in an anti-Black world. Yet such alignment has been precluded by the cultural and political backdrop I have sketched here, in which the default tendency of thought has been, particularly for elite and aspiring Asian Americans, to mimic the false notion that our group is by default, by self-hating pathology, white-desiring and white-allied.