The Asian Problem

The Myth of the Myth and Resistance That Complies

During a “vertical sweep” or routine siege of a Brooklyn housing project on November 20, 2014, on-duty NYPD officer Peter Liang shot and killed Akai Gurley in a stairway alley as Gurley was leaving a friend’s unit. Gurley’s murder and its immediate aftermath unfolded within an already explosive context: coming at the heels of Eric Garner’s murder that July by NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo, viral circulation of video footage capturing Pantaleo’s fatal chokehold, global response to Garner’s killing by an already vigorous BLM movement to defend and honor the lives of Black people ritually assaulted or killed with impunity, and mass outrage over the subsequent lack of state or federal charges brought against Pantaleo. In this powder keg, Officer Liang’s identity as Chinese American also shifted the apparent dimensions of the crisis, as public spotlight on Liang troubled an otherwise facile hegemonic framework in which police killings are considered racist because of the categorical identities of the killers (white) and the victims (Black). Introducing a third term requires more explanation, no matter what form the latter may take, and the spectacular nature of the proceedings to hold Peter Liang accountable for Gurley’s murder thus raised the intensity of the need both to challenge and to problematize “the whiteness of police.”5 On the one hand, advocates for Liang gained visibility by organizing protests, asserted or perceived as representing the “Chinese” or “Asian” position, that rallied for his exoneration. In Officer Liang’s defense, advocates generally argued that as an Asian American, he was being held to a different standard of justice and, moreover, stood as a scapegoat for the lack of accountability in all other previous cases in which officers caught killing Black people were identified as white.6 On the other hand, Asian and Asian American progressives also came out en masse, in opposition to Liang’s advocates and in support of BLM, presenting critical discourses of interest to me here for their own ideological complexities and stakes.

The range of both activist and scholarly arguments generalizable as or compatible with a contemporary “Asians for Black Lives” platform share an interpretive lens familiar to most of us involved in ethnic studies, as our discipline has influenced its formulation and reproduction over the decades. To crudely summarize this genre of thinking, the critique promotes (1) the need to refuse being a model minority and instead resist against structural racism—the latter widely understood as the contradiction of white supremacy and anti-Blackness, wherein those systems are commonly understood as the totalizing dominance of Anglo-Americans and the hatred or oppression of Black Americans, respectively, and the contradiction understood as Anglo-Americans hating or oppressing Black Americans out of the necessity to maintain their own supremacy; and (2) fulfillment of said task by ending complicity and complacency with white supremacy, rationally chosen by Asians in order to access white privilege, instead to stand by Black communities through gestures such as joining or endorsing campaigns, showing up to events, and attending protests (generalizing on this note too, older generations such as mine may use the language of “coalition” while those younger may prefer that of “allies”).7 Across the scope of iterations, this discourse at its most generative has raised awareness of systemic violence inherent to the U.S. way of life, also intensifying the stakes of this core contradiction by extending what we may observe or interrogate about its racial organization and galvanizing movements to disrupt it. Yet, I am driven here by the possibilities and problems available when examining the activism surrounding Liang’s trial more rigorously through the lens of contradiction as an analytic that suggests both-and rather than either/or—which is to say that Asians and Asian Americans can be both “victim” and “complicit” at the same time, that complicity and resistance can be part of the same gesture, and that our methods of racial description can play a constitutive part in resistance that not only complies but ultimately propels the reproduction of racism.8 This perspective allows for a critique that clarifies how shared racial assumptions, including defining an Asian racial case through the terms of the model minority thesis, essentially bond Asian and Asian American activists seeking either to punish or defend Liang as two sides of the same coin, in an ultimately zero-sum game relative to the intended goal of greater justice.9

In these regards, I am picking up questions already raised in critical analyses offered in relation to Liang’s trial and furthering their elaboration. For example, in the context of publicly circulating BLM rebuttals to pro-Liang advocates, that “Peter Liang is not a scapegoat, he is part of the problem,” Jenn Fang highlights how “the benefits of ‘model minority’ status are in fact transient,” which is also to say that the impossibility of realizing this status is evidenced rather than negated by the hyperperformativity of those seeking it.10 Here, the suggestion is not that historical performance correlated with the aspiration to embody a model minority does not produce racist murder and death, corresponding with civic and material gains for those so enfranchised. Rather, the point is that the performance never guarantees the protection it seeks to secure (as is also true for those presenting themselves as “white,” “good” immigrants, “nonviolent” offenders, and so on). In this nexus of racial overdeterminations, then, Fang posits a contradiction in which two seemingly opposed arguments can hold true at the same time—that is, that Liang can be at once a scapegoat and a part of the problem. Likewise, in her study of an earlier history of policing in multiracial Brooklyn, framed in the context of Gurley’s murder, Vivian Truong personalizes the contradiction as “my family’s simultaneous proximity to violence and their support of the systems that perpetuate it”—which I might point out is, at the heart of things, more or less the contradiction through which nearly everyone lives.11 Empirically speaking, both Truong and Wen Liu’s research on the ground in Brooklyn documents a pro-Liang activist community diverse in age, national origin, class, citizenship status, and political background: leading Truong to discern a simultaneity of political forces—corresponding with opposing racial logics of yellow peril and model minority—shaping the broader delimitation of this bloc’s positioning and thus no singular categorical means to apprehend it.12

