strugglingtobeheard:

“Person of color” = someone discriminated against for their race/ethnicity on a systematic level by the white majority

miswritten:

zuky:

rosaflora:

(Inspired by the commentary on this post)

For the purposes of anti-racism struggles, that’s all you need to go by.

Yes, the term, “colored” is not normally associated with Asian people these days, but it was definitely used to label people of Asian descent in this country in the past. We have been and still are the targets of White racism:

Believing the fallacy that people of Asian descent are not authentically or legitimately ‘Colored’ or ‘People of Color’ is wrong because:

1) It ignores the long history of racial discrimination and persecution of Asians in the U.S. (e.g. the Chinese Exclusion Acts, the Japanese-American internment during WWII, explicit campaigns to drive Asians out of the American West, the lynching of Asian Americans. (Which is something that is not commonly known due to the fact that many Asian and Mexican victims of mob violence in the 19th c. were classified as ‘White’ in official records*)

2) It ignores the history of White European imperialism in Asian countries, which intersects with White racism against Asian immigrants in White-majority countries. I assure you that White imperialists certainly did not view Indians, Chinese, or Vietnamese as being anything other than ‘Colored’

Imperial map of Asia, source of map

White European man receiving a pedicure from South Asian servants

3) It plays into the White racist divide-and-conquer strategy.

Even a brief look at the history of race/ethnicity in U.S. law alone makes it apparent that a key aspect of White racism has been the classification of non-Whites according to (white-defined) categories.

Those hailing from Asia (as well as the Middle East, the Caribbean, and Latin America) have been legally categorized in a myriad of ways—very occasionally as White, but more often as non-White (e.g. Ozawa v. United States, United States v. Thind). In general, Asians have occupied a strange ethno-racial limbo as ‘Other’ (e.g. the Census prior to 1870). As far as Whites were concerned, Asians might not have been ‘Negros’, but we certainly weren’t White either. Our otherness made us targets for discrimination and violence, and—because our right to citizenship has constantly come under attack—we’ve historically had as little recourse to the protection of the law as African Americans have.

Massacre of the Chinese at White Springs, Wyoming (source)

Yes, Asian people have (somewhat more recently than you think) enjoyed certain perks due to our ethnicity/race compared to Black and AmerIndian people (e.g. ‘the model minority’). But that’s just a more recent aspect of the divide-and-conquer strategy, which the White hegemony has used to pit minorities against each other so as to distract us from the real problems facing our communities.

And yes, some Asian people are complete racist dicks to those who aren’t Asian or White, but that’s internalized White racism. If you’ve been kicked and beaten by your master for years, then suddenly given a few scraps from his table, would you throw them in his face? Or is it more likely that—as beaten down as you are—you’d give in to Stockholm Syndrome and play along? (To be clear: that’s an explanation for Asian racism, not an excuse.)

Even so, incidents of Anti-Asian bias (e.g. Vincent Chin, Wen Ho Lee) and straight-up racist violence occur frequently enough these days that Asians are hyper-aware of the fact that many—including non-whites—don’t view us as Americans, let alone ‘Colored’. We’re simply foreign ‘others’.

So if White is grudgingly treating you OK, while Black and Brown seem to hate and distrust you, then whom do you ally yourself with? More importantly, who benefits from this apparent alliance?

In the American black-white paradigm of race relations, ‘others’ like Asians get shit on no matter which side we’re on. So the Asian internalization of White racism makes a twisted kind of sense as a survival strategy, particularly if your natural allies (other victims of White racism) are treating you like foreigners and even equating you with the oppressor himself. 

My point: Asians’ conflicted, sometimes tense, relations with African Americans and those who have been historically, categorically considered ‘Colored’ is an artifact of White racism. This means that if you exclude Asians from ‘Colored’ solidarity against White racism, you are reproducing a highly successful strategy of White racism.

Let that sink in for a minute.

To conclude: Anti-Asian exclusion from POC solidarity movements is ignorant, wrong, and just plain stupid. Asians’s current role as a prop of White racial supremacy is not our doing, just as our historic role as the foreign ‘Other’ is not our doing. The peculiar place of Asians in race relations today has been the result of the intersection of White racism, xenophobia, and imperialism. It is a mistake to think otherwise.  

TL;DR: Questioning the identity of Asians as “people of color” reinforces White racial supremacy.

