Risking to be wounded again: performing open eye/I

Abstract

In this article, I narrate a self‐reflexive inquiry on the process of becoming an Asian/Korean immigrant woman of color in the US. The purpose is to provide a particular insight and identity site to address the urgent need to examine ways in which the increasing number of postcolonial immigrants of color and US racial minorities engage with each other to make sense of our intersected but very differential impacts of racism. The article is organized using three vignettes on differently racialized encounters – my arrival to the racialized ruins of Korea town in LA as a newcomer, a recurring encounter with a racial epithet that defines me as Chinese, and an anti‐racism session in an educational conference where I was disclaimed from being a person of color by another racialized group. Through these vignettes, I analyze the complex dynamics between very personal, affective experience and socio‐political structure and actions that have constituted my still evolving palimpsest identity. In conclusion, I argue for the significance of performing open eye/I that risks being wounded again by not clinging to an unquestionable ideal of who we are and rather using it as a base to learn with others. This is to live those unknown possibilities of becoming through infinite practices of anti‐racism toward the absence of racism.

Keywords:

• Asian/Korean immigrant
• identity
• postcolonial
• racial minority relations
• racialization
• self‐reflexive inquiry

Notes

1. For further discussions on the use of self‐reflexivity inquiry as a legitimate cultural critique, scholarship and activism, see Asher (2001), Pillow (2003), Richardson (1997), Subedi (2006), Villenas (1996) and Webb (2001).

2. Five thousand years of Korea's national history is fraught with its struggles to keep the sovereignty from foreign dominations especially from China, Japan and the US in different historical times.

3. For this paper, I am not invested in analyzing specific contents of racial interactions such as Asian and black, Asian and Latino/a, or Asian and indigenous people's racial dynamics in US social settings. Contextualizing a particular relation between different racial minorities needs another full length of discussion. I am more interested in how US racial scheme as an organizing structure provides the condition for this interaction experienced as traumatic on my part within the process of my becoming and the implication for anti‐racism education. I argue that the form of interaction I am discussing in this paper can occur to anyone as long as there is historically constructed difference and situational power we can utilize. This is why I am not identifying other people's racial identities in this paper.