Thread by @reappropriate

A lot of good stuff to digest here, even if I reject one of the basic premises of this writing (and the book it reviews) that the Asian American identity is inherently empty or flawed, stitched out of nothingness. vulture.com/2021/10/jay-ca…

One of my concerns with the way the Asian American identity is always argued to be an empty anachronism is that so much work has already been done by us as a community to help define and explore it.

What emerges from that work is in my mind a distinct and powerful exploration of Asian America as knitted together as much by the ways we are different as the ways in which we are similar.

There’s this weird assumption that a community of shared racial identity must always mean sameness; even though such flattening treatment masks the economic, political, and cultural diversity of all racial groups, including but not limited to Asian Americans.

Asian American is a social construct - like all of racial identity. That does not constrain Asian American to operate by a common and limited set of rules. We can define Asian American in a way that is wholly specific to the distinct politics and history of our community.

But what I think is important is that studies actually do find that race emerges as salient for most Asian Americans. See @JLeeSoc and @karthickr 2021, and their discussion of the diversity-convergence paradox of Asian Americana:

rsfjournal.org/content/7/2/1

Lee and Ramakrishnan speak a lot about the diversity of the Asian American identity, but also how convergences in political opinion and lived experiences emerge that help us better understand this thing we call Asian American.

Relevant to the current discussion, one thing that has emerged recently both in my TL and this book review is the prevalence of self-hate and white assimilation narratives - effectively foretelling that AsAms are racially destined for whiteness.

This strikes me as concerning for a number of reasons, including in no small part because even as it extolls this seemingly inevitable fate for Asian Americans, it builds this argument in part by distancing from Blackness - it feels like a twisted misappropriation of Afropessism.

But anyways, I think it’s also important to contemplate that idea alongside this excerpt from @JLeeSoc and @karthickr:

And in so doing, we should remind ourselves that one of the areas East Asian Americans really have to work on is to stop invoking SA/SEA only when convenient while we still center fundamentally narrow EA theories of identity.

Asian American pan-ethnic political identity is imperfect. It is a work in progress. It has in practice absolutely committed many of the sins of flattening and erasure that I think the assimilation narratives are also guilty of.

To me, however, I hear a call for reimagining. I see a challenge to find a way to create an Asian American politics that celebrates our diversity, even while it helps us to see our shared struggles.

I imagine an Asian American identity that sees, celebrates and amplified our diversity as our political strength, not a vulnerability.

I also just want to revisit this to again challenge us to ask: what are we really saying by saying that a post-racial utopia is both possible and inevitable for whites and Asians by virtue of the fact that we are not Black?

I, for one, think this is a concerning take.

https://twitter.com/reappropriate/status/1449203094097575936

Anyways, just some thoughts.

And an apparently necessary disclaimer: this thread is engaging a bunch of ideas and casts no aspersions on any writers associated with any of the writing linked above. Because no one has the time for that shit tonight. It’s already been a long week.