Representation is not social justice

on Asian American as a political identity in a time of genocide

There is a series of funny TikTok videos that juxtaposes a group you wanted to see representation for (e.g., queer congresspeople; pansexual celebrities) and the unfortunate reality of what you received (e.g., George Santos; Jojo Siwa). You could consider it the very unserious version of the commencement speech at Spelman College this year, also on the topic of representation and viral on TikTok. In it, Dr. Ruha Benjamin — who is a Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University — says to the crowd of graduating seniors:

Black faces in high places are not going to save us. Just look at the Black proponents of Cop City in Atlanta’s leadership class. Just look at the Black woman’s hand — Ambassador at the UN — voting against a ceasefire in Gaza.

That is, our Blackness and our womanness are not in themselves trustworthy if we allow ourselves to be conscripted into positions of power that maintain the oppressive status quo.

The message within these videos — that representation alone, even of intersectional identities, is not in and of itself indicative of progress or justice — is one that continually struggles to find air in Asian American discourse. Year after year, and especially in May, I see the same messages pile flood my LinkedIn feed, my Asian American leadership Slack channels, across mainstream news outlets. Did you know there are so many Asian Americans in [insert sector here]? That only six Asians have ever won an Oscar? That is why representation matters — you can’t be what you can’t see!

It is quite a dilution of the initial vision for Asian American politics. When Emma Gee and Yuji Ichioka coined “Asian American” in 1968 — through the formation of the Asian American Political Alliance at UC Berkeley — it was an explicitly political identity used as a “radical label of self-determination.” The term Asian American countered the Eurocentric label “Oriental” and was meant to foster solidarity between ethnically different students over the shared purpose of protesting racism and labor exploitation at home, war and imperialism abroad. This group of Asian American students later joined Black, Latine, Indigenous, and other student groups as part of the Third World Liberation Front to demand significant changes at their universities, including the creation of Ethnic and Black Studies departments and a halt to discriminatory admissions and financial aid.

While the original intent of the term “Asian American” was to advance a collective vision of justice from the ground up, it has since become overshadowed by its use as a racial category — even though race is socially constructed and has no biological backing*. This has allowed the significance of Asian Americans as a political identity to be co-opted by agendas that solely focus on demographic representations of success (i.e., Asian faces “in high places” ) even when such cracks in the so-called bamboo ceiling are “conscript[ing] [us] into positions of power that maintain the oppressive status quo.”

In On Being White and Other Lies, author and activist James Baldwin wrote that for various ethnic populations** (e.g., Irish, Germans), “no one was white before he/she came to America. It took generations, and a vast amount of coercion, before this became a white country.” This process of “becoming” white was rooted in the “necessity of denying the Black presence and justifying the Black subjugation,” and the “price of the ticket” for such a “false identity” was the “moral erosion” of “opting for safety” instead of recognizing the humanity in Black lives.

Baldwin’s criticism of manufactured whiteness bears great relevance to the selective amnesia found in mainstream “Asian American”-ness — especially in light of the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Asian American as a political identity is unequivocal in its rejection of military imperialism and the war machine. Just as multi-ethnic student protestors of the 1960s called on their universities to “divest from the defense industry or anything connected to the war in Vietnam,” so are coalitions of students across 500-plus colleges now. And yet, even as we see administrations threaten student protestors with suspension and expulsion, and police officers arrest and shoot (with rubber bullets) unarmed students, supposedly “Asian American” organizations have not come out to support their message.

Indeed, the same organizations with endless stamina to applaud “Asian American” representation in capitalist enterprises like finance and Hollywood — including the largest Asian American philanthropic organization in the U.S., The Asian American Foundation (TAAF) — have remained silent as Asian American students bravely stood up for their values. For months now, Asian American activists have been demanding TAAF to call for a ceasefire and remove Jonathan Greenblatt — the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), who has continually proclaimed “Anti-Zionism is antisemitism” — from its Board of Directors. (In response, TAAF removed commenting access on its Instagram.) This sustained partnership is particularly galling considering that Greenblatt was seen exiting Harvard University’s Interim President Alan Garber’s office the very hour student suspensions were announced.

When the leadership of one of the most influential “Asian American” organizations in the country — launched with a cool $250 million — constitutes a whole host of (East) Asian millionaires with deep monetary interests far more aligned with the benefactors of the American military-industrial complex than the student protestors camping on school lawns, we really need to reassess the efficacy of “Asian American” representation to bring about substantial change.

Most are familiar with activist and poet Audre Lorde’s famous quote, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” However, there is a following sentence that often does not make it onto social media posts: this truth will prove threatening for those “who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”

The “master’s house” is not only built on a belief of racial superiority. It is founded on exploitation in the name of capitalism, buttressed by surveillance and suppression of resistance movements in the name of maintaining order, and reinforced through violence and punishment in the name of justice. Asian American as a movement was based on the work of dismantling this entire house, not just for ourselves but for all marginalized peoples. We cannot allow the term to be appropriated by Asian faces propping up industries that thrive on destroying the livelihoods of everyday workers, for initiatives that justify and further mobilize carceral violence against people of color, in support of a war against people our media outlets are depicting as “ungrievable.***”

Let me be very clear this is not a call to abandon efforts for diversity, equity, and inclusion. This is a plea for Asian Americans to reject the Faustian bargain continually being offered to us, of tokenism in exchange for a place in the oppressor’s army. Palestinian author Rasha Abdulhadi captured it best in her tweet:

We can notice, if we pay attention, who wants representation in empire and who is ready for another world.