Yet, across all of these insights offered, their essential privileging or maintenance of a dominant racial logic of vertical proximity (i.e., that Asians are categorically and universally closer to white than Black or are closer to white than Black people are) still leads them all back to a racial tautology in which categorical racial boundaries and their presumed integrity, rather than being exposed as social constructions within ongoing machinations of war, are only again reinforced as objective, transparent, and fixed. Such a framework or theoretical inconsistency can only thus lead to a terminal response that requires Asians to choose white or Black, or subjectivization of the rational choice to comply or resist, wherein presumably this choice manifests as which political protest or campaign to join. In more complicated formulations, this includes the idea of adding to the contradiction through the (re)creation of a derivative third term, as when Liu argues, “Only through claiming its proximity to Blackness [and rejecting proximity to whiteness] can Asian Americanness move outside of the awkward position of neither white nor Black and continue to exist as a relevant and legible racial community.”13 On these assertions, Asian American feminist and queer scholars such as Grace Kyungwon Hong clarify the interventions of our field and history of study, not only to interrogate how “Asian American/Asian diasporic people are positioned to benefit from anti-blackness but also [to] suggest ways to undermine this kind of relational structure that does not rely on a grammar of proximity and commonality.”14 Building on this latter perspective, closer examination of debates centered on Officer Liang’s fate brings fuller attention to the dangers of efforts rooted in both the grammar of proximity and commonality as well as its twin skin, the desire for relevance and legibility, within the racial order that we are paradoxically seeking to abolish.

While not discounting the power of criminal trials—including the broader political, cultural, and symbolic significance of their proceedings and outcomes, as well as the life-altering consequences for those individuals and communities immediately involved—I mean to address, again (as these points have been raised at every turn, whether the case be related to Assata Shakur, Rodney King, O.J. Simpson, etc.), key features of courtroom-based activism that impose severe constraints on what it can accomplish. That is, any popular demand for criminal prosecution requires a basic degree of complicity with, or unproblematized assumptions of, both the individualization of crime (and injury) and the legitimacy of the criminal trial itself to adjudicate justice. Complicity with these assumptions in and of itself does not render futile any and all activism pursuing legal forms of redress. Yet, as perhaps the most lucid example to illustrate these constraints and their specific effects on the activism surrounding Officer Liang, we may return to the April 2016 debate staged by progressive news outlet Democracy Now! placing Hertencia Petersen (Akai Gurley’s aunt) and Cathy Dang (then executive director of CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities, which supported Gurley’s family and was formerly called the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence) together in conversation with or against John Liu, a former New York City comptroller and professor of public finance who represented supporters of Officer Liang.15 As Shireen Roshanravan argues, Dang’s performance in this dialogue skillfully ruptured dominant racial optics to make legible an Asian American feminist position rooted in a politics of solidarity through difference.16 Nevertheless, and only reiterating the very grounds of critical race theory’s emergence as a field within the study of law over thirty years ago, the overall limits of the debate cannot but reinforce dominant racial logics and order and reconscript Dang into them, even against and through her own resistance.17 Namely, only pyrrhic victories can be won in fights that revolve strictly around the formal wrongdoing of one individual, within the same categorical logic of metonym and correspondence in which what happens to Liang denotes an ontological stake for all Asians and, correlatively, the outcome of the trial and sentencing denotes a larger structural gain or loss in the telos of American progress.

Playing by these rules forces Dang into a disturbing position, as definitive of the Asians for Black Lives position more generally in this trial, in which the claim to solidarity hinges on the argument that “justice is justice”—even as progressive and radical advocates know that (criminal) justice is not justice, whatever the latter may be. In a cruel yet somewhat foreseeable irony, then, the progressive argument in this dialogue became one about the necessities of retributive punishment, greater law enforcement, and proper application of fair treatment under U.S. law, while the reactionary argument became one about the necessity of structural or systematic redress, or holding the entire police department accountable rather than only one officer. It is worth noting that, as I first argued in the event of Trayvon Martin’s murder and woefully argue again now, my stake here is not in the fate of the killers or in judging their indictment; instead, I wish merely to point out that the call to prosecute and punish further complicates but does not address our ultimate concern of abolishing genocide.18 Furthermore, in the final analysis, a movement calling for this kind of accountability—that is, to hold the criminal justice system accountable for punishing more consistently with its own oscillating colorblind or multicultural logic—will have been the obstacle rather than the vehicle of abolition.19

It is in this sense that the problem of ambivalence vis-à-vis criminal justice and white supremacy—framed as one proper to the Asian case—actually exists as an unresolved tension animating all contemporary racial justice movements and the diverse communities involved in them, including BLM: those that are always-already struggling to grapple with the scope, effects, meaning, and end of race violence and, in all dimensions, still varyingly splintered or indeterminate in their collective commitments across and even within reformist, progressive, and abolitionist paths to change.20 What directions do and will these struggles take in the course of our lives? There cannot be just one path forward (teleology) or two (complicity or resistance), although as Kandice Chuh argued twenty years ago, at the root of Asian American critique remains the suggestion that, amid the unknowing, we cannot simply opt out of movements that enact abolition democracy and Indigenous sovereignties now.21

