Corinne Mitsuye Sugino, "Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans" (Rutgers UP, 2024)
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Welcome to the new Books Network.

Hi, Corinne. Thank you for taking the time to talk to me about your book, Making the Human, which I think really gives us a new vocabulary to talk about stories we tell about Asian Americans and stories Asian Americans themselves tell about themselves. So I noticed that your book begins with a discussion on the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings that killed six Asian women.

It's kind of interesting how that kind of faded away in the news pretty quickly. But here's another thing. So how did the project start? I got a sense that it started before 2021. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Yeah, definitely. And thank you so much for having me on the New Books Network podcast. I really appreciate you taking the time to interview me and read my work. But yeah, so my work is interested in how Asian Americans become legible as narrative figures and how that legibility interacts with, supports, or works to maintain systems of racial, gendered, or capitalist violence. And so

That interest began, of course, before, right, 2021, as you mentioned, when I was doing my doctoral work as a graduate student in rhetoric and communication. And at the time, I was working on a dissertation project that focused specifically on false inclusion, co-option, and

critique of liberal multiculturalism as it relates to Asian Americans. And so, you know, I was interested in all the ways that Asian Americans were sort of folded into these celebratory narratives as the symbols of progress. So like the chapter on Crazy Rich Asians started here, right? Because it comes out

As I'm in graduate school and amidst sort of these widespread deportations of Southeast Asian immigrant communities, ongoing, even if often invisibilized, anti-Asian racism, the hyper-sexualization of Asian women, so on and so forth.

But it's symbolized, it sort of becomes a symbol of, you know, progress and so on and so forth. That's, you know, uncritical of those ongoing forms of violence. Or, you know, similarly in the case of students for fair admissions, which at the time was not at the Supreme Court level yet. It was at, you know, the lower court level. But that case really struck me because, you

We were seeing the ways that Asian-Americans are framed as victims in order to forward a sort of anti-Black attack on affirmative action in the name of, you know, defending Asian-Americans from racism. And so I wanted to know at the time, you know, why, you know, these forms of sort of multicultural, supposedly progressive celebration could coexist with such persistent, insidious and extreme violence.

And so, you know, all of that becomes more vivid when COVID-19 breaks out and you have these widespread, you know, anti-Asian attacks. I'm worried for myself. I'm worried for my family, you know, but you also have a university incorporation and public institution putting out a solidarity statement saying that they stand with us and they've always stood with us and, you know, so on and so forth, even though Asian Americans had long been invisible to many of those same institutions. Right.

So I was trying to make sense of those often conflicting narratives. And after I sort of defend my dissertation, it evolves into the book project that you have now. And so the question shifted to be less focused on liberal multiculturalism and co-option as the focus. And that was more a larger surrounding context. And in some cases, one example of racial allegory, like in the SFFA chapter, but

But I think that I came to realize that the real questions I was interested in had to do with the reasons for why Asian-Americans had become highly visible figures in all of these contemporary social controversies, which is sort of what I describe in those opening pages. Right. So the pandemic. Right. We're central to these controversies.

controversies about public health, right? Education, right? Affirmative action, police brutality, the role of Tu Tao and Peter Liang, right? And their role in the killings of George Floyd and Akai Gurley, respectively, are, you know, a larger sort of conversation. And so I say all of this not to imply that these narratives are equivalent, but rather that there are just so many sort of conflicting narratives, stories that are circulating around

Asian Americans. And, you know, in each of those cases, these narratives are doing work, right? To whether they're framing Asian Americans as carriers for disease or as sources of sexualized temptation or as studious and meritorious. They're doing things, right? They're shoring up American exceptionalism. They're policing the boundaries of the nation state. They're redeeming the myth of meritocracy. They're trying to frame the U.S. carceral state as like inclusive and like democratic, right? And so I became...

Increasingly interested in less, you know, what are the stereotypes about Asian Americans and like how are Asian Americans being mobilized as narrative figures? What are they doing in these narratives? What do they represent? What value judgments do they imply? And, you know, how do they normalize Western man?

