Notes
- I dedicate this article to the memory of my friend, author Joe Wood. I am grateful to the following for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper: Elaine Kim, Eric Yamamoto, Rogers Smith, Edna Bonacich, Joe Feagin, Joan Scott, the anonymous reviewer at Amerasia Journal, and participants in the faculty seminars at the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Inequality at Yale University and the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study. Special thanks to Russell Leong for his thoughtful comments and advice.
- See Mari Matsuda, “We Will Not Be Used,” UCLA Asian American Pacific Islands Law Journal 1 (1993), 79–84 and Elaine Kim, “Korean Americans in U.S. Race Relations: Some Considerations,” Amerasia Journal 23: 2 (1997), 69–78. My focus in this article is on liberal and progressive scholars, activists, and advocates. I briefly touch upon conservative Asian American advocates in the discussion of the Ho lawsuit below.
- Matsuda, “We Will Not Be Used.”
- In making this argument, I am joining a conversation about interminority hierarchy, conflict, and justice that progressive race scholars associated with Asian American Studies have initiated in earnest over the past decade. See Eric Yamamoto, Interracial Justice: Conflict and Reconciliation in Post-Civil Rights America (New York: New York University Press, 1999); Elaine Kim, “Korean Americans in U.S. Race Relations”; and Glenn Omatsu, “The ‘Four Prisons’ and the Movements of Liberation: Asian American Activism from the 1960s to the 1990s,” The State of Asian America: Activism and Resistance in the 1990s, edited by Karin Aguilar-San Juan (Boston: South End Press, 1994), 19–69.
- By “narrative choices,” I mean the ways in which public spokes-people such as scholars, activists, and advocates choose to represent Asian Americans to the general public and the state through position papers, policy pronouncements, speeches, writing, etc.
- Claire Jean Kim, “The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans,” Politics & Society 27: 1 (March 1999), 105–138.
- I distinguish here between the “field of racial positions” as a shared cognitive map and the “racial order” as patterned material inequalities; the former is the blueprint, the latter the resulting structure. Although I confine my analysis to the White-Black-Asian American triad in both the earlier article and this one, this is more a decision of economy than of principle. My sense is that some of what I have to say about Asian Americans as a “triangulated” group applies to Latinos as well.
- Both types of practices are grounded upon an essentialized reading of Asian/Asian American “culture” that elides distinctions both between Asians and Asian Americans and among Asian American subgroups.
- As a “triangulated” group, Asian Americans are vulnerable to ostracizing practices on the part of Whites and Blacks alike. To say that Asian Americans are relatively advantaged compared with Blacks is not to say that they are immune to racism or nativism by the latter. On the other hand, it is not enough to say that all groups exhibit prejudice toward one another; we must pay attention to their positionality as well.
- The phrase “narrative of self-representation” is taken from Ruth Hsu, “‘Will the Model Minority Please Identify Itself?’ American Ethnic Identity and Its Discontents,” Diaspora 5: 1 (1996), 37–63.
- Here I borrow David Snow and Robert Benford's notion of a “collective action frame,” a schema which establishes a collective identity, diagnoses a social problem, and mandates what is to be done about it. See “Master Frames and Cycles of Protest,” Frontiers in Social Movement Theory, edited by Aldon Morris and Carol McClurg Mueller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 133–155.
- Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996).
- Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992).
- Paul Wong, “The Emergence of the Asian-American Movement,” Bridge 2: 1 (1972), 33–39, 35–36.
- It is worth noting that the antidiscrimination regime was in place at this point, and that Asian American activists had the option of embracing a more traditional civil rights approach to group empowerment. Some did, but the Third World frame held the center of gravity during the movement.
- Through the late 1960s and early 1970s, Asian Americans demonstrated their commitment to the Third World frame through various campus and community activities. Significantly, the first “Asian American” student organization—the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA)—made its public debut as part of the Third World United Liberation Front responsible for organizing the Third World strikes at San Francisco State College and University of California, Berkeley from 1968 to 1969.
- Franklin Odo et al., “The U.S. in Asia and Asians in the U.S.,” Roots: An Asian American Reader, edited by Amy Tachiki et al. (Los Angeles: UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 1971), 223–244, 225.
