help for etst

ASIAN AMERICAN FEMINISMS AND WOMEN OF COLOR POLITICS

EDITED BY LYNN FUJIWARA AND SHIREEN ROSHANRAVAN

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS Seattle

Copyright © 2018 by the University of Washington Press Printed and bound in the United States of America Design by Katrina Noble Composed in Minion Pro, typeface designed by Robert Slimbach 22 21 20 19 18 5 4 3 2 1

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS www.washington.edu/uwpress

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Names: Fujiwara, Lynn, 1964– editor. | Roshanravan, Shireen, editor. Title: Asian American feminisms and women of color politics / edited by Lynn Fujiwara and Shireen Roshanravan. Description: Seattle : University of Washington Press, [2018] | Series: Decolonizing feminisms | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018011126 (print) | LCCN 2018012662 (ebook) | ISBN 9780295744377 (ebook) | ISBN 9780295744360 (hardcover : alk. paper)

| ISBN 9780295744353 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Feminism—United States. | Asian American women—Political activity. | Minority women—Political activity—United States. Classification: LCC HQ1421 (ebook) | LCC HQ1421 .A85 2018 (print) | DDC 305.420973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/201801116

Cover illustration © Vesna Asanovic Cover design by Katrina Noble

CHAPTER 12

WEAPONIZING OUR (IN)VISIBILITY Asian American Feminist Ruptures of the Model-Minority Optic

SHIREEN ROSHANRAVAN

In November of 2014, Peter Liang, a Chinese American police officer employed by the New York City Police Department (NYPD), was conducting a routine patrol in the dark stairwell of a predominantly African American public housing unit in Brooklyn. With the elevator out of commission, residents regularly used the stairwell to enter or exit the unit. On this day, for an unknown reason, Officer Liang entered the dark stairwell with his gun drawn and ready to fire; it accidentally went off. The bullet ricocheted off a wall and killed Akai Gurley, an innocent unarmed African American father who happened to be leaving his friend’s seventh-story apartment. Instead of immediately administering CPR and calling for an ambulance, as professional protocol required, Liang left Gurley to bleed, as he worried about his own fate instead of Gurley’s imminent death.1 Consequently, Liang was indicted for second- degree manslaughter, a charge that carries a sentence of up to fifteen years in prison, becoming the first NYPD officer to be indicted in ten years for an on-duty shooting. In response to Liang’s indictment, Chinese Americans across the nation took to the streets with signs that read “Racist Prosecution” and “Peter Liang Deserves Justice Too.” The first nationwide public protest led by Asian Americans in decades sought public attention for what they believed was the racist prosecution or “scapegoating” of a Chinese American police officer (Wang 2016). Justice Danny Chun eventually reduced Liang’s charge from manslaughter to criminally negligent homicide and sentenced Liang to five years of probation and eight hundred hours of community service but no jail time.

As the nationwide protests erupted against Liang’s indictment, another Asian American mobilization took flight in support of Gurley’s family and the larger Black Lives Matter movement. In New York City, the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence (CAAAV) and Asians4BlackLives-NYC issued statements to the Chinese and larger Asian American community to declare solidarity with Gurley’s family and demand police accountability for the systemic murder of Black people (Rao 2016). During a discussion hosted by the independent media outlet Democracy Now! CAAAV executive director Cathy Dang sat next to Akai Gurley’s aunt, Hertencia Petersen, in vocal and visual solidarity with Petersen’s demands for justice for her slain nephew. Dang’s visual and ideological alignment with Gurley’s aunt stood in stark contrast to that of John Liu, also present for the discussion, who sat opposite Petersen and persistently defended Liang’s light sentence. While Liu, the first Asian American elected to the city council in New York City, argued with Petersen and at times talked over her, Dang entered the conversation infrequently but thoughtfully to support Peterson and the larger demand to hold all police officers accountable for murder. She never attempted to speak for Petersen or make her own display of Asian American solidarity the reason for being present. Instead, Dang made clear in her comments that Petersen’s demands should also

be Asian American demands, insisting that “all lives matter when Black lives matter” (Democracy Now! 2015). Her presence in the Democracy Now! segment offered a model of Asian American visibility inextricable from coalition with Black struggle.

This chapter analyzes these different post-Liang trajectories of Asian American public visibility to argue that Asian Americans can challenge what Mitsuye Yamada calls our “unnatural invisibility” only by enacting Women of Color coalition politics.2 In both of her chapter contributions to This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Yamada (1981, 74) argues that silence in the face of injustice reinforces the Orientalist distortion of Asian American women as the “least political” among women of color. Yamada’s call can be read as an echo of Frank Chin and Jeffrey Paul Chan’s (1972, 75) claim that “the method of being not-black is to make a lot of silence for all the noise the blacks make.” Yet, as the Peter Liang protests make clear, breaking silence and piercing the public shroud of a state- prescribed compliant invisibility is not sufficient to challenge the anti-Black logics of Asian American racial formation. Given Women of Color critiques of the racial state as a purveyor of violence in communities of color, what should a Women of Color political project of Asian American feminist visibility entail? If maintaining “cultures of dissemblance” is essential to Women of Color strategies for collective self-determination (Hine 1989), how do we need to rethink what visibility should mean for Asian Americans who have benefited from the model-minority racial project at Black Americans’ expense?