On this point, I am not so out of touch as to assume that Chuh’s formulation would function well as the next viral rallying cry for Asians and Asian Americans, “#SubjectlessDiscourse”—particularly as this phrasing may be hard to render practical in contexts of activism or advocacy wherein, as Chuh herself well embraces, place-based resonances of racial identity signify crucial meanings, needs, and stakes, with direct consequence for historical subjects in specific fields of struggle. Yet, I am interested in the work of jumping or bridging scales of abstraction in order precisely to take on the challenge of articulating what may be practical about theory that is too easily dismissed as not so. In this case, the very ambition of Asian and Asian American struggle seems to be as much about the determination of Asian racial representation as it is about justice for Akai Gurley, and in this regard, only theory can help us tease out relationships between the racial subject (“Asians”), the racial discourses they deploy both to autosubjectivize and to position themselves in a political field (representation), and the stakes of determination or, more precisely, the imagined stakes of the desire for determination (e.g., justice for Akai Gurley or for Peter Liang). On this problem, then, Wen Liu’s analysis proceeds by way of observing a racial crisis in which “there was a gap [between Asian and Asian American pro-BLM and pro-Liang activists] that seemed impossible to bridge—a gap that is beyond racial or ethnic identification, which I later realized is perhaps a fundamental difference between the dreams of these two groups.”22 I want to grapple more with the significance of this insight: that is, how might this notion of “dreams” be thought as rather than “beyond” racial or ethnic claims? And how might this way of thinking about ethnoracial discourse—that is, not as descriptive language directly commensurate with categorical subjects but as connoting instead dense and contending world visions—allow us both to challenge and to raise (what is perceived as) the stakes of determination, as well as to transform structures from which the very desire for determinacy, these confines of knowing and being known, grows?

Reposing the problem this way performs the critical function of clarifying the subtle but irreducible line between ideological correspondence and ideological struggle. In other words, it removes our analysis from a concept of race as discrete correspondence between people in a category and the seemingly fixed ideological boundaries of that category and instead moves us into a concept of race as living manifestation of ideological (and ontoepistemological) struggles between people in real time. Wen Liu’s argument seems to end on a similar note, proposing that “one must realize the politics in body not in abstract terms but in their material manifestations.”23 Again, shifting from an either/or to a both-and proposition avails the study of human struggle through dynamics within and between both abstract and material forms: making more relevant questions regarding race as the abstracted problem or definition of the human; the ways that complex articulations of the human in realms of abstraction are themselves always bound to, even as they do not correspond with, material being; and the relationships between any particular idea of the human, the apprehension and arrangement of human difference within that concept, and constant materialization of the sources, applications, and effects of that idea through living struggles varyingly understood as “racial.”

Stopping Asian Hate

Shoulda, woulda, coulda. My purpose in raising these challenges is not to breed more regret but, rather, to reflect that I am less revisiting the Liang case than the Liang case appears to be revisiting us, again. That is, amid ongoing cries for accountability in the 2020 murder of George Floyd at the hands of four Minnesota police officers—one Hmong American—we return to the need to articulate the Asian Problem differently as another round of hegemonic analysis has ensued. In this context, I am heartened that in the intervening years between the murders of Gurley and Floyd, police abolition has become a competing demand for justice alongside the more common call for police accountability, thanks to the enduring energies of countless communities, social movements, and Black struggles over decades and even centuries. Nevertheless, the core generic features of an Asian for Black Lives framework still hold constant, from the imperative to reject model minority standing to the rehearsal of reasons why we must resist white supremacy by confronting anti-Blackness: a historical exegesis that may take us through the Los Angeles “riots” and affirmative action debates to evidence Asians as complicit pawns in white supremacy, on the one hand, and, on the other, the 1960s Asian American movement and the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin to evidence our greater motivations and potential to resist.24 To be clear, at the moment I am not problematizing the turn to history per se (I myself often teach units on these same turns of events) but, more exactly, the resources or explanatory frameworks we rely on to generate meaning out of lived conditions—for example, as when Simeon Man observes that “what has gone unnoticed in most historical accounts of this movement [for justice for Vincent Chin] is that many activists understood anti-Asian violence in broad terms, seeing it not as a result of ‘discrimination’ or ‘scapegoating’ but as symptomatic of the capitalist system itself, including the violence of criminalisation and policing.”25

At this current conjuncture, then, we again face the opportunity and urgency to shift from a hermeneutic in which race explains violence, delimited within a politics that assumes an a priori categorical and ultimately universal subject, to one in which “race” is a constitutive part of the problem of violence that needs to be explained. Such a hermeneutic would compel analyses of race in every living instance as an unfolding constellation of subjective assertions—whether lodged explicitly as racial claims, more implicitly through assumptions of a universal human whose apparent existence needs no qualification, or some complex combination of both—varyingly exercised as political maneuvers in contexts of war. This essential qualification brings place-based dynamics of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, imperialism, heteropatriarchy, knowledge production, and other usually reified systemic antagonisms back into the scope of our observation and thinking on what race is and what our own racial claims can do. Such a perspective thus also removes us from the theoretical need for categorical innocence (or guilt), uniformity, and consensus and, instead, both allows and obliges us to interrogate what is happening in deeper and broader terrains of struggle and to redefine what the object of any collective struggle may be.