Yeah, so I think you're right that I think these stories, they serve certain goals of the state. And I think I'm also hearing that, yeah, these stories already existed kind of before COVID. There's a cumulative effect, but then things kind of got into like an overdrive during COVID where there is this weird desperate need to kind of

highlight or prioritize stories that Asian Americans are part of the progress of the nation. And you mentioned the phrase, the Western man, and that was actually in the title of the book, Making the Human, right? I guess, yeah, those are connected. So can you tell me about how you got the idea of the Western man? What's the relationship between that? And I think you mentioned neoliberal multiculturalism. What's the role of the Western man in a capitalist society? Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, that's a that's a great question. And so Western man is a concept that I draw from black study scholars like Sylvia Winters, Zakiya Jackson, Denise Barrett DeSilva, and others who highlight the sort of human, not as an inherent or purely biological category, but as something socially formulated through global colonial and anti black violence. And so Sylvia Winter, in particular, right, looks at how these sort of

histories of slavery, colonization, and the European quote-unquote discovery of the new world, right, all of which form the basis for, you know, the modern neoliberal and capitalist system as we know it, impose what she refers to as the over-representation of Western man as sort of what it means to be human. And so the, like, white, you know, property, Euro-American subject becomes this, like, transcendent, like, implicit, right, figure for what it means to be human, and it's defined negatively against

you know, black people in particular, but, you know, colonized and marginalized people more broadly. And so, um, and here she's like drawing on Fennonian sociogeny, which is also influential, um, in my thinking. And so, you know, all of this is, it illustrates, right, that we're conditioned to think of the human as this category that's like, just like scientific, like biological, right? It's a neutral concept. It's, it's descriptive. Um,

But, you know, she and these other scholars illustrate that the human is a combination of what she calls bios and mythoi. So it's not just physiological, but it's a conceptual category that, you know, society creates and polices through storytelling. And so this is where, right, racial allegory is sort of drawing on and picking up on these ideas and thinking about the role, you know, of narrative and storytelling, but in particular, right, their relationship to the sort of like fraught,

between human and non-human, subject and object, not just as a form of quote-unquote false representation. And, you know, similarly, right, some of these other scholars I'm drawing on, Zakiya Jackson, right, she thinks of the human, like, species, and she thinks of species and race as mutually constitutive, right? So rather than having species as, like, the foundation and then, like, a neutral foundation and then you have, like, racial categories as these socially constructed categories within the human, right,

that racialization and sexualized discourses, you know, about...

racialized people are essential to how we understand these concepts. And so all of this is the same, heavily influenced and inspired by these thinkers. That's where I get the concept of Western man. But at the same time, this scholarship hasn't traditionally focused on Asian Americans. And in turn, Asian American studies hasn't always dialogued with the scholarship on Western man. And so I wanted to know where Asian American racialization fit into all of this. And

I argue that Asian American racialization plays an important role in stabilizing this over-representation of Western man. And so particularly as it relates to abstract concepts that we associate with human equality or progress, like justice, discrimination, family, nation, these are concepts that don't have a concrete reference point, but that are...

essential to the way that we construct and organize society. And so I say that, you know, anti-Asian racism helps to secure Western man, to police its boundaries, to normalize its boundaries. And that can include, for example, the relationship with neoliberalism or, you know, with with multiculturalism, like the case of storing up, you

Like in the chapter on Crazy Rich Asians, I talk about these competing narratives of family, for example. And I say that, you know, the film mediates these larger anxieties about, you know, China and the U.S. And they sort of frame, you know, Asians and Asian Americans in the film become stand-ins for, you know, these competing nation states. And they use it to sort of uplift society.