I believe Asian Americans are ready for another world. Instead of seeing ourselves powerless in the shadows of influential “Asian American” leaders and their well-funded organizations, we can apply the concepts of power from philosopher Michel Foucault****: power as productive (able to create knowledge and truths), diffuse (not held only by specific individuals, groups, or institutions), and relational (constantly being negotiated through networks of relationships).

Put simply, it means it is well within our power as regular people to (re)define Asian American as a movement for liberation. Even if “Asian American” organizations like TAAF and Stop Asian Hate fixate “on ‘hate’ as a primary unit of information gathering, public discourse (common sense-making) and carceral state intervention” — as in, centering ‘hate’ in its constellation of power — we can reject this deficit- and “‘hate’ based victimization framework” to instead reclaim the Asian American identity as one rooted in solidarity, care, and activism; that sees its constituents as change agents instead of perpetual victims. We can make what Baldwin called the “moral choice” of seeing the humanity in our Palestinian peers over the façade of safety. We can, and many already are.

At a recent talk by Professor Julia Lee on her book Biting the Hand: Growing in Asian in Black and white America, I asked her how she and her students grapple with the pervasive idea that representation is social justice. She explained her use of Asian American as a political ideology to guide her in finding kinship and celebrating representation; otherwise, “I don’t claim them, and they don’t claim me.”

I deeply appreciated the sense of agency she spoke of, so I’ll end this newsletter with two questions for myself and all those reading: What do we claim as ours as we look toward a new era of Asian America? What must we leave behind to do so? For me, I think it starts with moving beyond just representation and reform to find a community willing to build anew in the name of Asian Americans who came before us.

Special thanks to Angela Bae for her edits.

*Even though researchers and scientists understand races like “Asian,” “Black,” “Hispanic,” and “Caucasian” to be problematic aggregators, it is often “the level at which most data are collected…and [thus the] source of statistics without sampling insufficiencies.” More complicated still, the very presence and use of racial categories are what creates some of the outcomes associated with race, which then reinforces the importance of collecting racial data. As history professor Linda Nash writes in Inescapable Ecologies:

Race is a crude approximation for genetic and lifestyle factors but race is also already entangled in access to medical care, long term and cumulative exposures, and presence in certain environments [that] these histories…have helped produce race as a meaningful epidemiological category to begin with.

TL;DR: race is now inescapable as a categorization method for people, even if it does not have biological merit.

**Baldwin also wrote specifically about Jewish assimilation and allegiance to whiteness in the same piece, which is eerily apt today:

It is probable that it is the Jewish community [who] has paid the highest and most extraordinary price for becoming white. For the Jews came here from countries where they were not white, and they came here, in part, because they were not white; and incontestably in the eyes of the Black American (and not only in those eyes) American Jews have opted to become white, and this is how they operate. It was ironical to hear, for example, former Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin declare some time ago that “the Jewish people bow only to God” while knowing that the state of Israel is sustained by a blank check from Washington.

***An excerpt from Judith Butler’s The Force of Nonviolence about the politics of grievability:

A life has to be grievable – that is, its loss has to be conceptualizable as a loss – for an interdiction against violence and destruction to include that life among those living beings to be safeguarded from violence. The condition under which some lives are more grievable than others means that the condition of equality cannot be met.

…Thus, the unequal distribution of grievability might be one framework for understanding the differential production of humans and other creations within a structure of inequality, or, indeed, within a structure of violent disavowal. To claim that equality formally extends to all humans is to sidestep the fundamental question of how the human is produced, or, rather, who is produced as a recognizable and valuable human, and who is not.

****Foucault has been making the rounds on social media for “Foucault’s boomerang,” even though it is not his concept but Hannah Arendt’s. (He never claims it, it happens to be associated with him because he references it in a speech.) Foucault is a brilliant philosopher, but let’s be more careful about perpetuating the erasure of women in our social justice work.

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Memes from This Week

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Personal Stuff from This Week

Listening: Nothing (again) because I need silence when writing. The book proposal will be going out to publishers soon!!!

Watching: Sour Grapes and Anatomy of a Fall

Reading: The Force of Nonviolence by Judith Butler and On the Inconvenience of Other People by Lauren Berlant (thanks Sara M. for the rec!)

Eating: A whole lotta cài fàn 菜饭 or “economy rice” (i.e., rice with side dishes) that I buy at my downstairs kopitiam, inhale, and keep writing

Drinking: Iced teh o kosong (iced tea without sugar or milk)

Nice thing I did for myself this week: I haven’t quite done it yet, but I think I’ll spring for a feet/neck massage since I am achy all over