In the case of George Floyd’s murder and the call for prosecution, the inconvenient fact of the ethnoracial diversity of the officers again upheaves a common understanding of white supremacy strictly as categorically white people exercising power over categorically Black people. Yet, key features of this case diverge significantly from Liang’s trial and no doubt further contribute to the relative silence or lack of public debate surrounding central parts of it. First, proceedings against J. Alexander Kueng, Thomas Lane, and Tou Thao, slated to begin in late August 2022 at time of writing, come at the heels of an unprecedented guilty verdict for their superior and mentoring officer, Derek Chauvin: an unremorseful white male whose nationally televised trial and popularly celebrated conviction somewhat overshadow the significance of the case against his subordinates. Second, public implication of Kueng, a light-skinned Black police officer whose visual ambiguity has led to inconsistent reports of his own ethnoracial background, further vexes the limits of hegemonic progressive discourse and its capacity to address the complexity of this cohort and the relationships between their social identities, their jobs, their actions, and white supremacy.26 Third, Thao’s ethnicity as Hmong American may puzzle Asian and Asian American activism that has conventionally assumed or required an East Asian character—although the generally unproblematized aggregation of Pacific Islanders into the Asian umbrella in most progressive Asian American activism is a more extreme indication that difference will remain a willful oversight (and indeed, such willed ignorance also ongoingly conditions campaigns to #StopAsianHate, to be discussed shortly).

Nonetheless, despite the crucial differences, certain lessons we may gather from Liang’s trial and the activism surrounding it remain relevant for the present. Namely, we face another opportunity and obligation to consider more robustly our working definitions of whiteness and white supremacy—as when, for example, Nikhil Pal Singh elaborates the dominant conditions through which Blackness and whiteness are not “strictly reducible to specific white people or black people . . . [but] emerge as subject positions, habits of perception, and modes of embodiment that develop from the ongoing risk management of settler and slave capitalism, and more generally racial capitalism.”27 From the specificity of this perspective on U.S. policing, calls to challenge white supremacy can move from a unifying cry of “justice is justice” (in essence, instantiating a white subject positioning in its support for dominant machinations of risk management to reproduce existing conditions) to take to task the point—in a cruel contradiction, the very argument presented by Chauvin and the countless others exonerated or never arraigned before him—that police are just doing their jobs when they torture and kill Black people, and any other cop would understand these actions as part of their hard work and choices. Specific to the upcoming trial against Kueng, Lane, and Thao, much hinges on this contention precisely because questions about race or racialized intent cannot be asked, let alone answered, within hegemonic frameworks, leading to a case in which dominant problematizations of white supremacy will be displaced into questions about hierarchy proper. That is, the indicted officers’ varied roles have led criminal defense attorneys to emphasize the effects of a militarized chain of command on the ability of subordinate officers to stop the murder. While prevailing calls for racial justice in this case must necessarily dismiss the defense’s argument in order to pursue proper prosecution, we must consider the consequences of denying the essence of a police job to “become the badge”—that is, to become an anonymous agent of the carceral state, alienated from the supposed individual identified with the body carrying the life force that has been sold under government employment contract (the status of political-economic and culture wars among us in public education, among other sectors, constantly determining the extent to which the same may be true for us).

Again, it will have been more tragedy if the energies of millions of people are absorbed into the demand to address and purportedly resolve the violences required to maintain a racial capitalist state through the legal prosecution of private individuals. Fortifying rather than abolishing settler state apparatuses that administer racial capitalist violence, such a supposed victory reestablishes legal and discursive precedent to keep claiming that mass murders are the exception rather than the rule in this form of humanity, while reinforcing the conceit that the criminal justice system represents our vision of justice and has our consent to define and punish criminality. While, certainly, abolitionist groups from the Black Panthers to Critical Resistance have proven that it is possible to pursue reform and abolition simultaneously, this notion of police accountability does not fall within the purview of nonreformist reform. Rather, such a movement and mode of understanding ultimately renders unavailable (to be euphemistic—or kills, to be blunt) critical thinking about the processes through which people become stripped of their own humanity and deputized through racial capitalist alienation, as well as the ways that communities are systematically killed precisely through the productivity of institutional organizing and administration rather than through individual will.

