Thread by @raceip

In honor of #AAPIHeritageMonth,* let's talk about 1) why Asian Americans should be invested in advocating for Critical Race Theory (CRT) as a tool of racial liberation and 2) why this moment provides an opportunity for building deep and healing coalitions. 🧵 1/n

#CRT began as a critique of the failures of the civil rights movement in the works of brilliant scholars including Derrick Bell, @sandylocks, and Charles Lawrence III. It has two major tenets: 1) "colorblind" laws have failed and 2) we should aspire to true equity. 2/n

Race Crits speak the truth! Our cities are still segregated. The biggest beneficiaries of affirmative action are white women. Pay equity is a fantasy. And the Global South is suffering at the hands of the West. The heroic narrative of civil rights is settler colonial fiction. 3/n

Asian Americans including @mari_matsuda, Philip T. Nash, @KorematsuCtr, Neil Gotanda, Keith Aoki, Sumi Cho, Lisa Ikemoto, and @maggiechon quickly joined the CRT ranks. Their radical scholarship and litigation strategies helped to scaffold meaningful social justice gains. 4/n

Asian American Race Crits wrote powerfully about racial triangulation, toxic colorblindness, hate speech, knowledge colonialism, model minorities, yellow perils, and more. They advocated for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, against racism and colonialism. 5/n

Asian Americans actually have a long history of standing with Black and Indigenous peoples. Indeed, they have an ethical responsibility to show such solidarity because of the roles Asians & Asian Americans have played in perpetuating anti-Black and anti-Indigenous violence. 6/n

Here's a stellar letter in which Mari Matsuda speaks about that history of solidarity and dispels myths that CRT and its resulting advocacies, e.g. affirmative action, are somehow anti-Asian (they're absolutely not). Oh and BTW meritocracy is a myth. reappropriate.co/2021/03/mari-m… 7/n

Asian American Race Crits also aided in the diversification of the legal academy. They treated the work of people of color as rigorous and tenurable and invested in transformative coalitions. If you have Black, Asian, Arab, Latinx, or Indigenous law profs, thank a Race Crit! 8/n

Asian American and Pacific Islander stories are part of the beautiful, nuanced, and inclusive vision of equity that CRT espouses. As LatCrit scholars write, focusing on "shifting bottoms and rotating centers" strengthens CRT by thinking with and beyond Black/white binaries. 9/n

I can't imagine anything more American than honoring this nation's diversity by committing to elevating the experiences and scholarship of people of color. CRT is *not* about hating white people or US history. It's about building a genuinely inclusive and equitable nation. 10/n

I want to pause to emphasize that the vitriolic attacks on CRT aren't new. Racial violence is rarely novel. As #45's own hateful past shows, the GOP has a long history of railing on rhetorics of racial liberation. CRT is simply the target du jour of conservative racism. 11/n

Asian Americans continue to have an important role to play in CRT conversations. Their stories highlight the toxicness, indeed deadliness, of model minority/yellow peril binaries and combat the "racial triangulation" that white supremacy uses to divide and conquer. 12/n

So let this moment of anti-Asian hate and racial battle fatigue remind us of the continuing need for Asian Americans to embrace CRT. Because we're all vulnerable under a system of white supremacy. And coalitions are the only viable path to transforming it. - fin - 13/n🧵

* AAPI is a fraught acronym that groups Asian Americans with distinct identities together with Pacific Islanders. I use the term with the caveat that it is imperfect and that racism, colonialism, erasure, and accountability are not evenly distributed among these groups. 14/n