Calls for Asian American solidarity w/ Palestine that center geography ("Palestine is in Asia") or history ("Asian Americans opposed the Vietnam war") often obscure the fact that the same imperialism responsible for the genocide in Gaza also divides and occupies Asia. A 🧵... The important legacy of the Asian American Movement's opposition to the war in Vietnam is its diagnosis of the war as one site of a global structure of imperialism, and its support not for an abstract peace but for Vietnamese resistance as a national liberation struggle

This is a great example of why orientalism refers not to a place but an imaginary; why race is not a category but a process. To be "orientalized" is to be subject to the shifting needs and desires of capitalism and empire. When Japan defeated Russia in military confrontation in 1905, it sparked a call for European unity in the face of a rising yellow peril.

But by the time the Cold War began, the USSR was defined by its "oriental secretiveness" (Kennan) and thus cast from the family of nations.

"Asian American" has emerged as a category of carceral state protection at the same time the "Indo-Pacific" is consolidated as the primary theater of U.S. war making.

In @ROAR_Magazine, I explore the contradictions of liberal antiracism and imperialism:

roarmag.org/essays/anti-as… "The domesticating of anti-Asian hate enables a strange contradiction: the visibility of anti-Asian violence in the US has been accompanied by the quiet expansion of the US military footprint in Asia, a bipartisan inheritance of Obama’s pivot to Asia and Trump's China-bashing."

Ken Jeong's standup is what happens when you grow up around white kids and never outgrow the "make self-deprecating Asian jokes about yourself to cope" phase Your big joke is about how your wife's last name is Ho? You're not twelve, it's just misogynistic and self-Orientalizing now.