At the level of the individual, then, to come back to Liang as an example: this would mean that, whether one is decisive or agnostic about the need to convict, a more transformative line of argument would be to acknowledge the truth of the defense, as abolitionist groups have long also expressed, that the system works exactly as it is supposed to. In this sense, Liang must thus learn through his own brutal experience the fact that—ironically, for the very same reason he may have shot Gurley to begin with—there is no safety to be found in either criminal or racial justice, not even for foot soldiers who become foot soldiers to protect themselves against other foot soldiers (as the majority of BIPOC who have also enlisted in the police, military, or the intellectual academy, for that matter, know too well). This raises at least two openings for popular consideration, whether the case be against Liang, Kueng, Lane, Thao, or even Chauvin: (1) that the trial itself, while having immediate stakes and significant consequences, is a zero-sum game in a structural sense, in that win or lose, exoneration or conviction, nothing has fundamentally changed vis-à-vis affirmation of the supremacy of U.S. law and order and its capacity to represent and administer universal justice (in the case of exoneration, the system, as is, simply prevails again; in the case of conviction, the system can maintain itself through autocorrect as prompted); and thus (2) the actual lesson here for Liang’s supporters is Liang’s own fatal mistake in expecting or hoping that in becoming an agent of racial state violence, he would be safe from it. Vulnerability to systemic violence is, indeed, racialized or group-differentiated, as Liang’s advocates point out (with respect to Liang, not necessarily to Gurley), and yet it is also ultimately universal: as any individual could at any time, depending on the particular state of war, be sacrificed—or rescued, for that matter—in the service of maintaining or securing dominance (think, for instance, of why mass shootings of white middle-class schoolchildren are allowed to continue unabated).

In this regard, again, my thoughts do not come from a conceit of political purity in which no prosecution or reformist activism at all can or should take place, only that it is worthwhile to consider more rigorously how we might generate vision or reimagine our social explanations and goals in and through the doing. In the case of Liang’s trial, Asian and Asian American efforts to support justice for Akai Gurley and his family, rather than revolving strictly around a demand to punish, could have instead spotlighted and supported the demands made public by Gurley’s family in the intervening months between Liang’s conviction and his sentencing: introducing tangibles that would also shift the boundaries of debate vis-à-vis Liang’s advocates who rhetorically endorsed accountability at the department level. Specifically, Gurley’s family joined existing calls for the NYPD to end all vertical patrols permanently and for the city to divert funds allocated to expand the NYPD to invest in social resources, such as affordable housing, community centers, and after-school programs.28 In this pending context, current and future campaigns in the vein of Asians for Black Lives could likewise deindividualize demands to punish and focus their energies on sustaining efforts in Minnesota and across the country to defund or abolish police through localized movements and measures that simultaneously restore stolen wealth.

Finally, perhaps the most decisive circumstance transforming the ideological terrain for Asian and Asian American activism since Gurley’s murder in 2014 is the Atlanta spa shootings that occurred in March 2021, coinciding with Chauvin’s trial verdict and sentencing, or at the height of public attention on movements calling for justice for George Floyd. Again, Liang’s trial also holds lessons that help contextualize the ensuing momentum to #StopAsianHate, insofar as the tragedy in Atlanta that killed eight people, mostly Asian women, galvanized national support for that hashtag or movement with an intensity briefly comparable to the visibility of BLM (within a hegemonic imagination that abides by an additive model of race thinking). On the one hand, the Atlanta shootings, in their specificity, prompted more careful thinking on the conditions that qualified the killings, such as executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta Phi Nguyen’s assessment that “we have to tell and reckon with the whole truth of why they’re not here with us today: systemic racism, White supremacy, gender-based violence, the enduring impact of war, both here and in Asia.”29 On the other hand, and on a more general basis, little attention has been paid to how movement discourses vis-à-vis systemic racism and white supremacy—how they are defined, invoked, explained, connected—need to evolve precisely in relation to the task of reckoning with constitutive dynamics, such as gendered violence and global war. In this sense, I have always thus cringed at the appropriately contradictory double entendre of “Stop Asian Hate” as suggesting an end both to hate directed toward Asians and to that emanating from Asians; by the latter provocation, I mean to return to the categorical assumptions that make the Asian case legible within hegemonic forms of racial justice and the effects of those assumptions and forms on social struggles more broadly.

Critically, one theoretical disagreement that has unfolded over the decades, and that also animated the binary activist divide over Liang’s trial, is the problem of whether the apparent existence of Asians demonstrates the need to break the Black–white binary in critical race theory and racial justice advocacy or whether anti-Asian sentiment is foundationally derivative of anti-Blackness and would thus resolve in a united fight against the oppression of Black Americans. As actualized in Asian and Asian American activism, the break the binary perspective manifests in arguments for Liang’s exoneration that assert or assume the uniqueness of anti-Asian racism, or oppression that is both exterior to the dynamics occurring between Anglo and Black American communities and subordinates Asians vis-à-vis Anglos in ways discrete from the subordination of Black Americans. In contrast, arguments for Liang’s conviction actualize a “derivative” perspective in which the decision to ally with Black Americans rather than to comply with Anglo-Americans decisively furthers Asian self-interest (inversely, in this thesis, complying with Anglo-Americans can only be but “white assimilation” rather than some other distinctive political maneuver and trajectory).30 Due to the limitations of hegemonic forms of race thinking discussed earlier, no discursive or imaginative space hence exists here to contemplate living dynamics of anti-Asian racism and Asian racialization that are both distinct from and connected to other “fatal couplings of power and difference.”31 Within these confines, then, the movement to #StopAsianHate marks a convergence of the previously opposing poles of Asian and Asian American activism through their ideological reconciliation along the core racial assumptions they still hold in common.

