Asian Americans in a World of White Supremacy and Anti-Black Racism: Reply to Asibong, Merchant, and Tummala-Narra

ABSTRACT

In their responses, Asibong, Tummala-Narra, and Merchant speak to Asian Americans’ plight for survival within the American racial hierarchy. In my reply, I build on their insights to further elucidate the Asian American relationship to white supremacy and anti-Black racism. In framing this exploration, I use Isabel Wilkerson’s notion of Caste system, which places Asian Americans in the middle between the dominant caste (whites) and bottom caste (Blacks). I introduce the concept of the malleable racial object, to describe the role to which Asian Americans have been relegated. I further posit that the Asian American position contains trauma-based identification with the aggressor/dominant caste and dissociated fear of being met with the fate of the bottom caste. Drawing from Robert Stolorow’s work on emotional kinship and Jessica Benjamin’s work on going beyond the binary of doer and done to, I make some suggestions on achieving racial repair through shared finitude and the ethic of “We are in this together.”

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to have three powerful, creative, and diverse responses to my paper. I thank Lauren Levine for her editorial guidance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ I owe it to Robert Stolorow and Ocean Vuong, whose raw self disclosures of their encounters with traumas have been deeply moving to me.

² I thank Dr. Peter Maduro for his helpful insight on the defensive function racial categories serve.

³ A number of excellent accounts now exist by Asian American historians on the treatment of Asian Americans during various historical times. For example, parts of Mae Ngai’s award winning book (Ngai, 2021) The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics describe how unscrupulous politicians capitalized on white workers’ fear that cheap Chinese wages depressed American wages, eventually leading to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the country’s first immigration restriction law. Anti-Chinese sentiments swept the nation, leading to a number of racist murder and violence against the Chinese, including a 1872 lynching of 17 Chinese men and boys in Los Angeles. A PBS documentary titled Chinese Exclusion Act addresses similar themes of scapegoating the Chinese. Also, see Tchen and Yates’ Yellow Peril! (Tchen & Yeats, 2014) for the sordid history of the deployment of the concept of the yellow peril, especially during the times of pandemic.

⁴ In a brilliant analysis of the play Slave Play by Jeremy O. Harris that hit New York theater scene like a storm, Avgi Saketopoulou speaks to these issues in addressing Black subjects’ pleasure in role-playing slaves. I quote Saketopoulou at length here. “[…] for some subjects agentic sexual desire may open up to something even as paradoxical as a scene of racist play (just like for some survivors of sexual abuse, agentic desire is refracted through staged scenes of intimate violation [here, here and here]). To a great degree, freedom and subjecthood pertain to being able to define oneself in one’s own terms, which often pivots around acts of creativity — not only in acts of resistance — and, for various reasons, sexuality is a particularly suitable medium toward such creative acts. For black subjects, self-definition includes not conforming to white people’s narratives about black subjectivity; understanding oneself despite white people’s charitable and, thus, potentially condescending ‘concerns’about what’s ‘really’ agentic – especially since agency is differently drafted for subjects formed through histories of enslavement; and last, it also involves defining oneself without having to carry the burden of representing all black people […]”(Saketopoulou, 2020).

⁵ Several of my Asian patients are so busy with work that they often take their zoom sessions while driving.

⁶ My uncle was imprisoned and tortured for his communist sympathies by the Japanese during the Japanese occupation of Korea. Our family then lived through the ravaging aftermath of the Korean War, triggered by the communist regime of North Korea. Given these experiences, the notion of revolutionary violence feels wrong in my bones. I admire Martin Luther King, Jr., for his commitment to nonviolent solutions.

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Kris Yi

Kris Yi is a psychologist and psychoanalyst in private practice in Pasadena, California.