- Amy Uyematsu, “The Emergence of Yellow Power in America,” Roots, 9–13, 11.
- Despite their critique of the antidiscrimination regime, most critical race theorists do not want to “trash” it altogether. While they argue that civil rights laws are ideological constructs designed to serve power, they also believe that rights rhetoric has provided subordinated racial groups with one of their only weapons to counteract domination. It is all well and good to talk about resisting cooptation, but people have to worry about their basic survival, and rights have proven helpful in this regard. See Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Race, Reform, and Retrenchment: Transformation and Legitimation in Antidiscrimination Law,” Critical Race Theory, edited by Kimberlé Crenshaw et al. (New York: The New Press, 1995), 103–122.
- Neil Gotanda, “A Critique of ‘Our Constitution is Color-Blind,’” Stanford Law Review 44: 1 (1991), 1–68.
- Some of the key cases reflecting this trend include: City of Richmond v. J. A. Croson Co. (1989), Shaw v. Reno (1993), and Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Pena (1995). To withstand strict scrutiny, racial classifications must serve a compelling governmental interest and be narrowly tailored to their specific purpose.
- Gary Peller, “Race-Consciousness,” Critical Race Theory, 127–158, 130.
- This shift has given rise to revisionist histories that depict the Asian American movement as part of the teleological story of minority incorporation by neglecting or mischaracterizing the movement's radical and/or militant elements and foregrounding its moderate, middle-class, and reformist elements. For example, see William Wei, The Asian American Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993).
- The Japanese American Citizens League, Leadership Education for Asian Pacifics, Organization of Chinese Americans, Asian Pacific American Legal Center of Southern California, National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium, Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, and Asian Law Caucus are some of the leading Asian American advocacy organizations. Each group has its own distinct history and agenda, although I focus in this article on what they say and do in common.
- Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity.
- Cited in Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity, 66.
- Strikingly, the shift from the Third World frame to the antidiscrimination frame is reflected in the way that Asian American Studies programs are developing nationwide. Although Asian American Studies was originally conceived of as an element of Third World Studies during the campus strikes of 1968–1969, there are more and more Asian American Studies programs growing up today on their own, apart from a broader “ethnic studies” rubric.
- For examples of this kind of narrative construction, see Angelo Ancheta, Race, Rights, and the Asian American Experience (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998), chapter 1; Kenyon Chan and Shirley Hune, “Racialization and Panethnicity: From Asians in America to Asian Americans,” Toward A Common Destiny: Improving Race and Ethnic Relations in America, edited by Willis Hawley and Anthony Jackson (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1995), 205–233; and Gary Okihiro, The Victimization of Asians in America,” The World & I (April 1993), 397–413. I should note that these authors do treat interminority issues in other aspects of their work. For instance, Okihiro's Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994) is one of the most nuanced and insightful accounts of Asian-Black relations I have seen.
- In Support of Civil Rights: Taking on the Initiative (Los Angeles: Leadership Education for Asian Pacifics Asian Pacific American Public Policy Institute, 1996), 2.
- The image of the “glass ceiling” as a physical/spatial barrier to group advancement fits nicely, it is worth noting, with the antidiscrimination regime's view of racism as aberrational rather than embedded in the social fabric: barriers are superficial, external obstacles that can be eliminated without rearranging basic social and political arrangements.
- For more on Asian American conservatives, see Omatsu, “The ‘Four Prisons.’”
- Author's personal interview with Byun Chun Soo, New York City, December 2, 1992. Much of this discussion of the Flatbush Boycott is drawn from Claire Jean Kim, Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
- Edward Park, “Competing Visions: Political Formation of Korean Americans in Los Angeles, 1992–1997,” Amerasia Journal 24: 1 (1998), 41–57, 48.
- Korean Americans have had mixed reactions to this move. In an interview conducted by Elaine Kim, Korean American community activist Bong Kim chastised Asian American advocacy groups for commenting on the Los Angeles “riots” without first consulting Korean American community leaders. During the same interview, however, Bong Kim compared the “riots” to the exclusion of Chinese immigrants and the wartime internment of Japanese Americans, thus situating the the former event within the Asian American story of victimization. That Korean Americans alternately compare Sa-I-Gu to the Japanese colonization of Korea and the Japanese American internment experience suggests the complex way in which they interweave a Korean racial-transnational consciousness with an incipient Asian American one. See Elaine Kim, “Between Black and White: An Interview with Bong Hwan Kim,” The State of Asian America, 71–100.