Most powerfully, theoretical adherence to the integrity of discrete, objective, and transparent categories (or “race” as descriptive rather than problematic) facilitates the contraction of a previously triangulated ideological terrain in the context of Liang’s trial (Black–white–Asian) to a binary one in the context of Asian hate (white–Asian), all again within an interpretive framework in which race explains violence in some self-evident way. This excision of the need to contend with multiplicity, however the latter may be perceived, produces theoretical grounds that, for reactionaries, validate their claims of unique victimhood and, for progressives, allow for the simple theoretical replacement of Asian for Black within the definition of white supremacy as a vertically hierarchical and binary formulation. Thus, the two blocs ultimately come together along at least three core tenets that motivate #StopAsianHate: (1) that Asians suffer abjection in America; (2) that Asians, who have been victims of our own silence as model minorities, must take a stand; and (3) that to not take a stand is to condone anti-Asian violence. While in solidarity with popular efforts and desires to end anti-Asian violence, I am disturbed by this rise of an Asian and Asian American politics that hence denies rather than embodies contingency—a maneuver or worldview that enables as much as it may prevent more race violence.

A Case for Inscrutability

To be clear, the validity of sentiments behind #StopAsianHate are certainly not lost on me, particularly to the extent that the hashtag or movement first emerged as a response to President Trump’s anti-Chinese threats and the acceleration of U.S. fascist movements during a time of intense global catastrophe. Nevertheless, the problems I have indicated have led to harmful directions and outcomes that only deepen the crisis. Perhaps more obviously by now, the critique I have laid out regarding the limits of individual criminal prosecution can be more or less directly applied to critique the dominant (though not uncontested) demand to formalize hate crime legislation purportedly to protect Asians. Yet, when looking at the some of the most spectacular incidents that went viral as cases of anti-Asian violence, we come across a less obvious (because largely inarticulate) and equally dangerous aspect of this movement’s direction—that is, the compulsion to cite racism based strictly on the supposedly transparent identity of the victim, regardless of what we may question or discern of the context of specific attacks or the circumstances and positioning of alleged offenders. As representative examples of the many that have worried me, only one day after the Atlanta spa shootings, a video went viral of a seventy-year-old Chinese woman who was hit in the face as she was leaning on a light pole in downtown San Francisco, and who then blew back at her assailant in kind: the video showing a disheveled, middle-aged Anglo man bloodied on a stretcher and an older woman holding a wooden bludgeon while also bleeding from her face, still verbally agitated at the assailant as she is surrounded by police. Local news footage shows her repeatedly calling the assailant “a bum” while he lay on the stretcher and referring to him as such to the crowd, while Twitter feeds identify him disparagingly as a drug addict.32 The day after that, the New York Times ran the headline “Asian-Americans Are Being Attacked. Why Are Hate Crime Charges So Rare?” Coverage begins with a story about a Chinese man stabbed in the back in Brooklyn in February 2021 by a twenty-three-year-old Yemeni immigrant, sparking local outrage among leading Asians and Asian Americans because the assailant was charged with attempted murder but not with a racist hate crime.33

Of course, whether targeted or seemingly random, assaults on these two persons and on anyone in any example are distressing, and I empathize with everyone especially concerned about the vulnerability of elders. That said, in both these instances—strategically raised during a sensitive historical moment—even the most superficial details indicate a need to consider a variety of other social factors besides anti-Asian hate that may animate the event and foster violence. In both cases, dominant identification of Covid-19 as the “Chinese virus” at its outset, coinciding with deepening political and capitalist antagonisms between the United States and China, surely intensified anti-Asian sentiment and violence within the weakening hegemony of U.S. multiculturalism, as much as it also heightened attention to the former in prevailing liberal media accounts.34 Yet, observable details in both cases also flagrantly point to other effects of the pandemic that must be acknowledged as part of the broader context of disaster: that is, unrelentingly severe and widespread crises in housing, health care, mental health provision, drug treatment, family and youth services, and nearly all other forms of basic support that we need for daily survival. In both cases, any pronounced political motivations for violence are unclear, at best; moreover, while avowedly racialized (insofar as there exists no “outside” to racism or racialism yet), the conditions of difference, power, and inequity in either situation cannot be assumed and, in any instance, cannot be resolved by displacing what we can interrogate about mass catastrophe and its ubiquitous effects into easy distinctions of victim and criminal. Nevertheless, a hegemonic Asian and Asian American politics whose legibility rests on the disavowal of contingency can do nothing but remain silent on these matters of life and death, leading to circumstances that, in the name of antiracism, only reproduce the machinations of racism in the final instance.

