Coda - Asian Americans and Anti-Blackness

Summary

As the U.S. goes through a racial reckoning brought on by the police murder of George Floyd in May 2020, Asian Americans are wondering with a new sense of urgency where they fit into the U.S. racial order. This book provides a theoretically innovative and historically grounded answer. Rather than focusing on white supremacy only, it brings structural anti-Blackness—or the organization of collective life around the phobic avoidance of Blackness—back into the picture from which it tends to be redacted. Asian Americans, I argue, are always already constituted as not-white but above all not-Black, and this has been true since the arrival of the first Chinese laborers in mid-nineteenth-century California. Consistently seen as the lesser of two evils, Asian Americans have been structurally advantaged relative to Black people, even as they have been structurally disadvantaged relative to whites. Moreover, the U.S. state has developed a pattern of weaponizing Asian Americans against the Black freedom struggle, invoking them as an alibi for structural anti-Blackness and racial capitalism and choosing to redress anti-Asian racism instead of redressing anti-Black racism. How Asian Americans respond to this dynamic will be the defining issue in Asian American politics in the twenty-first century.