Genteel Racism

Notes

• This essay was written with my friends at the Center for Third World Organizing (www.ctwo.org) in mind, especially Mark Toney and Rinku Sen. They, along with the folks at the Applied Research Center (www.arc.org) like Gary Delgado, Jeff Chang and Bob Wing, took the temperature on the Lowell fight early in the day. Some of the material came together in preparation for a debate with Dinesh D'Souza at the South Asian Students Association meetings in Chicago in January 1998 (thanks to Amy Paul and Palak Shah). Reshma Saujani and Allaudin-Ullah asked me to write these thoughts down. Maurice Wade and Elisabeth B. Armstrong offered useful critical suggestions.
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• Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265, 407 (1978).
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• Robin D. G. Kelley, Yo’ Mama's Disfunktional! (Boston: Beacon Books, 1997), 101.
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• See the first six essays in The Angela Y. Davis Reader, ed. Joy James (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1998).
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• Neil Gotanda, “A Critique of ‘Our Constitution Is Color-Blind/” Stanford Law Review 44: 1 (November 1991), 37–52; Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, “Color Blindness, History and the Law,” The House that Race Built, ed. Wahneema Lubiano (New York: Vintage, 1998), 280–88.
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• Jeff Chang, Rinku Sen and Francis Calpotura, “Lowell Settlement a Step Backwards,” Caught in the Crossfire: Asian American Progressives Respond to the Lowell Settlement (Oakland: Center for Third World Organizing, 1999), 1.
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• Gary Peller, “Race Consciousness,” Duke Law Journal 4 (September 1990), 758–847; Stephen Steinberg, “The Liberal Retreat from Race During the Post-Civil Rights Era,” The House that Race Built, 13–47.
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• Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan, “Why Ethnicity?” Commentary (October 1974), 34.
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• Nathan Glazer, Affirmative Discrimination: Ethnic Inequality and Public Policy (New York: Basic Books, 1975), 75–6. Also see the influential report by Richard Neuhaus and Peter Berger, To Empower People: The Role of Mediating Structures in Public Policy (Washington: American Enterprise Institute, 1975).
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• Thomas Sowell, “Colleges Are Skipping over Competent Blacks to Admit ‘Authentic’ Ghetto Types,” New York Times Magazine (October 13, 1970) 49.
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• Angelo N. Ancheta, Race, Rights and the Asian American Experience (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 158.
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• Daniel P. Moynihan, “The New Racialism,” Atlantic Monthly (August 1968), 40. The word “blunt” seems to imply some kind of racism is about to make its appearance from the Right: consider Joe Gelman, office manager for Proposition 209 in California, who noted of Ward Connerly that “to be blunt the fact that he was black was very important. It's like using affirmative action to defeat affirmative action. It's slightly unprincipled, but the fact was he brought some positive things like the full weight of the governor's office.” Lydia Chávez, The Color Bind: California's Battle to End Affirmative Action (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 74.
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• David Bell, “The Triumph of Asian Americans,” The New Republic (July 15–22, 1985), 25; Dinesh D'Souza, Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader (New York: The Free Press, 1997).
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• William Wei, The Asian American Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 157.
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• Alice Amsden, Asia's Next Giant: South Korea and Late Industrialization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
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• Francis Fukuyama, “Social Capital and the Global Economy,” Foreign Affairs (September-October 1995), 93.
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• “Up From Inscrutable,” Fortune (April 6, 1992), 120.
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• This is the central point of my “Anti-D'Souza: The Ends of Racism and the Asian American,” Amerasia Journal 24: (1998), 23–40; and of my Karma of Brown Folk (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2000).
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• William McGurn, “The Silent Minority,” National Review (June 24, 1991), 19–20.
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• Kenneth Lee, “Angry Yellow Men,” The New Republic (September 9, 1996), 11. We heard this first from Dinesh D'Souza, Illiberal Education (New York: Free Press, 1991), 50; but also from such stalwarts as Arthur Hu, “Education and Race,” National Review 49: 17 (September 15, 1997), 52–56; and Peter Shaw, “Counting Asians,” National Review 47: 17 (September 25, 1995), 50–54.
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• Lance T. Izumi, “There Are Asians, and Asians,” National Review (July 1, 1996), 25.
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• Chávez, The Color Bind, 117.
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• James Carroll and Frank Wu, “Anything for the Cause,” Asian Week 19: 14 (November 20–26, 1997).
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• Karl Marx (September 1843), Early Writings (New York: Vintage, 1975), 208.
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• Lucia Hwang, “A House Divided: Asian Americans and Affirmative Action,” Third Force 4: 5 (November/December 1996), provides the start of an explanation.
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• Chávez, The Color Bind, 236.
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• Emil Guillermo, “White Asian Americans,” Asian Week (July 28, 1995).
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• Vijay Prashad, “No Sweat,” Public Culture 10: 1 (Fall 1997), 193–199.
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• Kavalijt Singh, Taming Global Financial Flows: Challenges and Alternatives in the Era of Globalization (London: Zed Books, 2000); and Biplab Dasgupta, Structural Adjustment, Global Trade and the New Political Economy of Development (London: Zed Books, 1999).
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• Wei, The Asian American Movement, 155–56.
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• George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 222; and Arthur Hu, “Asian Americans: Model Minority or Double Minority?” Amerasia Journal 15: 1 (1989), 251–54.
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• Max B. Baker, “Bill Would Bar ‘Legacy’ Admissions,” Fort-Worth Star Telegram (January 4, 1999), 1.
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• J. Morgan Kousser, Colorblind Injustice: Minority Voting Rights and the Undoing of the Second Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), notably chapters 7–9.
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• Lipsitz, 1–23.
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• The bulk of the essays in Asian American Issues Relating to Labor, Economics and Socioeconomic Status, ed. Franklin Ng (New York: Garland Press, 1998); and Struggle for Ethnic Identity: Narratives by Asian American Professionals, eds. Pyong Gap Min and Rose Kim (Walnut Creek: AltaMira, 1999).
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• F. A. Hayek, Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (London: Routledge, 1967), 171.
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