In practical terms, the most recent recall of former San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin serves as a concrete example of the development and effects of these ideological maneuvers, as they helped to invigorate and ultimately fulfill previously unsuccessful attempts to thwart the formal advance of an abolitionist agenda for city development, amid long-standing struggles to restructure criminal justice in the Bay Area. In this context, ideological precedents established by earlier sensationalized cases have spiraled to help generate political havoc. For instance, in the example of the Brooklyn attack, legibility as an anti-Asian hate crime demands popular permission to disavow the open secret or question regarding the assailant’s subjection to equally virulent anti-Arab campaigns tethered to forever wars, as well as the relationship or inclusion of these circumstances in what we may also consider anti-Asian violence and racism. Repeated practices of such willed ignorance—brilliantly prompted and played by the ideological wings of war strategists who have rolled out sketchy example after example—have facilitated conditions through which stopping Asian hate could serve as a front to reinstitute measures that criminalize mass suffering and strivings to survive it, and particularly as both are signified in hegemonic terms by Blackness. Most directly, this includes the relentless media campaigns by San Franciscans for Public Safety Supporting the Recall of Chesa Boudin (or Safer SF Without Boudin, for short), the group that led the recall campaign with primary leadership and funding from the Bay Area’s corporate real estate and technology giants. Among other tactics, their campaign spotlighted the federal lawsuit brought against Boudin by a group of lawyers organized as the Alliance for Asian American Justice; the specific case offered for media attention is one in which Boudin allegedly failed to prosecute a Black man and his son accused of threatening and attacking a Vietnamese man, Anh Lê, in San Francisco Chinatown in 2019: letting the adult “off” with a misdemeanor plea and one-year probation and choosing not to prosecute the eleven-year-old child (interestingly, prevailing media accounts of this “hate crime,” as typical now of most, omit contextual details and social information about alleged assailants altogether in order to privilege claims of Asian hate, and progressive groups do not have any wherewithal to comment).35

Again, it is perhaps most critical now to acknowledge that this Asian Problem for racial justice is not exclusive to the Asian case, even if it is most clearly represented by or as it. Rather, the problem is a function of the current paradigm of racial justice proper—in other words, the theoretical norms, representational practices, political tensions, and ideological contradictions that delimit the evolution of #StopAsianHate also do so across social fields and contexts within the scope of racial justice, even as the specific constraints and dynamics of struggle always vary. In the case of Boudin’s recall, for example, Safer SF Without Boudin diligently recruited their own rainbow coalition of BIPOC, queer community members, and people who have experienced incarceration, houselessness, and substance abuse to represent their cause; this complex racialism also emerged explicitly (though not spectacularly) in the days following Boudin’s recall, in which celebratory callers on the public radio show KQED Forum included a self-identified democratic socialist who said Boudin did not understand “the streets” and a self-identified Black caller who said Boudin did not care about crime against Black and Brown people and failed to police their neighborhoods.36 The more generalizable optic, exhaustingly familiar from the multicultural heydays of the Clinton and Obama years of my youth in San Francisco and earlier adulthood in Los Angeles, betrays a progressive victory vis-à-vis the replacement of a white, cisgender, heterosexual, middle-class, Ivy League–educated male with (just as of today, at time of writing in July 2022) a Black Latina public prosecutor, Brooke Jenkins, in a city governed by a Black woman, mayor London Breed. While I cannot offer detailed insight into the implications of these developments on city governance, at the level of ideological significance, the contradictions of racial justice have thus reproduced mystification of the deep political lives of both the city of San Francisco, where liberal inclusion has long mediated the city’s sanctioning and practices of anti-Blackness, and of Boudin himself, accountable to a profound legacy of anti-imperialist struggle.37

What, then, can we learn from the Asian Problem—or, what can be done about us? I would first like to suggest, provisionally and by way of conclusion, that a more expansive starting point for examining the implications of the Asian case is through the lens of racial inscrutability, which defines Asian through an ontological freedom to be known as always-already unknown. While iterations of the ideological figure of the “inscrutable Asian” in the United States have fixated specifically on East Asians, a defining feature of orientalism as such is this generalizable notion of an impenetrable geographic and intellectual terrain upon which the modern project of Western knowledge and civilization begins to assert and reassert itself. Thus, on the one hand, while not universalizing the model minority myth to the diversity of groups ever classified as Asian, a premise of inscrutability can still augment rather than completely nullify generative analyses first conceived through a model minority framework, providing conceptual backdrop or establishing conditions of possibility further to desediment spectacular performances of “minority” achievement in the norms of U.S. civic life. In this latter regard, more intellectual space may become available to elaborate contradictions, or render them more precisely, when investigating how, why, and under what conditions such performances function as means of coming into legibility as a human subject under the dominant or Eurocentric terms of modernity.38 This latter line of thought (although not pursued here) likely bleeds further into contemporary problematizations of Asian American racialization and assertion in broader processes, such as settler colonialism in the Pacific and homologous movements of gentrification on the American continent—if we likewise carry over the thesis that the model minority premise cannot adequately treat the latter phenomenon either.

On the other hand, starting from inscrutability also establishes the Asian racial case as a nonderivative term that must be correlated with specific social conditions of emergence in every instance of its citation—lest the referent remain dematerialized historically even as we must remain unknown ontologically. The implications of this idea are at least twofold. First, it becomes more possible to investigate Asian and Asian American racial positions without necessarily falling back on cause-effect analyses routing back to white supremacy or the exigencies of U.S. racial state management, even as these relationships will almost always need to be carefully studied. As a direct example, in view of the crisis of “the AAPI community [becoming] a wedge issue for criminal justice”—as this was articulated in the multiracial activism to prevent Boudin’s recall—an avowal of inscrutability would not only displace the presumption of categorical transparency and the reification of people into a uniform issue. It would also allow us to acknowledge the “wedge” made clear by the existence of complex difference within the Asian case and, furthermore (as basis for other analyses beyond the present one), use it to break open new dimensions within hegemonic terrains of progressive struggle that not only include and affect global relations but enable qualitatively different problematizations and possibilities.39

