Access: https://drive.google.com/file/d/15JAHDLCceSF9dr1n3VryImRxs907bDYa/view?usp=share_link

Key excerpts

Research Findings on Racism in United States' schools: Qualitative Data

• I present and discuss qualitative data from the research I conducted about racism on college campuses. This data comes from a predominantly White Midwestern US school and a racially diverse US school in an urban area.
• The intent of these questions was to generate in-depth responses about participant’s experiences with racism on campus as well as their view of their campuses’ racial climate.
• Respondents were asked the following questions: (1) Please describe your experiences with racism on your campus; and (2) Do you think that your school provides a comfortable environment for culturally diverse groups?
• The following themes emerged: anti-Black racism, anti-Asian racism, segregation, “reverse” discrimination, and racist jokes.

Anti-Asian Racist Sentiments, Microaggressions, and Macroaggressions

• Anti-Asian sentiments, microaggressions, and macroaggressions were common at both schools.
• Asian students at both schools (and particularly the predominantly White school) endured anti-Asian racism, verbal harassment, liquid racism, anti-international antagonism, racist retaliation as a response to the critical mass of Asian students, and being blamed for White students’ underperformance.

People hate Asians (White woman, 18, at a predominantly White school).

People are most racist to Asians (White woman, 19, at a predominantly White school).

People dislike Asians the most out of every race. People telling Asians to go home/making fun of their customs and speech (White man, 19, at a predominantly White school).

• The first quote is one of the most profound in the study. It is a simple and declarative statement that captures the climate of race relations on the predominantly White campus.

Anti-Asian Racist Comments and Verbal Harassment

A week does not go by where I don’t hear something negative about my race. There are comments made every day…about the international kids. The way they eat, talk, smell, stick together, and other cliché generalizations of Asians. I’ve heard many comments about Blacks too, from mostly Whites. Rarely so [do] I ever hear negative comments about Whites. When I do, it’s about blondes (Asian woman, 21, at a predominantly White school).

I’ve heard people make comments about other races. My friends are somewhat racist. I’ve had experiences where Asians were made fun of in front of me (they didn’t know I was Asian) (Asian woman, 18, at a predominantly White school).

I get called bad names, and it hurts my feelings (Asian man, 18, at a racially diverse school).

People usually call Black people the n-word and Asian people chinks (Asian male, 20, at a racially diverse school).

• The first comment is incredibly disturbing but is unsurprising given the intense anti-Asian sentiment at the predominantly White school. At least once a week, the participant heard “something negative” about her race. Her experience was not uncommon. 
• Asian students on both campuses were inundated with verbal harassment and racist comments that were dehumanizing, humiliating, and embarrassing.
• Such comments not only impacted the target’s mental and emotional health (as seen in the third comment), it fostered a climate that was generally hostile toward Asians.

Anti-Asian Liquid Racism

• Racist jokes are also referred to as liquid racism. Weaver (2011) uses the term liquid racism to describe the difficulty of identifying behaviors as racist, particularly when racist behaviors are presented in a so-called humorous way. Weaver (2011) explains that racist humor “… is fluid, difficult to collect or identify because it may escape or dissolve before it can be contained, and is explicitly encouraged or given coverage in mass media (252).”

I notice a ton of racism towards Asians. Jokes which people know they will not respond to; stereotypes; rude comments; all around I feel that Asians are most targeted and that is not because I have [an] Asian background (many people do not even know I am) (Asian man, 18, at a predominantly White school).

I’ve received racial slurs [from] White people before with no reasoning. People tend to make many Asian jokes but always claim I’m not Asian because I’m Filipino (Asian woman, 20, at a predominantly White school).

I hear friends and people on the street downtown making racial jokes towards Blacks and Asians ALL the time (White woman, 19, at a predominantly White school).

• Liquid racism is one of the most common and insidious forms of modern racism. “Jokes” are used to dispense racism in a way that allows the offender to hide their true intentions by saying they were simply being playful. Attempts to hold the offender accountable for their words and actions often result in targets, allies, and those investigating such incidents being charged with the difficult task of proving intent.

Anti-International Antagonism

Most people are bad to the international students (Asian woman, 19, at a predominantly White school).

The only racism I have encountered was what I have seen others do and say to the foreign students usually from China (White woman, 18, at a predominantly White school).

I observe a lot of racism aimed at Asian international students on campus (White man, 20, at a predominantly White school).

Derogatory slurs about Asian exchange students (White woman, 20, at a predominantly White school).

Some students in my class don’t want to discuss with me, I felt (because I’m Asian) (South Korean woman and international student, 21, at a predominantly White school).

• International students, and particularly Asian international students at the predominantly White school, encountered a hostile and unwelcoming environment.
• international students may find it particularly challenging to navigate a foreign school system and to find allies and support systems that can help them document, report, and overcome the challenges of racism.

Defending “White Territory” from Asians

The Asians are taking over this fucking school and can’t even speak English (White man, 21, at a predominantly White school).

Chinese and Koreans come and don’t speak a word of English. They do not learn the language or customs because they make little or no effort to interact with Americans (White man, 22, at a racially diverse school).

• The above comments are very hostile and aggressive toward Asian students. It is clear from the comments that these White students believe that there is a wrongful intrusion of Asians onto their “White” campuses and, in an attempt to preserve their territory, they are responding with hostility (Levin and McDevitt 1993).
• Since there is a critical mass of Asian students at both schools, their visibility makes them clear targets for retaliatory hostility, microaggressions, and macroaggressions (Levin and McDevitt 1993; Stotzer and Hossellman 2012).

Curve Setting

Asians are categorized as smart and throwing off our grade curves (White woman, 20, at a predominantly White school).

A lot [of racism] against Asian students because they make up a good majority of the university and set curves (White woman, 18, at a predominantly White school).

• Asian students were accused of “setting the curve” or outperforming other students on exams and assignments. However, it is outlandish for any student to blame someone else for their academic performance.
• Unfortunately, for some students, scapegoating, bullying, and engaging in anti-Asian microaggressions and macroaggressions are more appealing than taking responsibility for their own academic performance.

Racial Segregation on College Campuses

• Students at both the predominantly White school and the diverse school cited racial segregation as a major problem on their respective campuses. There is an assumption that a diverse school would be more integrated and that there would be a higher degree of interracial solidarity and positive interactions between racial groups. This is not the case.

I rarely see different [racial] groups comingle… [The school] prides themselves on having many races of people, but no sense of community is visible. Asians hang [out] with other Asians, Latinos with other Latinos…I tried to be open, but I was shunned when I attempt[ed] to try to say “hi” (Latino man, 26, at a predominantly White school).

[On] campus, I feel [like] people [are] divided by race, Asian with Asian, White with White (Asian woman, 20, at a predominantly White school).

[It] just [feels] hard to step into the circle of Whites (Asian woman, 21, at a predominantly White school).

I see a lot of discrimination and people choosing to be friends with people of the same race (White woman, 22, at a predominantly White school).

Many races seclude/exclude themselves from others. Sometimes they hang out with the same type of people (Asian woman, 20, at a racially diverse school).

Even though our campus promotes diversity, I feel that everyone is racially separated (Asian woman, 18, at a racially diverse school).

• Self-segregation and isolation serve as protective mechanisms for students of color. Some students of color feel that it is safer (physically, emotionally, and psychologically) to separate themselves from the dominant group because of personal experiences, vicarious experiences, and the legacy of racism in America.

Research Findings on Racism in School: Quantitative Data

• The quantitative data comes from 2500 participants at a predominantly White institution and a racially diverse institution who filled out a survey that included scales and items related to racist microaggressive experiences, racist macroaggressive experiences, racist beliefs, post-racist beliefs, perceptions of campus climate, and cultural competence.
• Major findings are as follows:

1. students of color experienced more race-based microaggressions than White students;
2. Black and Asian students experienced the highest levels of race-based microaggressions, and
3. students of color experienced victimization by members outside of their racial group at higher rates than White students—which underscores the violence and oppression that students of color experience both vertically (by Whites) and horizontally (by other people of color).

• Table 4.1: 81% of Asian students experience racist macroaggression at predominately white campus, 86% at racially diverse campus.
• Table 4.2: 82% of Asian students experience racist microaggression at predominately white campus, 83% at racially diverse campus.
• These results are in line with recent literature that found, compared to White students, Black and Asian students reported experiencing more racial discrimination (Gomez et al. 2011). My findings are also in line with literature revealing that White male students are less likely to be victims of racialized violence (Perry 2010).

Access: https://drive.google.com/file/d/17T1HDHjefk7yw8tLgVOrRskFTDe_7Twz/view?usp=share_link

Abstract: We analyze 1027 articles published in four newspapers in order to trace the construction of the fentanyl “crisis” across social contexts. Our analysis reveals that Chinese producers and Mexican cartels were censured for bringing this deadly substance into Canada and the US as the number of fentanyl-related deaths and overdoses increased. News media construct this “illicit” form of fentanyl as foreign and risky. We contend that this coverage diverts attention away from the consequences of the neoliberal policies that contribute to opioid use and plays an important role in stoking feelings of insecurity that justify a disconcertingly wide range of governing practices that aim to secure the homeland against external threats, advance the state’s interests abroad, and discipline larger swaths of the population at home.

Drugs scares in the media

• In this article we interrogate the part of mass media in framing substance use and in creating drug scares. During these scares, substances and their users are blamed for a wide variety of social problems that threaten “the very order and moral health of social universes”. For instance, during the 1980s, crack cocaine was ostensibly the “cause of America’s troubles”, including crime and urban decay. Other scholars have similarly found that news media frame drug use as connected to, or the cause of, crime. Decades before the crack cocaine scare, alcohol was blamed for devastating families and LSD supposedly posed a threat to middle-class morality and work ethic.
• In more recent years, mephedrone has been linked to violence, anti-social behavior, and suicide by British news media, Scottish news media have suggested “alcopops” led to an increase in underage drinking, and methamphetamine use has come to symbolize the precarity of white privilege. In this last example, meth supposedly physically transforms individuals who use the drug, leaving them with lesions as well as decayed teeth and rendering them “white trash”. The fear associated with meth, Murakawa (2011) argues, is one of white status decline and economic instability for the white middle class.
• While in each of these cases the scare reflects “deeply rooted anxieties” (Alexandrescu, 2014: 26), the public’s attention is redirected away from broader structural issues, such as poverty, and toward a purportedly dangerous substance.
• During drug scares the substance and its users—Chinese opium users in the late 19th and early 20th century or Black individuals during the crack crisis, for example—become convenient scapegoats for much more complex social problems. Those who are scapegoated are often members of already-marginalized groups, typically ethnic minorities and immigrants. The scapegoated group is “othered” and portrayed as a “foreign parasitic force” that wants to “destabilize its host body”. These outsiders, then, threaten our very way of life.
• In short, during a drug scare, media frame substances and their users—typically racialized outsiders—as the cause of a variety of social problems and potential bearers of unparalleled and uncontrollable destruction, mostly for the white middle class.
• This type of cultural work further excludes scapegoated groups from society (Taylor, 2008). Specifically, because these outsiders pose a threat, but bear little resemblance, to “us”, it is easier to support control-oriented policies aimed at containing risk. Indeed, new drug scares enable the expansion of security projects that cover new territories and govern larger swaths of the population (Linnemann, 2016).
• For Linnemann (2016) and Neocleous (2011: 192, 2016), then, drug wars represent an attempt to “secure insecurity”; they aim to obscure the inequalities inherent in capitalism, pacify those who pose a threat to capital accumulation, and sustain the current social order. While this is the general formula for drug scares, media framing is to a certain extent contingent upon the particular drug in question and the kinds of people that are thought to be consuming it. In this regard, a closer consideration of discourse regarding opioid users is revelatory.

Media framing of opioid use

• Scholars have been critical of how media representations of unlikely opioid users diverge from users of other substances. For instance, McLean examines depictions of opioid users over time and finds that they have been increasingly framed as “good” and “normal” people who do not fit the stereotypical junkie profile; they may be “honor roll students and athletes”, “kids in the chess club”, or a “soccer mom”. In other words, they are regular folks who have been victimized or “duped” by unethical doctors and/or drug dealers.
• In contrast to racialized, urban heroin injectors, these particular opioid users are portrayed in a humanizing way that allows readers to understand and sympathize with them. Their drug use is contextualized or explained away, rendering them essentially blameless. In fact, their drug use is surprising, tragic, and does not represent moral failing: a common narrative is that a good person was prescribed painkillers for an injury, ended up addicted, and did not deserve to die.
• There remains a place for punitive criminal justice policies in this milieu, however. Instead of being directed at the seemingly faultless white suburban users, dealers and suppliers—typically racialized and immigrant men coming from a low socio-economic status—as well as inner-city users are the targets of these punitive policies. This leads McLean (2017: 415) to suggest that class, race, and location may actually “serve as a protective shield against media damnation” and blame. In short, these scholars help us understand how and why some opioid users (white, middle class, living in the suburbs) receive sympathy and treatment, while others (racialized, impoverished, living in the inner city) are marginalized and criminalized.
• Consistent with the existing literature, we find sympathetic representations of fentanyl users, considerable support for a public health orientation to the “crisis”, and blame directed at racialized outsiders. We also find calls to monitor patients and re-educate doctors, increase punishment of dealers and suppliers, and inspect international pack- ages. We argue that news media coverage constructs “illicit” fentanyl as the latest foreign security threat. In our view, this rhetoric justifies xenophobic policies, reconfigures the war on drugs, and introduces a range of new disciplinary measures that govern those at home. Notably, while this new drug scare has been mobilized for foreign policy gains, it leaves the neoliberal social and economic policies that have contributed to fentanyl-related deaths largely intact.

Data and methods

• The authors conducted a search for “fentanyl” in two Canadian (The Globe and Mail and Toronto Star) and two American (New York Times and Washington Post) newspapers. These were the most highly circulated daily newspapers (excluding tabloid and business press) accessible in the Factiva database at the time of the search. Our search covered the period of 1 January 2012 to 31 December 2017. The initial search produced a total of 1266 articles. We then removed duplicates, letters to the editors, articles less than 100 words in length, and those articles not substantively related to fentanyl. We analyzed 1027 articles: 394 in The Globe and Mail; 187 in the Toronto Star; 158 in the New York Times; and 288 in the Washington Post.
• We acknowledge this study has limitations. Notably, we recognize that audiences are active, rather than passive, and that we should not assume that others will interpret the content in the same manner as we do. Moreover, while the Factiva database allowed us to access, retrieve, and analyze a large sample of articles from multiple newspapers, this left us ill-equipped to consider format (see Valverde, 2006) and images accompanying the text, which, as Ayres and Jewkes (2012) note, also support particular ideologies. Finally, it is important to note that for the sake of space and coherence in this manuscript we focus on several themes rather than providing a representative overview of the entire data set.

Findings

“A new class of drug addicts”: Who is at risk during this crisis?

• News media coverage emphasized how risky ingestion of fentanyl was by highlighting the possibility of overdose and/or death. Fentanyl was referred to as a “deadly opioid” (Forrest, 2015b) and as a “poison” (McCaul, 2016). Martin Schiavetta, the head of Calgary’s drug unit, remarked that fentanyl “is absolutely the worst drug I’ve ever seen because of how toxic it is. The equivalent of two grains of sand will kill you, quickly”. 841 (out of 1027) articles emphasized the risks associated with fentanyl use.
• Much like terrorism, to which it is sometimes compared, fentanyl purportedly poses a threat to “every layer of society” (Wente, 2016). This question of who is at risk came up repeatedly. On this topic, some journalists lament fentanyl’s “growing prevalence not just among entrenched drug users but also among unassuming recreational drug users” and issue reminders to readers that those “at risk of overdoses are not just stereotypical ‘junkies,’ but people such as cancer patients and your grandmother”.
• In emphasizing that this social problem cuts across class, race, and geographic boundaries, news media encourage readers to identify with fentanyl users. For instance, Margaret Wente (2016), writing for The Globe and Mail, advocates a re-thinking of substance (mis)use predicated on who is consuming those drugs: “abusers need a lot more sympathy and help. Don’t think of them as junkies. Think of them as the clean-cut couple down the street.”
• News media coverage of the fentanyl “crisis” generates sympathy for fentanyl users in three other ways.

1. First, in 357 articles fentanyl is labeled a painkiller or a treatment option for individuals experiencing chronic pain. These labels legitimize some uses of the drug, perhaps encouraging the reader to think of those using fentanyl as patients rather than “addicts”.
2. Second, at times users are described as not making a conscious decision to consume fentanyl. Here news media characterize individuals as “unwitting” (Wee and Hernandez, 2017) or “unaware” (Hunter, 2015), noting that other drugs could be “laced” (Forrest, 2015a) or “spiked” (Howlett, 2016a) with fentanyl without the user’s knowledge. 251 articles portray a user in this manner.
3. The third way news articles engender sympathy for fentanyl users is by detailing aspects of their life histories and/or their struggles with opioid addiction. For instance, a feature in The Globe and Mail profiled Michael Stone, a yoga teacher from British Columbia with bipolar disorder who divulged a desire to self-medicate and sub-sequently died of a drug overdose. In the feature, his spouse described him as “a man who was always curious about the world”, while students noted he was “approachable and attentive” and “had a sense of humour” (Woo, 2017b: A8).

• Stories like this provide context for drug use, lessen blame, and humanize fentanyl users. As we discuss next, this makes it easier to shift blame to the dealers/suppliers who purportedly deceived these “unwitting” individuals.

Public health or criminal justice? Debating solutions to the “crisis”

• Considering the concern that “innocent” middle-class users were at risk, we were not surprised to find that many viewed the “crisis” through a public health lens and promoted corresponding solutions. These public health solutions include advocating for supervised consumption sites, the wider availability of the opioid antagonist naloxone, and other harm reduction initiatives. We argue that the support for treatment and harm reduction rather than incarceration makes sense because these particular drug users could be “us” and warrant our sympathy.
• Imbued with neoliberal rhetoric, harm reduction initiatives seek to transform those marginalized by neoliberal policies into healthy and productive citizens. They conceptualize drug users as rational and free to make choices, thereby ignoring and failing to remedy the structural issues that may lead to problematic drug use and limit an individual’s options in life. For instance, scholars (Bourgois, 1998; Moore, 2004) argue that instructing “street addicts” to avoid “risky” practices— sharing needles, not mixing drugs, not using alone—actually ignores their “lived experiences”.
• In the wake of the fentanyl “crisis”, the state has sought to responsibilize citizens by increasing access to naloxone, passing Good Samaritan laws, expanding the number of safe consumption sites, and the like. However, each of these policies ignores the consequences of decades of criminalization and makes individual behavioral change the focus rather than structural reform. Notably, as they have sought to make naloxone more widely available and educate the public regarding safe administration, governments have transferred risk and responsibility for life-and-death decisions onto citizens.
• Similarly, the “war on drugs” has left many people who use drugs with lengthy criminal histories and a suspicion of police, something Good Samaritan laws fail to anticipate (Koester et al., 2017; McLean, 2018). In addition, scholars have suggested safe consumption sites are actually sites of surveillance, discipline, and regulation that serve capitalist interests as they seek to “purify” “chaotic” neighborhoods populated by “uncontrollable” residents, creating order in urban spaces and indicating they are open for business.
• While these initiatives may be perceived as empowering and foster a sense of collective dignity among people who use drugs, they tend to ignore power dynamics as well as leaving structural inequalities and social conditions untouched. Indeed, harm reduction successes leave us less motivated to fundamentally reconsider our problematic approach—criminalization and the promotion of abstinence-based treatment—to drugs (Roe, 2005).
• These critiques correspond with our findings. Namely, while we found considerable condemnation of the criminalization of drug use, there was not a complete rejection of the “war on drugs”. Then, despite the subsequent proliferation of harm reduction initiatives, the fentanyl “crisis” has not precipitated a fundamental re-thinking of the criminalization of drugs or the role of prison. Rather, we witness a shift in who is considered deserving of punishment for drug-related offenses.
• While during previous drug scares, like the 1980s crack cocaine scare, racialized inner-city users were criminalized, in this case, where unknowing users are purportedly more likely to be white, working or middle class, and living outside of urban centers, there is more debate about what role the criminal justice system should play.
• The re-education of medical professionals and monitoring of patients were also considered prerequisites to slowing or stopping fentanyl-related overdoses and deaths. State agencies have also sought to intensify surveillance and monitoring of those using prescription drugs. In response to the fentanyl “crisis”, then, we see the state increase efforts to gather information about, to know, and to discipline its citizens.

Sinophobia and a border wall: Blaming China and Mexico

• Mainly in the early days of the news media coverage that we analyzed, the primary causes of fentanyl-related overdoses and deaths were thought to be an over-reliance on and over-prescription of opioids to treat various types of pain in Canada and the United States as well as the irresponsible marketing of pharmaceutical companies. In these and other instances, columnists and observers identified serious flaws within the social structure, particularly with both countries’ healthcare systems, the education and oversight of medical professionals, and the privileging of corporate interests at the expense of patient well-being.
• While this narrative never completely disappears, as the number of fentanyl-related deaths and overdoses grew we discovered that the blame for the escalating fentanyl “crisis” increasingly shifted outward to China—a development anticipated by Linnemann (2016)—and Mexico.
• Simultaneously, news media coverage distinguished the fentanyl used by medical professionals to treat chronic pain from the fentanyl found in street drugs (e.g. Howlett et al., 2016). The latter, referred to as “bootleg” or “illicit” fentanyl (n = 292), was systematically linked to Chinese producers and Mexican cartels. In short, this “illicit” form of the substance was constructed as foreign and blamed for the increasing number of fentanyl-related overdoses and deaths despite research suggesting otherwise (Fischer et al., 2018).
• Reiss (2014) insists that the process by which a substance is designated as licit or illicit, a threat or a blessing, is inevitably political and not necessarily rooted in physiology.
• China was portrayed as the primary source of the fentanyl that made its way to Canada or the United States in a total of 112 articles. For instance, Burton (2016) states that data from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service indicate “almost all the fentanyl comes from small synthetic chemical factories all over China”. Similarly, Howlett (2016a) notes “the bootleg version of fentanyl that is often made in clandestine labs in China and smuggled into Canada has been linked to overdose deaths”. We contend that this coverage encourages readers to redirect blame for the illicit fentanyl “crisis” to Chinese pro- ducers. Like previous drug scares, news media stoke fears of racialized outsiders.
• Notably, US newspaper coverage regarding fentanyl production in China was more explicitly focused on crime. One example is particularly illustrative. In October of 2017, the US Department of Justice laid charges against two “Chinese nationals” who ran multiple chemical factories in China and operated websites that sold fentanyl. These indictments received more attention in the US newspapers than in Canadian newspapers, despite the fact that several Canadians were arrested and said to be members of this conspiracy. We suggest that the Sinophobia present in the Canadian newspapers is subtler, while the US newspapers reify the link between racialized outsider groups—namely Chinese producers—and crime.
• In both contexts, China is depicted as lawless, corrupt, and dishonest. Several exam- ples are demonstrative.

1. First, Howlett and colleagues (2016: F1) suggest that China is “at the centre of the vast underground world of synthetic-drug manufacturers”, where “enforcement is fragmented, and companies operate with impunity”.
2. Second, Burton (2016) cautions against depending on China to stop fentanyl exports, claiming, “undoubtedly China’s fentanyl manufacturers are already issuing the necessary bribes to keep their operations free from government harassment”.
3. Third, Wee and Hernandez (2017), writing for the New York Times, suggest that cutting off the supply of fentanyl from China will be difficult because of the “lax regulation of chemical companies, a sprawling industry of more than 30,000 businesses that face few requirements for transparency”.

• This chemical industry is characterized as “vast” and “freewheeling” (Kinetz and Butler, 2016: A19), while the Chinese government is framed as negligent, permissive, and willing to accept bribes. Meanwhile, Chinese suppliers are portrayed as intelligent and deceptive, consistently uncovering ways to hide fentanyl and get around inspection rules. With China framed this way, its antithesis, the West (i.e. Canada and the United States), is thereby positioned as orderly, honest, and governed by the rule of law.
• In this “vast underground world”, “clandestine” Chinese laboratories are producing fentanyl, a synthetic opioid (n = 212). According to Jenkins (1999: 7), synthetic drug scares exploit concerns about the ability of unrestrained science to “corrupt humanity”. Furthermore, Jenkins (1999: 9) observes those chemists who create these unnatural substances are represented as “mysterious, evil geniuses”. Similar concerns are evident in the news coverage we analyzed, as former US Attorney General Jeff Sessions warns synthetic drugs are more dangerous, powerful, and addictive than before (Miroff, 2017).
• Those producing fentanyl in clandestine laboratories are described as so sophisticated that they are able to “custom-design variants of pharmaceutical-grade fentanyl by tweaking a molecule ever so slightly” and are “technologically skilled enough” to run their own shops on the dark web, where individuals purchase drugs and other goods anonymously using virtual currencies. We contend that, in the case of fentanyl, news media coverage stokes fears regarding the unrestricted nature of Chinese industry and the nation’s technological and intellectual sophistication. As such, this news coverage draws on and reproduces anxieties relating to the inevitable rise of China and concomitant white status decline (see Murakawa, 2011).
• In the US context, we find that Chinese producers and Mexican cartels are blamed for smuggling fentanyl. A total of 40 articles—37 of which were in the New York Times and Washington Post—mention Mexico as a major source of the drug. Much of this rhetoric was inflammatory and explicitly racist as it associated Mexico with poverty, crime, and violence.
• During the 2016 US presidential campaign, for instance, Donald Trump claimed that immigrants from Mexico are “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists” (Phillips, 2017). After being elected President, Trump remarked that “drug lords in Mexico are knocking the hell out of our country” (Phillips, 2017). These drug lords are purportedly concerned only with their own self-interest, “operate with quasi-corporate sophistication”, and employ violence strategically, killing “easily and with near-total impunity” in Mexico (Miroff, 2017: A01).
• Along similar lines, Berlanga (2016) suggests that the violence associated with the drug trade in Mexico necessitates businesses close their doors and fire their employees and means that “kids aren’t allowed to play outside”. In other words, Mexican drug cartels trafficking fentanyl are framed as ruthless and amoral, with their violent behavior threatening capitalism and curtailing freedoms “regular” Americans take for granted.
• This case study illustrates the racism inherent in drug scares is context-specific, “not monolithic”, and that globalization requires scholars to urgently (re)consider the various ways racism and criminalization intersect. Our initial reaction to the Sinophobia particularly evident in The Globe and Mail coverage was that it was subtle.
• We suggest that blaming “clandestine” Chinese labs is an acceptable way of expressing Sinophobia in a supposedly post-racial age of colorblindness. In our view, this phrase is designed to elicit fears regarding unchecked Chinese science and technology and the great risk the fentanyl produced in these labs poses to Canadians from “all walks of life”. While this phrase is not overtly racist like the ones—think “‘cocaine crazed’ Negro” and “Mexican menace” — uttered during previous drug scares, this is not reflective of progress.
• Despite Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s claims that Canada is committed to “diversity and inclusion” and that Canadians are “polite” and “reasonable” people who also “rise up to reject” intolerance, we should heed Omi and Winant’s (2009) warning that the institutionalization of multiculturalism and diversity can neutralize challenges to institutional or structural racism. This helps legitimate social structures that (re)produce racial inequality and obscure instances of state-perpetrated racial violence (see also Ward, 2015). In the United States, “old-fashioned racism” is alive and well as some journalists and officials perpetuate the “myth of the criminal immigrant”.

