Between Racial Stranger and Racial Underling: Elastic Racialization of Asian Pacific Americans Across White and Multiracial Academic Spaces

Abstract

Using an autoethnographic approach, this article draws on my personal experience as an Asian Pacific American (APA) political theorist who has navigated between different institutional spaces to reflect on a phenomenon that I call “elastic racialization” of APAs in higher education and its implications on our pedagogic agenda and curriculum. While the existing notion of “differential racialization” critically captures the ways in which racial minority groups have been racialized in different ways in accordance with the changing interests of the dominant group, the concept is often used in a broad U.S. national context such that even though it underlines fluidity in the social construction of race, the racialized meanings of particular racial groups can become fixed understandings and paradigms. As a result, we stop short of exploring further how the differential racialization of people of color—for instance, APAs as the “model minority” and the “perpetual foreigner”—can take on more protean forms in particular locations and contexts. Through a self-reflective analysis, I discuss how my racialized positionality in academia has taken on a more nuanced, elastic quality in different institutional contexts: shifting between “racial stranger” in the predominantly White space of political theory within political science and “racial underling” in the multiracial space of an interdisciplinary academic unit. Elastic racialization systemically effaces APA experiences/issues in the teaching/learning agenda of political science and other (inter)disciplinary fields, underlining the resilient multiformity of racism that requires a protean and multipronged approach of counter-racialization in higher education.

Keywords:

• Asian Americans
• autoethnography
• differential racialization
• model minority
• perpetual foreigner

Acknowledgements

Preliminary ideas of this essay were first presented on the panel, “Teaching (On and/or As) Asian-Americans in Political Science,” at the 2018 American Political Science Association conference meeting, and I thank the co-panelists and participants for their helpful discussion and feedback, especially Pei-te Lien, Janelle Wong, James Lai, John Ishiyama, Oki Takeda, and Nikki Filler. I also thank the two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments and suggestions on this manuscript.

Notes

1 While I was born in Taiwan, my grandparents came from China, so I identify as an Asian with Chinese and Taiwanese descent because both my Chinese ancestral lineage and Taiwanese cultural upbringing have shaped my hybrid ethnic identification. My journey in the United States as an immigrant has further complicated and diversified this ethnic identification and infused heterogeneity into my experience as an Asian Pacific American.

2 I wish to note that a number of political theorists have welcomed my presence and my work and do not make me feel like a racial stranger. It is the underlying institutional and intellectual norm and aura of the subfield that accentuate my sense of racial estrangement.