Second, on the other pole of the same contradiction, this approach offers an alternative to assumptions of the Black case as the imagined superhuman (rather than subhuman) against which the Asian case must also remain categorically and discretely defined. (While I cannot elaborate more here, it may be worth noting that this latter ideological tendency still relies on dominant logics of human hierarchy, in an inverse formulation, that at first blush appears to subordinate the Asian case to the Black in the service of becoming an ally but, in the final instance, only reproduces the original terms of anti-Blackness in which the Black case is always at the bottom, as it were.) Neutralizing this mode of comparison is especially urgent in view of the contingency delimiting the Asian case—as I have argued—which diverges from a certain lack of contingency that delimits the Black case (that is, insofar as the gestalt of BLM calls attention to the existential rather than contingent condition of Black bodies to “magnetize bullets”): a race difference that underscores how the ideal equivalence or analogy of #StopAsianHate to BLM in relation to white supremacy is not only untenable but unethical.40

What I am suggesting about the distinguishably contingent nature of the Asian case is certainly not new, as this lens has been foundational to the elaboration of a distinctively Asian and Asian American critical lens and racial form since at least the turn of the twenty-first century.41 More recently, Lynn Fujiwara and Shireen Roshanravan’s contemporary articulation of Asian American feminisms defines its boundaries precisely through collectively constructed forms of recognition, forged through the constant if fraught negotiation of irreducible difference.42 In this regard, as I have argued, continuing to contemplate the race concept through meditation on the Asian case can lay bare the provisional nature of all racial forms, even and especially those categorically assumed as stable. This is not to argue that certain patterns of war tethered to other categorical denominations, such as “Black” or “white,” are equally variable; this is merely to point out that living struggle nevertheless still always undergirds dynamics people often assume as given or inevitable. Attentiveness to the problems posed by the Asian case, then, serves as a quintessential reminder of the need to question rather than to assume the limits of racial category, in every instance in which race is an operable analytical lens—which is to suggest, again, either always or until racism is absolutely abolished. Moreover, studying the dominant dynamics and techniques of (de)humanization relative to the Asian case may well give us insights into what to look for or expect in other trenches of war.

It bears mentioning that the approach here provides further tools to rethink progressive Asian American reactions to the characterization of insularity that often accompanies ascriptions of inscrutability. Rather than denying or seeking to rectify—at least rhetorically—the charge, it may help first to consider insularity not as an innate racial trait but as an ongoing consequence of living in a violent apartheid nation-state (often after fleeing a differently articulated genocidal nation-state). This perspective may thus lay challenge to progressive assertions that our communities must be somehow more forward-facing or coalitional in order to be antiracist. It seems obvious to say now, but this cannot always be true and may not always be desirable or even possible. In this sense, understanding insularity not simply as a false stereotype but as a historical condition can also provide avenues to examine more thoroughly the potentialities of Asian and Asian American advocacy, activisms, feminisms, and general socialities that do not articulate themselves through a framework of Black solidarity, even and especially as their communal activities may have implications and effects on possibilities for that solidarity, or for connections with Black life more abstractly, to emerge. Along these lines, recent monographs by Christine Hong, Moon-Ho Jung, and Simeon Man each differently present Asian and Asian American cultural studies that, rather than defining a politics based on cross-racial coalition, excavate complex social dynamics across the Pacific region that establish conditions of possibility for both global carceral and abolition geographies.43 Likewise—and akin to earlier work, such as (another former CAAAV staffer) Eric Tang’s analysis of connections between technologies of war used in Southeast Asia, techniques of U.S. policing, and knowledge production facilitated by think tanks such as the RAND Corporation—contemporary questions have arisen that examine techniques of data mining used to control both migrant laborers (predominantly from Asia and the Third World) and women’s reproductive capacities in the United States, while also further interrogating the implications of these developments on the future of police surveillance.44 This quality of investigation yields much by way of clarifying both the dynamics through which racial being reproduces itself and the constant revitalization of possibilities for a world otherwise.

Ultimately, if a lens of inscrutability may help to contextualize the distinctiveness of contemporary Asian and Asian American activism in its emphatic concern for making oneself known (and, as I have tried to show, the pitfalls of this desire for legibility), then I propose that our definitive aim may be to remain human within our embodiment of racial disorder. Rather than to move toward racial legibility or to assume management of dominant racial optics, this indeterminate trajectory of inhabiting the inscrutable—striving if not already in excess of relevance to any civil society—resonates with the thrust of Black life that opens within opacity, exorbitance, improvisation, and fugitivity;45 Indigenous life that exceeds hegemonic politics of recognition and sovereignty;46 and Latinx life that problematizes mestizajeand miscegenation as a prevailing racial-sexual form of nation-state identity.47 In this unknown, much more remains to be elaborated with respect to this conjuncture, at this dense level of living abstraction, where racial cases may converge to actualize a “concretely universal WE.”48

Author Profile

Sharon Luk is currently an associate professor and Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Geographies of Racialization at Simon Fraser University. She is the author of The Life of Paper: Letters and a Poetics of Living beyond Captivity (2018, University of California Press).