Discussion

• We assert that news media coverage plays a significant role in constructing “illicit” fentanyl—and, concomitantly, Chinese science and technology as well as migration from Mexico and Central America—as the latest external security threat. In so doing, it helps justify a “‘new’ security agenda” that closes borders and excludes racialized outsiders, informs international diplomacy, and extends surveillance and control.
• News media coverage of the fentanyl “crisis” suggests that the US and Canadian borders are not secure and that this leaves citizens unprotected. Specifically, the President’s Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis reported that the nation’s “inability to reliably detect fentanyl at our land borders and at our international mail handling facilities creates untenable vulnerabilities” (McGinley, 2017). In the Globe and Mail, Howlett and colleagues (2016: F1) suggest the fentanyl produced in underground Chinese labs and factories “easily crosses our porous borders, triggering a heroin-like bliss in users—and, all too often, death”.
• Alongside claims that Mexican (and other Central American) immigrants bring with them deadly drugs, violence, and poverty, this rhetoric justifies a range of xenophobic policies and practices that seek to close borders and banish outsiders. Recently, for instance, children have been detained in warehouses away from parents who are being prosecuted for illegal entry into the United States and individuals who have lived in the United States for years and may have families and jobs have been deported. The most (in) famous of these proposed solutions is likely US President Donald Trump’s claim that a wall built along the southern border with Mexico will prevent drugs from entering the United States (see Lewis, 2017).
• Meanwhile, legislation has expanded the surveillance capacities and policing powers of customs officials. For instance, the SUPPORT for Patients and Communities Act (2018) mandates the collection and sharing of advance electronic data regarding packages arriving in the USA via international mail, while in Canada border officials may now open and inspect any package sent through international mail (Government of Canada, 2017). In short, both governments have adopted new policies that enable them to keep unwanted people and goods out.
• In recent months the fentanyl “crisis” has also been mobilized as a tool of statecraft (see Frydl, 2013). For instance, the recent arrest of Wanzhou Meng, the CFO of Huawei Technologies Co., in Canada at the behest of the US government illustrates that Chinese technology is perceived as a significant threat to national security. Claims that Chinese nationals were the ringleaders of a vast international fentanyl— a synthetic substance produced in clandestine Chinese labs, remember—conspiracy that left Americans dead reinforce this perceived threat.
• In response, US President Trump has used trade threats to curb China’s technology ambitions (Dodwell, 2018) and compel China to designate fentanyl a controlled substance (McKenna, 2018). This aligns with decades of US foreign policy, wherein the drug war has shaped how the USA has navigated relationships with the rest of the world and sought to (re)assert its global power (Frydl, 2013) or suppress challenges to its hegemony (Reiss, 2014). In other words, the fentanyl “crisis” is inextricably tied to international trade, diplomacy, and the maintenance of the current global capitalist system.

Conclusion

• Our analysis reveals news media continue to play an important role in the construction of social problems. Specifically, we find that journalists privileged claims and advanced argu- ments that highlight the significant threat fentanyl posed to ordinary people, including those taking pain medications and unwitting recreational drug users. As the number of fentanyl-related overdoses and deaths grew, news media coverage increasingly blamed this problem on an “illicit”, and now foreign, substance produced in Chinese labs and trafficked in part by Mexican cartels.
• We argue this coverage works to establish new enemies and in so doing legitimize a disconcertingly wide range of governing practices that aim to secure the homeland against external threats, advance the state’s interests abroad, and discipline citizens at home. Indeed, states have worked to deport long-time residents and split fami- lies, restrain an emerging global power, expand surveillance and monitoring, and “empower” patients to make better—less risky—health choices.
• By redirecting readers’ attention to the external threat posed by Chinese science and technology and Mexican cartels, we are concerned that less focus is on the state’s close relationship to pharmaceutical companies, the quality of healthcare, or the structural inequalities that contribute to opioid use in the first place.

Access: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KUbaTi9S5weWUnepoyzXe2-oFW395ToO/view?usp=share_link

Abstract:

• This paper explores how multiracial parents with White partners articulate narratives of ethnic and racial ‘dilution’ and cultural loss in relation to the socialization of their children. Parents commonly spoke of concerns around dilution and generational change in relation to four key themes: the loss of cultural knowledge and diminishing practices that connected parents and their children to a minority ancestry; the embodiment of White-appearing children and the implications of this for family relationships; the use of biological or genetic discourses in relation to reduced blood quantum; and concerns amongst Black/White participants about whitening and the loss of racial consciousness.
• Parental understandings of dilution varied greatly; some expressed sadness at ‘inevitable’ loss; others were more philosophical about generational change; and others still proactively countered loss through strategies to connect their children to their minority heritages. We show that despite growing awareness of the social constructedness of race and an emergent cosmopolitanism among these parents, discourses of genetics, cultural lineage, and the ‘naturalness’ of race continue to hold sway amongst many multiracial parents.

Key Excerpts:

Multiracial parents in British society

• Interest in ethnic and racial ancestry, and of one’s ‘roots’, is of particular relevance in British society today, given the very significant growth in intermarriage and of ‘mixed race’ (or ‘multiracial’) individuals. But very little is known about multiracial people as parents, or about their children (who constitute second-generation mixed people), and the transmission of ethnic and racial difference and heritages to their children. This study engages with debates about whether many multiracial people (and their progeny) will effectively become ‘White’. As we argue below, this is very much an open question in the British context.

The study

• We recruited 62 mixed-race parents from across the UK who each completed an online survey, and an in-depth interview. 37 were women and 25 men, and most were aged between 25 and 50 with the following mixed backgrounds: 32 Black/White (usually Black Caribbean or Black African), 19 South Asian/White, 11 East Asian/White.
• Most participants were ‘first generation’ mixed, seven participants were ‘second generation’ mixed. Most participants had White British or White European/North American partners with whom they had children. It is this subset of the sample, those with White partners, which will be the focus of this paper.
• Given the propensity for mixed people in Britain to partner with White Britons (ONS, 2005), in general, we were interested in investigating the implications of this for how multiracial parents thought and felt about the ethnic and racial identities of their own children.

Terminology for mixed race people

• Various analysts have used a variety of terms to refer to people popularly known as ‘mixed race’. For instance, Ifekwunigwe uses the term ‘mixed race’ ‘to describe individuals who according to popular folk concepts of “race” and by known birth parentage embody two or more world views or in genealogical terms, descent groups’.
• In this paper, we use the terms ‘multiracial’ and ‘mixed’ (or ‘mixed race’) interchangeably, but in doing so, we do not endorse the ontological status of ‘race’ or essentialist notions of racial difference. But given the dominance of conventional and folk beliefs about race and racial difference, based upon beliefs about intrinsic differences between putatively distinct races, we cannot discuss and analyse the experiences of mixed individuals and their children without recourse to some language that is in common usage, albeit critically.
• As Brubaker (2013) has argued, there is an important distinction between a ‘category of practice’, which is a category used by people in everyday life, and a ‘category of analysis’, which is critically discussed by analysts. So to study ‘mixed’ people (who actually constitute a very diverse population) does not necessarily reify a notion of racial difference. As such, we are critically investigating the thoughts and experiences of mixed people as a category of analysis.

Our findings

• Many parents articulated concerns about ethnic and racial ‘dilution’ and cultural loss, and the role of generational transmission in countering these. A number of parents specifically used the term ‘dilution’ to refer to what they saw as the gradual lessening of a minority physical/genetic ancestry, and/or a waning of emotional and cultural attachment to their minority ancestry(ies), as the generations pass.
• How parents framed their aspirations for their children’s senses of self both in the present and the future were articulated in relation to 4 themes:

1. The loss of cultural knowledge and diminishing practices that connected parents and their children to a minority ancestor or ancestors
2. The embodiment of White-appearing children, in which the physical markers of a minority heritage were largely absent, and the effect of phenotypic difference on family relationships and feelings of relatedness
3. The use of biological or genetic discourses around reduced blood quantum and racial fractions
4. Concerns amongst partially Black participants about whitening and the loss of politicized racial consciousness.

• Whilst some parents expressed anxiety or helplessness around the perceived inevitability of loss through dilution, others were more proactive about countering dilution by deliberately and creatively reinforcing their children’s connections to their racial and ethnic heritages.

Loss of cultural knowledge and ethnic distinctiveness

• We found that parents’ concerns about cultural loss operated in two directions – retrospectively, in terms of what they understood themselves and their children to have already lost, and prospectively, in relation to what their children may stand to lose in the future.
• Pauline (East Asian/White, 55), who reported anxiety around her ability to be perceived as ‘authentically’ Chinese, was highly aware of how that heritage was now even more ‘diluted’ for her daughters. Although she understood many Chinese cultural rituals, she and her children faced barriers towards wider claims to their Chineseness because of their lack of language skills and their non-Chinese physical appearance:

... I remember when I had Jasmine I wanted to keep ... I am very conscious of keeping this Chinese thing going but I know it’s getting more diluted because I don’t speak Chinese. I could . . . If I spoke Chinese I would definitely have taught Jasmine and Lena to speak Chinese, definitely. I would have kept that going. But because I don’t speak Chinese I just feel the whole thing is going – I don’t look it, I’m not really accepted if I go into restaurants. I know what to order, I know how to behave, I know what to do with your chop sticks, you know, all these silly things . . . all the little rituals that they have and I was sort of brought up to respect older people and you know to defer to them . . .

• Pauline expressed feelings of guilt that she had not been able to teach her children some ‘Chinese’, and other parents articulated similar feelings of regret. Some suggested that the lack of particular skills may not have concerned them when they were younger, but that becoming a parent had engendered all sorts of desires to leave something behind for their children. Others said that in hindsight, they regretted not seeking out more cultural or kin knowledge from their parents, and could no longer do so because their parents had passed away.
• Participants, like Nicole (East Asian/White, 28) commonly spoke about the importance of grandparents for the maintenance of cultural connections, and what may be lost if children were unable to have contact with them. When asked how she would feel if her son just saw himself as British as he grows up, Nicole responded:

Yeah, that’s a bit of a strange one actually. I think I’d feel a little bit sad. I think I’d feel that I hadn’t done my job in introducing him to the other culture, other part of his makeup.

• Some parents were quite accepting or relaxed about the degree to which their children would or would not lose knowledge about, or contact with, their ethnic heritage. Matt (South Asian/White, 50), for example, while expressing a degree of regret that his family’s Parsi roots were being gradually lost, also appeared to feel at ease with his teenage son’s benign disinterest in his minority ancestry. He acknowledged that his son currently had other social and educational preoccupations, but that if Matt and his partner continued to provide their son with a range of knowledge about his heritage, he could revisit them if and when he was ready:

Taylor puts pieces together, so . . . I mean, he may well not decide to acknowledge that side of his culture, but we’re not forcing it on him, but we’re making it part of his life, definitely, but again, because Emily is half of this relationship, then it only comes from me, and it comes from Dad really now, and my sister. So I suppose it is diluting slowly.

• Such a sense of an inevitable distancing from an ethnic minority culture with the passing of generations was commonly raised, but not all parents articulated it in terms of sadness or direct loss. Drew (South Asian/White, 47), for example, had grown up with an Indian father and English mother, and in talking about who his children might partner with in the future, believed such dilution to be just a matter of time:

I think it would be very much down to them whether they want to sort of .. My guess is yes, it will dilute further and in the fullness of time, you know, me, my dad/mum, you know, that’ll just become a little bit of family history and gradually that will, you know, sort of come down to a little dot somewhere and if somebody is really interested sort of look back a hundred years they’ll say, ‘Oh yes, there was a sort of Indian in our family at some point’.

Physical whitening, family relationships and feelings of relatedness

• We were struck by how commonly parents raised the issue of physical whitening and resemblance, both in terms of their children appearing whiter than them, but also in cases where children had markedly different complexions to their siblings. Some parents expressed sadness or disappoint- ment when their children did not bear physical markers of a minority ethnic heritage.
• Rose (East Asian/White, 45), for example, felt not only that her Chineseness has been ‘biologically erased’ in her children’s embodied selves, but that her very parental or familial relatedness to her children was disrupted by her children’s White appearance:

Interv: Do you think that becoming a parent in any way changed your . . . thinking about yourself or the significance of your ethnic and racial background?

Rose: Well, I suppose there was the question of ‘what will my children look like?’ And both my children came out blonde with blue eyes and I was completely stunned!

Interv: So you were surprised?

Rose: I was really surprised and I felt a bit disappointed because . . . it felt like it was an erasure of part of my own heritage.

• Rose did not conceive of herself as White, in part due to her racially ambiguous appearance (including her dark hair and eyes), so to be confronted by her children’s physical Whiteness was startling and rather unsettling for her. Her sense of erasure was compounded by the fact that her children had English first and surnames, and as such, there were no visible or symbolic markers of their Chinese background.

Reduced blood quantum and racial fractions

• In addition to references to physical whitening in their children, it was common for parents to refer to notions of blood quantum and racial fractions when talking about the passing on or not of racial and cultural heritage – and this was where some of the strongest articulations of generational ‘dilution’ emerged.
• For some parents, there was an element of un-knowing about the degree to which they and their children could authentically claim a minority ethnic or mixed identity label. Participants’ awareness of this genetic dilution was used to explain why some participants identified their children as ‘White’ on forms, or in their explanations of why they would not want to em- phasize a specific minority heritage which they saw as constituting a very small ‘proportion of all the ingredients’, as described by Kevin (South Asian/White, 39) below:

Strangely enough, my wife Sally has asked me exactly that when we’ve had to fill in those kinds of forms . . . from my point of view, I’d normally categorize them as being White British, and the reason I do that is I try and work out the proportion of all the ingredients . . . my mum is Scottish and then with my wife being wholly Scottish, I see that the Asian side of the family is pretty diluted, it was pretty diluted with me. So by the time it gets to the boys it’s even further diluted if you like.

• In contrast, other respondents acknowledged that whilst a minority blood line might be seen to be diluted in their children, they resisted the notion that they should then be regarded as White. For instance, when Jonathon (East Asian/White, 42) was asked about how he would identify his children, he replied:

Actually the first time we had to do that was a few weeks ago, for Oliver, and we said to each other ‘well, what do we tick for Oliver?’ And I couldn’t actually . . . I didn’t know, it flummoxed me, and I felt awful about it, because you think about the visual markers that obviously don’t define people’s identity, but he looks very Caucasian, very white, and in the end Faye said ‘well, he’s mixed race, of course he’s mixed race, it’s diluted but he’s mixed race’. And I said ‘you’re right, of course he’s mixed race’, so we ticked mixed race.

• A sense of an outwardly hidden or unrecognized (but ever-present) physical trail or impression of mixedness left on the familial bloodline, was articulated by a number of parents. Matt (discussed earlier), for example, talked of how his son had yet to appreciate his ethnic ancestry – but that it was somehow hard-wired into him, genetically:

But I don’t think that’s necessarily going to . . . it won’t ruin what is already there, because what’s engrained in him is a blueprint, that’s his, nobody can take that away, and he can’t shake that off. That’s his, but that’s up to him when, at what point he wants to address it, if he wants to, or even if he’s fascinated or interested in it. That could happen at any time.

• By referring to his son’s ‘blueprint’, Matt makes a clear reference to the idea of inherited genealogy and ethnic ancestry, and links the awakening of emotional and cultural connectedness to the physical and embodied genetic fact of his being partly mixed race. According to his father, his son’s heritage was stored away in his genetic make-up, to be addressed (or not) at a later date or stage in the life course. So while the ‘blueprint’ may remain latent, according to his father, it was undeniably there.

Concerns about a loss of racial consciousness in part Black people

• For some parents, the realization that their children may not (or did not) possess the same identification with, or commitment to, a Black political consciousness and anti-racist stance borne out of experiencing discrimination first-hand, was difficult to accept. Thus, while these parents were relieved that their children would likely experience less racism than they had, a loss of a political consciousness (as a partially Black person) was feared to be one possible consequence of ‘whitening’ or dilution.
• Tara (Black/White, 50), for example, who devoted her working life to promoting racial justice, said this about the possibility of her children having White partners

Part of me cares. Part of me thinks if they both have White partners then the colour can be lost, like you know it can just disappear . . . . As has happened many times in the past in this country.

The reason it bothers me, I think . . . no, I think what really bothers me is I don’t want them to forget that race matters. That race affects people’s life chances, that there is this hierarchy of shadeism – the lighter you are the better your life chances. I want them to help me and to help the world make it different. And, that’s the bit that I really worry about, I really worry that I’m gonna die and it will all be forgotten about . . .

Modes of countering dilution

• Whilst themes of dilution commonly arose in interviews, not all parents broached the subject with anxiety or concern. Instead, many, in recognizing it as merely one form of change in the life of an extended mixed race family, proactively went about either countering it, or reframing it less as a negative process, and more as a process which would result in growing cosmopolitanism and what Caballero et al. (2008) call ‘cultures of mixing’.
• Parents were also keenly aware that whatever their own desires for their children’s socialization, and despite ‘dilution’, children were likely to engage with their families’ pasts and heritage on their own terms. The theme of maturation arose frequently in this regard – that knowledge and desire for cultural connectivity might increase as children got older. Lots of parents felt that their role was to provide a range of information and tools for learning within the home for their children, to access how and when they wished, rather than manufacturing and imposing cultural or ethnic narratives upon them.
• Finally, while the recognition of ethnic dilution in their children was typically connected with notions of cultural loss, physical whitening, and a reduction in ethnic minority blood quantum, for some respondents, racial mixture and generational change was not about dilution or loss necessarily, but about gaining something (diversity) too.
• Indeed, some participants resisted notions of straightforward dilution and emphasized an emergent cosmopolitanism and hybridity. In this respect, some of these multiracial participants represented a normalization of ethnic diversification which was linked with a notion of transcending racial difference altogether, as Evelyn (South Asian/White, 43) exemplifies:

In the very, very long term maybe it will stop mattering. You know, you know that the amount of . . . the number of ethnic minorities that have been absorbed into this country or any other country and eventually it’s . . . unless you do a genetic test people can’t tell . . .

• Whilst Evelyn is a little sad that something as distinctive and personal as her Asian ancestry may ‘disappear’ in the future, she also articulates an appreciation of the bigger picture that many parents in the study also (at times, reluctantly) acknowledged – that through them, their children, and their children’s children, individually distinct heritages may be being ‘absorbed’ into the melting pot of hyper-diversity.

Conclusion

• In his defence of The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie (1991, cited in Hall, 1992: 311) celebrates the products of translation and mixture (melange). Rushdie’s work addresses the potentialities as well as the tensions that emerge in what Stuart Hall calls the ‘oscillation between Tradition and Translation’ (1992: 310). Interestingly, many of the multiracial participants in this study talked of their children as effectively in transition, drawing upon various cultural and ethnic traditions (Hall, 1992).
• Despite the potential for ‘gaining’ through hybrid identifications and the mitigation of loss in translation, the theme of loss and anxieties about the fragility of their ethnic origins were still felt strongly by a number of respondents.
• In the face of popular discourses about challenges to categorical certainties and a stress on building one’s own biography, it may be that genealogical roots and knowing where you ‘come from’ symbolize a point of ontological security (Giddens, 1991).
• The growing cosmopolitan outlook of many multiracial parents is not conceptually synonymous with a conventional notion of ethnic dilution (which suggests a dilution into a rather homogeneous Whiteness), but instead should be seen as a dilution into diversity.

We have reached 200 members after 1 full year!

In celebration of this major milestone, here are one-paragraph highlights from some of the most viewed research papers featured in our subreddit in the past year!

Asian History

Italy was the European country with the highest number of Chinese people in concentration camps. ...At least 260 Chinese were persecuted in Italy during the war and they were, after Yugoslavs, the largest group of non-Jewish foreign civilians imprisoned in concentration camps. Most of them were sent to three concentration camps: Tossicia, where the Chinese were the most numerous group of prisoners in the first years of war; Isola del Gran Sasso (both in the province of Teramo, Abruzzo); and Ferramonti di Tarsia (in the province of Cosenza, Calabria). Racism in Italy and the Italian-Chinese Minority (2022)

For the South African government, attempting to categorize and identify an idea that is currently understood to be completely socially derived was a challenge, as seen by the case of one David Song, a man who achieved reclassification as “white” based on letters of acceptance from white friends, although he personally admitted he “looks like a Chinese”. Two months later, in May 1962, the government amended their legislation to ensure that applicants for racial reclassification not only had to be accepted as white but had to look the part as well. A total of 183 people were classified both into and out of the Chinese group between 1974 and 1990—a number that clearly shows the potential for racial mobility. The Chinese Diaspora in South Africa: The Gray Area (2022)

The flogging of Chinese, as ordered by the courts, became so commonplace that the Registrar of the Supreme Court wrote: Disgusting exhibitions of public flogging were reported to be of almost daily occurrence .... The extent to which the rattan was made use of was almost incredible .... The records of the Police Court, on examination, would show that there was more flogging in Hong Kong than probably in any country in the world according to the population. For the most trifling offenses the Chinese were being daily sentenced to be publicly whipped. Law and Racism in an Asian Setting: An Analysis of the Britsh Rule of Hong Kong (1995)

Internalized Racism

I argue that beyond the racialised subject’s experience of a manifestation of internalised racism, whether negatively or positively, is how they conceive of themselves as relationally dependent upon the dominant racial group’s appraisal of them. I articulate a growing call among race scholars to move beyond a purely individualised understanding of internalized racism as it tends to be interpreted within the psychological literature. Focusing on the destructive impacts of how racism (racist ideology) is internalised by racialised subjects and communities, while important, often does not (at least explicitly) highlight the structural causes of the phenomenon. Serving the White nation: Bringing internalised racism within a sociological understanding (2021)

Our findings indicate that...critical exposure to ethnic and racial history, ethnic organizations (e.g., summer camps, college organizations), and coethnic social ties (e.g., role models)...ultimately lead to the emergence of an empowering critical consciousness, which is necessary for diverting Asian Americans away from behaviors that perpetuate internalized racial oppression. Asian Americans and Internalized Racial Oppression: Identified, Reproduced, and Dismantled (2018)

Bay Area Asian Americans often had to leave California to recognize their racial privilege and Asian Americans who grew up in non-Asian majority communities had more encounters with blatant racial discrimination that made it more difficult for them to ignore the realities of being a racial minority. Privileged but not in Power: How Asian American Tech Workers use Racial Strategies to Deflect and Confront Race and Racism (2023)

The same issue seemed to be present in conversations that I’d had with an East Asian scholar who was frequently determined to distance herself from her East Asian culture, her East Asian language, and her East Asian religion. She seemed to seize every opportunity to declare, especially to white colleagues, that she was ‘not very Asian’ in her lifestyle, her thought and her taste. When I mentioned to her that I was writing a paper about the negative perceptions of East Asian students in Western academia, she was puzzled owning to the fact that she believed the negative stereotypes about East Asian students to be true and wished that East Asian students could be as open-minded, hard-working and honest as she imagined white students to be. ‘But you’re white’: An autoethnography of whiteness and white privilege in East Asian universities (2022)

Covid Racism

June: 'In my international business law class, my professor spent 20 minutes talking about how disgusting Chinese people were and how . . . they have wet markets that have no hygiene . . . . It was very traumatizing because everyone in the classroom was just laughing along with her . . . She was saying ‘that’s why they brought over Coronavirus, and that’s why we’re suffering now’. ‘I went outside of the classroom. I was crying and . . . I was not even breathing. I was so angry ... ’ COVID-19 racism and the perpetual foreigner narrative: the impacts on Asian American students (2022)

Asian American male respondent: While I was trying to pick a bike at the dock station, a Bay Wheels operations employee who was changing the batteries on ebikes yelled at me and said “Spray that shit” (meaning I need to spray the bike with disinfectant after riding.) This employee went on and said “the Chinese invented the virus and Donald Trump knows it.” I’m Asian and was wearing a mask at the time of the incident. Why are Asians wearing face masks attacked? Face mask symbolism in anti-Asian hate crimes (2020)

Prior to this pandemic, British Chinese were an invisible presence in mainstream media and public discourse (Yeh 2018). Yet, in present times, they become hypervisible because of what they embody – Coronavirus. Their foreign-ness is highlighted precisely because they are now so visible in public spaces as possible carriers of the virus. It follows that if all ‘Chinese’ people in the UK are seen by others as possible carriers of the virus, they must have arrived from China. This re-affirms the notion of a white British imaginary where the category ‘British Chinese’ is unimaginable. The hypervisibility of Chinese bodies in times of Covid-19 and what it says about being British (2020)

With data from 139 participants, we conducted a path analysis of COVID-19 anti-Asian racism predicting suicidal ideation via perceived burdensomeness and thwarted belongingness COVID-19 anti-Asian racism significantly predicted suicidal ideation. Greater COVID-19 anti-Asian racism was associated with greater perceived burdensomeness, which in turn was associated with greater suicidal ideation. The significance of perceived burdensomeness was substantiated given the non-significant direct effect. The results suggest that the ongoing COVID-19 anti-Asian racism may be an alarming risk factor for suicidal ideation for Asian American emerging adults. COVID-19 anti-Asian racism significantly predicted suicidal ideation (2023)

Sexual Politics

We found evidence that by ages 25-32, Asian American men continue to be excluded from romantic relationship markets. One might argue that perhaps Asian Americans differ from other groups in terms of their cultural preferences. However, it is unlikely that cultural norms can account for the lower levels of romantic involvement of only men. In other words, if cultural norms dictated romantic relationship behavior, we would expect to find that Asian American women have similarly low levels of relationship involvement. That’s not the case. Asian American women have higher rates of being in a romantic relationship compared to Asian American men, as well as compared to their Black and Hispanic counterparts. We found no differences for Asian American women relative to (foreign-born) women. The disadvantage is specific to Asian American men. Asian American Men in Romantic Dating Markets (2018)

Asian American men report a significantly higher awareness of racism than their female counterparts. Some attribute this to a form of racism toward Asian Americans that has historically targeted men. While stereotypes of Asian women as exotic and hypersexual are contemptible, those stereotypes have not increased their social distance with other groups nor obstructed their opportunities to rise to prominent positions in the public eye. Studies have found the pervasive negative stereotypes of Asian American men contribute to a preference for White male partners among some Asian American women. Although men are often privileged in society, according to Kumashiro, the intersection between racial and gender identities can supersede any one representation. These intersected racial and gender stereotypes can lead to new and unique forms of oppression, as in the case for Asian American men. Asian American Interest Fraternities: Fulfilling Unmet Needs of the Loneliest Americans (2019)

This friend talked to one man from Maryland who put profile on Match.com one night a few years back. This man had good reason to think he would do well on the site. He made more than $150,000 a year; he was white; he was over six feet tall. The next morning, he woke up and checked his account. Over the course previous night, he had gotten many responses. How many responses had he gotten? How well could he expect to do, being a makable to check off, without lying, boxes that certified that he made more than $150,000 a year, that he was six feet four inches tall, and that he was white? How well do you think he was going to do on that site people disclosed what they really wanted out of life and also they really didn't want? He had gotten 6000 responses in one night. The Face of Seung Hui Cho (2009)

Feminist psychoanalysis argues that women’s alienated desire takes the form of submission to and envy of men. Women often seek to fulfill their desire by identifying with the ideal lover’s power. Benjamin perceives women’s submission to and sacrifice for male heroes as the quest for paternal recognition and glory, which she argues is the necessary effect of society’s privileging of masculinity. Angelina desired to gain approval by “serving” a white man, and stated, “My purpose in coming to this world is to marry someone who is white.” Angelina's desires were deeply racialized in the sense that she regarded whiteness as a significant marker of ascension and privileges, a measure by which she had found herself lacking. The majority of the first-generation Asian American women whom I interviewed similarly engaged with their white male partners in traditional, racialized gender roles. Intimacy, Desire, and the Construction of Self in Relationships between Asian American Women and White American Men (2006)

Colonialism and Global White supremacy

...“anti-Asian racism” or “anti-Black racism” or “anti-Indigenous racism” — subtly switching the focus from the cause to the effect — the equivalent of referring only to “the sexual assault of women” as if the problem should be categorized primarily for its effects on women, rather than thinking about what is causing women to be assaulted. The various kinds of racism that are the product of white supremacy may target people differently — to suffer from anti-Black racism is different from anti-Asian racism is different from the ongoing colonial dispossession of Indigenous peoples — but they serve a common cause, to lump people together into categories called “race” that define them as the problem. The white elephant in the room: anti-Asian racism in Canada (2022)

If racist relations were created only by people in the past, then racism would not be as formidable as it is today. It could be regarded as part of the historical dustbin and a relic of a cruel society. If racism were only problems promulgated by “bad whites,” then bad whites today either out-number “good whites” or overpower them. The question becomes: Who are these bad whites? Since very few whites exist who actually believe they are racist, then basically no one is racist and racism disappears more quickly than we can describe it. We live in a condition where racism thrives absent of racists (Bonilla-Silva, 2003). There must be an alternative explanation: in general, whites recreate their own racial supremacy, despite good intentions. The Color of Supremacy: Beyond the Discourse of “White Privilege” (2004)

"The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line," since, as Du Bois would later point out, too many have accepted "that tacit but clear modern philosophy which assigns to the white race alone the hegemony of the world and assumes that other races ... will either be content to serve the interests of the whites or die out before their all-conquering march." The Racial Contract, Chapter 3: Naturalized Merits (1997).

