well that was bomb that doug posted that thought and brought up questions on it, because that was exactly what i wanted to talk about.
when i saw the reading we had to do from the ROOTs compilation, i was so excited. the yellow power movement is something that i have a huge interest in, particularly as it helped construct many things that i take for granted now in my politics and identity. the yellow power movement brought into national focus the struggles and issues of the API community, and even gave a name to this community, that is, the term Asian American. and while there are problems with this term, such as in its essentialism and its connotation for e. asians only, etc, providing an umbrella for these racialized asian/asian descent groups to come together under is really incredible to me. i thus really wanted to reexamine these readings with doug's question in mind of how i relate to the selections.
in particular, i found the parts in the articles when they discussed race relations for the API community to be very interesting. these young men and women rather directly discuss the issues of being a more "privileged" ethnic minority, even when these apparent privileges can be misleading. they also own up to the fact that by participating in the model minority myth, this behavior can be detrimental to other marginalized communities. Amy Uyematsu bluntly states that "Asian Americans have formed an uneasy alliance with white Americans to keep the blacks down", which is admittedly a bold and contentious statement. however, her following comment of how Asian Americans "close their eyes to the white latent white racism toward them which has never changed" is something that i find can be true still today. i find it amazing that API/As can still claim that racism (or at least racism against API/As) has been eradicated when on any given day you can find something on the Internet that day that proves to the contrary. Uyematsu, along with a few other authors, bring up the idea that by accepting our roles as the 'model minority' and remaining passive, we are ultimately detrimental to other marginalized communities. and i find myself in complete agreement, for in my mind, there can be no end to these intersections of domination and oppression if each marginalized group does not come together.
further in that vein of thought, Violet Rabaya [I Am Curious (Yellow?)] brings up a point that is still often ignored today, that is, the construction of "asian american". Rabaya writes that "the term oriental has been interpreted by most to mean peoples of yellow skin, [and] the Filipino is not yellow, but brown." thirty years later, rather than finding ourselves in a more inclusive state/community, it seems that we have only perpetuated this habit of exclusion. in fact, this really brings us to the issue of why the term "asian american" is so problematic. connotatively, it does not spread its umbrella over south asians, southeast asians, pacific islanders, and other invisible groups. further more, there is not even a single generalized 'asian american experience' that one can point to. i find today that we have reached a place where there is not even a shared JA experience, particularly with the arrival of the shin-issei (a new current set of Japanese immigrants).
reading all the works from the ROOTS compilation, i was really overwhelmed by all the different emotions that they evoked. recently, i've been looking and studying the different progressive movements of the recent past i.e. from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. looking at these different movements (in particular, the women's movement, and the yellow power and black power movement), i become both exhilarated and depressed. it seriously lifts my heart and i find myself so moved that people were able to come together and create this glorious social change that we benefit from so much today almost without even any gratitude. but then i reflect on the state of today, and i can't help but feel that what happened was a once in a lifetime opportunity, and we will never be able to coalesce as they did then. we are in a state of society where we are far from being done with achieving social equality, justice, and freedoms. the very fact that, as doug points out, we are still struggling for many of the same issues is something i find to be absolutely shit. this particularly frightens me, because i really do fear that this could remain status quo, given what i perceive as apathy among youth. that isn't to deny the presence and power of activism currently in existence, but rather, a comment on what i see as our nation's inability to really come together and fight for something we believe in. for example, if Obama were to win the popular vote but lose in the convention due to super delegates (or vice versa with Hillary), how would the nation react? would we rise up and protest? or simply accept it and complain about it to ourselves/each other. i admit, i can't help but feel no matter how hard some people try to bring about a revolution, the latter would prevail.
ok i realize this was all very disjointed and weird but it was kind of a thought in process deal, and i might try to go back and add other thoughts from when i was reading it, but for now, holler.