- The beating of Cao Tuan, a Vietnamese American man, by a group of Black youths near the boycott scene raised the specter of the Vincent Chin killing. As it turns out, the incident had nothing to do with the boycott or with mistaking certain Asians for others.
- That quintessential document of the antidiscrimination regime—the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report, “Civil Rights Issues Facing Asian Americans in the 1990s” (1992)—included the Flatbush Boycott in a chapter entitled, “Bigotry and Violence Against Asian Americans,” the same chapter that covers several notorious racially motivated killings of Asian Americans.
- During the 1980s, when a controversy arose over whether several selective universities were using quotas to depress Asian American admissions rates, conservatives hijacked the issue for their own anti-affirmative action purposes. They transformed the real issue of whether universities were capping Asian American admissions to preserve the Whiteness of their student bodies into the false issue of whether affirmative action for Blacks and Latinos was depressing Asian American admissions. See Dana Takagi, The Retreat From Race: Asian American Admissions and Racial Politics (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992).
- James Walsh, “The Perils of Success,” Time, Special Issue (Fall 1993), 55–56, 56.
- Similarly, the Japanese American Citizens League flyer entitled, “Why Asian Americans Should Oppose Proposition 209, the Deceptively Named ‘California Civil Rights Initiative’,” argues that Asian Americans need affirmative action to break through the “glass ceiling” and gain meaningful equal opportunity. The antidiscrimination rationale for affirmative action is thrown into relief by the few pro-affirmative action appeals made on other grounds. See, for example, “An Open Letter to Our Fellow Asian Brothers and Sisters: JOIN THE FIGHT TO DEFEND AND EXPAND AFFIRMATIVE ACTION,” Hitting Critical Mass 3: 2 (Spring 1996), 135–140. The authors of this article, veterans of the campus strikes of 1968–1969, write: “[O]ur fight is not to side with the system against other minorities to reach the rung below the glass ceiling, just so a few of us are not on the bottom rung of society” (p. 137).
- Proposition 209, a state constitutional amendment approved by California voters (54% to 46%) in 1996, eliminated affirmative action programs in public employment, public education, and public contracting. For discussion of how Proposition 209 advocates wooed Asian Americans, see Kenneth Lee, “Angry Yellow Men,” The New Republic (September 9, 1996), 11.
- A few Asian American scholars and advocates who write about affirmative action do acknowledge Asian-Black differentials, but they tend to do so in passing. See Theodore Wang and Frank Wu, “Beyond the Model Minority Myth,” The Affirmative Action Debate, edited by George Curry (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1996), 191–207 and Henry Der, “The Asian American Factor: Victim or Shortsighted Beneficiary of Race-Conscious Remedies?” Common Ground, 13–18. Paul Ong's recent article does consider some of the ways in which Asian Americans are advantaged and disadvantaged compared to other groups: “The Affirmative Action Divide,” The State of Asian Pacific America: Transforming Race Relations, edited by Paul Ong (Los Angeles: LEAP Asian Pacific American Public Policy Institute and UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 2000), 313–361.
- “Amerasia Dialogue: Glenn Omatsu Interviewed by Russell Leong,” Amerasia Journal 25: 2 (1999), vii–xiv, viii.
- Given San Francisco's uniquely multiracial composition and its long history of segregating all students of color from White students, it is not surprising that a case about clashing minority imperatives arose here. For discussion of San Francisco's history of educational segregation, see Charles McClain, In Search of Equality: The Chinese Struggle Against Discrimination in Nineteenth Century America (Berkeley: University of California, 1994).
- The nine groups were: Spanish, White, Black, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, American Indian, and “other nonwhite.”
- As of 1992–1993, Chinese American students had to have a score of 66 to be accepted into Lowell; Japanese Americans, Korean Americans, Filipino Americans, American Indians, and “other nonwhites” had to have a score of 59; and Blacks and Spanish students had to have a score of 56. Selena Dong, “‘Too Many Asians’: The Challenge of Fighting Discrimination Against Asian-Americans and Preserving Affirmative Action,” Stanford Law Review 47 (May 1995), 1027–1057, 1033.