Taking their cue from the general’s dehumanization of the Southeast Asian “gooks” and “slopes” and “dinks,” in a war that reduced the human dead on the enemy side to “body counts,” American troops in Vietnam removed and saved Vietnamese body parts as keepsakes of their tours of duty, just as their fathers had done in World War Two. Vietnam, the soldiers said, was “Indian Country” (General Maxwell Taylor himself referred to the Vietnamese opposition as “Indians” in his Congressional testimony on the war), and the people who lived in Indian country “infested” it, according to official government language. The Vietnamese may have been human, but as the U.S. Embassy’s Public Affairs Officer, John Mecklin, put it, their minds were the equivalent of “the shriveled leg of a polio victim,” their “power of reason . . . only slightly beyond the level of an American six- year old.” American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World, Part 1 (Before Columbus), Chapter 1, Section 2 (1993)

Asians were not ‘immigrants’. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Filipinx and South Asians arrived in North America as a result of capitalist and imperial expansion that radically altered relationships within households and villages, destroyed working and rural people’s homes and lives, and generally made those lives unliveable. A more accurate term is ‘migrant labour’, which denotes Asians’ sole function within capitalist economy as labour, whose value was derived from their ability to extract profit. Anti-Asian violence and US imperialism (2020)

Not surprisingly, when I ask, “When will the United States transcend white supremacy?” the responses vary widely. Indigenous and black people often chuckle, not because the subject is funny but because the answer — never — is so obvious.In general, people of color are understandably skeptical about the commitment of white America, recognizing the clash between the good intentions of many white people and those same white people’s reluctance to endorse the easy steps, let alone the radical social change, necessary to transform a society. Will the United States ever transcend white supremacy? (2017)

"New" Red Scare

Among the recent political rhetoric is the anthropormorphizing of China as a person. According to Margaret Lewis (2020), a negative stereotype is being built and reinforced that stigmatizes anyone who has any quality of being “like China”. In Lewis’ paper, she observed how the Department of Justice, including the FBI, depicts China as taking on a personified form, meaning that “China can steal” or “China can cheat”. She goes on to argue that China itself, as an entire country, is not a perpetrator; rather, it is individuals. In effect, criminalizing China stigmatizes people who are seen as possessing a shared characteristic of “China-ness”. Neo-racism and the Criminalization of China (2020)

On Jan. 14, 1900, a white woman who lived in a wealthy Honolulu suburb came down with the plague. Her death shocked the white community — who mistakenly thought whites couldn’t catch the plague, and several white newspapers began to advocate for leaders to burn down Chinatown. On Jan. 20, 1900, during a controlled burn of an infected Chinatown building, the winds picked up, spreading the fire. The community of Chinese, Japanese, and Hawaiians worked together with the fire department to regain control, but the inferno spread through Chinatown. The fire wiped out 25 city blocks and displaced at least 6,000 Chinese residents — most of whom were relocated to detention camps. “I Don’t Like China or Chinese People Because They Started This Quarantine” The History of Anti-Chinese Racism and Disease in the United States (2020)

Gaysian

Classical Chinese language had no term to denote a person who engaged in same-sex acts. Nor was there any identification of a particular sexual identity, sexual essence, or sexual orientation. The language distinguished same-sex behavior from same-sex identity, using poetic metaphors based on ancient same-sex love stories to refer to same-sex actions, tendencies, and preferences rather than to an innate sexual essence (e..g, yu tao and duan xiu). Another category describing same-sex love invoked specific social roles such as “favorites,” rather than sexual essence. The onslaught of Western ideas at the turn of the twentieth century overturned the fluid and indeterminate representation of sex and gender in classical Chinese medicine. Tongzhi Living, Chapter 1, "A Cultural History of Same-Sex Desire in China" (2015)

Male homosexuality has a long and well-attested tradition in Japan going back at least a thousand years. However, until recently the notion of the homosexual as a distinct type of sexual being has not been apparent in Japanese culture...same-sex eroticism was understood as simply one kind of erotic enjoyment which was not considered to exclude opposite-sex attraction. The Meiji period saw the development of new discourses framing homosexuality deriving from recently evolved sexological discourses imported from the west. The contest between older understandings of nanshoku (male eroticism) as part of the samurai code of honour and new sexological discourses positing homosexuality as a deviant and dangerous passion. Male Homosexuality in Modern Japan, Chapter 2, "Homosexuality in Japanese History" (2000)

In all, the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) not only replicated Whiteness through its governance and structure but was also rife with various racialized tensions. The unintentional and wilful neglect among its White leaders and members for not consistently bringing awareness to various types of power dynamics and imbalances conflicted with the GSA’s mission to be an inclusive and welcoming environment for historically underserved youth. Diversity, equity, and inclusion for some but not all: LGBQ Asian American youth experiences at an urban public high school (2021)

Please type your comment in the live chat for any type of research or content related to the Asian experience you would like to see on AsianResearchCentral.

Alternatively, post any type of question relating to the Asian experience you would like to see addressed.

We will keep track of these questions and provide content accordingly.

Members are highly encouraged to participate and contribute!

Access: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Tx5V79HwBn9DtxdlQumGUZxz4t597y4a/view?usp=share_link

Abstract: This study examines the interracial relationship between Asian Americans and white Americans. The goal is to understand how the social construction of sexual desire is shaped by race and gender. This study begins with the argument that racialized images and discourses on “Asian women” and “White men” have been produced within the hierarchies of local and global structures of race, gender, and nation. I found that the formation of relationships between Asian American women and white American men relies on a range of desires among Asian American women for four aspects of white hegemonic masculinity: middle-class status; material security; egalitarian knighthood; and narcissistic gaze. This study addresses how Asian American women married to or partnered with white men have strategically participated in the re-generation of these discourses.

Desire for white masculinity as middle class status: "my purpose in coming into this world is to marry someone white"

• Asian American women sometimes regard white men as the possessors of superior socioeconomic capital. Frankenberg writes, “[W]hiteness is made out of materials that include socioeconomic status, cultural practice, peer group acceptance, parental teaching and community participation.” The next two stories demonstrate how Asian and Asian American women often view marriage with white men as one of the few available ways through which they can gain upward mobility and assimilate as “honorary whites.”

Angelina Brown (39-year-old, Filipina American):

• Angelina had come to Mississippi at 18, when her mother married an American serviceman who was stationed in the Philippines. At 21, she met Thomas, a serviceman at the military base there and they had married two years later.
• Angelina’s willingness to take on the traditional feminine role complemented Thomas, who believed in playing the traditional male role and in keeping Angelina as a mother and a wife. Thomas said, “ . . . as a white guy, my culture would have me keep my wife at home. . . . It’s recommended that the woman stays home and raises the kids.” Thomas viewed traditional gender roles as racialized status and said “We are supposed to be the dominant male, protecting women and providing for the family. If we are equal partners, then what are we?”
• In her individual interview, Angelina said that she had chosen to marry Thomas because she thought the marriage would provide financial and emotional security. Angelina confessed that she saw marriage as a material and psychological opportunity: “He’s like an investment. I was like, you buy this mutual fund in the beginning, and it gets bigger and bigger, and at the end, you know, you got all of this and you get to enjoy it.”
• For Angelina, marrying a white American had meant marrying into American society and transforming herself into an American. She said that she already had decided to “be an American” by the age of 10, when she first saw the high standard of living on the U.S. military base in the Philippines. After that, images from the media filled her with prosperous visions of “being an American,” as she explained:

If you marry American, you get to go to America. You enjoy your life. America is great. So, I get this American mentality all of the sudden. I’m nothing in this country. My goal is to go to America. And, I didn’t want to have Filipino boyfriend. I didn’t care for them . . . because if I married them, I didn’t get to go to America. . . . My first boyfriend was American. . . . I never dated Filipino, never . . . . I like tall men. I like speaking English.

• Angelina’s sexual desire was subsumed by her desire to gain power via the racial, gender, and class privileges of white middle-class America. In her imagination, marrying an American was an opportunity not only to go to America but also to “be” an American who enjoyed a prosperous lifestyle and spoke English.
• A Filipino man, as a marital partner, was coded as inferior and lacking in resources. Angelina continued, “I guess, to me, the white American was the highest standard, and I chose somebody who’s higher standard. I’m sorry; it’s a shame, but that’s how I thought. That’s how I was formed.”
• Her desire to gain the same resources as white middleclass Americans was to be realized, for her, through heterosexual romantic love with a white man: “I like tall guys and I like the American standards, the way the white people live. I could show them what a good woman I can be for them. I like to serve that person.”
• The American standard was naturally assumed to be a white standard, possibly that of the middle class, and tall guys were regarded as the normative masculine figure, which Asian American men did not embody. White American middle-class masculinity reigned at the top of each hierarchy that Angelina had created, and marriage with a white man had signified her identificatory union with the highest power. She saw it as a significant means of accessing the dominant group, the “highest” status of whiteness. For her, this marriage brought the moment of self-realization and “true” self that she had imagined as “white middle class American.”
• Her desire might reflect neo-colonial dynamics between the U.S. and the Philippines, but it is also highly gendered in the sense that white men function as protective savior figures through whom one gains racial privileges.
• Stoler, citing Fanon, writes that in colonialism the man “uses sex as a vehicle to master a practical world.” Marrying the colonizer gives the colonized access to privileged schooling, well-paying jobs, and certain residential quarters. Fanon’s insight on colonial desire, that “to marry white culture” is “to grasp white civilization and dignity and make them mine,” well explains Angelina’s imaginary transformation towards the “highest standard” of marrying the powerful other.
• Feminist psychoanalysis argues that women’s alienated desire takes the form of submission to and envy of men. Women often seek to fulfill their desire by identifying with the ideal lover’s power. Benjamin perceives women’s submission to and sacrifice for male heroes as the quest for paternal recognition and glory, which she argues is the necessary effect of society’s privileging of masculinity.
• Angelina desired to gain approval by “serving” a white man, and stated, “My purpose in coming to this world is to marry someone who is white.” Angelina's desires were deeply racialized in the sense that she regarded whiteness as a significant marker of ascension and privileges, a measure by which she had found herself lacking. White masculinity and Asian American femininity, in Angelina and Thomas’s relationship, conformed to the ideal of white middle-class ideology and family values. The majority of the first-generation Asian American women whom I interviewed similarly engaged with their white male partners in traditional, racialized gender roles.

Desire for white masculinity as material security: "I didn't feel anything about him"

• For Asian women who enter into marriage as “mail-order brides,” sexual desire takes the form of desire for a white man, who will embody the social, cultural, and economic privileges that enable one to attain one’s future potential and ideal-self.
• For these women, global inequality becomes another factor, along with traditional gender roles and racial stereotypes, that influences their choice of marriage. The story of one Filipina American woman’s deliberate choice of marriage as a mail-order bride illustrates the complex interworkings of these economic, social, and cultural factors on a global scale.

Linda Miller (34-year-old, Filipina American)

• She had been married to her husband, Jack, a 41-year-old computer engineer, for ten years. The couple had two children whom Linda described as “white.” Linda had first contacted Jack through what she called a “pen-pal relationship,” while she was working in Hong Kong as a domestic worker.
• Linda had started working as a maid for an American serviceman’s family when she was 12 years old. Her father had worked at an American military base as a maintenance man, and her family had run a small store. As with most people in the Philippines, work had been a part of her life since she was a child. Linda said, “We just work because work is there.”
• At that time, her Filipino friends had been circulating lists of American men who were looking for Filipina brides. Linda had chosen her current husband because he was the youngest of all the Americans on the list, which included men in their sixties and seventies. She had gone back to the Philippines, and her husband had come over to meet her and marry her.
• Although Linda had not experienced any romantic feelings toward him, she nonetheless accepted his offer of marriage, which had taken place four days after his arrival in the Philippines. “He was a quiet, simple person. That’s it. I can’t think of any other words . . . but I thought he was okay, a macho man, a big guy,” Linda replied without any smile.
• Asked about any concerns she might have had about marriage, Linda expressed a combination of disassociation and irritation. Her attitude toward her husband was distant and mechanical. “It’s just, this is my man. I am going to be with him. . . . I didn’t feel anything about him,” Linda said, “Not excitement. Not fear.”
• Linda had never dated American men before she married Jack. She had seen many Filipina women being mistreated by American servicemen around the U.S. military base, and she had felt that those American men were never serious about the Filipina women there: “They [the American servicemen] are all playboys. They all just want something from you . . . one-night thing. That’s all. All American people I know do like that.” Linda expressed anger toward American servicemen’s treatment of local Filipina women: “They just take you out for one-night stand. I’m not a one-night stand! Back off!”
• Linda had decided not to become one of the Filipina women who entered short relationships with American men and were then discarded with no financial or emotional support. She had resorted instead to other ways of finding a “different kind of” American husband, who would guarantee her a long-lasting marriage. Linda seemed to avoid the deep contradiction between her aversion to American men in the Philippines and her choice to marry one: “I didn’t know that I would marry American.”
• Once Linda and Jack were together in the US, Jack continued to send $150 a month to her family in the Philippines. She sighed, “That’s not enough for them. It’s not enough to support them. . . . It’s still a poor economy.”
• Linda appreciated her husband’s financial support of her and her family, but her words could not conceal the emotional distance underneath, especially when she talked about Jack showing no interest in her family and culture: "He doesn’t ask how my brothers and sisters are doing. I’m getting used to it. It doesn’t matter any more. I don’t care. . . . I talk to his family. But, he doesn’t talk to my family. I just accept it. I can’t do anything. You are not expecting him to talk more or be happy about what he hears from you. I wish he were. I wish he could commit more to my family and my background. Yeah . . . it bothers me. But, I can’t make him do that."
• Linda barely finished her sentence and seemed about to cry. She did not move or speak for a while. Linda said she followed her husband’s suggestions, except when he yelled at her. When he yelled at her loudly, she said, she threatened to leave him. Divorce was the last thing she wanted because of its cultural unfamiliarity as well as the consequent loss of support that she would suffer.
• Linda’s hope, and strategy of resistance, was to live one day with her parents, who had been waiting in the Philippines for ten years for legal permission to immigrate to the United States. Being an assimilated middle-class American appealed much less to Linda than it did to Angelina. The main desire driving Linda’s decision was the desire for material security.

Desire for white masculinity as egalitarian knighthood: "Asian men are small and not courteous to women"

• Common among many of the Asian American women whom I interviewed was an aversion toward Asian and Asian American men, due to their small physical size and attitude of ethnic patriarchy. For these Asian American women, the white man’s body, in contrast to the Asian body, symbolized not only physical strength but also Western civility and the ideal of gender equality— “white knighthood.” The following story illustrates one Chinese American woman’s desire for an egalitarian white knight, with whom she could resist ethnic patriarchy and realize ideal independent womanhood.

Grace Wong (24, born in Taiwan, moved to U.S. soon after):

• When her family first moved to the U.S., they had suffered a hard time economically. Her father had helped his family’s business for a while, then had been “a day trader” and “lived by stocks.” Grace’s mother had worked at a jewelry store full-time since they arrived in the United States.
• Grace described her father as “very quiet and withdrawn.” She went on to say, “He thinks that our personal lives are my mom’s responsibility.” He “controls the money my mother makes,” does not allow her mother to spend money, and “bullies her around.” Grace resented the fact that her father neglected her mother and controlled all the family members: “He never gave her anything as a present, not for her birthday and not for Christmas, nothing. . . . I hate my dad.”
• Grace said that she felt terrible pain when her mother suppressed her anger about her husband and complained about him only to Grace and Grace’s two sisters: I feel very, very sad when she tells me things like that. . . . I don’t want to end up like her. I don’t want that to happen to me. It’s kind of very sad. I don’t feel like I can do anything about it. Sometimes she gets really sad; I can tell.
• In these moments, she adopted her mother’s unhappiness, anger, and sadness as her own, and directed it against the Asian masculine norm by which her father maintained authority. Grace said that she had decided not to repeat her parents’ pattern of unequal gender relations: “My father is the opposite of what I want. Just because I can see the pain that my mother goes through.” For Grace, her father’s negative characteristics and her mother’s anger were easily transferred onto the gender characteristics of the Asian American men around her.
• Grace remembered what her mother used to say to her: “Once in a while, she would say, like, American guys are, they are just a lot more polite, and they are so much nicer. They treat women so much more fairly.” The unfulfilled desire of Grace’s mother was thus transferred onto Grace, and she unconsciously retained her mother’s anger and directed it towards Asian men in general.
• This intergenerational transference became a gender strategy through which to resist Asian male dominance. Grace armed herself with a higher racial and gender power: white masculinity. Race was the significant weapon by which she could attack the male dominance that haunted her.
• Kelsky, in her ethnographic studies of Japanese women, has demonstrated that it is not only Western Orientalist discourse that creates fetishized stereotypes of Asian women, but also Japanese women themselves. Kelsky has observed that these women appropriate such racialized images “for an act of revenge against the patriarchal Japanese nation-state,” even though this appropriation might arguably perpetuate “self-colonization” and feed the value of white supremacy.
• Grace defied Asian masculinity, criticizing Asian men as both too masculine and too feminine—the former as silently domineering and the latter as incapable of dealing with “independent women”—and then offered a contrasting explanation for the attractiveness of white men:

A lot of Asian girls are small, petite, and little. But, not everyone, though. I think they like guys that are taller and bigger, because they can protect them or something. . . . I am not attracted to Asian guys. . . . They are not gentlemen. . . . They are not affectionate. At least the ones I’ve met. I think my personality clashes with a lot of them because I think I’m too independent. I’m too outgoing. I’m just a too-myself kind of a person. A lot of Asian guys like Asian women. . . . Either they are dainty, or they are pretty, or they are very almost, like, submissive in a way.

• Grace perceived Asian American men as being incapable of dealing with her independence and assertiveness. As she put it, “I feel Asian guys are intimidated by me. So, they would never approach me.” Grace understood Asian American men to date only quiet and submissive Asian American women. She thus effeminized both Asian American men and Asian American women, while presenting herself as clearly different from the feminine stereotype.
• Grace appropriated the normative racial hierarchies, which place white masculinity on the top. In her view, Asian American masculinity emerged as a compensatory masculinity:

I think a lot of Asian guys, they feel inferior to Caucasian guys. I think they feel like they try hard to make up for their looks. So instead of being super nice to the girl, they act bitter, and so they are all, like, trying to act macho.

• The Asian American women whom I interviewed usually mentioned the negative characteristics of Asian American men in connection with comments about physical size. One Chinese American woman referred to Asian men as “small and “not courteous to women.
• Physical masculinity has not always been considered the most important aspect of masculinity. In the twentieth century, however, man’s physical prowess took the place of disciplines of the body that are regulated by the faculty of reason, and over time the white male body has emerged as the intense object of control by which to represent masculinity. These messages of the man’s body being strong, tough, independent, and protective operate as the primary manifestations of American manhood. Physical masculinity evokes various levels of masculine imagination, such as aggression, competition, strength, success, competence, reliability, and control. The racialized man’s body thus becomes the object of projection for various gendered messages.
• In Grace’s mind, and in the minds of a number of Asian American women whom I interviewed, the Asian male body was given an opposite place to that of its white counterpart, which signified knighthood and egalitarianism. For Grace, the white man’s body provided imaginative empowerment to defy Asian men.
• By obtaining recognition from her white boyfriend, she gained strength and confidence, in relation to Asian authority in general and to her father in particular. Having never seen her mother show any disagreement with or disapproval of Grace’s father while Grace was growing up, Grace had learned not to express her point of view to her father.
• With her boyfriend’s encouragement, however, Grace had changed her gender strategy from that of silent suppression to that of vocal expression: Ever since I was young, you know, you don’t talk back to your elders. You don’t say in front of their face, like, or you don’t disagree with them. But with Jacob though, he would tell me, ‘Why don’t you tell him no?’ In their culture, it’s okay to speak up and disagree with, or even yell. . . . Back then, I would keep it to myself. I wouldn’t say anything to my father. But now, I would tell him ‘no,’ or . . . ‘what are you talking about?’ It’s a big change.
• Grace described Jacob as a rational thinker, a patient listener, and a dependable partner. Grace felt that with Jacob’s support, her self-confidence in her ability to express herself and her right to do so had grown dramatically. She had found a rationale for gender and individual equality in “their culture,” and had experienced a transformation from a traditional Asian feminine suppression to a more masculine subjectivity.
• Grace intentionally embraced white masculinity and identified with hegemonic individuality. Grace’s rejection of Asian American men represented a combination of her aversion to repeating her parents’ unequal relationship and her desire to identify with the image of independent womanhood, an image that she felt Asian American men could not accept.
• Grace saw her mother as a powerless feminine figure and avoided identifying with her powerlessness by rejecting Asian American women in general as “quiet” and “submissive.” Grace’s contemptuous view of Asian American women as submissive and dainty, shared by other Asian American women whom I interviewed, thus reinforced mainstream stereotypes. Similarly, Asian American women’s aversion to Asian American men, even though it appears to have originated in a resistance to Chinese patriarchy, was complicit with Western stereotypes of Asian American men.

Narcissistic gaze and desire in white American masculinity

• When white men fetishize “Asian” women as their love objects, their objectification of the race and culture of the “other” can cause a sense of emotional tension and racial alienation for Asian American women. ”The following story illustrates the reaction of a Chinese American woman to her white boyfriend’s preference for and fetishization of Asian women.

Irene Huan (25-year-old Chinese American):

• Her parents divorced when she was sixteen. Irene explained why her mother, isolated from the Chinese community and having blamed herself for being a bad wife, went back to Taiwan: “A lot of times, in the Asian family, when there is a divorce, they kind of blame the woman. You know, she isn’t a good enough wife. She should’ve kept the family together, that sort of thing. . . . I think she wanted to get away from that.”
• Irene’s father, an engineer in the computer industry whom she described as “very unconventional and very liberal,” had lived with a white woman for several years at the time of Irene’s interview. Irene’s father once told her not to date or marry Asian American men, and he himself dates only white women: “I remember him telling me, ‘I never want you to ever marry an Asian guy.’ And, I was like, ‘Why?’ He goes, ‘Well, I know how they are, and I don’t want you to marry an Asian.’”
• Irene speculated that her father was “rebelling against Chinese culture,” since he had never gotten along with his traditional family in Taiwan. Irene always had felt foreign and missed a sense of racial and cultural belonging. She said, “When I go back to Taiwan, I don’t really feel like I fit in there. But when I’m here, I don’t feel like I’m fitting in here. . . . I’m not one hundred percent . . . . I’m American but . . . I was born here, but I’m still a minority.”
• Irene’s sense of not belonging and of being foreign led her to date both white men and Asian American men, despite her father’s advice. Irene said that she had tried to find the most comfortable place and person with whom to be: “There was a while when I wanted to marry someone Asian if I was going to get married. I think, growing up in America as an Asian person, every Asian kind of goes through that phase.”
• She also had found among young generations of Asians a strong racial animosity that she had never before encountered, to which she alluded in speaking of her ex-boyfriend: He was the kind of person, he is like, ‘I just don’t like white people.’ He didn’t like to talk to white people. He’s kind of very closed-minded about that. So, he knew he wanted to date, he wanted to marry, an Asian woman. I think he’s kind of a traditional Asian guy.
• Rather than viewing this racial hostility as historical or social, Irene saw it as simple closed-mindedness. She also interpreted Asian American men’s racial tension toward white men as a “traditional” defensiveness of Asian American masculinity.
• After a year of dating him, Irene was still hesitant to call him a boyfriend: “I never considered him really as my boyfriend. I knew that he wasn’t the one for me.” Irene met her boyfriend, Brian Thompson, a 26-year-old law school student, at a club: “I remember the first thing he said was, like, he asked about my tattoo, and he thought it was Kanji. It’s just insects. But from far away, it looks like a Chinese character.”
• From a very young age, Irene had been aware that the white men around her exoticized and sexualized Asian and Asian American women just because they were Asian. Until she began dating Brian, she had avoided going out with those white men who simply fetishized her Asian-ness. Irene emphasized, “I had made this conscious decision not to date a guy that was interested in Asian women.”
• Eventually, Irene called Brian, and they had been in a relationship for three months at the time of the interview. “He is very smart. I like intelligent people,” Irene said. On the other hand, Irene still was trying to make sense of the fact that Brian had dated only Asian girls and was primarily attracted to Asians. Irene speculated that he liked the physical appearance of Asian and Asian American women and not necessarily Asian cultures or languages: “That’s what his idea of beauty is. So, that’s acceptable. I mean it is. He finds a certain type of person attractive. . . . There’s nothing you can do about it logically.”
• However, Irene suspected that Brian liked all Asian girls: That’s another one of the weird suspicions when you date a guy that likes Asian girls a lot because you think he is indiscriminate about it. And, he’s always making these comments. There would be some girls at a club. He would be like, ‘Oh, she is really cute,’ some Asian girl. She is totally not attractive. I would be like, ‘Okay, you know, . . . she is cute because she is Asian.’ Brian had many female Asian friends and knew a lot about Chinese, Korean, and Japanese cultures, in part because those were the cultures of his former girlfriends.
• When Brian proudly expressed his knowledge of Asian cultures, Irene felt ambivalent about his attraction to her. She said, “Sometimes I ask myself if it is because I’m Asian that he’s attracted to me because I know that initially, of course, that’s what it was. But sometimes, I kind of ask myself, like, if that is the only reason why. I know it is not. But in the back of your head. . . .”
• Irene noticed how white men lump “Asian” cultures and people together as one, and how they are sometimes oblivious to her Chinese origin. Every time Brian pointed out certain Asian characters in a movie or talked excitedly about a Japanese film he had seen, Irene remembered a man she had dated several years before who always told her how fascinated he was by Japanese culture and girls. “Chinese culture and Japanese culture are different,” said Irene.
• Irene felt that she was “othered” and “exoticized” as an Asian woman in her relationship with Brian. Irene, having failed in an effort to erase her foreign-ness in a relationship with an Asian man, went on to struggle with her sense of “other-ness” and “foreign-ness” in her relationship with a white man. She complained about the difficulty of “being made to feel that you are different.” This difference, she meant, stemmed from Brian’s constant re-imposition of “foreign-ness,” or “Asian-ness,” on her.
• Women like Irene seem to serve as pleasurable objects, similar to the characters in Asian stories and films, for men like Brian, who exoticize and are fascinated by Asian media and culture. Irene, in her interaction with Brian, felt pressured to be exotic and different as an Asian woman.
• Irene expressed the wish to build relationships based on mutuality, but she knew that it was her racial difference, in large part, that fascinated her white boyfriend. Nevertheless, Irene had not told Brian about her sense of being “other-ed,” nor had she tried to change the dynamics of a relationship that centered around his fascination with Asianness. Irene told me that when Brian started working as a lawyer, she would move with him to Los Angeles.
• A few Asian American women whom I interviewed, regardless of their ethnic or national background, engaged in similar internal conflicts around their desirability as an exoticized other. Irene chose to negotiate with the white men’s gaze, hoping to confirm that it was not racist but genuine love that kept them together.