the story of, you know, Rachel and Carrie as, you know, uh, this, like, this, um, romantic narrative, like, of American capitalism as, um, you know, uh,

as this, as meritorious, as a story of immigrant grit, in contrast to the sort of quote unquote crazy rich Asians who, you know, take wealth to the extreme or excessive or overindulgent, so on and so forth. So like, for example, that's, you know, how it would, you know, play a role there. Or in the chapter on

um you know on on affirmative action um so i'm interested in how western man um is related to

or sorry, anti-Asian racism and anti-Blackness are interrelated, but they're irreducible, right? And so my argument is not that like, look, you know, these scholars showed how anti-Blackness supports Western men. Look, Asians too support, right? Like the point is that it's like more complex. It's not just sort of synonymous, but they're also interrelated, right? So there's these key concepts at play

at play during the case. You know, what is justice? What is discrimination? And SFFA, you know, and then the SCOTUS decision, right, take this age-old anti-Black backlash to affirmative action, and they reframe it in the language of justice and defending Asian Americans from discrimination. And it occurs through

For example, this extended analogy where SFFA and the majority opinion, right, compare affirmative action to Plessy versus Ferguson, right? That sort of misruling that maintains segregation. And then they compare the gutting of affirmative action to Brown versus Board. And I was taken with that because I was like, how is this possible? Like, how is it possible that this is what's happening, right? But I was also interested in this because

the way that they understand Asian Americans or frame Asian American applicants as victims is only through reference to blackness and anti-blackness, right? To segregation and desegregation. And so anti-blackness forms this narrative template through racial allegory for making sense of Asian American victimhood, for making them legible as victims in the first place. But at the same time, right, you have the way that the victimhood of Asian Americans in turn, right, helps

to re-secure anti-Blackness in the language of progress, right, through this backlash. And so those things, they're working differently, right? Asian American racialization, Black racialization are working differently. They're not synonymous, but they're working, you know, to support a larger, right, system of Western man. So I think that's...

Those are some of the ways that I see Western man playing out in the work, its relationship to neoliberalism and then also comparative racialization. Yeah, I really like all the cases you talk about, but with the affirmative action case, I'm particularly drawn to it because I work in higher education. And also, like, the report has come out. It's really sad to see that, you know,

that the sort of the fight for Asian American admissions actually ended up not leading them to anywhere. There's not much change in kind of the demographics in admissions to also to these like basically 10 schools, right? That's what kind of what they want to fight for.

And I think the topic about how the overlap between kind of protecting Asian-American security or safety, how it overlaps with anti-blackness is something I want to come back to later on. But I also want to ask you a question about the other, the key phrase in the book that you mentioned, racial allegory. We've got to unpack that. What you understand is the type of narrative that flattens or stabilizes the meaning of what it means to be Asian-American or Asian in America.

So two questions here. Why not use the word stereotype? I just did a word search of stereotype in your book and they surprisingly didn't come up a lot. And I also want to know what happens when there are competing racial allegories. I'm thinking about even in the most recent presidential election, we see kind of two Asian American women

embodying two kinds of stories, right? JD Vance's wife, Usher Vance, whose story has come to epitomize family value, and Kamala Harris, who kind of embodies meritocracy. And well, one one. So I guess my question is, what happens when there are competing racial allegories? Is there one that kind of is more prioritized? Yeah. So two questions. Why stereotypes? And what happens when they compete?

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Yeah, yeah. These are excellent questions. And so for the first one, yeah. So racial allegory is the term I use to talk about how like media, institutional, cultural, right, discourses mobilize categories of difference, in this case, Asian Americans, to stabilize Western man. And so I think the reason why not stereotype is because I think that, you know, that work is important. And I'm, you know, I'm glad that that work exists. But I am particularly interested in not just sort of

what the tropes about Asian Americans are, right? The figure of the model minority or the figure of the yellow barrel. Although again, you know, that work is important. It's just kind of, you know, it's being done by other. But so not just what they are, but how they are

um, put in motion through narrative, right? So, you know, when I'm looking at these narratives, I'm interested in like, what, how are Asian Americans represented, but also, um, what are they doing in these stories? Like, what are the actions that they are taking? How are they framed, you know, and then what value systems,

Are they shoring up? Do they support a limited understanding of justice? Do they normalize the heteronormative nuclear family? You know, so on and so forth. And in a lot of these cases, exactly as you say, it's happening in ways that are, you know, like largely seemingly contradictory, right? Like they will support these competing narratives. The SFFA case frames Asian Americans as victims.