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Thanks for this personal testimony. Two thoughts:
- To my mind, the possibility of people living in this country from all identitarian backgrounds—and Asian/Asian-American backgrounds in particular—to coherently maintain that racism against Asia America has been eradicated simply underscores how laughably problematic public discourse surrounding racialized issues in the country has become. Our inability to a) look beyond liberal-individualistic notions of "prejudice" and grasp the systemic/institutionalized aspects of social oppression, and b) discern channels of complimentarity between the treatment of different marginal/minoritary groups, are staggering and concretely disastrous. When people say that racism toward group X no longer exists (or is, at least, no longer relevant), it betrays an obvious analytical deficiency w/r/t the divide-and-conquer tactics of hegemonic systems. The socio-symbolic position of "model minority" is clearly inextricable from its constitutive opposite: "non-model" minorities. Inclusion according to the mandates of normativity will, regardless of which people or institutions determine the particular content of what's considered "normative," will necessitate political and discursive practices of exclusion: representational otherizing, prohibitive laws that favor some communities over others, etc. And this has everything to do with an economic system built on, and driven by, exclusion: if we buy Omi and Wynant's claim that "race" refers (at least) to the set of metaphors that we use to symbolize social violence, then racialization and capitalism are forever interpenetrating. Perhaps, then, the proper jumping off point for radical interventions re: racial (and gendered) oppression is structural and socio-economic. Not necessarily class-based critique at the expense of everything else, but certainly the continual recognition (and, more importantly, the vehement insistance in public discourse) that neoliberal policy and public beneficience come into conflict precisely when the maintenance of "structural" unemployment (which is always "good for the Market") is decidely NOT good for the people—and so long as it continues, such conflict will always be sublimated in terms of exclusion. The project for radical politics, it would seem, is to find theoretical and practical standpoints from which to refuse this dynamic of inclusivity and exclusivity altogether.
- You say: "i really do fear that this [fighting against the same fucked up stuff over and over again] could remain status quo, given what i perceive as apathy among youth. that isn't to deny the presence and power of activism currently in existence, but rather, a comment on what i see as our nation's inability to really come together and fight for something we believe in." I would reach this critique even further back: We're coming up fast on social and cultural conditions that are prohibiting us—even on an individual level—from "believing in" much at all. In fact, the dominant ideology of contemporary trasnational capitalism seems to be, on the one hand, rampant cynicism and, on the other hand, (mis)appropriations of Eastern / neo-Pagan theories cosmologies of balance—both of which conspicuously lack any space for genuine belief. Consider the following passage from Slavoj Zizek: "'culture' is a name for all those things we practice without really believing in them, without 'taking them seriously ... Today, we ultimately perceive as a threat to culture those who live their culture immediately, those who lack distance toward it. Recall the outrage when the Taliban forces in Afganistan destroyed the ancient Buddhist statues at Bamiyan: although none of us enlightened Westerners believe in the divinity of the Buddha, we were outraged because the Taliban Muslims did not show the appropriate respect for the 'cultural heritage' of their own country and the entire world. Instead of believing through the other like all people of 'culture,' they really believed in their own religion and thus had no great sensitivity toward the cultural value of the monuments of other religions—to them, the Buddha statues were just fake idols" (from The Puppet and the Dwarf, MIT [2003]). Zizek's analysis—though perhaps overly garish at points—sheds light on the disastrous results of dissolving belief in the relativistic standard of universal "culture"—which is nothing more than the discursive space where legitimate belief goes to die. This is the traumatic reality of "pluralism" and "tolerance" (those banners of guilt mitigation par excellence): affirmation of the multiple destroys the content of all its constitutive parts—to believe in everything is, effectively, to believe in nothing. To me, this is precisely the social juncture at which psychoanalytic theory becomes not only valuable, but indispensable, to the extent that it allows us to interrogate how institutions are set up to sustain certain social fantasies—and hopefully point the way to practices that help traverse, and divest us of, those fantasies. Because until that happens, the articulation of (politicized) belief that you're describing will be impossible.
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