Discussion and summary

• Intimacy is a major technology of modernity for achieving self-realization and forming identity. The Asian American women whom I interviewed understood intimacy as a “potential avenue for controlling the future as well as a form of psychological security,” and strategically deployed their desires toward white men.
• The feminine strategy of the two Filipina American women whose stories I examine in this paper has strong links to the economic deprivation in their country of origin as well as to the Philippines’ neo-colonial/colonial relationship to the United States. Their desire for white men corresponded to their desire for status as an ideal white American citizen, who possesses access to the global and local privileges in a place where whites constitute “a ‘nation’ with whiteness,” and where non-European immigrants “encounter the challenges of being treated as second-class citizens” and “can at best become ‘honorary whites.’”
• Intermarriage, like education and occupation, can serve as one of the few means for non-European immigrants with fewer socioeconomic resources to gain upward mobility toward achieving such “honorary whiteness.” The language barriers, lack of family, separation from culture of origin, and lack of social resources led first-generation women to engage in traditional femininity, thereby making explicit gender inequality more common in their relationships.
• The two Chinese American women sought white men because of their aversion to racialized images of “Asian” men and women, and out of a desire to resolve a racialized sense of “non-belongingness.”
• In my interviews, the majority of the first-generation married Asian American women engaged in traditional gender roles, while the second-generation non-married Asian American women tended to express their aversion to submissive images of Asian women and their desire to have relationships based on gender equality.
• For these women, love with white men is a risk-taking gamble by which they resist their racial and gender marginality, deprivation, and inequality. Common among Angelina, Linda, Irene, and Grace is that, even though their strategies are different, “white Western men as potential lovers or husbands become one of the most alluring means” to escape local and global constraints. Thus, desire for white men “is a potentially transgressive and transformative force.” In all four cases, Asian American women’s sexual desire for white men is grounded in their aspiration for upward mobility and discovery of true-self.
• The feminine positions in which Asian American women engage are highly regulated by the local and global discourses of romantic love, and by neo-colonial hierarchies of race. I emphasize again here, however, that what has led these women to engage in feminine subjugation is not their subservient nature in a stereotypical sense, but rather the culturally embedded imaginary discourses that promise their upward mobility and realization of self.
• Projecting visions of equality onto white men is common among both first- and second-generation Asian American women. Six of the ten Asian American women with whom I conducted interviews as part of a couple stated such a belief directly or indirectly. For many of them, a desire for white male egalitarian knighthood corresponded to the belief that egalitarian relationships were not possible with Asian American men.
• The desire for white masculinity as a gateway to middle-class American status and for white masculinity as material security, as represented by Angelina’s and Linda’s stories, are deeply mediated by economic and immigration status. Choices of white men for their socioeconomic and cultural privileges derive from women’s strategic resistance to powerless positions, but such choices also inevitably increase Asian American women’s vulnerability to white power over them.
• The combination of cultural stereotypes of Asian and Asian American women and the actual desires that Asian American women have for white hegemonic masculinity has created a “mutual attraction" between Asian American women and white men. This attraction, grounded as it is in profound inequalities and controlling images, also “promotes Asian American women’s availability to white men and makes them particularly vulnerable to mistreatment.”
• The women whom I interviewed saw white men as sources of power through which they might transform their marginality. Paradoxically, these desires led Asian American women partnered with white men to subordinate themselves to hegemonic views of race, gender, class, and nation.
• Regarding the question of whether Asian American women’s feminine strategy can be one of self-liberation or is mere complicity with the dominant ideology, I do not reduce my findings to a dichotomized discourse of either liberation or self-colonization.
• Rather, the importance of this work lies in showing how, contrary to popular utopian celebration of mixed-race marriage as a sign of multiracialization, interracial intimacy is still regulated by racial, gender, class, and national hierarchies.

Access: https://open.library.ubc.ca/media/stream/pdf/52966/1.0413618/5

• This thesis attempts to “unearth” bodies of labour and intimacy to understand the colonial everyday as experienced by Chinese migrant men in Singapore in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is also an attempt to illustrate colonial power through the vantage point of gender, intimacy, and masculinities.
• The legacy of intimate labourers remains largely outside of the Chinese migration story in Singapore, yet its impact and reverberations have ramifications for bodies and people in the present day.
• Many Chinese migrant men in the 19th and 20th centuries arrived on the island of Singapore to find work and novel opportunities, only to end up as domestic servants or “houseboys” for White elite men. Others ended up in the sex trade as sex workers.
• Abused and effeminized by their overlords and treated as exotic servants by women, Chinese men were placed in a position of flux where they were not afforded a seat at the table as men yet also not treated as women.
• These houseboys occupied a third space built around exoticism. They acted as a tool to further exoticize Singapore as a place of pleasure.
• Due to survival, the colonial frontier was also a space in which White men and their subordinates needed to work intimately together. This is most apparent within the household in domestic labour and in sex work - intimate labour. It is under this guise that gender becomes a vital component of understanding the running and maintaining of the colony and for understanding the vestigial effects of colonialism.

Colonial masculinities in Singapore

• White men erase notions of identity and agency to hold power for themselves to create the colony. This display of power was also a demonstration of mastery over Chinese men and a display of masculinity targeted at other White men.
• From Orbaugh’s writing about bodies and agency within literary theory, dynamics of intimacy within the sexual also exist within the colonial framework. That is, “performing” the passive role in any relationship – sexual or otherwise should not be seen as simply an absence of power but that it is an active use of restraint to accomplish a specific goal or task.

Chapter synopses

• Chapter 1 will explore how Chinese men migrating into Singapore were transformed from men into “boys” for their White masters. Key to this discussion will be the idea that masculinity in the colonies was a construction of power that required “buy-in” from Chinese men and White men. The Chinese arriving for labour needed to submit a part of their own cultural notions of masculinity and “Chineseness” in order to find work, and White men were operating on a competitive basis to display masculinity through colonial dominance of people and material goods. The chapter will highlight the foundations and posturing of colonial masculinity within Singapore and how it is sustained through images of masculinity.
• Chapter 2 illustrates how Chinese men were also oppressed by the White mistresses, furthering their infantilization. Chinese workers began to band together in order to fight off abuse by the mistresses and masters. As they consolidated their power and identity, so too did the colonial elite gather their own power, leading to the enacting of the Domestic Servant’s Ordinance in 1888 to police Chinese labour and organization against their employers.
• Chapter 3 offers a different paradigm of intimacy in the colonies – one of sex and “male” sex work. Looking through the lens of Chinese bodies as threats to hierarchy, I will chart how Chinese male and transgender sex workers’ bodies were made to be policed. Intimate labour and services offered by sex workers are grafted into a larger narrative of a gendered and racial threat caused by partaking in same-sex activities. The body became a political apparatus in which colonial power was subverted and questioned. As such, policing of bodies not just in the unhygienic sense, but also in a racial sense will be used to explain the creation of Section 377A of the Penal Code forbidding same sex between two consenting men. Through this exploration of sex work and the people who partook in it, I will illustrate the development of the “unmemorable body,” or the bodies that were made to be forgotten.

Summary

• At its core, this thesis is an exploration into the bodies and people who formed the basis of colonial Singapore – Chinese men who crossed the sea to find work and opportunity: unremembered bodies.
• It is also the story of masculinity and its power to move people and shape society. The story of Chinese men within the tapestry of Singapore was diminished into them being “boys” and as labour for white masters and mistresses. Labouring bodies which provided the backbone for the colonial every day are in an active state of “unremembering” – acknowledging the colonial legacy and its effects on the Chinese community as it relates to nation-building, but purposefully forgetting the intricate labour that textualizes the colonial experience.
• In this regard, my work and its findings have their echoes in the present state of domestic work in Singapore and across Southeast Asia, in the sustaining of Penal Code Section 377A forbidding same-sex acts between men, and in the sexual underground that exists in Singapore through the form of “Gentleman’s Clubs” which all serve to sustain the colonial legacy of masculinity as something that must be acquired, maintained, and replicated.

Access: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ucVORYxklZ8-US9Sm9nXXjjUnzYTqO6Z/view?usp=share_link

Abstract: Despite considerable prevention and intervention efforts, military suicide rates in the US have increased. Although most research on active-duty military suicide has focused on combat exposure, evidence shows that bullying, hazing, and race are understudied risk factors for military suicide. According to the interpersonal theory of suicide, thwarted belongingness, perceived burdensomeness, and acquired capability are necessary components for enacting a suicide death. In this theoretically-based interpersonal case analysis of the suicide death of Private Danny Chen, an American soldier of Chinese descent, we explore how bullying, hazing, and race have intersected with other vulnerabilities to result in his death.

Key Excerpts

Background of US Army Private Danny Chen

• US Army Private (PV2) Chen, age 19, the only son of Chinese immigrants, was from NYC's Chinatown neighborhood. He was a member of the 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division, stationed at Fort Wainwright, AK.
• On the morning of 3 October 2011, he went to his guard tower and fatally shot himself in the head. The phrases, “Tell my parents I’m sorry” and “Veggie—pull the plug,” were scrawled in black marker on his forearm.
• When he died, PV2 Chen had been deployed for less than two months to an American base in Kandahar Province.
• At the time of PV2 Chen’s death, the US Army had no-bullying policy.

White supremacist racial violence against Danny Chen in the US military

• PV2 Chen wrote several letters to his family during his time in basic combat training. In these letters, he wrote “All the weaker people have left” and “Now I’m the weakest one left.”
• Soon after the Chen's arrival to his unit in Afghanistan, his platoon-mates began making racial jokes and calling him racial epithets. He silently endured it, and the behavior persisted.
• In a Facebook comment Chen made on September 27, 2011, “... being Chen and Chinese in this platoon is a no go”.
• In PV2 Chen’s unit, his superiors administered “corrective” actions in the form of “smoke” sessions, which were periods of intense physical activity. In his six weeks with his unit, PV2 Chen experienced many such incidents. In one instance, a member of his unit struck his thighs while PV2 Chen leaned against a wall, knees bent.
• On another occasion, his team leader, who was also his roommate, dragged him on his back, covered only by a thin T-shirt, for a distance of 40 yards.
• Another time, he was made to shout instructions to other soldiers in Chinese while wearing a green hard hat, even though no one else in his unit spoke Chinese.
• In an Op-Ed, Lieutenant General Thomas P. Bostick (US Army-Retired), Director of Personnel for the US Army when PV2 Chen died by suicide, wrote, “...night after night, week after week, Chen experienced this terrible treatment”.
• Hernandez (2015) described the events that unfolded a few hours before PV2 Chen’s suicide in the guard tower, ostensibly because, similar to many other his fellow soldiers who were not targeted, he was not wearing his Advanced Combat Helmet:

PV2 Chen was “smoked” by his squad leader, a Staff Sergeant, and the two Specialists, who made him do pushups and flutter kicks for several minutes after which he was ordered by these same three individuals to low crawl over coarse gravel and in full gear to the guard tower nearly 100 yards away. As he low crawled, the two Specialists threw rocks at him and yelled many of the same names they had called PV2 Chen before: “chink, egg roll,” and “fortune cookie.”

• One of the Specialists dragged him by the carrying handle of his body armor. Finally, he was dragged up the stairs by the Specialists and left to perform tower watch.

Risk factors for Asian American military members

• Joiner’s (2009) ITS is a useful framework for elucidating the complex nature of suicide in military populations. The ITS conceptualizes that Perceived Burdensomeness (PB) (i.e., the perception that one cannot meaningfully contribute to society) and Thwarted Belonging (TB) (i.e., unmet psychological need for connectedness) must be present and interact to produce suicidal desire. A third component, AC, involves developing the ability to enact one’s death (i.e., fearlessness of death combined with increased pain tolerance), which is necessary for suicide desire to progress to suicide enactment.
• When combined with bully victimization and other vulnerabilities, racial factors contributed to the PV2 Chen’s development of ITS conditions for suicide.
• First, as a young Chinese American, PV2 Chenalready had a heightened risk for suicide. Suicide is the leading cause of death for Asian Americans in his age group (CDC, 2019).
• Asian active-duty service members die by suicide at higher rates than their representation in the U.S. military would suggest (DoD, 2019, 2020a).
• Second, as a soldier of color, he was more likely to experience bullying. In a study of 300 Asian American veterans, as high as 77% reported racism experiences during military service (Loo et al., 2001).
• Third, he was less likely to experience high levels of resilience that could have been protective. Resilience is a critical protective factor that can buffer PB and TB (Hourani et al., 2018). Yet, AA/AI service members may be less resilient than other groups, increasing their vulnerability to the potentially suicidogenic effects of bully victimization. In a study of Operation Enduring Freedom/Operation Iraqi Freedom combat veterans, psychological resilience was significantly lower among AA/PI veterans than non- Hispanic White veterans (Herbert et al., 2018).
• Finally, race plays a role in who seeks help and who does not. PV2 Chen did not seek help, likely because he perceived that engaging in such a stigmatized behavior (seeking mental health services) might further exacerbate the bullying. AA/PI veterans have a higher stigma around mental health problems and lower treatment-seeking rates than other veteran groups. Asian American active-duty personnel who perceived stigma were less likely to seek treatment than non-Asian peers (Chu et al., 2021). Those who eventually sought treatment waited until their problems were quite severe (Tsai & Kong, 2012).

Other Statistics:

• The DoD-wide suicide rate was 25.9 deaths/100,000. Of the 344 total active- duty suicides in 2019, suicide decedents were primarily men under 30, enlisted in the Army, who died by firearm injury.
• The racial categories of White, Black or African American, Asian American/Pacific Islander (AA/PI), American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN), and Multiracial/Other represented 70.6%, 16.9%, 5.6%, 1%, and 6% of all active-duty service members respectively.
• The percentage of suicides among those groups was 75.6%, 10.5%, 6.4%, 2.0%, and 5.5%, respectively.

Access: https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2018/09/asian-americans-companies.html

Asian-Americans are more than twice as likely to be hired as CEOs when a company is struggling, possibly setting them up for failure.

• Researchers analyzed data for almost 5,000 CEOs from publicly traded companies across every major industry in North America over five decades and found Asian-Americans were appointed two-and-a-half times as often during a company’s decline than when a company was successful. The study also found that stereotypes of Asian-Americans as self-sacrificing may play a role since CEOs may be expected to work long hours or give up bonuses if a company is struggling. The research was published online in the Journal of Applied Psychology.
• “It’s important to understand that some seemingly positive stereotypes about minorities may appear to be silver linings on the surface, but they often obscure underlying challenges that perpetuate discrimination,” said lead researcher Seval Gündemir. “It is our hope that this research can serve as a key first step to combat bias and inequality that affects Asian-Americans.”
• Despite high levels of education and income, Asian-Americans are underrepresented in company leadership positions. Researchers collected the names of 4,951 CEOs from North American databases dating to 1967 and found only 41 Asian-American CEOs, representing less than 1 percent of the group. Asian-Americans have been the fastest-growing minority group over the past decade and represent 6 percent of the U.S. population, according to census data.
• Researchers used public databases, biographical information, news accounts and photos to identify Asian-American CEOs, who were defined as people of East Asian descent, including individuals from China, South Korea, Japan, Vietnam and neighboring countries. The study then used public documents to analyze the financial success of the publicly traded companies. The vast majority of the companies included in the study were located in the United States (96 percent), with smaller numbers in Canada and Mexico.
• The study found that whites, Hispanics and African-Americans were not more likely to be hired during a company’s downturn, unlike Asian-Americans, who were more than twice as likely to be hired during those periods. However, Asian-Americans didn’t serve longer terms as CEOs than whites during a company’s struggles, and their tenure (2.8 years) was less than half as long as white CEOs (6 years) during successful periods.
• Since Asian-Americans are hired more often to lead struggling companies, they could face more stress and blame for the company’s failure, Gündemir said. Only 12 percent of the companies included in the study were struggling, further limiting the opportunities for Asian-Americans to lead companies.
• “A fairer representation of minority groups in positions of power can not only contribute to organizational productivity and innovation but also provide role models to minority employees,” Gündemir said.
• The researchers also conducted three online experiments about the self-sacrificing stereotype for Asian-Americans. In an experiment with 227 U.S. residents, half of the group read a newspaper article about a fictional successful company while the other half read about a struggling company. The participants then rated the importance of self-sacrificing behaviors by a leader, such as giving up a bonus or working on the weekends. Then they were told to imagine they were on a CEO hiring committee and were given information about an Asian-American candidate (“Alex Wong”) and a white candidate (“Anthony Smith”). Participants who read about the struggling company were significantly more likely to choose the Asian-American candidate than participants who read about the successful company.
• In a second experiment with 101 U.S. residents, participants were given information about the same two fictitious CEO candidates. Participants rated the Asian-American candidate as more likely to engage in self-sacrificing behaviors than the white candidate. In a final experiment with 199 U.S. residents, participants were more likely to say an Asian-American candidate was a better fit as CEO when a company was struggling.

Please type your comment in the live chat for any type of research or content related to the Asian experience you would like to see on AsianResearchCentral.

Alternatively, post any type of question relating to the Asian experience you would like to see addressed.

We will keep track of these questions and provide content accordingly.

Members are highly encouraged to participate and contribute!

Access: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EELsT1kqtnmAMKB1HdaSkgz7Mf4CCl3j/view?usp=share_link

Binary construction of difference, privileged identities and the third-space of Asian Americans

• Societies tend to organize themselves around sets of mutually exclusive binaries: white or black, man or woman, professional or laborer, citizen or alien. In the US, this binary construction of difference - of privileging and empowering the first term and disempowering the second - structures and maintains race, gender, and class privilege and power.
• Thus, white / male / professional / citizen constitutes the norm against which black / female / laborer / alien is defined. Normed on this white, male, bourgeois hierarchy, working class immigrant women of color are subordinated and suppressed.
• There is also another kind of dualism, one that treats race, gender, and class as mutually exclusive categories. By privileging either race or gender or class instead of recognizing their interconnections, this dichotomous stance marginalizes the experiences of those who are multiply disadvantaged.
• As a multiply disadvantaged people, Asians in the US complicate either/or definitions and categories and carve out for themselves a "third space" as "neither/nor" and as "both/and". Because of their racial ambiguity, Asian Americans have been constructed historically to be both "like black" and "like white," as well as neither black nor white.
• Similarly, Asian women have been both hyper feminized and masculinized, and Asian men have been both hypermasculinized and feminized. And in social class and cultural terms, Asian Americans have been cast both as the "unassimilable alien" and the "model minority". Their ambiguous, middling positions maintain systems of privilege and power but also threaten and destabilize these constructs of hierarchies.
• This essay discusses how Asian Americans, as radicalized others who occupy a third position, both disrupt and conform to the hegemonic dualism of race, gender and class.

Adoption of dichotomous thinking for both Asian men and women

• The problems of race, gender, and class are closely intertwined in the lives of Asian American men and women. It is racial and class oppression against “yellows” that restricts their material lives, (re)defines their gender roles, and provides material for degrading and exaggerated sexual representations of Asian men and women in U.S. popular culture.
• On the other hand, some Asian Americans have adopted the either/or dichotomies of the dominant patriarchal structure, “unwittingly upholding the criteria of those whom they assail”.
• Having been forced into “feminine” subject positions, some Asian American men seek to reassert their masculinity. Though it is useful to view male tyranny within the context of racial inequality and class exploitation, it is equally important to note that this aggression is informed by Eurocentric gender ideology, particularly its emphasis on oppositional dichotomous sex roles.
• This dichotomous stance has led to the marginalization of Asian American women and their needs. Concerned with recuperating their identities as men and as Americans, some Asian American political and cultural workers have subordinated feminism to nationalist concerns. From this limited standpoint, Asian American feminists who expose Asian American sexism are cast as “anti- ethnic,” criticized for undermining group solidarity, and charged with exaggerating the community’s patriarchal structure to please the larger society. In other words, these displays of male prowess are indicators of “marginalized subordinated masculinities.”
• The racist debasement of Asian men makes it difficult for Asian American women to balance the need to expose the problems of male privilege with the desire to unite with men to contest the overarching racial ideology that confines them both. As Asian American women negotiate this difficult feat, they, like men, tend to subscribe to either/or dichotomous thinking. They do so when they adopt the fixed masculinist Asian American identity, even when it marginalizes their positions, or when they privilege women’s concerns over men’s or over concerns about other forms of inequality. Finally, Asian American women enforce Eurocentric gender ideology when they accept the objectification and feminization of Asian men and the parallel construction of white men as the most desirable sexual and marital partners.
• Traditional white feminists likewise succumb to binary definitions and categories when they insist on the primacy of gender, thereby dismissing racism and other structures of oppression. The feminist mandate for gender solidarity accounts only for hierarchies between men and women and ignores power differentials among women, among men, and between white women and men of color. This exclusive focus on gender makes it difficult for white women to see the web of multiple oppressions that constrain the lives of most women of color, thus limiting the potential bonding among all women. Furthermore, it bars them from recognizing the oppression of men of color: the fact that there are men, and not only women, who have been “feminized” and the fact that white, middle class women hold cultural power and class power over certain groups of men.
• In sum, Asian American men, Asian American women, and white women unwittingly comply with the ideologies of racialized patriarchy. Asian American men fulfill traditional definitions of manhood when they conflate might and masculinity and sweep aside the needs and well-being of Asian American women. Asian American women accept these racialized gender ideologies when they submit to white and Asian men or when they subordinate racial, class, or men’s concerns to feminism. And white women advance a hierarchical agenda when they fail to see that the experiences of white women, women of color, and men of color are connected in systematic ways.

Capitalistic exploitation across gender, class and racial lines

• A central task in feminist scholarship is to expose and dismantle the stereotypes that traditionally have provided ideological justifications for women’s subordination. However, ideologies of manhood and womanhood have as much to do with class and race as they have to do with sex. Class and gender intersect when the culture of patriarchy, which assigns men to the public sphere and women to the private sphere, makes it possible for capitalists to exploit and profit from the labor of both men and women.
• Because patriarchy mandates that men be the breadwinners, it pressures them to work in the capitalist wage market, even in jobs that are low paying, physically punishing, and without opportunities for upward mobility. In this sense, the sexual division of labor within the family produces a steady supply of male labor for the benefits of capital.
• On the other hand, in however limited a way, wage employment does allow women to challenge the confines and dictates of traditional patriarchal social relations. It affords women some opportunities to leave the confines of the home, delay marriage and childbearing, develop new social networks, and exercise more personal independence. As such, wage labor both oppresses and liberates women, exploiting them as workers but also strengthening their claims against patriarchal authority.
• U.S. capital also profits from racism. In the pre-World War II era, white men were considered “free labor” and could have a variety of jobs in the industrialized economic sector, whereas Asian Men were racialized as “coolie labor” and confined to nonunionized, degrading low paying jobs in the agricultural and service sectors. Asian immigrants faced a special disability: They could not become citizens and thus were a completely disfranchised group. As noncitizen, Asian immigrants were subjected to especially onerous working conditions compared to other workers, including longer hours, lower wages, more physically demanding labor, and more dangerous task. The alien, and thus rights-deprived, status of Asian immigrants increased the ability of capital to control them; it also allowed employers to use the cheapness of Asian labor to undermine and discipline the white small producers and white workers.
• The post-1965 Asian immigrant group, though much more differentiated along social class lines, is still racialized and exploited. In all occupational sectors, Asian American men and women fare worse than their white counter-parts. Unskilled and semiskilled Asian immigrant labor is relegated to the lowerpaying job brackets of racially segregated industries. Due to their gender, race, and noncitizen status, Asian immigrant women fare the worst because they are seen as being the most desperate for work at any wage.
• The highly educated, on the other hand, encounter institutionalized economic and cultural racism that restricts their economic mobility. In sum, capitalist exploitation of Asians has been possible mainly because Asian labor had already been categorized by a racist society as being worth less than white worker’s labor. This racial hierarchy then confirms the “manhood” of white men while rendering Asian men impotent.
• Racist economic exploitation of Asian American has had gender implications. Due to the men’s inability to earn a family wage, Asian American women have had to engage in paid labor to make up the income discrepancies. In other words, the racialized exploitation of Asian American men has historically been the context for the entry of Asian American women into the labor force. Access to wage work and relative economic independence, in turn, has given women solid ground for questioning their subordination.
• Moreover, Asian women’s ability to transform traditional patriarchy is often constrained by their social-structural location in the dominant society. The articulation between the processes of gender discrimination, racial discrimination of (presumed or actual) immigrant workers, and capitalist exploitation makes their position particularly vulnerable.
• If Asian men have been “feminized” in the United States, then they can best attest to and fight against patriarchal oppression that has long denied all women male privilege. If white women recognize that ideologies of womanhood have as much to do with race and class as they have to do with sex, then they can better work with, and not for, women (and men) of color. And if men and women of all social classes understand how capitalism distorts and diminishes all peoples’ lives, then they will be more apt to struggle together for a more equitable economic system.
• Thus, to name the categories of oppression and to identify their interconnections is also to explore, forge, and fortify cross-gender, cross-racial, and cross-class alliances. It is to construct what Chandra Mohanty (1991:4) called an “imagined community”: a community that is bounded not only by color, race, or class but crucially by a shared struggle against all pervasive and systemic forms of domination.

Access: https://www.annfammed.org/content/annalsfm/20/4/374.full.pdf

• “Keep your head down.” One of my Asian residents told me that he learned growing up that he would be fine if he did. As an Asian myself, I knew what he meant.
• I am not a natural activist or protestor. When discussing anti-Asian racism I have experienced, I would say something like, “I haven’t experienced a lot, mainly being called slurs but nothing worse than that.”
• To understand how I fit into society, I have had a long-standing interest in cross-cultural issues. This interest is one of the threads that led me to a role as a psychiatry residency director at a historically Black medical school. Most of the residents in the program are Black. I have been able to discuss with the residents the impacts of race to a great degree. Therefore, at the height of the 2020 protests against police violence toward Black people, it was straightforward for me to initiate a processing session for our entire resident body.
• March 16, 2021 came the fatal shootings of Hyun Jung Grant, Yong Yue, Suncha Kim, Soon Chung Park, Delaina Ashley Yaun, Paul Andre Michels, Xiaojie Tan, and Daoyou Feng at 3 Atlanta-area spas. Six of the victims were Asian women working at the spas, including 1 owner. These hate crimes happened amidst the backdrop of increasing anti-Asian violence due to animosity toward China for the pandemic.
• When Asians increasingly became the targets of violence, I did not immediately think to address it formally in the program. I have come to expect that others will not take anti-Asian racism seriously. I was suppressing my fear and anger so I could continue to function at work but beginning to realize that doing so was doing more harm than good.
• I was becoming more aware of how I had been minimizing anti-Asian racism. While traveling abroad many years ago, I laughed off people making karate chop motions as they passed me in the street. When my wife and I were traveling in a different state a couple years ago, a restaurant staff member put us on the waitlist, and later a colleague called out for “Chong.” We had not given a name, and I realized that “Chong” was how she had noted us on the waitlist. What other racism had been happening outside our awareness? We were uncomfortable but still ate there and joked about it.
• The “model minority” myth views Asian Americans “as healthy, wealthy, and with a strong work ethic” leading to positive outcomes, hiding the heterogeneity of this group and making it easy for all people to minimize real problems that Asians experience.
• I learned and even taught about this concept many years ago but still partly bought into the view that Asians have it good and should not complain. I had been working on an article on being an Asian leader in medicine and the cultural factors complicating my leadership journey.
• With the racial turmoil last year, however, I did not think it was the right time to describe my cultural challenges, when other groups had it worse. I have since come across a study finding that internalized model minority myth was associated with valuing emotional self-control, which was one of the Asian cultural value variables studied. Keeping my head down has been a prime example of this emotional self-control.

My first experience as a group therapist in my early days as a psychiatrist is illustrative. One group member used an anti-Asian slur, not to refer to me but to someone from his past. I froze, not knowing what to do, and did not address it in the group.

• I brought it up later to my co-facilitator, who was an experienced group therapist. He said he was shocked at the time but had forgotten about it. He asked me if it was affecting my experience, but I downplayed it. It was not until months later, when I was about to leave this role and time was running out, that I told him I wished he had addressed it during the session right after it happened.
• In my role as residency director, individual residents told me that an all-resident processing session on anti-Asian violence would be helpful, so I organized one. Some of the residents with Asian heritage shared their experiences and feelings, and other residents provided support.
• Asians can internalize the model minority stereotype to the point of believing that other ethnic minority groups are fully responsible for their struggles. Meanwhile, as stated earlier, other minorities may believe that Asians do not experience discrimination. These perceptions can cause division between Asian and other minority groups. This division prevents unified action that would be helpful to fight racism.
• For the processing session, I wanted to allow the residents to speak and waited until the very end to talk about my own experience. Time was running out, and I had to force myself to be vulnerable and brave. I explained that, while I have been called racial slurs, in the past I did not worry about being physically attacked due to my race. Then I described conversations with my wife about the many cases of anti-Asian violence in our former home of New York City and how it made her hesitant to return there. Finally, I said, “I knew intellectually that some people have to live in fear, but now I know what it feels like.”
• I was glad that I had shared my experience publicly, though it was not easy. Whether the tendency to keep my head down is personal, familial, or cultural, it is something I continue to work on.
• As a way of making up for inadequately addressing the racial slur in group therapy years ago, I discuss with the residents when and how to address racism head-on in psychotherapy and other settings. The people at my program and the increased antiracist activity nationally have helped me find my voice in speaking out against racism against my own group.
• This piece is another example. Through the review process, feedback from both editors and reviewers pushed me to express my emotions more about anti-Asian racism. Doing so was challenging to me, which is just another example of the silencing forces I have to keep fighting.

Access: https://sites.middlebury.edu/sexandsociety/files/2015/01/DEmilio-Capitalism-and-Gay-Identity.pdf

Abstract: For gay men and lesbians, the 70s were years of significant achievement. In the 80s, however, with the resurgence of an active right wing, gay men and lesbians face the future warily. Everywhere there is a sense that new strategies are in order if we want to preserve our gains and move ahead. I believe that a new, more accurate theory of gay history must be part of this political enterprise. There is historical myth that enjoys nearly universal acceptance in the gay movement, the myth of the ‘eternal homosexual’. The argument runs like this: gay men and lesbians always were and always will be. We are everywhere; not just now, but throughout history, in all societies and all periods. This myth served a positive political function in the first years of gay liberation. But in recent years it has confined us and locked our movement in place. Here I wish to challenge this myth. I want to argue that gay men and lesbians have not always existed. Instead, they are a product of history, and have come into existence in a specific historical era. Their emergence is associated with the relations of capitalism; it has been the historical development of capitalism that has allowed large numbers of men and women in the late twentieth century to call themselves gay and to organize politically on the basis of that identity. Finally, I want to suggest some political lessons we can draw from this view of history.

Key excerpts:

Creation myth of the gay liberation movement

• When the gay liberation movement began at the end of the 1960s, gay men and lesbians had no history that we could use to fashion our goals and strategy. In the ensuing years, in building a movement without a knowledge of our history, we instead invented a mythology.
• This mythical history drew on personal experience, which we read backward in time. For instance, most lesbians and gay men in the 60s first discovered their desires in isolation, unaware of others, and without resources for naming and understanding what they felt. From this experience, we constructed a myth of silence, invisibility, and isolation as the essential characteristics of gay life in the past as well as the present.
• Moreover, because we faced so many oppressive laws, public policies, and cultural beliefs, we projected this into an image of the abysmal past: until gay liberation, lesbians and gay men were always the victims of systematic, undifferentiated, terrible oppression.
• These myths have limited our political perspectives. They have contributed, for instance, to an overreliance on a strategy of coming out – if every gay man and lesbian in America came out, gay oppression would end – and have allowed us to ignore the institutionalized ways in which homophobia and heterosexism are reproduced.
• There is another historical myth that enjoys nearly universal acceptance in the gay movement, the myth of the ‘eternal homosexual’: gay men and lesbians always were and always will be. We are everywhere; not just now, but throughout history, in all societies and all periods.
• This myth served a positive political function in the first years of gay liberation. In the early 70s, when we battled an ideology that either denied our existence or defined us as psychopathic individuals or freaks of nature, it was empowering to assert that ‘we are everywhere’. But in recent years it has confined us as surely as the most homophobic medical theories, and locked our movement in place.
• I wish to challenge this myth. I want to argue that gay men and lesbians have not always existed. Instead, they are a product of history, and have come into existence in a specific historical era.
• Their emergence is associated with the relations of capitalism; it has been the historical development of capitalism – more specifically, its free-labour system – that has allowed large numbers of men and women in the late twentieth century to call themselves gay, to see themselves as part of a community of similar men and women, and to organize politically on the basis of that identity.

Capitalism and the destruction of the self-sufficient family unit

• First, let me review some features of capitalism. Under capitalism workers are ‘free’ labourers. We have the freedom to look for a job. We own our ability to work and have the freedom to sell our labour power for wages to anyone willing to buy it. We are also freed from the ownership of anything except our labour power.
• Most of us do not own the land or the tools, but rather have to work for a living in order to survive. So, if we are free to sell our labour power in the positive sense, we are also freed, in the negative sense, from any other alternative. This constant interplay between exploitation and some measure of autonomy informs all of the history of those who have lived under capitalism.
• In the US, capitalism initially took root in the Northeast, at a time when slavery was the dominant system in the South and when noncapitalist Native American societies occupied the western half of the continent. US capital has since penetrated almost every part of the world.
• The expansion of capital and the spread of wage labour have effected a profound transformation in the structure and functions of the nuclear family, the ideology of family life, and the meaning of heterosexual relations. It is these changes in the family that are most directly linked to the appearance of a collective gay life.
• The white colonists in seventeenth-century New England established villages structured around a household economy, composed of family units that were basically self-sufficient, independent, and patriarchal. Men, women, and children farmed land owned by the male head of the household. Although there was a division of labour between men and women, the family was truly an interdependent unit of production: the survival of each member depended on all.
• As merchant capitalists invested the money accumulated through trade in the production of goods, wage labour became more common. Men and women were drawn out of the largely self-sufficient household economy of the colonial era into a capitalist system of free labour.
• By the mid-nineteenth century, capitalism had destroyed the economic self-sufficiency of many families, but not the mutual dependence of the members. This transition away from the household family-based economy to a fully developed capitalist free-labour economy occurred very slowly, over almost two centuries. As late as 1920, 50% of the US population lived in communities of fewer than 2500 people.
• For those people who felt the brunt of these changes, the family took on new significance as an affective unit, an institution that provided not goods but emotional satisfaction and happiness. By the 1920s among the white middle class, the ideology surrounding the family described it as the means through which men and women formed satisfying, mutually enhancing relationships and created an environment that nurtured children. The family became the setting for a ‘personal life’, sharply distinguished and disconnected from the public world of work and production.

Transformation of heterosexual relations and the meaning of sex

• The meaning of heterosexual relations also changed. In colonial New England the birth rate averaged over seven children per woman of childbearing age. Men and women needed the labour of children. Producing offspring was as necessary for survival as producing grain.
• Sex was harnessed to procreation. The Puritans did not celebrate heterosexuality but rather marriage; they condemned all sexual expression outside the marriage bond and did not differentiate sharply between sodomy and heterosexual fornication.
• By the 70s, however, the birth rate had dropped to under two. With the exception of the post-World-War-Two baby boom, the decline has been continuous for two centuries, paralleling the spread of capitalist relations of production.
• It occurred when access to contraceptive devices and abortion was systematically curtailed. The decline has included every segment of the population – urban and rural families, blacks and whites, ethnics and WASPS, the middle class and the working class.
• As wage labour spread and production became socialized, then, it became possible to release sexuality from the ‘imperative’ to procreate. Ideologically, heterosexual expression came to be a means of establishing intimacy, promoting happiness, and experiencing pleasure.

Emergence of the homosexual identity

• In divesting the household of its economic independence and fostering the separation of sexuality from procreation, capitalism has created conditions that allow some men and women to organize a personal life around their erotic/emotional attraction to their own sex.
• It has made possible the formation of urban communities of lesbians and gay men and, more recently, of a politics based on sexual identity. Evidence from colonial New England court records and church sermons indicates that male and female homosexual behaviour existed in the seventeenth century.
• Homosexual behaviour, however, is different from homosexual identity. There was, quite simply, no ‘social space’ in the colonial system of production that allowed men and women to be gay.
• Survival was structured around participation in a nuclear family. There were certain homosexual acts – sodomy among men, ‘lewdness’ among women – in which individuals engaged, but family was so pervasive that colonial society lacked even the category of homosexual or lesbian to describe a person.
• It is quite possible that some men and women experienced a stronger attraction to their own sex than to the opposite sex – in fact, some colonial court cases refer to men who persisted in their ‘unnatural’ attractions – but one could not fashion out of that preference a way of life. Colonial Massachusetts even had laws prohibiting unmarried adults from living outside family units.
• By the second half of the nineteenth century, this situation was noticeably changing as the capitalist system of free labour took hold. Only when individuals began to make their living through wage labour, instead of as parts of an interdependent family unit, was it possible for homosexual desire to coalesce into a personal identity – an identity based on the ability to remain outside the heterosexual family and to construct a personal life based on attraction to one’s own sex.
• By the end of the century, a class of men and women existed who recognized their erotic interest in their own sex, saw it as a trait that set them apart from the majority, and sought others like themselves. In this period, gay men and lesbians began to invent ways of meeting each other and sustaining a group life. These patterns of living could evolve because capitalism allowed individuals to survive beyond the confines of the family.
• Simultaneously, ideological definitions of homosexual behaviour changed. Doctors developed theories about homosexuality, describing it as a condition, something that was inherent in a person, a part of his or her ‘nature’. These theories did not represent scientific breakthroughs, elucidations of previously undiscovered areas of knowledge; rather, they were an ideological response to a new way of organizing one’s personal life.
• The popularization of the medical model, in turn, affected the consciousness of the women and men who experienced homosexual desire, so that they came to define themselves through their erotic life.
• These new forms of gay identity and patterns of group life also reflected the differentiation of people according to gender, race, and class that is so pervasive in capitalist societies.
• Among whites, for instance, gay men have traditionally been more visible than lesbians. This partly stems from the division between the public male sphere and the private female sphere. Streets, parks, and bars, especially at night, were ‘male space’. Yet the greater visibility of white men also reflected their larger numbers.
• The Kinsey studies of the 1940s and 1950s found significantly more men than women with predominantly homosexual histories, a situation caused, I would argue, by the fact that capitalism had drawn far more men than women into the labour force, and higher wages. Men could more easily construct a personal life independent of attachments to the opposite sex, whereas women were more likely to remain economically dependent on men.
• Kinsey et al. (1948, 1953) also found a strong positive correlation between years of schooling and lesbian activity. College-educated white women, far more able than their working-class sisters to support themselves, could survive more easily without intimate relationships with men.

Emergence of well-developed gay community

• At least through the 1930s, gay and lesbian subcultures remained rudimentary, unstable, and difficult to find. How, then, did the complex, well-developed gay community emerge that existed by the time the gay liberation movement exploded?
• The answer is to be found in the dislocations of World War Two, a time when the cumulative changes of several decades coalesced into a qualitatively new shape.
• The war severely disrupted traditional patterns of gender relations and sexuality, and temporarily created a new erotic situation conducive to homosexual expression. It plucked millions of young men and women, whose sexual identities were just forming, out of their homes, out of towns and small cities, out of the heterosexual environment of the family, and dropped them into sex-segregated situations. The war freed millions of men and women from the settings where heterosexuality was normally imposed.
• For men and women already gay, it provided an opportunity to meet people like themselves. Others could become gay because of the temporary freedom to explore sexuality that the war provided.

Scapegoating of gay and lesbian people for the destruction of the family unit under capitalism

• Although gay community was a precondition for a mass movement, the oppression of lesbians and gay men was the force that propelled the movement into existence. As the subculture expanded and grew more visible in the post-World-War-Two era, oppression by the state intensified, becoming more systematic and inclusive.
• The Right scapegoated ‘sexual perverts’ during the McCarthy era. Eisenhower imposed a total ban on the employment of gay women and men by the federal government and government contractors. Purges of lesbians and homosexuals from the military rose sharply. The FBI instituted widespread surveillance of gay meeting places and of lesbians and gay organizations, such as the Daughters of Bilitis and the Mattachine Society. The Post Office placed tracers on the correspondence of gay men and passed evidence of homosexual activity on to employers. Urban vice squads invaded private homes, made sweeps of lesbians and gay male bars, entrapped gay men in public places, and fomented local witchhunts.
• The danger involved in being gay rose even as the possibilities of being gay were enhanced. Gay liberation was a response to this contradiction. Although lesbians and gay men won significant victories in the 1970s and opened up some safe social space in which to exist, we can hardly claim to have dealt a fatal blow to heterosexism and homophobia. One could even argue that the enforcement of gay oppression has merely changed locales, shifting somewhat from the state to the arena of extralegal violence in the form of increasingly open physical attacks on lesbians and gay men.
• As our movements have grown, they have generated a backlash that threatens to wipe out our gains. Significantly, this New Right opposition has taken shape as a ‘pro-family’ movement.
• How is it that capitalism, whose structure made possible the emergence of a gay identity and the creation of urban gay communities, appears unable to accept gay men and lesbians in its midst? Why do heterosexism and homophobia appear so resistant to assault?
• The answers, I think, can be found in the contradictory relationship of capitalism to the family. On the one hand, as I argued earlier, capitalism has gradually undermined the material basis of the nuclear family by taking away the economic functions that cemented the ties between family members.
• As more adults have been drawn into the free-labour system, and as capital has expanded its sphere until it produces as commodities most goods and services we need for our survival, the forces that propelled men and women into families and kept them there have weakened. On the other hand, the ideology of capitalist society has enshrined the family as the source of love, affection, and emotional security, the place where our need for stable, intimate human relationships is satisfied.
• This evaluation of the nuclear family to preeminence in the sphere of personal life is not accidental. Every society needs structures for reproduction and childrearing, but the possibilities are not limited to the nuclear family. Yet the privatized family fits well with capitalist relations of production.
• Capitalism has socialized production while maintaining that the products of socialized labour belong to the owners of private property. Capitalist society maintains that reproduction and childrearing are private tasks, that children ‘belong’ to parents, who exercise the rights of ownership.
• Ideologically, capitalism drives people into heterosexual families: each generation comes of age having internalized a heterosexist model of intimacy and personal relationships.
• Materially, capitalism weakens the bonds that once kept families together so that their members experience a growing instability in the place they have come to expect happiness and emotional security. Thus, while capitalism has knocked the material foundation away from family life, lesbians, gay men, and heterosexual feminists have become the scapegoats for the social instability of the system.

Summary

• This analysis, if persuasive, has implications for us today. It can affect our perception of our identity, our formulation of political goals, and our decisions about strategy.
• I have argued that lesbian and gay identity and communities are historically created, the result of a process of capitalist development that has spanned many generations. A corollary of this argument is that we are not a fixed social minority composed for all time of a certain percentage of the population.
• Claims made by gays and nongays that sexual orientation is fixed at an early age, that large numbers of visible gay men and lesbians in society, the media, and the schools will have no influence on the sexual identities of the young, are wrong**.**
• Capitalism has created the material condition for homosexual desire to express itself as a central component of some individuals’ lives; now, our political movements are changing consciousness, creating the ideological conditions that make it easier for people to make that choice.
• Our response must be to challenge the underlying belief that homosexual relations are bad, a poor second choice. We must not slip into the opportunistic defence that society need not worry about tolerating us, since only homosexuals become homosexual.
• I have also argued that capitalism has led to the separation of sexuality from procreation. Human sexual desire need no longer be harnessed to reproductive imperatives, to procreation; its expression has increasingly entered the realm of choice.
• Lesbians and homosexuals most clearly embody the potential of this spirit, since our gay relationships stand entirely outside a procreative framework. The acceptance of our erotic choices ultimately depends on the degree to which society is willing to affirm sexual expression as a form of play, positive and life-enhancing.

Access: https://repository.uclawsf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1396&context=hastings_international_comparative_law_review

Abstract: As 1997 nears, and the British government prepares to hand over land it has ruled since 1842 to the People's Republic of China. The British portrayal of themselves, in these final years of governance, as the promoters and champions of democracy confronting the anti-democratic obstacle of the People's Republic of China is a distortion of the very nature of the British rule. This article will analyze and illustrate the British use of law as a tool to consolidate control of Hong Kong in the hands of a privileged minority.

Key Excerpts:

The annexation Hong Kong, Britain's global opium trade and forced Christianization of Hong Kong

• The lust for money was at the root of British acquisition of Hong Kong in 1842. As the British Prime Minister wrote, Hong Kong was seized "solely and exclusively with a view to commercial interest."
• In 1813 Britain took over the East India Company and the opium trade then became a vital source of revenue to England. Britain knew full well of the enterprise in which its merchants were engaged. An official report to His Majesty's Government described the impact of the opium trade:

The slave trade was merciful compared with the opium trade. We did not destroy the body of the Africans, for it was our immediate interest to keep them alive; we did not debase their natures, corrupt their minds, nor destroy their souls. But the opium seller slays the body after he has corrupted, degraded and annihilated the moral being of unhappy sinners.

• In March of 1839, Commissioner Lin ordered the British to surrender over four million pounds of opium...proceeded to destroy the opium...then ordered all the Britons in Canton to leave. The London merchant houses and opium traders urged armed retaliation. Thus the First Opium War had begun, and the battles continued for over two years...until the annexation of Hong Kong.
• Legal possession did not occur until the August 29, 1842 signing of the Treaty of Nanking, wherein "His majesty the Emperor of China ceded to her majesty the Queen of Great Britain the island of Hong Kong, to be possessed in perpetuity by her Britannic Majesty, her heirs and successors, and to be governed by such laws and regulations as Her majesty the Queen of Great Britain [should] see fit to direct."'
• The victorious British were to receive the equivalent of US $6 million under the treaty as compensation for the seized opium. China was thus forced to pay for the illegal contraband that Britain had been pushing into China.
• The churches lost no time in taking advantage of the new colony. Christian missionaries arrived from the London Missionary Society...The enthusiasm of the Society was extreme, illustrated by their unanimously passed resolution giving "thanksgiving to God for the war between China and Great Britain, and for the greatly enlarged facilities secured by the treaty of peace for the introduction of Christianity into that Empire." Hong Kong did become, and remains, a base for both Protestant and Roman Catholic missionary groups interested in China.
• As Hong Kong grew in population, the British government desired to possess Kowloon, a part of the Chinese mainland directly across from Hong Kong Island to show the Chinese that if Britain so desired it could assert control over more integral parts of China itself.
• War broke out between Britain and a weakened Manchu Dynasty after attempts to persuade the Emperor of China to cede Kowloon to Britain failed. As British troops approached Peking in October of 1860, China was forced to agree to the Convention of Peking which provided for the Kowloon Peninsula to become part of Britain's Crown Colony of Hong Kong.
• The present colony of Hong Kong was completely formed after the Convention of 1898. The antagonism of the Chinese Communists, who won control of China in the late 1940s, to the British presence in Hong Kong is revealed in the following Communist account of the acquisition of the territory:

Hong Kong has been Chinese territory since ancient times. This is a fact known to all, old and young in the world.... British imperialism came to China by pirate ships, provoked the criminal "opium war," massacred numerous Chinese people, and occupied the Chinese territory of Hong Kong. Later it snapped up the Chinese territory of Kowloon and the Chinese territory of the "New Territories." This is an enormous blood debt British imperialism owes to the Chinese people.... [l]t is the British imperialists who have come from thousands of miles away to seize our land by force and kill our compatriots.

Early Chinese influx to Hong Kong after British annexation and living conditions

• Chinese were attracted to the island for its opportunities in smuggling and opium dealing. In 1844, the Governor of Hong Kong referred to those Chinese who chose to come to Hong Kong as the "scum" of China. The highest level British official in China in the late 1840s described Hong Kong as the "great receptacle of thieves and pirates protected by the technicalities of British law."'
• There was little concern for the living conditions of those who were not wealthy. No government services or aid were provided to the impoverished, except to Europeans.
• An ordinance enacted in 1845 made it a crime to "beg, or expose any sore or infirmity to view." In 1854, a doctor appointed by the Hong Kong government to assess the state of the people's health issued a report describing Hong Kong as having "so much filth," full of "cowsheds, pigsties and stagnant pools" with crowded, miserable housing.
• Nothing was done to remedy the situation. In 1860, the Colonial Surgeon prepared a report that described the horrid state of sanitation and health conditions of the Chinese in Hong Kong, but the Governor suppressed the report.
• Opium dens, whorehouses, and gambling parlors thrived. In 1859, The Times of London reflected the perception in England of Hong Kong as a place "always connected with some fatal pestilence, some doubtful war, or some discreditable internal squabble'...The newspaper minced no words, and added: "We cannot wish that the sea should take [Hong Kong] back to itself, because English life and English property would be endangered."
• Because the sanitation and housing conditions for the vast majority of Chinese in Hong Kong were abysmal, the area suffered an outbreak of bubonic plague in 1894. By 1896, there were 1,193 reported cases, 1,088 of which were fatal. There were 1,175 deaths in 1898, 1,428 in 1899, and in 1900 there were 1,434 deaths in which even the Europeans were being affected." However, the thousands of deaths were perhaps not considered to be the real disaster.
• The bubonic plague at last abated, in part due to a scheme of Governor Sir Henry Blake to offer two cents for every rat tail that was handed in to a government office. In 1890 alone, 43,000 rat tails were turned into the government.

Early British governance of Hong Kong and legalization of slavery

• Police corruption was rampant and the high crime rate continued. Victoria prison had become so full in 1863 that 280 prisoners had to be kept in a boat anchored in the harbor.
• The jail crammed as many as sixteen people into a cell constructed for one. A report by the Colonial Surgeon in 1861 found the overcrowding, the lack of ventilation, and the stench in the prison to be "beyond description.'
• Hong Kong became a place for the booking of coolie laborers who were sent to the United States and Jamaica. Women were kidnapped from Canton and brought to Hong Kong from where they were sent overseas as prostitutes.
• Syphilis grew to epidemic proportions. The Colonial Surgeon reported in 1856 that "some of the worst forms of venereal disease" were to be found in Hong Kong and that prostitutes were "suffering from the disease in the most shocking form I ever beheld. Death at last put an end to their sufferings."
• Confronted with an ever-increasing presence of gambling in both Hong Kong and Kowloon, the Governor decided that the government should share in the profits from the vice. He legalized the gambling dens in 1867 and instituted a licensing requirement as a source of revenue.
• Hong Kong was a center for the sale of girls, by their own parents, into domestic servitude. The British allowed this sale of human beings in Hong Kong, even though slavery was, of course, illegal in England.
• It was not only young Chinese girls who were enslaved. When the South African war ended in 1902, there was a need for labor in the gold and diamond mines. Special depots, supervised by government officials, were built in the Lai Chi Kok area of Hong Kong, and indentured Chinese farm hands were shipped to South Africa.
• The way the government handled the issue of human wastesharply criticized in the 1882 reports-reflected the atmosphere of unbridled laissez-faire capitalism. Instead of requiring landlords to provide latrines for their tenants, the government allowed businesses to profit from the provision of toilets.

British "justice" in Hong Kong: daily flogging, humiliation ritual, public execution

• When the British annexed Hong Kong, the residents were told that they would be governed by the "laws, customs and usages of China." However, in reality British-inspired ordinances enacted by the Hong Kong Legislative Council were to prevail.
• When it came to punishment, the British believed that more than just incarceration was required to deal with Chinese law-breakers. The flogging of Chinese, as ordered by the courts, became so commonplace that the Registrar of the Supreme Court wrote:

Disgusting exhibitions of public flogging were reported to be of almost daily occurrence .... The extent to which the rattan was made use of was almost incredible .... The records of the Police Court, on examination, would show that there was more flogging in Hong Kong than probably in any country in the world according to the population. For the most trifling offenses the Chinese were being daily sentenced to be publicly whipped.

• As further punishment, and a deliberate insult to the dignity and heritage of the Chinese, the British would cut off the long braided hair ("tails") which hung from the back of a Chinese man'; head to show respect for the Emperors of China. However, no specific ordinance authorized tail-cutting as a punishment. It was the Chief Justice, C.M. Campbell, who decided that tail-cutting was a desirable form of punishment.
• To make certain that a Chinese man whose tail was severed would not be able to tie on a new tail, the roots of the tail were shaved off. Men who may have been convicted of only minor offenses were thus made pariahs for life.
• Executions, as well as floggings, were inflicted in public. The gallows were permanently exposed to the public view, in the magistry compound, in the center of the European part of the Colony. At that time Hong Kong was the only British Colony which had public hangings.
• In 1868, London began to exert pressure to have such executions take place within the prison yard. The local government, however, resisted, citing as always the "unique" needs of Hong Kong, especially the need for a deterrence against the Chinese-even though the typical crowd of several hundred spectators was predominately British.
• The British Registrar-General was empowered by an ordinance enacted in 1846 to enter at any time any house or boat "within the Colony" which was "wholly or partly inhabited or manned by Chinese. This ordinance was a frightening exercise of Colonial power. Not only did it give the government absolute power to intrude upon the lives of its subjects, but it also specifically limited this power to use on those of Chinese ancestry. The ordinance attempted to abate Chinese antagonism by ordaining the Registrar-General with the added title, "Protector of the Chinese Inhabitants in Hong Kong."
• Beginning in 1857, all Chinese were required to have a night pass, issued by the Superintendent of Police, in order to be on the streets between eight in the evening and sunrise. Any Chinese person out at night without a pass could be punished with fourteen days imprisonment with hard labor. But that punishment paled in contrast to the power given to all policemen who, between eight in the evening and sunrise, were "authorized to fire upon, with intent or effect to kill, any Chinaman whom he shall meet with and whom he shall have reasonable ground to suspect of being [there] for an improper purpose."
• In 1870, the law that no Chinese.could be on the streets without a pass between 8:00 p.m. and sunrise was reconsidered, and the starting time was changed from 8:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. The Governor was further empowered to require that any Chinese persons out in Hong Kong Island after dark were to carry with them a "lighted Lamp or Lantern." Violation of this lantern requirement merited imprisonment for one month."
• It was not just the physical conditions of the Chinese in Hong Kong that so offended the British, but rather the very character of the Chinese. For example, when the issue of the right to vote for the Chinese was presented to the Hong Kong government, the Colonial Secretary stated:

The testimony of those best acquainted with them represent the Chinese race as endowed with much intelligence, but as very deficient in the most essential elements of morality. The Chinese population of Hong Kong is, with perhaps a few honourable exceptions, admitted to stand very low in this respect .... The Chinese have not yet acquired a respect for the main principles on which social order rests.

Racial segregation during British Hong Kong

• For the British who had settled in Hong Kong, separation from the Chinese was the goal.
• Sir Hercules Robinson, Governor at the time of the acquisition of Kowloon, wrote, "My constant thought has been how best to prevent a large Chinese population [from] establishing themselves at Kowloon, and as some native population is indispensable, how best to keep them to themselves and preserve the European and American community from the injury and inconvenience of intermixture with them."
• It is not surpising that the British settlers, regarding the Chinese as a lower "yellow race," would wish to be geographically separated from them.
• The portrayal of the Chinese as dirty and dishonest was widespread. Typical was the Hong Kong Telegraph's report of one British merchant's claim that "the [Chinese] community including women and even children... pass their Sunday afternoons in filthy Chinese dens .... [I]s it any wonder that petty pilfering is rather the rule than the exception in almost every office and every house in Hong Kong?
• It was not just the poor, but all Chinese, from whom the British desired to be separated. It was as though being "filthy" and "dishonest" was considered endemic to the Chinese race. The memoirs of a British police detective stationed in Hong Kong contain the following description: "In some cases the European looked upon the Chinese as being the lowest form of human life; I have actually seen a European ricksha passenger throw his fare money to the ground rather than risk touching the ricksha coolie."
• Within two years of the British occupation of Hong Kong Island, land occupied by Chinese was cleared to make way for the British. Buildings located on one and a half acres of prime land near the harbor were demolished. The governor supported the Land Officer's goals and added, "It would be very advisable for the interests of the community that the Chinese shall be removed, so as to prevent as much as possible their being mixed up with the Europeans.
• Pride in being British and a feeling of racial and national superiority was claimed by many who back home in Britain were not among the favored. The appeal of life in Hong Kong for a lower-class Englishman was evidenced by the following description: "Lower class Europeans working in Hong Kong became metamorphosed into supervisors, with a Chinese labouring force underthem." Another social commentator described the transformation of lower class English youths into "men of Epicurean tastes, connoisseurs in wines, [and] lavish in expenditure."
• The most desirable location to live in Hong Kong was called the Peak. Until 1888, Europeans living on the Peak were carried up the slope in sedan chairs which were covered to protect them from the sun. Four Chinese chair-coolies were needed to carry one European up the slopes from the central business district.
• In May of 1888, the electric Peak Tramway began operation to carry the wealthy up to their airy, luxurious mansions. The British feared that the existence of the tram would lead to a desire on the part of wealthy Chinese to move up to the Peak.
• In 1904, legislation was passed to comply with the wishes of the Europeans living on the Peak. The Hill District Reservation Ordinance 227 was short and concise. The bill was designed to prohibit Chinese from owning land or residing on the Peak, except that "the Ordinance shall not apply to servants of the residents of the Hill District living on the premises of their employers." The legislation was not so much rooted in class antagonism as in racism. The ordinance had made it clear that it was the Chinese people, of whatever class, that were the cause of alarm.
• The Governor, Sir Francis May, used overtly racist language in his confidential correspondence to the Colonial Office in London: "It would be little short of a calamity if an alien, and by European standards, a semi-civilized race were allowed to drive the white man from the one area in Hong Kong in which he can live with his wife and children in a white man's healthy surroundings. '
• One hundred British families had previously petitioned the government to institute a school exclusively for European students. The petition claimed that the "education of the European children suffers very much from the fact that Europeans and Asians are mixed, and the European child had to be educated side by side in the same class with large numbers of Asiatics." "Constant contact with Chinese," the petition continued, "both in class-room and in play-ground must affect the formation of the character of the European boy."
• Intermarriage between British civil servants and Chinese was discouraged. A police officer who did intermarry would not be permitted to re-enlist, and employees in the Public Works Department who intermarried were forbidden by regulation from living in government
• The intense feelings against an English woman marrying a Chinese man were made clear in a statement of the Committee of the Shanghai Branch of the China Association in 1898:

The chances of a happy result of such a marriage are almost nil, while there is not the slightest prospect of any change taking place during the lifetime of the present generation sufficient to justify an Englishwoman on counting on even a tolerably comfortable life if allied to a Chinese husband. The Committee wish[es] to place on record their opinion that even when the strictest inquiries show the Chinaman in question to be an honourable and well-educated man ... and with ample means to justify his getting married, the final result is likely to be of the most disappointing description.

Everyday white "expat privilege" in Hong Kong and racial caste system

• Expatriates, whites of European ancestry who lived in Hong Kong, typically occupied positions vastly superior to those of the Chinese. The inequity not only made the Chinese second-class citizens in their own country, but also meant that those who governed were not "of the people," nor "in touch with the people," or even able to understand the voices of the people they ruled.
• Judges, for example, were almost all expatriates. They lacked understanding of the culture, tradition, and background of those they judged. As recent as 1993, the highest positions in Hong Kong's Government-the Governor, the Chief Secretary, the Financial Secretary and the Attorney General-were all held by Britons.
• The top echelon of the police department has historically been European, and even as late as the mid-1970s, in most governmental departments the percentage of expatriate occupants at the top positions still approached 95%.
• When the Japanese occupied Hong Kong during World War II, they attempted to capitalize on the racist employment policies of the British by appealing to the Asian identity of the Hong Kong Chinese.
• An editorial in the Japanese-controlled Hong Kong News of February 20, 1942, described the situation the Japanese found regarding government jobs in colonial Hong Kong: "Callow British youths, just out from school, and half-witted Englishmen were often placed in charge of departments over the heads of Asiatics who, perhaps, had spent nearly half their lives in these very same departments and who, therefore, knew their work inside out."'
• Perhaps the reason for this treatment of the Chinese lay in the deeply held British belief that the Chinese were simply an inferior race. For example, in 1866, Superintendent of the Police Charles May, who had been with the Hong Kong Police for almost thirty years, rejected a proposal to recruit Chinese to join the force. He did so because "they are useless, physically and morally."'
• The "English laws" were written only in English, even though the vast majority (98%) of Hong Kong Chinese were not able to understand the language. The only "official language" was English, and no member of the Legislative Council, not even the Chinese members, were permitted to speak Chinese during a legislative session.
• When a Chinese person was arrested, the arresting officers and station-house police often could not even inform him of the charges. It was not until 1974 that the Official Languages Ordinance was passed which declared both English and Chinese to be official languages.
• The conditions of employment for expats in the government were far superior to those for the local Chinese. Europeans received either free government housing or a housing allowance, were able to retire at the age of sixty, received free trips for the employee and family (up to six people) back to Europe every two years, and obtained partial payment of tuition for children to attend private schools in Europe. Vacation days for expatriates ranged from forty-two to fifty-nine days per year-more than twice that of the local Chinese-plus twelve days "casual leave."
• The salaries of expats were so high that at one point in recent years it was estimated that at least fifty-one senior goveminent officials were being paid more than the Prime Minister of Great Britain.
• Even when a Chinese was hired for a low level starting position, his opportunities for advancement were limited. Several studies of the civil service in Hong Kong have shown that expatriates were promoted far more readily than locals, and that this was the single greatest source of dissatisfaction among Chinese employees. The Chairman of the Senior Non-Expatriate Officers' Association reported that the morale of the civil service was at an all time low in 1993.
• This economic stratification in Hong Kong has created two different worlds divided by race. The caste system in Hong Kong is alive and well. The life of the Governor in 1991 exemplified the indulgences of the British: a domestic staff of thirty-a chief steward, a head chef, four number-two chefs, a tailor, twenty-two domestic servants, a Rolls Royce and two Daimlers (chauffeur-driven), and a one hundred foot long boat. And even though the vast majority of Chinese live in extraordinarily crowded housing conditions, the average British expatriate with two children lives in a house or apartment of 2,500 square feet.'
• The far superior position of whites, whether British, Australian, Canadian, or American, is a constant reminder to the Hong Kong Chinese that they are still considered inferior residents in their own land.

Access: https://drive.google.com/file/d/14zyulX31GBOfIUKSEkt7y_XZs3O4tYnJ/view?usp=share_link

Abstract: The article analyzes mainstream (LGBT) media representations of the white serial killer as “ordinary, yet aberrant,” the queer victims of color as sexually and socially fuckable, and the murderous racism of the Canadian state. The article centers the concept of (queer)necropolitics in conversation with discourses of anti-immigration, anti-Muslim racism and racialized sexualities to situate the generative force of racialized sexualized violence in the case.

Key excerpts:

Queer necropolitics and homonationalism

• Foucault’s (1992) concept of biopolitics focuses on the ways in which the government of the life of a population is deeply dependent on state racism. Mbembe (2003) has extended this theorization through the concept of necropolitics, which focuses on the ways in which...subjugation, violence and death are normalized for those imagined as outside the social.
• State racial “violence is one effective way by which particular groups are kept in their place” or rendered docile, which serves to re-establish their social (non)worth, condition the marginality of their social relations and reinforce normative social order. Such violence is not only deployed by state institutions, but through homonationalist “investments” (Lamble, 2013) or complicities, whereby mainstream queer communities who embrace and are embraced by state nationalism pathologize and disavow queers of color, as “bad queers,” unworthy of the rights and protections guaranteed to predominantly white queer citizen-subjects.
• In Queer Necropolitics, Haritaworn et al. (2014: 1) claim that racialized sexualized difference “is increasingly absorbed into hegemonic apparatuses, in a way that accelerates premature death...for those who are unassimilable in liberal regimes of rights and representation and thus become disposable.”
• Lamble’s (2013) analysis of queer necropolitics as enlivening the carceral state, demonstrates the increased decriminalization and rights-based inclusion of LGBT communities, which coalesces with the strengthened criminalization of especially racialized queer populations who are targeted as undeserving of queer citizenship and of state protection on account of their constructed racial alterity. For Lamble, punishment has become—under neoliberalism—the prioritized response to social problems, which are increasingly projected as racial problems.
• Punishment may take the form of “socially-sanctioned deprivation” (Lamble, 2018)—for example, the denial of police attention, the denial of formal citizenship status and the denial of belonging even within the LGBTQ community to those deemed undeserving of protection, security, and community. If homonationalism is deeply reinforcing of the carceral state’s punitive logic, then those “bad queers” who either fall outside the state’s biopolitical prescriptions of normativity or refuse to comply with the strangulating conditions of docile citizenship, are confined to what Lamble (2013: 244) terms a “caged life,” which involves “biological, social, political and civil death.”
• The discursive construction of queers of color as “bad queers” serves to rationalize their sexual/social fuckability (i.e. their constructed predisposition to sexual violence as racial humiliation), disposability, and killability. As a concept, I regard killability as a strategy of ruling, which refers to the structured conditioning of misery/social privation, risk and violence for racialized Others who are consigned to the constitutive outside of citizenship.
• It is important to recognize that both the state and the LGBT community are complicit in the production of racialized necro-availablity as part of a “calculus of death” (McIntyre and Nast, 2011), whereby “race becomes... a marker that one deserves the misery to which one is consigned” (McIntyre and Nast, 2011: 10).
• Focusing on the racialized sexualized torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Sherene Razack (2005: 344) suggests that the brown body is itself the expression of social hierarchies, through which white citizens come to know themselves as superior. In this sense, sexual violence—as a technology of racial power (Han and Choi, 2018; Razack, 2005)— against brown (queer) bodies is crucial to the regeneration of white (queer) innocence and authority.
• In the context of Canadian homo/nationalism, racialized sexual violence must be connected to the “multiple racial logics” (Dhoot, 2018: 50) which support and sustain the Canadian state’s project of racial governmentality. For Dryden and Lenon (2015), Canadian homonationalisms secure the ascendancy of white settler nationalism by reinforcing claims about the exceptional tolerance and benevolence of Canada. Yet, Dhoot (2018) and Wahab (2015) have demonstrated how this project depends on the deployment of anti-brown racism and Islamophobia as “queer investments” in national security, whereby the brown (queer) body is made available to the operations of state violence.
• Writing on the McArthur case, the editor of CanIndia News Online—a South Asian-Canadian newspaper—remarked that “being brown in Canada often means being second-class in some ways but being gay and brown can often relegate those individuals to third-class status” (2018). Brown queer-identified Toronto writer, JP Larocque (2018), offered a similar queer of color critique, claiming that “the double marginalized status of these men in Toronto’s Gay Village made them both targets of a killer and lower priorities in the eyes of the law.”
• According to Han and Choi (2018: 145), “sexual racism” is driven by the ways in which erotic worth is established through a racialized “hierarchy of sexual value”, which construct gay men of color as undesirable and unworthy of gay sexual citizenship precisely because they hold less sexual capital. Their necro-availability is therefore deeply conditioned by the poverty of sexual currency they hold as a result of their racialized marginality. Furthermore, the assignment of nonvalue to brown queers operates within circuits of desire and intimacy to simultaneously produce their fetishization and expulsion.

"Topping brownness" as racial ordering

• Media images of serial killer, Bruce McArthur, seemed to humanize the killer or at least brand him as an “ordinary” Canadian citizen. Within the gay community, McArthur was also known by his nickname “Santa” to many in the gay community and “attended a Gay Fathers of Toronto support group”.
• Despite a prior conviction (2003) for beating a man with a metal pipe—for which he subsequently received a state pardon—a psychologist report claimed that McArthur showed “no sign of mental health problems,” and characterized him as “passive” and a “very minimal risk for violence” (Brockbank, 2018b).
• At the same time that McArthur was framed as an ordinary Canadian (which reinforces the otherness of his victims), he was also constructed as an aberrant individual driven by sickening sexual fantasies. A community activist who “chatted with him on dating sites” claimed that “he (McArthur) asked if I wanted to get high and if I liked getting tied up with chains and straps.”
• Pathologizing BDSM—as bad sex—serves to divert attention away from the brutality of everyday Canadian racism in the case and a consideration of how “larger racial structures are maintained through intimate encounters,” (Han and Choi, 2018: 147). Furthermore, media reports of the sexual encounters suggest that the victims were placed in the roles of submission (i.e. “the bottom”). At the scene of death (McArthur’s apartment), victims were restrained, drugged, beaten, and killed through ligature strangulation.
• His murderous racist violence signify a violent exertion of control over subjects who were already emasculated and feminized (as racial humiliation) by the Canadian state and within the LGBTQ community. For Han and Choi (2018: 149), racialized gay men are constructed as socially and “sexually bankrupt,” resonating with Larocque’s (2018) claims that in Toronto’s gay village “brown guys are [stereotypically constructed as] bottoms.”
• Critical race scholars (e.g. Razack, 2005) have pointed to this violent ritual of colonial ordering, which requires the social/sexual feminization or “racial castration” (Eng, 2001) of men of color. The sexual bottoming of brownness serves to mirror the social eviction of brown queer men from human citizenship.
• In her analysis of lynching as racial castration, Razack (2005: 353) claims that: “Sexualized violence accomplishes the eviction from humanity, and it does so as an eviction from masculinity. Interestingly, if also paradoxically, it is the white man who descends into savagery in order to establish his own civility.” Intimate violence, for Razack, serves to avert the racial (and feminized) threat posed by brownness, as a way to reterritorialize desire through the murderous repulsion of brown queer bodies.
• Topping brownness is thus “a [nationalist and imperialist] ritual that enables white men to achieve a sense of mastery over the racial other, at the same time that it provides a sexualized intimacy forbidden in white supremacy and patriarchy” (Razack, 2005: 341–342).
• Given that brown hetero-masculinity has been predominantly constructed in Western media as hyper-masculine/ultra-patriarchal “topping brownness” is a violent disciplinary strategy of enforcing submission, even to the point of death. The spectacle of racialized sexualized violence is, however, contained by the serial killer discourse—a discourse of national exoneration—which isolates the racist violence and individuates McArthur as “sick” and aberrant.
• Some media reports reinforced this through a discourse of internalized homophobia, describing McArthur as struggling to “come to terms with his sexuality”. Yet, scholars have argued that “the serial killer” is a social construct, rather than the lone individual motivated by psychogenic factors. Moreover, the serial killer frame enables a “manifesto of denial,” which for Farley (1997: 469), is a strategy of race pleasure, whereby denial is itself a form of humiliation that feeds white power.
• In other words, McArthur’s murderous sexualized racialized violence is not exceptional, but reveals a collective desire for pleasure through ritualistic violence or “racial terror” (Razack, 2005: 360), specifically through the bottoming of brownness

Discourse of living "double lives"

• Across the mainstream (LGBTQ) media, the brown victims were repeatedly described as living “double lives on the down low” (as inauthentic gayness), because of homophobia in their ethnic communities. Writing in the US context, Han (2015) explores how the discourse of “double lives on the down low” has been deployed to construct the sexual otherness of especially Afro-American men who have sex with men as threats to heterosexuality, racializing the closet (and homophobia) vis-a-vis the white mainstream LGBT community that is publicly out.
• The double-lives frame is thus a white (gay) construction of racialized sexualities that seeks to make sense of the “unthinkable” identities of the victims and masks the social vulnerabilities that positioned them as killable. “Down low” sex, especially for racialized queers engaging in interracial intimacy is viewed as risky sex, since those on the “down low” are imagined as promiscuous, dirtily deceptive, refusing the call to respectable citizenship, and thus responsible for the consequences of their actions.
• Moreover, the construction of black and brown bodies as living double lives serves to brand and demonize their communities as primitive and intolerant. This is in contrast to the framing of McArthur (who “wasn’t really out”) as affected by “internalized homophobia,” rather than being constructed on the “down low.”
• The double-life discourse was not only deployed by state institutions to construct the victims’ subjectivities, but also mobilized by the gay community to construct the truth of the racialized queer men. The discourse reveals more about the operation of the racialized closet within homonationalist projects to silence and evict queers of color, which facilitates the ascendancy of white respectable queers into citizenship.
• Reflecting on Majeed Kayhan’s “out-ish” life in the gay community one bargoer commented that: “He was out to the gay community in the Village but not out to his family, who is Afghani ... His gay life was very compartmentalized. He came to the Village and was able to be who he really was, which was separate from hisresponsibilities with his family” (Houston, 2013). A former village bartender constructed Kayhan as hypermobile and transient, claiming that he “was in and out of the community. He would come and be around for a while, and then he would disappear for time on end.
• These comments are structured through a homonormative framing of queer self-liberation in the gay village (i.e. being “out”) versus sexual repression within racialized immigrant communities. This framing layers neatly into racist state discourses about intolerant racialized others who are held responsible for spoiling official multiculturalism by their refusal to assimilate to Canadian values, in this case, that of the tolerance of sexual and gender non-normativity.
• The notion of fragmented or “compartmentalized” subjects here is a deeply racialized coding of brown queerness, as it stands in opposition to the fully coherent, out, white queer citizen who is supposedly now beyond homophobia.

Access: https://drive.google.com/file/d/18JylA5VdrkAcLP9KR8khx_xKiU5xrz_z/view?usp=share_link

In this chapter, drawing from many examples throughout history, Malm makes clear the case that social progress (women's right to vote, emancipation, abolishment of apartheid...) has never been brought solely from pacifism. Rather, most social progress required a non-pacifist activist flank. Although Malm questions the usefulness of pacifism in the context of climate change activism, his argument have broad applicability in challenging many of the narratives that are embedded in contemporary social justice movements worldwide.

Slavery was not abolished through pacifism

• Would slavery had ended without the slaves and their allies fighting back?
• Slavery was not abolished by conscientious white people gently disassembling the institution. The impulse to subvert it sprang from the enslaved Africans themselves, and they very rarely possessed the option of non-violent civil disobedience; staging a sit-in on the field or boycotting the food offered by the master could only hasten their death.
• From Nanny of the Maroons to Nat Turner, collective action against slavery perforce took on the character of violent resistance. The first sweeping emancipation of slaves occurred in the Haitian revolution - hardly a bloodless affair. As some recall, slavery in the US was terminated by a civil war. If there was one white abolitionist who helped precipitate that showdown, it was John Brown, with his armed raids on the plantations and armouries. 'Talk! Talk! Talk!' he exclaimed after yet another convention of a pacifist abolitionist society. 'That will never free the slaves! What is needed is Action - Action.'

Suffragettes were not pacifists

• The suffragettes are instructive. Their tactics of choice was property destruction.
• Decades of patient pressure on Parliament to give women the vote had yielded nothing and so in 1903, under the slogan 'Deeds not words', the Women's social and political union was founded. Five years later, two WSPU members undertook the first militant action: breaking windowpanes in the prime minister's residence. One of them told the police she would bring a bomb the next time. Fed up with their own fruitless deputations to Parliament, the suffragettes soon specialized to 'the argument of the broken pane', sending hundreds of well-dressed women down streets to smash every window they passed.
• Militancy was at the core of suffragette identity: 'To be militant in some form, or other, is a moral obligation', Pankhurst lectured. 'It is a duty which every woman will owe her own conscience and self-respect, to women who are less fortunate than she is herself, and to all who are to come after her.'
• In the most concentrated volley, in March 1912, Emmeline Pankhurst and her crews brought much of central London to a standstill by shattering the fronts of jewllers, silversmiths, Hamleys toy shop and dozens of other businesses. They also torched letterboxes around the capital. Shocked Londoners saw pillars pilled with paper throwing up flames.
• Diane Atkinson's Rise Up, Women!, gives an encyclopaedic listing of militant actions: suffragettes forcing the prime minister out of his car and dousing him with pepper, hurling a stone at the fanlight above Winston Churchill's door, setting upon statues and paintings with hammers and axes, planting bombs on sites along the routes of royal visits, fighting policemen with staves, charging against hostile politicians with dog whips, breaking the windows in prison cells.
• Such deeds went hand in hand with mass mobilization. The suffragettes put up mammoth rallies, ran their own presses, went on hunger strikes: deploying the gamut of non-violent and militant actions.

Gandhi refused to fight the British - because he fought for them

• Anyone who sees in Gandhi a paragon should pick up Kathryn Tidrick's masterful biography of the mahatma. During his time living in South Africa, he found his British masters marching off to the Boer War, and ran after, begging them to enlist him and his fellow Indians. A few years later, the British again paraded out to the provinces, now to the Zulus who rebelled against oppressive taxes and had to be flogged and mass executed into submission, and again Gandhi asked to serve. Perhaps the Boer and Zulu episodes were youthful blunders?
• Hardly had the First World War broken out before Gandhi offered up to the Empire himself and as many Indians as he could dispose of. In early 1918, certain movements were busy trying to end the slaughter, agitating for soldiers to desert and turn against their generals, at which point Gandhi decided that more Indians had to be thrown into the trenches. 'If I became your recruiting agent-in-chief, I might rain men on you', he flattered the viceroy, promising another half million Indian men on top of the one million already in regiments or graveyards, leaving no stone in the countryside unturned in his search for eager volunteers. Gandhi's strategy for national liberation never condoned violence against the British, but it did include violence WITH them.
• Gandhi mightily disapproved of the popular violence against the British occupation that seemed to accompany mass actions. After setting up campaigns for satyagraha, engaging Indians in non-cooperation and lawbreaking en masse, he would receive word of crowds sabotaging transport systems, cutting telegraph wires, burning shops, breaking into police stations and attacking constabularies. He was flummoxed and livid every time.
• Gandhi likewise frowned upon anti-fascist resistance. In November 1938, in the days after Kristallnacht, the mahatma published an open letter to the Jews of Germany exhorting them to stick to the principles of non-violence and to delight in the result. 'Suffering voluntarily undergone will bring them an inner strength and joy.' In the case of war, Hitler might implement 'a general massacre of the Jews', but 'if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving', for 'to the god-fearing, death has no terror. It is a joyful sleep'.
• Facing objections, Gandhi had to clarify his comments and add subsidiary arguments - Jews have never mastered the art of non-violence; if only they could take on their suffering with courage, even 'the stoniest German heart will melt' - Indeed, 'I plead for more suffering and still more till the melting has become visible to the naked eye' (January 1939).

The author goes on talking about the non-pacificism inherent in the civil rights and anti-apartheid movements.

Please type your comment in the live chat for any type of research or content related to the Asian experience you would like to see on AsianResearchCentral.

Alternatively, post any type of question relating to the Asian experience you would like to see addressed.

We will keep track of these questions and provide content accordingly.

Members are highly encouraged to participate and contribute!

Access: https://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1001&context=stdtpapers

• Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives are increasingly popular in higher education and corporate institutions.
• Many of the action steps needed to meet these objectives are implemented through various forms of training and workshops.
• But are these practices effective means for dismantling systemic white racism?
• Although DEI is proliferating across the country, white supremacy remains prevalent in our societal institutions.
• To truly understand how diversity, equity and inclusion actually work towards upholding systemic white racism, we must first understand the historical context of DEI and how it came to be.

DEI's historical purpose is to avoid lawsuits for white elites

• Diversity Equity and Inclusion initiatives can be traced back to the modern civil rights movement of the 1960s and 70s and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
• The only reason these motions were accepted by the United States empire was because of what critical race theorists call material determinism.
• Material determinism argues that “because racism advances the interests of both white elites (materially) and working-class people (physically), large segments of society have little incentive to eradicate it,” so when there are series of triumphs “in the civil rights litigation [it] may have resulted more from the self-interest of elite whites than a desire to help non-whites”.
• This legislation along with the rise of discrimination suits filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission led many companies to adopt some form of diversity training to abide by the law and avoid lawsuits**.**
• This again is a clear instance of interest convergence of material determinism, the fact that diversity training will only be implemented once it is known that there is an economic gain or rather an avoidance of lawsuits and payouts.

DEI creates an illusion of progress by focusing on micro racism

• DEI exists to normalize racism by attempting to make change through a micro lens by focusing on correcting the behaviors of individuals in higher education and the corporate world through training and workshops. However, to truly effect change and create a racism-free world one must eradicate the whole system, not work within it.
• DEI is what Williams (2020) calls a “nice racism” a form of “white supremacy [that] conceptually and structurally obscures how raced relationships or social ties between self-identified whites and groups create, securely maintain, and excuse systemic white racism”. “Nice racism” hides the truth behind whiteness as it allows for “whites” to hide behind their identity and leads to the refusal to acknowledge their collective role in sustaining and upholding systemic white racism in society.
• This is where DEI comes into play. DEI is a way of reorganizing people and assimilating them into the larger institution of life, if DEI was for radical change, it would be about reallocating power (Tran 2021).
• Diversity Equity and Inclusion work towards upholding a protecting the institution while making minimal changes to the power relations. DEI initiatives simply center whiteness and establish the understanding that racism can be solved at the micro-level of society and ignores its pervasiveness (Williams 2020: 46-47).

DEI creates "allies" but not accomplices

• The real harm that comes with DEI is how they support their students of color; DEI provides students with coping mechanisms and accommodations in order for them to assimilate into the white educational institutions as they are rather than radically transforming them.
• This is again where whiteness comes into play. Because whiteness allows “whites” to believe that racism is practiced in individual settings and not see how they themselves enact and benefit from whiteness there is the false notion that it can be eradicated from the individual level. This leads to whites enrolling and participating in various diversity training and workshops so they can become allies.
• Allies, however, are not how one transforms the institutions and structures (“Accomplices not Allies” 2019). DEI trains “whites” and others in power to approach racial oppression as racial and oppressive issues in individual situations never on how those systems are structural and need to be dismantled.
• To dismantle systemic white racism, we don’t need training that creates allies, we need accomplices. Accomplices are people willing to commit the “crime” of destroying oppressive regimes by working alongside oppressed people to build new people centered institutions (“Accomplices not Allies” 2019). If DEI was to do the work that it believes it does, it would be creating leaders and accomplices that would tear down a system by all necessary means.

Access: https://robertwjensen.org/articles/when-will-the-united-states-transcend-white-supremacy/

This is a blog post written by a white male professor.

• Let's ask an uncomfortable question: “When will the United States transcend white supremacy?”
• I want to go beyond easy targets to ask, “When will U.S. society — not just neo-Nazis and the Klan, but the whole country — reject all aspects of white supremacist ideology and take serious steps toward rectifying the material inequality justified by that ideology?”
• The answer is obvious: Never.
• There’s no evidence the dominant culture is interested. The wealth — in fact, the very existence — of the United States is so entwined in the two foundational racialized holocausts in our history that transcending white supremacy requires not only treating people of color differently, but understanding ourselves in new and painful ways.
• To transcend white supremacy, white America would have to come to terms with the barbarism of our history and our ongoing moral failures.
• If that seems harsh, heartless, or hopeless, let’s start with history.
• The United States is the wealthiest nation in the world. The acquisition of the land base of the country and our path to industrialization and that wealth are inextricably tied to the genocide of indigenous people and African slavery.
• Those processes and practices, driven by dreams of domination and the nightmare of unchecked greed, were justified by white supremacist ideology.
• The result: millions dead, the lives of millions more impoverished, and entire cultures ravaged and sometimes destroyed.
• Yes, the story of the United States also includes the quest for freedom and perseverance in the face of adversity, hard work and ingenuity. We love to tell those stories, while the barbarism typically is treated as a footnote.
• But there would be no United States as we know it without the genocide of indigenous people that cleared the land of “the merciless Indian Savages,” as the Declaration of Independence described the native population standing in the way of a new nation. Slave-grown cotton provided a crucial raw material and equally crucial export earnings that aided U.S. economic expansion and spurred industrial development in the North.
• White supremacy defines not just the states of the Confederacy, but the whole country. I was born and raised in North Dakota, and I’ve lived the past 25 years in Texas. Which is more virulent, the overt anti-Indian racism I grew up with or the overt anti-black racism I live around today? They’re about the same. What about the unspoken sense of superiority of polite white society? About the same in both places, whether it’s conservative Fargo, ND, or progressive Austin, TX.
• Why do these attitudes persist? Because to face the reality of our barbaric history would be to admit that our wealth — our very existence — depends on our racialized holocausts, and hence our claim to that land and wealth is suspect. It doesn’t matter if any of my ancestors participated in the genocide (they were more recent immigrants) or owned slaves (they didn’t). What matters is whether we can tell the truth and remedy, to the degree possible, the consequences of that historical barbarism and the contemporary practices that flow from it.
• Being anti-racist means supporting anti-racist policies. School equity would be one small step toward an honest reckoning, and we don’t even do that. I can’t say with certainty that white America will never face this honestly, but in my life I’ve seen no indication of a general interest in a public discussion at this level.
• Not surprisingly, when I ask, “When will the United States transcend white supremacy?” the responses vary widely. Indigenous and black people often chuckle, not because the subject is funny but because the answer — never — is so obvious.
• In general, people of color are understandably skeptical about the commitment of white America, recognizing the clash between the good intentions of many white people and those same white people’s reluctance to endorse the easy steps, let alone the radical social change, necessary to transform a society.
• But the only people who routinely get indignant at the question are other white people. They’re the ones who accuse me of being harsh, heartless, and hopeless.
• Perhaps I am all three, but even if that’s the case, the question hangs uncomfortably: When will we transcend white supremacy?

Access: https://drive.google.com/file/d/19Z5UdW_uV2lN2wQ3lTuAGQy5iOwDZNSi/view?usp=sharing

Abstract: This paper explores the challenges in integration of ethnic identity among a certain segment of immigrant women who have experienced sexism related traumas in their culture of origin. These women’s assimilative experiences and integration of identity are more complicated by the fact that their ethnic identity is tied to trauma. These women may find a refuge in the American culture, while defensively dissociating from their culture of origin, disavowing ethnic ties, severing contact with family, or avoiding contact with people from the same ethnic group, which amounts to cultural dissociation. I contend that in order to successfully engage dissociated cultural states, a therapist’s ability to self reflect on her cultural situatedness is crucial. The challenge of the analyst-patient dyad is to disentangle the patient’s traumatic experiences from nontraumatizing normative aspects of the culture of origin in order to promote a viable ethnic identity.

Key Excerpts

K.'s story

• K. was born in Korea to a poor family. Her father could not find work and the family made do with the meager income her mother made by selling fruits. Her father drank heavily and beat her mercilessly in front of the children.
• K.’s mother was in turn abusive towards K., accusing her of being an ugly and useless child. Then, when K. was in her teens, her mother suddenly died, leaving her with an older brother, two younger brothers, and the drunken father. Being the oldest female child, she was expected to drop out of school to allow her older brother to continue school and to support her younger siblings.
• In the next few years of her life, she worked menial jobs at small factories where she would also sleep. She contracted a major communicable disease, which she combated in secret. It was while recovering from her illness that she met an American in Seoul. She fell for his gentle love for her and followed him to America.
• In the States, K. severed contact with her family and friends in Korea. In fact, she avoided all things Korean. She did not cook Korean food, refused to work for Korean employers, lived away from ethnic enclaves, spoke only English, and generally avoided associating with other Koreans.

Cultural dissociation due to trauma

• Over the years, I have met immigrant women who are much like K., from Asian or Latin cultures where they experienced sexism-related trauma.
• In their traumatized emotional worlds, no distinction exists between their suffering and the ethnic culture. They cannot separate their culture from its sexist practices and therefore may shun it all together.
• They may sever contact with family and friends back home, forget their mother tongue, marry people from outside their culture, and demonize their culture. They may eagerly adopt American customs and the English language, and may excel in schools and careers in mainstream culture. They may do well academically and/or professionally, demonstrating seeming independence and achievement.
• These women’s cultural dissociation is also misunderstood by the popular ethnic identity models provided by the discipline of American multicultural psychology. In this model, ethnic pride is equated with mental health. As such they tend to regard minority individuals lacking ethnic pride as “marginal” people who have internalized racism.
• I believe this is a misapplication of a context, resulting in misunderstanding of the experiential worlds of women like K. K.’s avoidance of her ethnic culture is born out of traumatic experiences in that culture, not so much internalization of American racism.
• Idealization of the American culture exists, certainly, but it is a function of the same defensive flight from the source of trauma. They believe by doing so they do not have to process painful affect associated with their culture of origin. They think, “If I flee to American culture, all will be okay.”
• The women’s behavior towards their ethnic culture can be characterized as a conscious decision to avoid painful traumatic affects associated with their culture; however, any such conscious avoiding is done in the service of maintaining an underlying, unconsciously motivated dissociation.
• They run from external ghosts, under the illusory belief that doing so could keep them safe. This is no use, of course, as the real ghosts live and hide in their interior mind, revealing their presence, forcing terrifying encounters. This is what happened to K. too: She tried, with all her might, to hermetically seal herself from Korean culture. Yet, in the wake of giving birth to her daughter, she began having hallucinations of her dead Korean mother, leaving her haunted, half mad.

Untenableness of cultural disassociation

• I contend that such cultural dissociations are untenable. One’s psychic energy is expended to shutting out one’s ethnic self, leaving one inflexible, overcontrolled, and/or overcontrolling.
• When K. gave birth to her first child, a daughter, she fell into terrifying panic. It began with an administration of pain medications following her delivery, which made her feel heavily drowsy, anxious, and out of control of her body.
• She then felt she could not breathe, could not feel her baby in her arms, and would see her mother’s ghost, hanging around in silence at the edge of her room.
• K. never told anyone about this experience, afraid of being perceived crazy. These feelings would intensify over the next few months, and, no longer able to bear them, she sought psychotherapy.
• At the center of her panic was that she’d become like her mother who did not care or protect her, and abandoned her (through her death) to fend for herself alone in the world.

Integrating dissociated cultural worlds

• What does the work of integrating dissociated cultural worlds look like? Here a contemporary psychoanalytic model of mind as offered by Phillip Bromberg (1996, 2003, 2006) and others provide an excellent conceptual lens.
• For Bromberg, a viable self is not a unitary, monolithic static state, but an amalgam of flexible multiple self-states (emotional worlds) with permeable open borders. A pathologic situation arises when rigid separation between self-states is in place due to one or more of them containing trauma related experiences.
• Here, dissociation is employed to maintain self-organization and to keep the trauma related self-states at bay. Needless to say, self-organization depends on leaving out or walling off unstabilizing states. Bromberg’s vision of turning this pathologic dissociation to ordinary dissociation involves a promotion of a capacity, to “stand in the spaces between” multiple, dissociated self-states or emotional worlds.
• Similarly, a vision of a culturally viable self would involve more or less seamless shifting between multiple cultural emotional worlds. Here, to borrow Bromberg, one is able to stand in the spaces between cultural emotional worlds instead of existing only in one cultural world. The immigrant women under consideration want to only live in the American cultural life. Conversely immigrants traumatized by racism, economic difficulties, and alienation in America may wall off the cultural world of American life.

The rest of the article discusses the author's proposed therapeutic measures for K.'s circumstance, as well as K's eventual recovery

• The creative challenge of the analyst–patient dyad is to disentangle the patient’s particular traumatic experiences from nontraumatizing normative aspects of the culture of origin in order to promote a viable ethnic identity, a sense of flexible yet more or less seamless self-continuity across time and place. The work here is to forge progressive differentiation between traumatizing toxic authoritarianism on one hand and the nontraumatizing benign hierarchical relatedness, both present in the culture.
• Progressive differentiation means loosening the vicelike grip of an organizing principle that consigns them to an unending cycle of experiencing their culture in a toxic, traumatizing way.
• The result of such differentiation is that the patient feels liberated from humiliating submission and self-annihilation. She is capable of discerning a more benign motivation behind male behaviors and is able to appreciate that she is not required to respond with submission or accommodation at her expense but is free to imagine multiple ways of creative responsiveness that preserves her autonomy and sense of self.
• I contend that in the heart of this progressive differentiation is what I call a cultural corrective experience in the therapeutic relationship. By being a presence attuned to the patient’s life experiences in general, and her cultural traumas in particular, the therapist opens up a space for the patient to change her perception of an ethnic other.
• Central to my work with her revolved around the idea that not all culturally sanctioned ideas and practices are right, referring to her deeply held belief that as the oldest female child she was to sacrifice herself for her family. I also repeatedly pointed out that she was shamed not for her own actions but for the actions of her family members. I would wonder out loud, “How can you be shamed for things for which you were not directly responsible? Is it fair to yourself to take on the blame and shame for your family members’ behaviors?”
• About a year into our work together, K. began making trips to Korea, reconnecting with her family. Even in the face of her family’s demonization of her for abandoning them, she let them know that she was no longer willing to be enslaved by their requirements of female servitude and sacrifice.
• She witnessed the poverty and squalor her still alcoholic father lived in, and even with his (and everyone else’s) expectation of her performing filial duty of taking care of him, refused to overextend herself for him, financially or emotionally. She was grieving for her father for the mess he made out of his life but was now much more accepting of letting him live with the consequences of his actions.
• As of today, K. is a different person: Her terrifying panic is mostly gone as is her obsessive overprotection of her daughter. She is enjoying the pleasures of pursuing a life of her own without feeling guilty. She continues her relationships with her family and friends in Korea rather actively, through Internet, phone calls, and visits, but on her own terms.

Please type your comment in the live chat for any type of research or content related to the Asian experience you would like to see on AsianResearchCentral.

Alternatively, post any type of question relating to the Asian experience you would like to see addressed.

We will keep track of these questions and provide content accordingly.

Members are highly encouraged to participate and contribute!

Access: https://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~tadepall/dpd/The%20Color%20of%20Supremacy__xid-36354670_3.pdf

Summary: This essay argues that a critical look at white privilege must be complemented by an equally rigorous examination of white supremacy, or the analysis of white racial domination. Although the two processes are related, the conditions of white supremacy make white privilege possible. In order for white racial hegemony to saturate everyday life, it has to be secured by a process of domination, or those acts, decisions, and policies that white subjects perpetrate on people of color. As such, a critical pedagogy of white racial supremacy revolves less around the issue of unearned advantages, or the state of being dominant, and more around direct processes that secure domination and the privileges associated with it.

Highlights

Metaphors of racial privilege can obscure the process of white domination

• Racial privilege is the notion that white subjects accrue advantages by virtue of being constructed as whites. Usually, this occurs through the valuation of white skin color, although hair texture, nose shapes, culture, and language also multiply the privileges of whites or those who approximate them.
• During his comments at American Educational Research Association panel, James Scheurich described being white as akin to walking down the street with money being put into your pant pocket without your knowledge. We can imagine that whites have a generous purse without having worked for it.
• However, there is the cost here of downplaying the active role of whites who take resources from people of color all over the world, appropriate their labor, and construct policies that deny minorities’ full participation in society. As a result, the theme of privilege obscures the subject of domination, or the agent of actions, because the situation is described as happening almost without the knowledge of whites.
• If money is being placed in white pockets, who places it there? If we insert the subject of actions, we would conclude that racial minorities put the money in white pockets. This maneuver has the unfortunate consequence of inverting the real process of racial accumulation, whereby whites take resources from people of color; often they also build a case for having earned such resources.
• Second, we can invoke the opposite case. It might sound something like this: the experience of people of color is akin to walking down the street having your money taken from your pocket. Historically, if “money” represents material, and even cultural, possessions of people of color then the agent of such taking is the white race, real and imagined.
• Critical analysis begins from the objective experiences of the oppressed in order to understand the dynamics of structural power relations. It also makes sense to say that it is not in the interest of racially dominated groups to mystify the process of their own dehumanization. Yet the case is ostensibly the opposite for whites, who consistently mystify the process of racial accumulation through occlusion of history and forsaking structural analysis for a focus on the individual.
• When scholars and educators address an imagined white audience, they cater their analysis to a worldview that refuses certain truths about race relations. As a result, racial understanding proceeds at the snail’s pace of the white imaginary (Leonardo, 2002).

In the real-world, white domination is recreated daily by white people

• Addressing a white audience at a workshop, Peggy McIntosh (coiner of "white privilege") said that coming in terms with white privilege is “not about blame, shame, or guilt” regarding actions and atrocities committed by other whites in their name.
• Likewise, in a recent invited lecture, titled “Race, Class, and Gender: The problem of domination,” I was tempted to begin my talk with the same sentiment. Upon reflection, I decided against the strategy because I wanted my audience to understand that despite the fact that white racial domination precedes us, whites daily recreate it on both the individual and institutional level.
• Whites as a racial group secure supremacy in almost all facets of social life. The concept of race does not just divide the working class along racial lines and compromise proletarian unity. Racism divides the white bourgeoisie from the black bourgeoisie (a mythical group, according to Marable, 1983), and white women from women of color (hooks, 1984). In other words, race is an organizing principle that cuts across class, gender, and other imaginable social identities. This condition does not come about through an innocent process, let alone the innocence of whiteness.
• When it comes to official history, there is no paucity of representation of whites as its creator. From civil society, to science, to art, whites represent the subject for what Matthew Arnold once called the best that a culture has produced. In other words, white imprint is everywhere. However, when it concerns domination, whites suddenly disappear. Their previous omnipresence becomes a position of nowhere, a certain politics of undetectability.
• Many whites subvert a structural study of racism with personalistic concerns over how they are perceived as individuals. However, "looking racist" has very little to do with whites’ unearned advantages and more to do with white treatment of racial minorities. Said another way, the discourse on privilege comes with the psychological effect of personalizing racism rather than understanding its structural origins in interracial relations. Whites today did not participate in slavery but they surely recreate white supremacy on a daily basis.

Critique of McIntosh's description of "White Privilege"

• Throughout her essay, McIntosh repeats her experience of having been taught to ignore her privilege, to consider her worldview as normal, and to treat race as the problem of the other. Deserving to be quoted at length, she writes,

whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege . . . about which I was “meant” to remain oblivious . . . My schooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor . . . I was taught to see myself as an individual whose moral state depended on her individual moral will . . . [A] pattern of assumptions that were passed on to me as a white person . . . I was taught to recognize racism only in individual acts of meanness by members of my group, never in invisible systems conferring racial dominance on my group from birth.

• First, notice the passage’s passive tone. White racist thoughts are disembodied, omnipresent but belonging to no one. White racist teachings, life lessons, and values are depicted as actions done or passed on to a white subject, almost unbeknownst to him, rather than something in which he invests.
• Second, the passage is consistent with McIntosh’s advice for whites to avoid feelings of personal blame for racism. But white domination is never settled once and for all; it is constantly reestablished and reconstructed by whites from all walks of life. It is not a relation of power secured by slavery, Jim Crow, or job discrimination alone. It is not a process with a clear beginning or a foreseeable end (Bell, 1992). Last, it is not solely the domain of white supremacist groups. It is rather the domain of average, tolerant people, of lovers of diversity, and of believers in justice.
• If racist relations were created only by people in the past, then racism would not be as formidable as it is today. It could be regarded as part of the historical dustbin and a relic of a cruel society. If racism were only problems promulgated by “bad whites,” then bad whites today either out-number “good whites” or overpower them. The question becomes: Who are these bad whites?
• Since very few whites exist who actually believe they are racist, then basically no one is racist and racism disappears more quickly than we can describe it. We live in a condition where racism thrives absent of racists (Bonilla-Silva, 2003). There must be an alternative explanation: in general, whites recreate their own racial supremacy, despite good intentions.

In the real-world, white people endorses (as opposed to having been duped or manipulated into accepting) white domination.

• Communities of color have constructed counter-discourses in the home, church, and informal school cultures in order to maintain their sense of humanity. They know too well that their sanity and development, both as individuals and as a collective, depend on alternative (unofficial) knowledge of the racial formation.
• By contrast, white subjects do not forge these same counter-hegemonic racial understandings because their lives also depend on a certain development; that is, color-blind strategies that maintain their supremacy as a group. Like their non-white counter-parts, white students are not taught anti-racist understandings in schools, but, unlike non-whites, whites invest in practices that obscure racial processes.
• State sponsored curricula fail to encourage students of all racial backgrounds to critique white domination. In other words, schools may teach white students to naturalize their unearned privileges, but they also willingly participate in such discourses, which maintains their sense of humanity.
• So it is not only the case that whites are taught to normalize their dominant position in society; they are susceptible to these forms of teachings because they beneft from them. It is not a process that is somehow done to them, as if they were duped, are victims of manipulation, or lacked certain learning opportunities. Rather, the color-blind discourse is one that they fully endorse.

White privilege summarized and explained

• Whites have “neighbors . . . [who] are neutral or pleasant” (McIntosh, 1992, p. 73) to them because redlining and other real estate practices, with the help of the Federal Housing Agency, secure the ejection of the black and brown body from white spaces.
• Whites can enter a business establishment and expect the "‘person in charge’ to be white"(McIntosh, 1992, p. 74) because of a long history of job discrimination.
• Whites are relatively free from racial harassment from police officers because racial profling strategies train U.S. police officers that people of color are potential criminals.
• Finally, whites “can choose blemish cover or bandages in ‘flesh’ color” to match their skin (McIntosh, 1992, p. 75) because of centuries of denigration of darker peoples and images associated with them, fetishism of the color line, and the cultivation of the politics of pigmentation.
• We can condense the list under a general theme: whites enjoy privileges largely because they have created a system of domination under which they can thrive as a group.
• The enactment is quite simple: set up a system that benefits the group, mystify the system, remove the agents of actions from discourse, and when interrogated about it, stifle the discussion with comments about the “reality” of the charges being made.

White people's sense of safety through mere discussion of privilege stalls real change

• To the extent that white audiences need a discursive space they can negotiate as safe participants in race critique, discourses on privilege provide the entry.
• However, insofar as white feelings of safety perpetuate a legacy of white refusal to engage racial domination, or acts of terror toward people of color, such discourses rearticulate the privilege that whites already enjoy when they are able to evade confronting white supremacy.
• As long as whites ultimately feel a sense of comfort with racial analysis, they will not sympathize with the pain and discomfort they have unleashed on racial minorities for centuries.
• Solidarity between whites and non-whites will proceed at the reluctant pace of the white imagination, whose subjects accept the problem of racism without an agent.

Access: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WoP0uKJSa4UmtZuz2S6qnh8NdKRSuI5Q/view?usp=sharing

Abstract： It is well established that white privilege routinely materialises in Western universities. Yet, there has been insufficient attention toward whether white privilege also exists in East Asian universities. This article seeks to explore this issue by offering an autoethnography in which the author, a mixed-race academic who is racialised as white on some occasions and as a person of colour on others. It is argued that those who are racialised as white are privileged in East Asian universities and may even seek to actively sustain this. In departing from the dominant understanding of whiteness as always-and-only privileging, this article also explores the extent to which white academics in East Asia may also be disadvantaged by their whiteness.

Key Excerpts

Third Wave Critical Whiteness Study

• The first and second waves of Critical Whiteness Studies were mostly characterised by an overriding Westerncentrism which focused almost exclusively on the USA and the UK. A third wave of Critical Whiteness Studies seems to have become established in the past decade with the increase of scholarship examining whiteness beyond Western contexts. This literature has demonstrated that, although white people in East Asia are heterogenous and have an assorted range of experiences, whiteness is largely valorised in East Asia and white people are often granted multiple privileges that are not extended to others and may avoid the racism that is faced by racial minorities and migrants of colour.

Autoethnography as a research method

• While it is common for scholars’ life experiences to inspire their scholarship, autoethnographies take this a step further by enabling scholars to explicitly put their own life experiences into conversation with academic literature, concepts and theories. In this regard, autoethnographies are akin to interviewing and quoting oneself, which is why it has been described as ‘the researcher being researched by themselves’.
• Some commentators have dismissed autoethnography as an illegitimate research method. Those who reject autoethnographies may underestimate the committed effort, emotional vulnerability and individual sacrifice that producing an autoethnography about one’s personal life may involve. They may also overlook the numerous instances when scholars have successfully deployed autoethnographies to arrive at rich understandings of various social issues. In particular, autoethnographies have been a valuable form of ‘counter-storytelling’ for exploring sensitive topics which are either difficult to observe or difficult to talk about.
• The autoethnography that is to follow is based on my experiences of living and working as an academic in East Asia between 2013 and 2022 as a relatively young, mixed-race, British man, with Iranian and Irish heritage, and the added complexity of being a Muslim with a European forename and a Middle Eastern surname.
• I have taught close to 500 East Asian students in Singapore and participated in numerous academic activities in China, Indonesia, Thailand, Japan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Philippines, Cambodia, Brunei and Singapore. This has resulted in countless interactions with East Asian academics and students which have informed my analysis.

Becoming white in East Asia

During one of my annual trips back to the UK, I approached the elderly, middle-class, white woman who was selling vegetables, I was surprised when she said, in a slow and elevated tone: ‘THIS-IS-LETTUCE. DO-YOU-HAVE- IT-IN-YOUR-COUNTRY?’. I froze, taken aback by the way that she had instantly categorised me. I had encountered similar interrogations of my racial identity and belonging countless times before, from being ‘politely’ asked questions such as: ‘were you really from?’ and ‘do you have black blood in you?’, to being more aggressively called a ‘Muslim terrorist’ and a ‘(fucking) Paki’. But this time I was caught off guard because, since moving to Singapore in 2013, I had become accustomed to being viewed and treated as a privileged ‘expat’, an ascription that exudes whiteness. Acquaintances, friends, and students in East Asia had often indicated that they saw me as white through passing comments like, ‘White people like you...’ or through fondly describing me as an ‘Ang Moh’, ‘Buleh’ or ‘Mat Salleh’. On one memorable occasion, when I needed to register my ‘race’ with the authorities in an East Asian country, the official behind the counter was taken aback when I declined her suggestion to record my race as ‘Caucasian’. Eventually, we settled on ‘British’, a compromise that, to me at least, sidestepped the dilemma of having to reify ‘race’, but which was probably a synonym for white for the official who knew how to define me better than I knew myself.

• The encounters above capture the way that I am typically racialised as a person of colour, or at least ‘not-quite-white’, in the UK, whereas I am typically racialised as white in East Asian contexts.
• The reclassification of myself as white in the East Asian racial regime closely echoes the account offered by Fisher (2015), who, as a mixed-race academic like myself, is racialised as a person of colour in New Zealand but white in the Philippines. Our experiences of becoming white in East Asia reveal the way in which people may be granted or denied whiteness depending on context, which is possible because the malleability of whiteness means that who is racialised as white can change over time, place and context.
• This easier access to whiteness in East Asia contrasts with the tendency in the West to strictly separate whiteness and non-whiteness due to a perception of non-whiteness as contaminated, dirty and impure. Yet, in East Asia, the boundaries of whiteness may be policed to a lesser extent which means that those who are people of colour in the West may become white in East Asia.
• Furthermore, those who may encounter racism in one context may encounter racial privilege in another context, depending on ‘specific racial-spatial configurations’. Thus, just as Fisher (2015) had to make uncomfortable admissions about enjoying greater research access and being viewed positively in East Asia due to her newly ascribed ‘whiteness’, I similarly have to concede that, in East Asia, I am routinely viewed and treated in favourable ways due to being perceived as a white ‘expat’.

The privileging of whiteness in East Asian universities

I had just arrived at a conference at an East Asian university in 2017. Students stared at me with admiration and this culminated in them asking to take selfies with me. It wasn’t the first time in East Asia that strangers had asked to take selfies with me and each time it happened it made me feel like a celebrity. When I gestured to my friend, a scholar from India, to join us, there didn’t seem to be the same level of enthusiasm toward him, despite his cheerful personality. The incident reminded me of a conversation that I’d had with students in another East Asian country when they told me that they felt short-changed when they were taught by East Asian academics. These students candidly admitted to believing that white academics are more competent, more knowledgeable and more open to debate than East Asian academics. The same sentiment seemed to exist amongst some East Asian academics too, who I’d observed inviting white academics to be keynote speakers at academic events in East Asia, even when those white academics had no expertise, or even interest, in the East Asian context. A similar thing even happened to myself in an East Asian country, when I was promptly invited to be a keynote speaker at a conference after the organisers heard I was in town, even though they were unfamiliar with my scholarship, and even though I lacked any substantive expertise in the topic of their conference. The same issue seemed to be present in conversations that I’d had with an East Asian scholar who was frequently determined to distance herself from her East Asian culture, her East Asian language, and her East Asian religion. She seemed to seize every opportunity to declare, especially to white colleagues, that she was ‘not very Asian’ in her lifestyle, her thought and her taste. When I mentioned to her that I was writing a paper about the negative perceptions of East Asian students in Western academia, she was puzzled owning to the fact that she believed the negative stereotypes about East Asian students to be true and wished that East Asian students could be as open-minded, hard-working and honest as she imagined white students to be.

• The above narrative highlights the way in which whiteness may be similarly desired due to being imagined as symbolising the epitome of advanced intellectual ability. As a result, the white academic in East Asia may become a ‘celebrity’ who is viewed as a precious entity in ways that are not extended to academics of colour. Such white privilege may translate into white academics being shown greater respect and being given greater opportunities than others in East Asian universities, such as being overrepresented in syllabi and citations, both of which I have witnessed multiple times.
• The privileging of white academics in East Asian universities may also occur at an institutional level in instances when East Asian universities glorify white academics. This may be witnessed when East Asian universities are more inclined to establish partnerships with ‘white universities’, when East Asian universities have a preference to use images of white people on their websites and promotional materials, or when East Asian universities prefer to employ and promote white academics regardless of their qualifications or competency. I have been informed by several academics who work in East Asian universities that such preferential treatment of white academics in East Asian universities is readily apparent and an ‘open secret’.
• This not only highlights the importance of going beyond McIntosh’s (1988) conceptualisation of white privilege as an individual benefit, but it also implies that East Asian universities may be characterised by an ‘institutional whiteness’.
• The veneration of white academics in East Asian universities relates to a broader veneration of whiteness in East Asian societies. Contemporary reverence of whiteness in East Asia originates in an ideological discourse that European colonisers concocted and imposed on East Asian societies in order to justify their imperialistic domination. This resulted in white people being extolled as ‘colonial masters’ who should be granted status, advantage, authority, concessions, access, benefits, opportunities and rights that were not afforded to East Asians.
• While the glorification of fair skin in East Asia predates colonialism, it was in the colonial period that the contemporary understanding of whiteness in East Asia was cemented. In the academic domain, this colonial-era racism still materialises as a mantra that implies that white people are best equipped to produce and convey knowledge due to supposedly being superior in creativity, innovation and critical thinking, which has not only privileged white scholars, but has also devalued the intellectual contributions of scholars of colour in the past and the present.
• What is most significant to note here is that tenets of white supremacy appear to have been subscribed to by a significant number of East Asians. In fact, an incessant desiring of whiteness may be so deeply etched into some people of colours’ psyches that, according to Seshadri-Crooks (2000), some may subconsciously believe that proximity to whiteness is the only way to realise complete humanness.
• In East Asian universities, this ‘internalised racism’ results in some East Asian students, academics and universities potentially subscribing to lingering colonial assumptions about the superiority of whiteness. The East Asian academic who was eager to distance herself from her East Asianness may be an example of someone who possesses the fantasy of ‘de-ethnicizing’ in the hope of becoming an ‘honorary white’ who can access ‘white prestige’.
• When read alongside Schultz’s (2020: 876–878) and Thompson’s (2020: 54–55) identical observation that some East Asians may value photographs with white people that they meet as a way of signifying proximity to whiteness, the selfies that the East Asian students wished to take with me are transformed into a potential symbol of this quest to access whiteness.

Sustaining white privilege

At an academic conference at an East Asian university in 2018, an East Asian academic delivered a poor presentation. A white academic in the audience belligerently lambasted the presenter’s lack of academic rigour during the Q&A and then proceeded to escalate his comments into a broader criticism of the alleged intellectual redundancy of social science in East Asia. While doing this, he maintained eye contact with me, the only other person racialised as white in the room. The white academic declared: ‘Social science in East Asia is of a shoddy nature which is why people like me are needed in East Asian academia’. His self-aggrandizing and patronising tone was familiar. It resembled the numerous instances when white academics had complained to me about East Asian students being deficient in their intellectual capabilities. I asked myself if I had ever positioned myself as superior to East Asian scholars and students. An incident came to mind, which still makes me cringe, but which was a turning point for me in thinking about how I take up space in academic settings. The incident occurred in 2016, when I was attending an academic colloquium in an East Asian country. The main presenter was a white academic, and all the other participants, except myself, were East Asian. I wasn’t fully aware at the time, but upon reflection, I realised that during that event, I had elevated myself alongside the status of the main presenter by dominating the proceedings, positioning myself as having a superior critical oversight and assuming the role of cultural interpreter by uninvitedly mediating between the main presenter and the other participants. Would I have had the same sense of entitlement to be heard had the racial demographics been otherwise?

• White academics in East Asia may also embrace, sustain and perpetuate the glorification of whiteness themselves. This may involve white academics, including those who consider themselves to be anti-racist ‘white allies’, deploying subtle Orientalist and racist tropes by denigrating East Asians as less competent and less worthy than white people.
• On numerous occasions, I have witnessed certain white academics in East Asia: (a) treating East Asian academics as invisible in academic discussions, (b) excluding East Asian academics from social activities, (c) making no effort to familiarise them-selves with East Asian colleagues’ research agendas and (d) dismissing East Asian academics’ scholarship; all of which correspond with studies which have found that white academics in Western universities may hold condescending views about the worth of academics of colour.
• Similarly, I have observed some white academics in East Asia: (a) showing a diminished level of commitment to the education of East Asian students, (b) refusing to adapt their teaching to the East Asian context, (c) dismissing East Asian students’ feedback as unimportant and (d) partaking in the same type of patronising stereotyping of East Asian students that I have previously identified in Western academia.
• Notably, East Asian academics and East Asian students may be cognisant of such belittling and discriminatory treatment, as was confirmed to me on two separate occasions when East Asian students and an East Asian academic confided in me that they felt dehumanised by the way in which certain white academics routinely treated them.
• On occasion, white academics’ Orientalist and racist perceptions may extend beyond academia and also be applied to East Asian societies more generally. Thus, I have encountered numerous white academics routinely deploying what Oh and Oh (2017) have referred to as a ‘white expat discourse’ which involves white people constructing themselves as ‘progressive advocates’ who mock, ridicule and generalise East Asian societies and cultures in hostile terms compared to Western societies.
• At times, I have observed this escalating to the adoption of ‘a White saviorist ideology’. That is to say, some white academics in East Asia seem to elevate themselves as best placed to ‘save’ East Asians. For instance, although I have encountered white academics who see their time in East Asia as being little more than an exotic adventure in a ‘white playground’, there are also white academics – and perhaps even ‘white universities’ – who seem to believe that their purpose in East Asia is to make an altruistic and benevolent intervention in East Asian societies that only they can make.
• In such instances, ‘the scholar who identifies the inadequacies of the Other may position themselves as having the authority and attributes to diagnose and rectify the supposed deficiencies of the Other, or to put it another way, to civilise them’.
• This belief that (white) Western academics and universities can help East Asian people ‘catch-up’ has been referred to as a clear example of ‘academic imperialism’. In this regard, as has been suggested about other white people in East Asia, some white academics may deploy a ‘colonial imagination’, ‘the colonial gaze’ and ‘neo-colonial imaginaries’ in the way in which they talk about themselves, East Asia and East Asians.
• Fechter (2007) has suggested that white expatriates in Indonesia may be thought of as ‘neo-colonisers’ due to the way in which they may enjoy appropriating some aspects of Indonesian culture at the same time as segregating themselves from Indonesians who they may view as uncivilised, unclean and unintelligent.
• Recognising that some white academics may uphold white privilege diverges from a common perception that white privilege is bestowed upon white people by others, or that it is ‘an unconscious habit’ (Sullivan 2006). Rather, white people in East Asia may feel that they are entitled to white privilege and seek to sustain it. Thus, greater onus may be placed on white academics in East Asia to become, what Amico has called ‘white people of conscience’, which involves recognising the moral and pragmatic reasons for actively disengaging from white privilege and then dismantling the discourse of white supremacy.
• This need not go as far as the radical suggestion that white people must become ‘race traitors’ who commit to ‘unwhite’ themselves so as to ‘abolish’ whiteness and achieve ‘the end of the white race’, but it may lead to white people challenging instances when they are invited to enjoy white privilege.