The COVID-19 era racism frames Asian Americans as like carriers for disease or technological schemers and like theories about, you know, the like the lab leaf theories and so on, bioweapon theories and, you know, stuff like that.

And so these are like seemingly like opposing narratives or opposing stereotypes or, you know, whatever. But they both are ultimately serving to uphold a very limited understanding of what it means to be human, of what justice looks like, of what it means to be a victimized subject or what it means to be, you know, part of the sort of like normative, like, you

national body, you know, so on and so forth. And so I think the reason why allegory, why narrative and not stereotype is because, yeah, I'm interested in the function of storytelling. And, you know, again, this is partially drawing on the scholarship on Western Man, but also thinking about, you know, what does it look like to understand not just what the stories are saying, but what they're doing? Yeah.

And then sorry, the second question about the like presidential election competing narratives. So yes, I would definitely say racial allegories are or were a play in the most recent presidential election. And yeah, you mentioned Usha Vance and exactly like she's

sort of held up as the symbol of the cis heteronormative nuclear family unit, right? There's these sort of stories that circulate that she contributes to, right? She grows up as the child of immigrants and they come to the United States and she's able to meet J.D. Vance and it's like proof of

you know, how great the country is, like that, right, right, all of this stuff, right. And so all of that, again, is like doing work, right? It creates an image of, you know, Vance, and you know, maybe just like the like Republican Party, Trump, President, whatever, as ironically, right, multicultural as embodying the American dream, and also, right, implicitly denying claims that they are racist, or denying claims that they are by immigrant, or I've seen some discourses being like, you know, the Democrats don't know how to compute,

Right. They just attack, you know, this this this this like diverse woman or this immigrant woman. Right. And all of that, you know, is doing work to sort of cloak the Republican Party as, you know, being more progressive than it is of implicitly normalizing a vision of like good or acceptable or respectable immigrants versus bad or unacceptable immigrants. Right. That then legitimizes or works to legitimize all of this, you know, sort of horrible mass violence movement.

um, ice crackdown, so on and so forth. And so, um, yeah, similar, right. So I'd definitely say racial allegory is, is at play there. Um, and like similarly, um,

you know, with Harris, um, um, as well, you know, she celebrated, um, as the, um, first black woman in Asian American vice president, um, under Biden and also held up as a symbol of progress. And, you know, in the campaign as sort of this, this, um, you know, figure for advancing, you know, American democratic values. And, um, one thing that I was simultaneously sort of fascinated by and also disturbed by is how much her record, um,

um uh as you know prosecutor and versus trump like as a felon became this like narrative oh yeah um because and my point is like not that like you know trump and and like whatever that they're equivalent but that it is important to recognize that these narratives were normalizing a carceral system and they did it under the image of like a diverse and like anti-racist and progressive candidate

And I think it dovetails actually as well with the discussion in the last chapter about, you know, the sort of narrative of diverse policing, the assumption that incorporating more diverse police or diverse, you know, like state figureheads will adequately reform the justice system, right, rather than seeing the system itself as grounded in anti-Black, anti-Asian, you know, anti-immigrant violence. And so, yeah, so competing racial allegories, I think that is definitely apt.

play, I think it's actually the norm because I think racism by nature is socially produced and informed. So it's contradictory because it's like not real, you know, and I like it's real has material effects, but it's, you know, it's, it's designed to reinforce violence, not to, you know, be internally consistent or, or whatever. And so I think, yeah, again, yeah, it's, it's, you know, are these narratives contradictory? Yeah.

is a good question, but also, you know, what, what, not just what are the content of the narratives, but what are they doing? How are they, how are they shoring up, you know, power hierarchies? How are they being deployed in ways that coalesce around, you know, maybe similar goals, even if, or outcomes, even if they're sort of propped up as opposites? Yeah, that's a great way to think about this as like these allegories not having like a coherent, you

bang behind it, but rather that they are, they serve a sort of moralizing goal, as all allegories, I guess, are. And so let's actually jump into some of the chapters. I was particularly interested in the chapter on...