ETA: There appears to be an uptick in hostility against Asians in these recent hard times. Last time there were major layoffs and bumps in the US economy, Vincent Chin got beaten to death. Unfortunately, I’m waiting for similar news to emerge from the current downturn. Even in so-called social justice circles, resentment of Asians under the umbrella of the model minority myth is often palpable. And this often comes from US Americans who have apparently shrugged off their own country’s racist invasions of the Philippines, Samoa, Hawaii, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Korea, the atomic bombs on Japan, the ongoing US military presence in Okinawa and the Korean peninsula, the ongoing occupation of Hawaii and Samoa. Two million Asians killed by US forces in Indochina and they think we don’t know oppression. It’s pretty amazing to hear people talk about how good Asians have it or how racist Asians are against this backdrop.

i have conflicted feelings about the original post/analysis, and disagree on multiple points… i can’t really pinpoint what makes me uncomfortable yet, but i guess it feels simultaneously like an explanation and a rationalization for the oppressive things asians do to other people of color in the US.  and one point of contention is (what seems to be) the underlying tone that “asians aren’t seen as valid americans and that’s the problem.” 

of course, that might just be me projecting on OP, though, just because so much of asian american activism/analysis tends to rely on the problem of “we get shit on because we aren’t seen as american,” and the solution is often “therefore we need to be seen as true americans and not seen as “asian-” americans.  which is a shitfest of a conclusion to come to, because the oppression of native and black people is inherent in the creation and perpetuation of the US. 

i agree that white colonialism, imperialism, and racism have broken us in different ways that make it really damn hard to build anything as different colonized and decolonizing peoples. 

and mostly i just reblogged for zuky’s commentary.  mulling over it all…

(Source: downlo)

downlo:

Something I find exasperating is how badly some Americans react to the suggestion that conversation about racism in the U.S. needs to exceed the traditional black-white dichotomy (because U.S. racism itself exceeds the traditional black-white dichotomy).

Saying the racial conversation needs to include more subjects than just White racism against Blacks is sometimes taken to be a call to gloss over Black oppression. And that is just. Not. True. What it actually is is an attempt to deepen and enrich that account. For example, you just can’t fully discuss racist citizenship laws without accounting for slavery and the Reconstruction Amendments and the Chinese Exclusion Acts and the legal treatment of Native American/Amerindian reservations and xenophobia and nativism inspired by 19th century Irish and Southern and Eastern European immigrants. Leave any of that out and you don’t get a complete and nuanced picture of racial and racist laws pertaining to U.S. citizenship. Talking about all of that history doesn’t necessarily downplay any particular piece of it.

Saying the racial conversation needs to include more subjects than just White racism against Blacks is also an acknowledgment that the history of White racism against non-Black people of color is less widely know, less frequently discussed, and more often treated as secondary or side issues…which just compounds the alienation! On one side, you have the establishment denying your oppression because some (‘Asian’ = a huge, diverse group) members of your group have been doing conspicuously well in recent decades…and then other POC are doing the same thing for essentially the same reason? 

It is beyond frustrating when points that exceed the Back/White racial binary—like the lynching of Asian (and Latino) people, immigration and citizenship laws that specifically excluded your nationality from even entering the country, and being a safe target of racist humor even now—are subtly dismissed as being whiny. And that calls for POC solidarity by Asians are viewed as suspect and insincere.

Look, no serious Asian anti-racist activist would ever seek to mitigate or ignore Black oppression. In fact, like most anti-racist resistance movements, we’ve long looked towards Black Americans in defining our own struggles with White power and privilege, but in doing so, we’ve come to realize that our experience is distinct.

For the purposes of anti-racist struggles, Asian anti-racists probably occupy a socio-political space that is closer to that occupied by Latin immigrants due to the transnational, post-colonial nature of both our struggles. Work by Juan Flores and recent Asian/South Asian, Latino and Caribbean critical race theory have informed my own thoughts about these issues. Racism, imperialism, and othering by both Whites and non-Whites are intersecting oppressions that don’t affect ‘just’ Asian people of color in the U.S. (and if you suggest the ideas in the following passage could only apply to Black immigrants, then I know you are beyond hope):

[I]n studying the…the experience of the United States Afro-Latino, one ever feels his threeness: A Latino, A Negro, an American…

To be clear, the use of the catchy term, “triple consciousness” is not intended to trump or one-up African American particularity and struggle but rather only to point to the increased complexities of the “color line” in light of the transnational nature of present-day social experience. For when in The Souls of Black Folks Du Bois so momentously declared the problem of the twentieth century to be the color line, he was not speaking strictly of African Americans but of “the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.” He recognized over a hundred years ago that these crucial social differentiations were not national but global in scope.

The experience of Afro-Latin@s in the United States and the emergent realities of the new century impel us, in tune with Du Bois’s critical legacy, to further advance an integral global vision of race, and at the same time to articulate a keener awareness of specificities and internal complexities both within and across the amplified range of groups. Here again, Du Bois’s choice of language is of key interest, for in The Souls of Black Folk, we have the crucial linkage of a class dimension with the heralding of cultural awakening among the oppressed nations and peoples; the word, “folk”, which harbors both a class and racial referent, holds the key to comprehending the new Black and Latin@ diversity and to hailing our elusive yet persistent goal, “the dawn of freedom.”

The Afro-Latin Reader: History and Culture in the United States, Miriam Jiménez-Román & Juan Flores, (2010) p. 15

And that’s my last word on the subject. If you don’t get it by now, no amount of blog posts and Du Bois quotes on the subject will make you get it.