The limits of white privilege

A friend of mine, a white academic, often complains to me about the racism that he believes he suffers within the East Asian university that he works in. This includes being ridiculed with jokes about his whiteness, being left out of social activities and not being promoted to senior roles. When I told him that I was writing an article about white privilege in East Asian higher education he was not impressed. I understood his perspective because in my own experience I’d seen what he was referring to when interacting with another friend, an East Asian academic who I often have discussions with. On more than one occasion, this friend has dismissed and mocked my views on a range of issues as ‘a white way of thinking’, such as when he became agitated after I criticised aspects of political governance in East Asia which led him to pronounce: ‘If you don’t like it in East Asia then go back home’. In other instances, he has told me that ‘white people are too outspoken’ and ‘white people should adapt to our way of doing things’. After informing another East Asian academic that I am writing a paper that argues that whiteness is privileged in East Asia, she insisted that East Asians actually find white people repulsive and un-sophisticated, even if they conceal this from white people.

• Although I earlier argued that I am typically racialised as white in East Asian universities, there remain moments when I am not racialised as white. For instance, white academics in East Asia routinely racialise me as a person of colour, and some have even subjected me to racialised microaggressions which left me feeling disrespected, undermined and excluded in ways that resemble encounters that I have had in the West.
• What I am interested in here is the tendency for whiteness to provoke negativity in East Asian academia so as to offer a more nuanced understanding of whiteness by departing from the tendency within Critical Whiteness Studies to assume that whiteness is always-and-only privileged. For example, it has been documented that although whiteness often has several positive connotations in East Asian societies, white people are simultaneously stereotyped as: arrogant, overpaid, immoral, selfish, sexually promiscuous, impolite and unassimilable outsiders.
• This means that even those white people who are the ‘whitest-whites’, or who have what has also been referred to as ‘accentuated whiteness’ or ‘hyper-whiteness’, may also lack access to white privilege in East Asian higher education due to the possibility that whiteness is understood in less positive terms than may often be the case. It is therefore necessary to acknowledge that in the East Asian context, even though whiteness may be valorised in a number in instances, there are also moments when whiteness is associated with negative connotations to the extent that white people in East Asia may be avoided, objectified, exploited, labelled, disliked, and generally seen as problematic.
• In seeking to explain this seemingly contradictory observation that whiteness in East Asia is both privileged and disprivileged, Hof (2021) has suggested that white people in East Asia are increasingly only able to access a ‘passive whiteness’ with a ‘passive value’. This means, according to Hof, that while white people in East Asia still often accrue benefits due to their whiteness, this white privilege is often superficial, fleeting and limited in more significant domains.
• While it is necessary to recognise the limits of white privilege, there may still be many more occasions in East Asia when whiteness remains privileged, especially when one compares white peoples’ experiences with racial minorities and migrants of colour. Furthermore, since white people in East Asia can be sure of receiving white privilege on many occasions, this may mean that the moments when their whiteness leads to them being disadvantaged are tolerable since they know that their whiteness will reimburse them on other occasions.
• One may also speculate about whether some of the instances when white academics may feel disadvantaged are actually just a loss of white privilege rather than racial discrimination . For example, a white academic has suggested to me that they are regularly subjected to anti-white racism when they are gazed at by strangers in East Asian neighbourhoods. However, this could also be understood as the loss of a common manifestation of white privilege of having unfettered access to spaces without being made to feel unwelcome.
• In this regard, when recognising the limits of white privilege in East Asian universities, one must be cautious not to perpetuate the discourse of ‘white victimization’ which suggests that the greatest priority is to tackle ‘reverse racism’. This would overlook the structural components of racism which may mean that it is actually more accurate to say that white academics in East Asia are subject to prejudice and discrimination, but not necessarily racism.
• Rather, it would be more reasonable to say that one should avoid a simplistic conclusion that whiteness only affords privilege, or the reverse; that it only affords disadvantage, because racial hierarchies operate in more complex ways. Thus, whiteness in East Asia can paradoxically be an asset in some instances and a liability in others, all on account of the intricate ways in which whiteness is both desired and resented, celebrated and doubted, even though whiteness seems to retain its prestige in most instances.

Access: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1641IjbwPZfSVDzG2uBvm1ebbvOos59z9/view?usp=sharing

Summary: This article reports on a two-year study on the experiences of 10 Asian American LGBQ-identified adolescents who attended a public high school in the Midwest. Participants reported being bullied and harassed at school because of their assumed or real gender expressions/identities, race, and sexual orientation. The participants also struggled to find their place in a Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) that perpetuated White dominance in all aspects of its culture, operations, and programming. Practitioners and scholars alike must therefore move towards (but also beyond) simply raising awareness of LGBTQ identities or trying to promote tolerance of differences in school-based settings. The creation of formal school-wide policies that explicitly describe mandatory reporting processes is necessary to hold adults accountable. School personnel would also benefit from ongoing professional development on topics such as bullying, reporting requirements, and violence prevention.

Key Excerpts:

Experiences with violence-based encounters and reluctance to report

• Zachary (gay Korean American male): Zachary's masculinity was questioned even before he ‘came out’ because of the racialized imagery associated with his physical appearance. He was called derogatory names such as ‘pussy and wussy’ along with other racial slurs such as ‘dog eater’ and ‘Ong-ong China little dong.’ He recalled:

My PE teacher was a rude homophobe. He would say, “Quit throwing like a girl, Zach-man.” The other kids would laugh at me, and ... said how I not only “threw like a girl,” but supposedly “ran like a girl . . . ”whatever that meant. I started to cry, and this dude [teacher] had zero sympathy. He was like, “Stop crying you big baby. You need to man up.”

• Ginger (Hmong American lesbian): in the 6th grade, Ginger shaved the bottom half of her hair, wore a chain wallet, and started to wear baggy men’s clothing...She recalled how her physical appearance constantly came under scrutiny and resulted in physical attacks:

At first, people were totally freaking out. One guy threw a banana at me at lunch. I think, though, the girls were worse. Like, when I went to the bathroom, they told me to go to the boys’ room because they said I’m a dude.

Lack of support from adults at school

• Blatant homophobia and race-based bullying were common experiences for the participants that involved frightening instances of physical and symbolic violence.
• Some of their experiences with homophobic and racist bullying and comments came from their own coaches and teachers. When their peers directly engaged in violent behaviours, few adults at school did or said anything to intervene.
• Robin (Bi-male, Japanese Jewish) reported how several of his teachers heard his peers make homophobic remarks about his sexual orientation in and out of the classroom, but ‘They mostly just stood there looking uncomfortable . . . they don’t really say anything. Some who you know see something don’t help and sometimes walk away.’
• Manny (Gay male, Hmong) shared that one of his coaches, a White male, blamed and shamed him: ‘He actually was someone I look up to. He said I should bulk up and suck it up ... it was like he was saying that it’s OK to be bullied if you don’t look and act a certain way.’

Gendered and racialized forms of heterosexism and homophobia

• Manny was told by his peers and some of his teachers that his sexual orientation was just ‘a phase,’ and that in order to fit in, he should find a girlfriend. Manny cited the presence of a group of affluent Korean American male students at school who appeared to represent a more ‘acceptable’ version of Asian American masculinity because how they acted and dressed symbolically embodied heteronormative Whiteness.

Some straight people try to “help” me, by, like, you know, saying how they’d dress me up like those rich preppy Korean guys so I can get a girl. But some of my straight friends, even some of my Asian friends, don’t get why I don’t want to change to be like them. I’m like, no thanks! I’m Queer, I’m Hmong, and I’m proud to be me. But there’s still a lot of pressure for me to try to be more “manly” to fit in.

• Robin (Chinese American, bisexual male), experienced a distinct type of racialized discrimination at school that was primarily instigated by his gay White male peers. He believed that his appearance as an Asian American male led to a specific type of bullying where he was labelled as effeminate and therefore undesirable to gay White males.

Gay Caucasian dudes . . . how they treat Queer Asians is messed up. Some of these guys would call me “boi” or “lesbo” or “pretty girl” because, well, I guess, meaning that since I also am interested in girls, that I was like a pseudo-lesbian and not really their idea of “queer.” It was confusing that these guys would treat me like this since I’m supposed to be one of them.

• For Robin , it was particularly painful that his White LGBTQ classmates, especially gay White males, labelled him in ways that he did not identify. He reflected on the following: ‘It’s surprising because these guys, being gay, should know better. They should really show their support.’ That is, he expected his White LGBTQ classmates to have been White allies who supported him because of their shared sexual orientation.
• Other female participants reported that they confronted a great deal of hostility from both White American females and males, including both heterosexuals and LGBTQ individuals, because they disrupted dominant representations of heterosexual Asian American females. For example, Amanda, a (Chinese American, lesbian), shared the following:

Most Asian girls at my school go out with Caucasian guys. It’s kinda the expectation. I get hit on by lots of Caucasian guys. I’ll tell them I’m a lesbian and am not into guys. They either get mad or confused. Many will think I’m teasing them. Some of these guys think it’s hot that they hit on a lesbian. They think they can “change my mind” if I go out with them!

The Gay-Straight Alliance organization as a site of erasure and marginalization

• Eastern High had a GSA or a Gay-Straight Alliance. According to its mission statement on its website, a GSA is:

A student-run club, typically in a high school or middle school, which provides a safe place for students to meet, support each other, talk about issues related to sexual orientation and gender identity and expression, and work to end homophobia and transphobia.

• Moreover, a GSA publicize three primary services to its members: (1) a supportive space that is safe and welcoming, (2) a place to build community through social networks, and (3) a group that strives to take action to generate awareness about gender identity and sexual orientation within communities and schools in hopes of promoting equality and equity for all LGBTQ individuals.
• While the club itself was racially diverse with over 100 members on its listserv, White Americans primarily ran its operations, a structure that signalled a larger trend about how conversations about other diversities within the LGBTQ community such as race were absent.
• Similarly, GSA members who led major initiatives were also predominantly White, which could further explain why these spaces did not generally include LGBTQ youth from racialized backgrounds as key decision-makers or leaders.
• Neal, a gay Chinese American male, noted that even basic community-building activities at Eastern High’s GSA that were supposed to help people get to know and relate to each other seemed to orbit around the interests of White American students. He stated:

‘This GSA is White-washed. Like, we listen to Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber. Even the potlucks are White-washed: casserole, cookies, and other American food. Nobody eats our food. So, I tend to feel that I don’t belong.’

• However, the reality that the school’s GSA and other Queer-justice initiatives largely neglected to discuss issues of racial diversity became problematic as the participants encountered hostile interactions for bringing up issues of racial equity.
• Pete, an Indian American gay male, shared similar critiques of how ‘mainstream’ LGBTQ spaces at Eastern High tended to reinforce White dominance. Importantly, Pete and Neal, along with other GSA members, convinced their principal to officially have Eastern High celebrate a first-ever LGBTQ week in March along with the school’s longstanding Women’s History Month. However, Pete spoke about how LGBTQ youth from racialized backgrounds were discredited and silenced during this event’s implementation for trying to address the lack of racially diverse representations during LGBTQ week:

They were all about White celebrities like Neil Patrick Harris, Elton John, Ellen [DeGeneres]. Queer White folks galore... My friend, Jasmine mentioned to the group something about starting small, like, having a collage of Queer people of color like Michelle Rodriguez, RuPaul, George Takei, etc. during LGBTQ week. But instead of listening to our concerns, which are legit, we’re being accused of “stealing the attention” from the “cause.”

• One White student told Jasmine that she allegedly ‘hates White people’ for criticizing the collage for only including White American LGBTQ celebrities, which triggered more tense and uncomfortable exchanges.
• Pete tried to step in to defend Jasmine, but he was frequently interrupted by White GSA members. The White American faculty adviser ended up cutting Pete off midsentence, saying that the conversation would carry over into a special meeting the next week for those who were interested.
• At the next meeting, both Jasmine and Pete wanted to resolve the ‘hates White people’ comment, but the White American faculty adviser curtly said, ‘It’s a new day. Let’s get over that and move on.’ After the meeting, Pete expressed frustration about how the GSA was not able to, as a group, address the racial tensions that had been building up.
• In all, the school’s GSA not only replicated Whiteness through its governance and structure but was also rife with various racialized tensions. The unintentional and wilful neglect among its White leaders and members for not consistently bringing awareness to various types of power dynamics and imbalances conflicted with the GSA’s mission to be an inclusive and welcoming environment for historically underserved youth.
• The lack of representation and respectful discourse was especially salient for the participants given the longstanding historical history of racism in U.S. schools and society, coupled with the unique socio-cultural challenges that many Asian American youth confront when discussions around diversity tend to follow the Black-White binary.

https://rethinkingschools.org/articles/i-dont-like-china-or-chinese-people-because-they-started-this-quarantine/

Highlights

Orientalism and Anti-Asian American Racism

• To understand today’s anti-Chinese American and anti-Asian American racism, we need to look at “Orientalism.” Historically, European colonizers framed much of their world in terms of the West — the Occident — versus the East — the Orient.
• For them, the Occident was cultured, civilized, trustworthy, pure, and godly, while the Orient was barbaric, uncivilized, heathen, untrustworthy, and culturally and morally depraved — providing justification for European rulers’ imperial ambitions.
• As “Orientals” entering U.S. territories colonized by white settlers, Chinese and other Asian American communities were never trusted as legitimate members of society. Whites often saw them as interlopers, temporary labor, outsiders, and a cultural “other.”
• This is the ideological basis of the “Yellow Peril”: In response to economic or political crisis, Asian and Asian American communities are framed as a non-Western threat to “American” values and supremacy.
• In 1848, there were about 325 Chinese immigrants in the continental United States; by 1880, 300,000 Chinese had immigrated to the country. Although some came in response to the California gold rush, most worked on the transcontinental railroad. White railroad barons paid Chinese railroad workers lower wages and often gave them the most dangerous jobs (like dynamiting mountains in preparation for tracks).
• White racism deeply influenced the living conditions in the Chinatown neighborhoods where immigrants were forced to settle. White landlords often mistreated Chinese American tenants and kept their housing in disrepair with no fear of reprisal. Coupled with inconsistent city infrastructure for sewage systems and clean water, this contributed to the substandard living conditions and general squalor that helped spread disease.
• Popular media painted Chinatowns as seedy, dirty, heathen, dangerous, full of “vices” like gambling, drugs, and prostitution, and full of similarly dirty and dangerous people. Likewise, whites saw Chinatown neighborhoods as uncivilized, “foreign” spaces to be controlled by Western authorities.
• These racist tropes laid the groundwork for equating Chinese Americans with disease — which first happened more than 100 years ago, and continues today.

The 1899–1900 Quarantines and Burning of Honolulu’s Chinatown

• On Dec. 12, 1899, health officials confirmed a single case of bubonic plague in Honolulu’s Chinatown. The so-called President Dole — who came to power when a gang of white businessmen and missionaries overthrew Queen Liliuokalani, Hawai’i’s Indigenous sovereign — declared a state of emergency. Honolulu’s Chinatown — 14 square blocks, around 10,000 people — was quarantined the next day. Officials painted lines around Chinatown and placed guardsmen on 24-hour patrol.
• White authorities subjected Honolulu’s Chinatown population — mostly Chinese (Hawai’i had not yet become a territory of the United States) but also roughly 1,500 Japanese and 1,000 Native Hawaiians — to daily inspections of their homes and bodies to check for signs of plague.
• Residents felt the intrusion of invasive bodily inspections by white inspectors of the “Citizens’ Sanitary Commission,” raising concerns about petty theft, racial harassment, and even attempted rape by inspectors.
• Honolulu Chinese also pointed out the racist boundaries of the quarantine zone. The Chinese-owned City Mill was included in the quarantine, but the white-owned Honolulu Iron Works next door was excluded — forming a white quarantine-free peninsula extending into Chinatown.
• A native Hawaiian newspaper, Ke Aloha Aina, pointed out that the Chinatown residents weren’t to blame for the conditions there:

The Japanese and Chinese are not the unclean ones who are spreading the plague in the city. . . . Instead, it is the large land owners who rent units on a large-scale profit. These are people such as Samuel Damon, Dillingham, Keoni Kolopana, and some others who sit and collect huge monthly and annual profits.

• White officials lifted the first Honolulu Chinatown quarantine after several days. However, when several more people died of plague, officials placed Chinatown under quarantine again and proposed a controlled burning of individual plague-infected buildings.
• The Honolulu Chinese protested the burning plans, posting fliers and making death threats against the Board of Health and any Chinese officials who cooperated. Chinese property owners wrote letters, and community leaders petitioned authorities.
• Then, on Jan. 14, 1900, a white woman who lived in a wealthy Honolulu suburb came down with the plague. Her death shocked the white community — who mistakenly thought whites couldn’t catch the plague, and several white newspapers began to advocate for leaders to burn down Chinatown.
• On Jan. 20, 1900, during a controlled burn of an infected Chinatown building, the winds picked up, spreading the fire. The community of Chinese, Japanese, and Hawaiians worked together with the fire department to regain control, but the inferno spread through Chinatown. The fire wiped out 25 city blocks and displaced at least 6,000 Chinese residents — most of whom were relocated to detention camps.

The Quarantines of San Francisco Chinatown

• On March 6, 1900, there was a suspected death from bubonic plague in San Francisco’s Chinatown, and the Board of Health cordoned off Chinatown. More than 35 police officers were posted around 12 square blocks. White authorities blocked traffic, limiting the movement of the 25,000 residents — mostly Chinese American, but also more than 1,000 Japanese Americans.
• However, whites were allowed to leave because, like in Hawai’i, whites believed they couldn’t get the disease.
• The San Francisco Chinese Americans resisted this selective quarantine. Members of the community gathered to protest, and the Chinese Consul-General of San Francisco called the “Blockade of Chinatown” racist.
• Mayor James D. Phelan countered that the quarantine was necessary because Chinese people were a “constant threat to public health.”
• The Chinese American community protests overwhelmed white officials, and less than three days after it began, the Board of Health ended the quarantine.
• With a cluster of plague deaths near the end of April, the federal government directed local officials to administer an experimental vaccine, one known to have severe side effects, to the Chinatown population.
• By mid-May, large crowds of Chinese Americans protested, noting the vaccine’s harsh effects. On the night before the forced vaccinations, fliers posted around San Francisco’s Chinatown announced resistance:

It is hard to go against an angry mass of people. The doctors are about to compel our Chinese people to be inoculated. This action will involve the lives of us all who live in the city. Tomorrow . . . all business houses large or small must be closed and wait until this unjust action settled before anyone be allowed to resume their business. If any disobey this we will unite and put an everlasting boycott on them. Don’t say that you have not been warned at first.

• When the mostly white doctors and health officials came to Chinatown to begin the forced vaccination program, they found businesses closed and residents leaving the area. In the days that followed, Chinese American protesters rallied against those Chinese Americans who they believed were cooperating with the vaccination program.
• Health officials also directed the railroad companies to deny Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans passage on trains leaving the city if they could not prove vaccination.
• A Chinese American merchant filed a complaint with the federal court. Federal Judge William W. Morrow invalidated the travel ban, saying that it violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. He ruled that the travel restrictions were “boldly directed against the Asiatic or Mongolian race as a class, without regard to the previous condition, habits, exposure to disease, or residence of the individual.”
• White health officials quarantined San Francisco’s Chinatown again after more Chinese Americans died of plague. On May 30, 53 police officers patrolled the lines of this new racial quarantine. A San Francisco Chronicle reporter observed that in the “careful discrimination in fixing the line of embargo, not one Caucasian doing business on the outer rim of the alleged infected district is affected. . . . Their Asiatic neighbors, however, are imprisoned within the lines.”
• The editors of San Francisco Call demanded that Chinatown be burned:

In no city in the civilized world is there a slum more foul or more menacing than that which now threatens us with the Asiatic plague. . . . So long as it stands so long will there be a menace of the appearance in San Francisco of every form of disease, plague and pestilence which Asiatic filth and vice generate. The only way to get rid of that menace is to eradicate Chinatown from the city. . . . Clear the foul spot from San Francisco and give the debris to the flames.

• In court, Chinese American leaders again complained about their treatment. Judge Morrow called the Chinatown quarantine the “administration of a law ‘with an evil eye and an unequal hand.’” Again, drawing upon the 14th Amendment, he issued an injunction lifting the second quarantine of San Francisco’s Chinatown.

A Moment to Teach About Racism

• Given our country’s history of racist Orientalism and anti-Asian American violence, it is easy to see how here in the United States the recent outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has been so effortlessly and predictably mapped onto the Chinese and other Asian American communities.
• When students study the historical antecedents to these efforts, they are better equipped to resist white supremacist attempts to equate disease with communities of color now.
• In this moment, teachers building online social justice curriculum and parents assisting with distance learning are in a position to teach our children about historical injustices such as those visited upon the Chinese American community at the turn of the 20th century, as well as share historical victories won through resistance and protestations.

Access: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342196709

Summary: “I fear that, although white feminism is palatable to those in power, when it has won, things will look very much the same. Injustice will thrive, but there will be more women in charge of it." We argue that (white) feminism ideologically grounds itself in a gendered victimology that masks its participation and functionality in white supremacy. By erasing women of color, positioning women as victims of white male hegemony, and failing to hold white women accountable for the production and reproduction of white supremacy, (white) feminism manifests its allegiance to whiteness and in doing so commits “discursive violence”.

Highlights

Seeing Race, White Racial Frame, White epistemology and discursive violence

• By “seeing race” in (white) feminism, we do not mean counter-colorblindness, but rather a profound critical grasp of the centrality of race and its transformative intersections with other identities in political and social life. “Seeing race” as a liberatory racial politic is vital. For example, critiques from feminist women of color have repeatedly argued that the liberatory racial logic we reference is absent in (white) feminism.
• Indeed, a central problematic within (white) feminism is its reliance on and grounding in a white epistemology, what Feagin refers to as a “white racial frame.” White epistemology is grounded in a way of knowing and understanding the world that colludes with and/or rationalizes systemic processes that uphold and reproduce racial inequality and white supremacy.
• Given that “woman” has historically been read as “white” in the U. S. context, (white) feminists must work deliberately, purposefully, and consistently to explode (white) patri-archal influences in their theory and praxis. We believe that (white) feminism has historically failed, and presently fails, to do so. As long as (white) feminism continues to miss the mark in this regard, we cannot understand it as a politics of liberation of the people (i.e., those who seek racial and related social justices), but instead lament its failure to continually disrupt and upend white supremacy.
• The historical facts and functions of (white) feminism suggest that its liberatory potentiality appears circumscribed by its proximity to whiteness, which commits “discursive violence.” Holling explains discursive violence as “masking or effacing other forms of violence and/or productive of negative valence, that colludes with other manifestations of violence” while ignoring the complicity of implicated groups.
• Materially, the oppressive nature of (white) feminism manifests in its discursive violence that is amplified by a white epistemology that helps advance white supremacy. (White) feminism masks white epistemology by masquerading as a liberatory movement that professes to represent ALL women while primarily focusing on the needs of white women.

The erasure of women of color in (White) feminism and mainstream feminism

• Women of color are vanished in (white), or what Jonsson calls “mainstream” feminism, by centering white feminist narratives that silence and marginalize women of color. Case in point is a monument to the (white) feminist movement in Central Park, New York City featuring Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Though both women were certainly active in nineteenth century efforts to secure (white) women’s suffrage, their strategies and stances were racist and classist, usually ignoring the needs, desires, and concerns of women of color and/or poor white women.
• In yet another example of (white) feminism’s penchant for marginalizing women of color is the whitening of #MeToo and #TimesUp, evident in their popularization and visibility extended to white women’s victimage. Though (white) feminism erases and marginalizes women of color, (white) feminists are quick to trot out tropes referencing folks of color when to their benefit. Bette Midler’s tweet during the Kavanaugh hearing in which she cited Yoko Ono’s comment that “women are the n ... ... ’s of the world” or some (white) feminists’ suggestion that women should “take a knee” to protest its outcome indicate the latency of a white epistemology wherein racial difference figures when convenient.
• The erasure of women of color, whether through marginalization or neglect, from social views of (white) feminism points to “discursive violence” (i.e., “harm committed in/by discourse” such as through erasure).

The victimology of (White) feminism, White victimhood

• The white victimhood narrative is a tool that distracts from the reality of race relations in the US, whereby white US Americans either claim they are racially marginalized, or that they are ‘attacked’ for being the beneficiaries of inequitable race relations.
• This narrative plays out in a number of ways in white discourse from framing those who call out racism as irrational, scary, and dangerous to exaggerated claims of attack when engaged in discussions about race and racism (e.g., white fragility).
• In this narrative, white men are constructed as solely responsible for both racism and sexism which ignores white women’s allegiance to them. Recent examples include white women voters’ support for Donald Trump (52 percent) and for Roy Moore (63 percent), former Senatorial candidate, each of whom was accused of sexual assault and misconduct, respectively. Historically, there is white women’s participation as slave-owners, as leaders in white supremacist organizations for “ladies” (e.g., WKKK) that terrorized both women and men of color, as violent protesters against school desegregation, and as supporters of eugenics.
• One arena where white victimhood plays out with regularity is instances when white women are called into account by women of color. Cargle documents extensively “toxic white feminist” microaggressions often observed in settings where the intersection of race and gender ground conversations and include “tone policing” (wanting women of color to stop being aggressive or angry), “spiritual bypassing” (demanding peace from communities in peril), a “white savior complex” (focusing only on what one has done for people of color in the past), and “centering” (focusing on their own emotions and sensitivities). To this list, we add “white woman tears”; it shifts focus from people of color to white women in need of care.

(White) feminism’s failure to hold White women accountable

• While there is ample documentation that (white) feminism has been called out repeatedly by women of color for its racist and exclusionary politics, less noted is (white) feminism’s unwillingness to call out white women when social and political events so dictate.
• Underscoring the centrality of gender and race in determinations of fear and safety are a series of recent attacks on people of color by white women in public spaces who invoked police power that offered opportune moments for (white) feminist action. The plethora of such attacks such as #Permit Patty, #BBQBecky, #CornerstoneJennifer, and #GolfCartGail instigated a new hashtag, #living-while-black that attempts to document the current state of events for black people. Most shocking has been the utter lack of response from (white) feminists and the failure to call white women into account en masse.
• White women’s role in policing public space is especially disturbing and compromises (white) feminists’ espousal of a collaborative relationship with women of color. Despite the abundance of incidents in which white women have invoked police response as a result of folks of color simply living life in a deeply white supremacist entrenched culture, (white) feminism has been tragically silent. No manifesto, no beseechment from white women to consider their role in white supremacy, no commitment to antiracist agendas in response to folks of color’s plea to whites to “come get your people” and no promise to stand with folks of color against such deliberate efforts that terrorize them, especially black folk.
• The combined (in)actions by (white) feminism reproduces and compounds direct and structural forms violence confronting all women and, in the process, unintentionally bolsters white supremacy. As a consequence, the liberatory potentiality of (white) feminism is limited.

Please type your comment in the live chat for any type of research or content related to the Asian experience you would like to see on AsianResearchCentral.

Alternatively, post any type of question relating to the Asian experience you would like to see addressed.

We will keep track of these questions and provide content accordingly.

Members are highly encouraged to participate and contribute!