When you talk about Asian dating sites, because I am a huge, I think I told you about this over email, that I am a huge dating show, reality TV fan. I tried to find the footage of Seeking Asian Female, which is the PBS documentary that you wrote about. I only saw snippets. I'm glad I didn't see the whole thing. I don't think I had the stomach to watch the whole thing. It was like the parts I watched were kind of uncomfortable for me.

And I think one of the takeaways from the book and that chapter is that racism takes more forms than interpersonal hate.

But what would you say to people? And I get asked this question a lot, mostly by students when I teach this topic, is that, well, what about individual agency? Are we all just subject to this totalizing regime? And I feel that sometimes, especially because I don't want to bring up many of my fiancées in every conversation, but here I am, is that I am moved by these stories as I'm watching them, to be like, oh, they are in love, and this is not about...

You know, he has yellow fever or something. And what do you say to that? The individual in here? Yeah, that's yeah, that's a an excellent question. And yeah, I think you're, you know, sort of spot on on in terms of, you know, I'm interested in anti Asian racism, not just as a form of individualized hate or bias.

And, yeah, the chapter on the dating sites and on seeking Asian female are interested in that question because, you know, in, you know, chapter one, it's interested in the question of how the hypersexualization of Asian American women and, you know, Asian American people is sort of framed as a positive thing at best and a benign personal preference. Right. Yeah.

Or sorry, a friend does a good thing at worst and as a benign personal romance. Yeah. Right. And my point is not like, you know, now like Asian, like outside their race, like, you know, like, like, that's, that's, that's not the, you know, that's not like, people should do what they want. But, um, the...

I'm more interested in how the narrative gets told in that documentary. And then, you know, to an extent on these on these dating websites, because they frame, right, the sort of unequal power relations in this language of like, you know, like,

like individual preference and like, you know, multicultural plurality and, you know, so on and so forth. And so, you know, a lot of the, for example, conversation about how the narrative of the film, right, relies on, you know, for example, Sandy doing the, you know, Asian American woman, Stephen Pursue's doing, you know, all of the sort of like emotional labor basically to like make him into, you know, a better person.

he's cleaning the apartment and like whatever. So, so his personal transformation is through the sort of medium of, of her sort of as this, you know, racialized and sexualized appendage to them at the same time, right. That he's sort of overlaying all of these various stereotypes. And of course, like the, the narrative arc of the,

um documentaries meant to start with look at this look at this creepy guy but then to basically wrap it in this language of love conquers all um and um i think what that does is it takes right um

it takes a larger narrative that says that, you know, if we just, you know, if we just love someone enough that, you know, we can move past, right? The more racism. Right, exactly. And it sort of, again, individualizes racism. Similarly to write maybe the chapter that thinks about the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act and, you know, the Atlanta shooting. There's a lot of framing in the midst of that stuff about anti-Asian racism as, you know,

Asian hate and it's well intentioned, but I think it's dangerous because it unintentionally does a few things. It frames anti-Asian racism as episodic rather than systemic, as an aberration, right, rather than the sort of logical outcome of a country built on violence.

And it also frames it as committed more by like random fringe like individuals or like extreme like racist or, you know, in the case of maybe dating like super creepy guys rather than being something that, you know, for example, is sanctioned.

by the state sanctioned by these larger systems of power. And so I do think it's important to see anti-Asian racism as more pernicious than hate, as more widespread than hate, as more dynamic and flexible than hate, and to see the role that institutional violence plays in it, not just sort of individual bias. But that being said, because I get a similar question sometimes from my students as well,

I personally don't see, you know, racism or other forms of violence as deterministic. I don't, they are so easily uprooted, right, through diversity trainings and positive representations, but they're not inevitable because they were created by people. They are also violently enforced, right, by, you know, by these systems, by these people, but the concepts are not inherent. And so they're not inevitable either.