- Just before the lawsuit was filed, Blacks constituted 18.4% of the district's enrollment and only 4.5% of Lowell's student body; Latinos constituted 20% of the district's enrollment and only 9.3% of Lowell's student body. Peter Schmidt, “Cursed By Success,” Education Week on the Web (April 5, 1995), http://www.teachermagazine.org/ew/vol-14/281owell.h14.
- Brief of Plaintiffs-Appellants, August 5, 1997, 5.
- Brief of Plaintiffs-Appellants, August 5, 1997, 6, footnote 2. This long footnote cites numerous equal protection cases from Chinese American history, as well as the works of several noted scholars of the Chinese American experience.
- According to a 1998 Chinese American Voter Education Committee Survey of Chinese surname voters in San Francisco, 45% of respondents thought Lowell High School admissions quotas were a “bad idea,” while 32% thought they were a “good idea,” and 23% had no opinion. See Ong, “The Affirmative Action Divide,” 339–340.
- San Francisco-based Chinese for Affirmative Action (CAA) is one of the most prominent Asian American advocacy groups in the nation. According to Diane Chin, its current executive director, the tacit division of labor among liberal/progressive Asian American advocacy groups in San Francisco led other groups to look to CAA for leadership in response to the Ho lawsuit, since the case concerned race-conscious remedies. Although most of these other advocacy groups did not take public stands against the lawsuit, they implicitly supported CAA's oppositional stance (Author's phone interview with Diane Chin, April 12, 1999). See note 53 below.
- Der argued that the plaintiffs' claim that they were denied access to their school of choice and thus subjected to unconstitutional harm was simply untrue. Although they were denied admission at Lowell High School, all of the Chinese American plaintiffs were accepted into other prestigious alternative schools that same year. See Der, “The Asian American Factor” and Jeff Chang, “On The Wrong Side: Chinese Americans Win Anti-Diversity Settlement—and Lose in the End,” Colorlines (Summer 1999), 12–14.
- Dong, “‘Too Many Asians.’”
- Eric Yamamoto, “Critical Race Praxis: Race Theory and Political Lawyering Practice in Post-Civil Rights America,” Michigan Law Review 95 (February 1997), 821–900, 828.
- Together with the Chinese Progressive Association, the Chinatown Youth Center, and individual Chinese American community leaders, Chinese for Affirmative Action has filed opposition papers challenging this settlement.
- Julian Guthrie, “Minority Admissions Plummet at San Francisco School,” San Francisco Examiner (March 16, 1999): http://www.latinolink.com./news/news99.
- The three projects I outline below will be most effective if other groups of color undertake them simultaneously. It is a measure of the absence of interminority debate and conversation that Asian Americans scholars, activists, and advocates are presumed to have to direct their exhortations at Asian Americans; African Americans at African Americans, etc.
- Although I have treated Asian Americans as a homogeneous category for the purposes of my argument here, I am mindful of the staggering internal diversity of this group. I am open to the idea, for instance, that some Asian American subgroups are faring better than others and thus bear more responsibility for the impact of the Asian American struggle upon other oppressed groups. It may be that the categorical statement that Asian Americans are more advantaged than Blacks will have to be strongly qualified. All of these complexities remain to be worked out in the kind of critical intellectual work I have in mind.
- In The State of Asian Pacific America: Transforming Race Relations, President Clinton's Initiative on Race is mentioned in the introductory and closing essays. I am doubtful that a state-sponsored dialogue can serve as a vehicle for progressive racial change. For a critique of the race initiative, see Claire Jean Kim, “Clinton's Race Initiative: Recasting the American Dilemma,” forthcoming in Polity (Winter 2000).
- See Raymond Okamura et al., “Campaign to Repeal the Emergency Detention Act,” Amerasia Journal 2: 2 (1974), 71–94.
- Ibid., 76–77.
- This information about KIWA is drawn from Omatsu, “The ‘Four Prisons’” and Leland Saito and Edward Park, “Multiracial Collaborations and Coalitions,” The State of Asian Pacific America: Transforming Race Relations, 435–474.
- Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams.