That the church is undergoing a kind of reckoning with its entanglements with racism is not necessarily new news. Multiple theologians have been raising critical awareness of the ways in which the church has perpetuated white supremacy. And the church hierarchy itself in recent years, particularly in the United States, has more overtly acknowledged the sin of racism and the need to respond to the church’s complicity in it. The pastoral letter Open Wide Our Hearts: The Enduring Call to Love—A Pastoral Letter Against Racism (2018) is a prime example of that acknowledgment. But as Cheah points out in no uncertain terms, this letter is indicative of how much more antiracism work the church has yet to do, especially when it comes to its awareness of and response to anti-Asian racism. Reiterating Bryan Massingale’s pointed observation of the letter’s passive voice in talking about racism (which makes racism’s cause vague), Cheah criticizes the letter and its companion, Encountering Christ in Harmony: A Pastoral Response to Our Asian and Pacific Island Brothers and Sisters, for hardly mentioning anti-Asian racism as a function of white supremacy, thus minimizing the force of racism felt by Asian Americans.
To address this shortcoming, Cheah turns to three insidious Asian American tropes: Asian Americans as yellow peril (chapter 1), the model minority (chapter 2), and the perpetual foreigner (chapter 3). He concludes with an account of Jesus that amplifies the preceding chapters. Throughout, Cheah outlines the multiple ways in which white supremacy makes Asian Americans invisible in U.S. racial discourse.
Each chapter surveys numerous sources from Asian American studies (history, religion, sociology). This approach works well in calling out the church’s insufficient attention to the racial plight of Asian Americans. However, the generality in the way the book covers anti-Asian racism raises a number of questions and leaves the reader wanting more. For instance, Cheah recognizes the heterogeneity of Asian American identity when he states that Pacific Islanders experience racism differently from Chinese Americans. And yet, Cheah continues to lump both communities together by interchanging “AAPI” (or “Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders”) and “Asian American” throughout the book and appeals frequently to Filipino/a experiences among other non–East Asians as representative of how Asian Americans experience racism. This is a minor quibble, but it is indicative of the book’s ambiguities. Consider further his discussion of Jung Young Lee’s 1995 book Marginality: The Key to Multicultural Theology in chapter 3. While Cheah insightfully calls attention to Lee’s emphasis on pluralism as a remedy to “centralist thinking” (which fuels the perpetual foreigner stereotype), whether this is a remedy that Asian Americans need more so than the church (or vice versa) is unclear. If church teaching on race falls short with respect to Asian Americans, then it would indeed benefit from non-centralist thinking. Pursuing that proposition would have been interesting and constructive, maybe even radical, but Cheah seems reluctant to go there, and instead focuses on what non-centralist thinking demands of Asian Americans: to “participate in both worlds of Asia and America without being bound by either” (128).
In registering this observation, my question, ultimately, is about the book’s audience, whether it is primarily for church authorities or for non-Asian Catholic theologians, who have traditionally overlooked the problem of Asian American racialization. And, while it is of course true that books are often written for multiple audiences, in this case, clarity on the question would go a long way in elucidating how Cheah is trying to employ Catholic social teaching (CST). He claims that his aim is to supplement the church’s discussion on racism in the two pastoral letters discussed previously (4). Additionally, he notes that the book demonstrates how CST principles are already being lived out by Asian Americans (20, and esp. 165ff). Both aims are accomplished deftly, but one is left wondering if these aims end up distracting from the rather damning claim that the church’s grappling with the long legacy of racism against Asian Americans “is entirely inadequate” (3).