And so the allegories told by Asian Americans, they're often internalized by Asian Americans, myself included. Right. But that doesn't mean that they have to be. It doesn't mean that we're defined solely through these stories told about us. And I think producing a critical vocabulary for naming them is, you know, maybe not going to solve racism tomorrow. Right. But it is important on a personal level, I guess I felt that.

I've been gaslit for most of my life about the reality. I'm like, Asian Americans don't have it that bad. Or this thing that happened to you wasn't really racist. Always something else. You know, there's always some other reason for it. It was, you know, it was really classism or it was, it was just, you know, a joke or it's just an accident or, you know, whatever. Or, or it's a positive thing that, you know, men sexualize you in this way. Like you should, you should be so lucky, right? All of this stuff. Yeah.

And, you know, going back to like the origin story of the book and why I wanted to write it, and just maybe my journey into, you know, becoming a scholar in general was that it was always more than academic research to me. And these scholars writing about race or Asian Americans or in Black studies or ethnic studies or whatever, it gave me a vocabulary for naming that violence, for describing that violence, for critiquing that violence when, you know, it was...

you know, consistently sort of invisibilized or denied or, you know, so on and so forth. And so I think that it's important in that regard. And then also just that,

um, you know, these allegories of Asian Americans, my point is not that they're solely the thing, of course, that determine what it means to be Asian American. As you point out, you know, they flatten or they distort Asian American experiences. And I think that that conversation is really useful because it relates to this question of the category Asian American. It's, yeah, I talked about a little bit, you know, it's formed as this pan ethnic sort of category for the purposes of collective struggle amidst

Asian American movement, the SFSU strike, you know, so on and so forth. And so I think that's one thing, too. I do maybe not like not really just hope for individual agency, but, you know, for possibilities of collective struggle. I'm a little bit more so interested in that. But anyways, you have that sort of emergence as a term tied to, you know, anti-racist action. And then you also have the category that is often as a category that's often deployed, especially in mainstream discourse, but also in, you know, sort of

or, you know, activist Asian American spaces in such a way that's reintroductive

a very limited understanding of what it means to be Asian American, where East Asian Americans sort of become, East Asian American citizens stand in as what it means to be, you know, Asian American in general. And, you know, that's a function of racism. Asian Americans are lumped together, like in COVID, or like in Crazy Rich Asians, the, you know, sort of framing of the East Asian American feminist agency. I love it.

you know, by Rachel or the Youngs, you know, is predicated on their excessive wealth, their ability to wield power over South Asian and Southeast Asian service workers, right? So all of that is creating with a very narrow understanding of that category. And so I'm interested, of course, in what happens and why...

why that flattening happens and what it does but um my goal is less like the response is less like now let's make a more complete and comprehensive category of Asian American and I'm because I think you know language is brought representation is brought um I don't think we should now abandon like we should just stop talking but um but I'm I guess I'm I'm more interested in how we can use our critiques and stories and narratives to unsettle the category than in like creating

like a truly representative category, that it's a more true representation. Because I'm interested less in saying these are false representations, although they are, right? And more in what did these representations do? This episode is brought to you by MeUndies. Underwear drawers are like the Wild West. You never know what you're going to pull out or what shape it's in.

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Yeah, I totally agree with, especially with how you were saying, talking about, you know, having that vocabulary just changes how you perceive your personal experience. I think that's what I love about reading Asian American scholarship is that I feel so personal and the closest maybe analogy, it's like having a diagnosis. It's like, it kind of has that clarifying effect. And I think it has a sort of healing effect of just having the language to describe it. And so I want to talk a little bit more about

the chapter on affirmative action because that's, you know, what's happening. And the sort of taking down of affirmative action. I was really struck by this artifact you found, which is the SCOTUS decision in 2003 written by Sandra Day O'Connor.

that talks about how society, like, you know, she talks about how affirmative action should have an end date because, you know, society is on a trajectory from racism to not racist and this multicultural melting pot. Can you talk, I think you touched on this a little bit, but I think throughout the book, the word multicultural or anti-racism, they are not neutral or positive. Can you say a little bit more about that?

How can something be kind of purportedly anti-racist, but also like anti-Black? And what has been missing? What are people missing in between? Yeah, yeah. So that's, yeah, it's also a great question. And

So when I say multiculturalism, I don't just mean like the mixing of various cultures. I mean, to describe a pernicious regime of power that co-ops difference to maintain hierarchy under the guise of dismantling it, right? And so the reason...

So that's the reason why instead of calling it anti-racism, I call it multicultural anti-racism because I'm like distinguished, right? Because, you know, I see multicultural anti-racism as, you know, like one type, for example, of allegory that appropriates the language or co-ops the language of anti-racism to reinforce racial hierarchy. And so I say it like that because I don't actually think

what SFFA is doing or, you know, multicultural anti-racism is anti-racist, right? I think it's co-opting anti-racism or the language of anti-racism to seem benevolent, even heroic. And so it's not any more anti-racist than colorblindness is quote-unquote race neutral, right? But I use the term because I do think it's distinct a little bit from

Color blindness and, for example, post-racialism, it interacts with them, of course, but it's not exactly the same. And so if color blindness says, you know, I don't see color, right, it implies that racial difference matters. And post-racialism says something more along the lines of, you know, Obama was elected president, so racism can no longer exist, right? This

This is a little different than colorblindness because it does explicitly acknowledge race, right, to then disavow racism or the continuity of racism. But both colorblindness and post-racialism share in that they deny the continuing legacy of racism. And so multicultural anti-racism and what's going on in the cases is a little bit distinct insofar as they acknowledge the ongoing nature of racism, right? SFFA goes through

lengths um throughout the like not just you know at the scotus level but at the earlier levels right to talk about japanese american internment to talk about the chinese exclusion act right and then to be like now affirmative action like it is you know iteration of this and so it's it's explicitly trying to acknowledge a history of racism but then you know sort of um perverting it using it right to um backlash against um uh affirmative action right and so um

So I think that it is an example of, you know, a group or, you know, a larger discourse that co-ops the language of anti-racism, that claims to defend Asian Americans for the purposes of concealing their anti-blackness. Yeah. So in that case, what do you think a more rigorous form of anti-racism, what would it look like to you? What...

In theory and in practice. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's the million dollar question. How do we fight racism when our own efforts at refusal and rejection are so viciously co-opted, right? Exactly, yeah.

But yeah, and so like, of course, I don't have all the answers. But I do believe that anti-racism that is grounded in an anti-cartel, you know, anti-capitalist and sort of solidarity-based framework is more rigorous, right? I think that centering the most marginalized of, you know, like in this case, Asian American communities provides for, you know, more...

rigorous analysis of power and therefore, right, the, you know, ability to sort of challenge it to, you know, avoid the pitfalls of co-option, as well as, right, for example, I think the way that we describe or understand that violence matters, right? So the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act is a case in point. So when we frame anti-Asian racism as hate, when we frame it as

fringe, racist, attacking Asians, you know, like on the train or whatever, not state-sanctioned violence that also criminalizes, you know, migrant Asian Americans, queer and trans Asian Americans, you know, sex workers who are also Asian American, whatever, all these things, right? And we frame it as this individualized thing that is committed by fringe racists.

