AT – set col – Asians want to be white settlers / topic construction of Asian stereotypes

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.

Second, it is clear that given the racial dynamics of the Democratic primary, it is highly unlikely that an Asian American would win the presidency through the currently available channels of previously held elected office, previously held celebrity, and/or previously held oligarchic wealth; that is, it would most likely be through an ideas-centered outsider candidate based on policy principles backed by, yes, the math of technocratic expertise and research, and this person will also be left to their own devices to navigate the anti-Asian racism of both the American electorate at large and the inner workings of the party’s establishment.      

Finally, though Yang did public appearances with Viet Thanh Nguyen and Jeff Yang, not a single Asian American intellectual of national stature became an endorser, revealing the general lack of a “we” within the Asian American intellectual class to rally around the first major viable Asian American candidate. (This left a very small-time untenured professor of African American literature of all things—in South Carolina of all places—as perhaps the most adamant Asian American professorial voice advocating for Yang.[7]) In light of this disunity, it looks especially silly in retrospect that the few times Asian American expertise was called upon with regard to Yang’s candidacy was, again, almost exclusively to step one self-hating toe into the deeper model minority conceptual morass and to leave it at that.

All of this attention to Yang’s alleged performance of a white supremacist stereotype also had the effect of occluding much more interesting connections between his candidacy and his racial self. For instance, it was under America’s nose the entire time of Yang’s candidacy that the concept of Universal Basic Income has a special cultural affinity with East Asian heritage. A variety of Asian American voices on Yang Gang Twitter made the point that the suite of cultural notions embedded within the concept of Universal Basic Income—of money’s symbolism, societal holism, redistributive collectivism, and transformative hospitality—rang true to them in and by way of their community formations.

Thus, to many Asian Americans, it was politically novel yet not culturally shocking that the first viable Asian American presidential candidate was also the first Universal Basic Income candidate. Ronny Chieng, in an excerpt from his recent Netflix special, jokes that “you think rappers love money? Yo, we love money more than anyone! Chinese people love money so much that we have a god of money! We pray to him… for more money!”[8] More directly still, MC Jin, in explicit reference to Yang’s candidacy, cracks the (maybe too-obvious) joke that UBI is Lunar New Year money.[9] Needless to say, these Asian Americans are making light of a cultural difference in ways that could be said to border on racial stereotype. On the other hand, it is revealing that no essay or interview from any academic or political figure has appeared that broaches this obvious compatibility of Asiatic cultural beliefs regarding care and hospitality and Universal Basic Income as a federal policy. In the spirit of Chieng’s invocation of the Taoist god of money, Cáishén, I contend that this compatibility points to the ontological totality to which Asian Americans share privileged access, even here in the western hemisphere, and that the whiteness-saturated notions of individuated subject, agent, citizen, and consumer simply do not.

Given the depths of anti-Asian racism, perhaps it should surprise no one that the white left has not seen and engaged this ontological difference, despite the fact that their own political tradition often coalesces around notions of collectivism and holism as well. Consider, for instance, how Yang’s attempt to make this cultural emphasis on redistributive money apparent to the American electorate was first to focus on the neoliberal savagery of the last 45 years, with a special emphasis on the economic exploitation of the white underclass. In his campaign book, The War On Normal People, Yang describes the political problem of white perceptions of diminishment, scarcity, and resentment: “The group I worry about most is poor whites. Even now, people of color report higher levels of optimism than poor whites, despite worse economic circumstances. It’s difficult to go from feeling like the pillar of one’s society to feeling like an afterthought or failure.”[10]

Yet in March 2019, his campaign’s explicit empathy for the Trump-deceived white underclass was quickly transformed into accusations of Yang being an alt-right sympathizer. Even though the most prescient intellects on race and class of the twentieth century—such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, Cedric Robinson, and Angela Davis—argued that the causes of anti-Black racism are largely based on false white perceptions of economic scarcity, competition, and unworthiness, it was beyond the pale for an Asian American in the twenty-first century to make a similar case, i.e., that in this current iteration of fascism, the majority of Trump sympathizers are simply desperate within neoliberalism and deceived by the extant neoliberal arrangement of power. Yang’s diagnosis of the state of the economic arrangements in our country was similar to that of fellow candidates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, with an emphasis on rising inequality framed historically both by the American economy “since the 1970s” and as a more specific crisis of the last ten years:

Today, inequality has surged to historic levels, with benefits flowing increasingly to the top 1 percent and 20 percent of earners due to an aggregation of capital at the top and increased winter-take-all economics. The top 1 percent have accrued 52 percent of the real income growth in American since 2009.[11]

Yet most followers of both white progressive senators could not hear Yang’s Asian American-voiced prognosis, Universal Basic Income, which immediately before Yang’s candidacy had been enjoying a wave of white-leftist resuscitation by national figures such as Annie Lowrey, Robert Reich, and David Graeber.