‘I’m picking a side’: Thick solidarity, antiblackness and the grammar of the model minority

ABSTRACT

This article explores efforts by San Francisco based Asian American youth organizers to build meaningful cross-racial coalitions. Based upon two years of ethnographic field work with Fist Up, I offer an analysis of how youth organizers carried out the unsettling work of practicing what Roseann Liu and Savannah Shange have described as thick solidarity. Interrogating the model minority myth required that Asian American youth organizers develop sophisticated understandings its relationship to anti-Black political projects.

KEYWORDS:

• Solidarity
• antiblackness
• model minority
• Asian Americans
• youth organizing
• racial antagonisms
• ethnography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).