That framing of the problem makes the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act as a solution logical because the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, you know, funds these resources for law enforcement. But if you don't understand that law enforcement are interlocutors of anti-Asian violence, not protectors from anti-Asian violence, then, like, I see why they, like, you know...

you get to that solution and so then i think that you know understanding anti-asian racism as you know something that goes beyond sort of hate or bias that is intertwined with a carceral system not separate from it right so on and so forth produce right more rigorous ways of pushing back against um you know those those forms of violence and when i wrote chapter five um

it was because there was not only the narrative of, you know, the sort of COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, which was, you know, of course, sort of unnerving, right, to see, but like the alignment amidst, right, amidst, you know, Lives Matter and these calls for abolishing the police and, you know, whatever,

These calls for expanding law enforcement resources, all of that is disturbing, but simultaneously, I was also really inspired by all of these Asian Americans, community organizations, scholars, like Red Canary Song, who I talk about in the chapter, like Abe, Edelman, Leed, etc., that

had a very different approach, right? Had this critical vocabulary for thinking about Asian American politics and community differently, one based in mutual aid rather than state recognition, one based in centering the most marginalized of Asian Americans rather than just sort of the, the,

the most, you know, privileged category of East Asian American citizens, right? One in solidarity with black migrant incarcerated and other oppressed communities, not because, you know, we're all the same, but actually because our, because our oppression looks very different, but it's intimately tied. Um, and so, you know, then I guess a subset of that is that I don't think that sameness is a necessary condition for, um,

solidarity or coalition building, it can be dangerous. I can see when it's been used strategically, but it can also be dangerous.

And, you know, what happens, you know, when, you know, like, I think it can be beautiful to say that we're not the same. We have varying levels of power and oppression, but our fates are intertwined. Anti-Blackness and settler colonialism and anti-Asian racisms are interrelated, but irreducible on that, you know, producing an analytic that in a form of anti-racism and response that response to that understanding of power will be more rigorous than one that, you know, frames it in these more individual ways. Yeah.

Yeah, that's a good place for me to, because I have a question about the chapter on the Castro story, how Asian American stories shore up the Castro state.

And you mentioned the stories of these, like, you know, examples of Asian American victims being victims of state violence. And those stories, I realized they're way harder to find, the stories about Rick and Erickson. And, like, it took me some time to look them up on Google. And I feel like, what can we do when there's so many, like, these racial allegories that are mainstream that are so...

often told and even on, you know, what's the subtle Asian traits, you know, like they're everywhere on social media. Like what tools do we have? How can we find other stories? And yeah, how do we seek out these other stories when I feel like everything is against us?

Yeah, yeah. I'm glad you said that because at the time I didn't know their stories either and I found them because I found Red Canary's song statement and then that prompted me to learn more about them. And so I'm not necessarily an expert in how to resolve the...

The issues like technologically, like with social media and stuff, I do think it's a good case in point because it illustrates, you know, that resistant knowledge doesn't just come from like traditional, like quote unquote traditional or institutional academic research, but often, you know, marginalized communities or community activists that are working with these populations. But, you know, also for me, it's not just seeking out stories, but also questioning the ones that we're told.

And so, you know, it's what these stories do. And sometimes there's a push to try and make a more accurate and more whole, more comprehensive picture of, like the category Asian American, you know, but, and, you know, and so if we just, you know, include more stories, more people, etc, then it will be truly representative. And, you know, that

you know, itself as, as I mentioned before is, is can be fraught because, you know, representation is a shortcut. Narrative is a shortcut. I'm not saying like now let's like stop using language, but more just like what, what if we thought of it as the reverse? What if,

our stories were important, not because they produced a more legible or comprehensive picture, but because they helped to undo or unravel the taken for granted categories that have been ingrained in us for so long as a result of these power structures. What if we tried to find the ways that these critiques

you know, undo these categories. And in doing so, it allows us to let go of these, you know, sort of very narrow understandings of, you know, Asian Americans or power or whatever. And, you know, maybe opens us up to seeing new possibilities outside the limiting narratives that we've been told. And so, yeah, I think that's sort of what I would say is that, you

I'm interested in unsettling the categories, unmaking the categories, and seeing what possibility comes from.

the general possibility of critique and undoing and you know yeah yeah I love that making me human and making the category so thank you so much again I don't want to take up too much of your time but thank you so much for speaking with us and I really really appreciate it yeah thank you so much again for having me this has been you know really great conversation so I really really appreciate it