As Grace Kyungwon Hong (2006, xvii) argues, the racial state’s commitment to white supremacist neoliberal logics make “visibility a rupture, an impossible articulation,” for women of color and our communities. Women of Color politics lives in this impossibility of legibility via the racial state’s divisive logics and emerges as meaningful in coalitions across what Audre Lorde names our “non- dominant differences.”3 Anchored in cosmologies and histories of resistance that challenge Eurocentric accounts, nondominant understandings of the very differences used to justify systemic state violence against us emerge within community, by and for those committed to living beyond state logics of possibility. Constructed as the antipode to a pathologized defiant Blackness, with the primary points of distinction our obedience to authority (silence) and investment in heteropatriarchal tight-knit families (insularity), Asian Americans inhabit a powerful locus from which to understand the coalitional imperative of any struggle against state violence (Wu 2015, 171). The project of Asian American feminist political visibility, therefore, cannot seek representation through appeals to the state and its institutions, but rather must be communicative beyond Asian America as a refusal and disruption of the state’s divisive racist optics.

Given the above, I engage Daphne Brooks’s (2006) tactical strategy of “spectacular opacities” to map an Asian American communicative politics of visibility that respects opacity as integral to insurgent Women of Color coalition politics. I invoke Édouard Glissant’s (1997, 67 and 49) understanding of opacity as “that which protects the Diverse” in its refusal to become legible according to principles of generalization that seek to assimilate or annihilate the other. The “spectacular” dimension of Asian American coalitional visibility is born from the intentional rupture of “model-minority” public transcripts that generalize Asian Americans as the silent and obedient racial-ethnic minority (invisible) who keep to themselves (insular). Exhibits of coalitional boundary crossing are thus central to this Asian American feminist praxis because they disrupt both state-prescribed hostility toward other communities of color and the heteropatriarchal principle of indifference to those not legally defined as one’s own community or kin. The Chinese Americans protesting Liang’s indictment sought to rupture their invisibility as the silent, obedient racial-ethnic minority while remaining loyal to divisive principles of insularity to protect and advance their own interests against state-imposed obstacles. As one Asian American participant at a

Liang protest rally conceded to a Black woman who asked where were Asian Americans during Black- led protests against the racist criminal justice system: “At the end of the day, if it’s not your people, you do not care” (“Christopher Kwok Defending Chinese Protestors” 2016).

The current #NotYourModelMinority pledge and Asians4BlackLives mobilizations in support of the Black Lives Matter movement refuse this closed insularity in a communicative exhibit of coalitional boundary crossing. By confounding, if not disarming, the model-minority scripting of Asian Americans, Asian-Black solidarity projects enact “spectacular opacities” or “dark points of possibility that create figurative sites for the reconfiguration” of Asian American bodies “on display” (Brooks 2006, 8). Displays of Asian-Black solidarity rupture model-minority constructions of Asian Americans as insular, silent, and anti-Black. The disruption of these dominant expectations of anti-Blackness renders Asian Americans opaque in the face of “hostile spectators’ epistemological resistance to reading alternative racial and gender representations” (8). This opacity in turn extends an invitation to (re)learn Asian American (inter)subjectivity in coalitional relation with Black communities against whom we are racialized.

ASIAN-BLACK ROOTS/ROUTES OF COALITIONAL VISIBILITY

I begin with Yuri Kochiyama and Grace Lee Boggs because they serve as important anchors for understanding the historical legacy and dynamics of what I am calling an Asian American feminist praxis of coalitional visibility. As two Asian American women activists well known within and beyond the grassroots political and academic institutional circles of Asian America, they are most recognized for their intimate and sustained commitment to movements for Black liberation rather than their political identification or work with Asian American communities. For this very reason Kochiyama and Boggs exemplify a process of becoming Asian American political protagonists through modes of relating and learning in relation to those against whom we have been racialized. I highlight, in particular, Kochiyama’s and Lee’s emphasis on learning about, and identifying with, Black struggle without ever appropriating that struggle as their own, and the consequent confounding (or occlusion) of their Asian American identities via this coalitional immersion. The question of whether Boggs and Kochiyama are more models of freedom fighters for Black community than Asian American feminist resisters signals an epistemic investment in what Glissant (1997, 11) calls “root identity.” Root identity reduces Asian American belonging to singular terms of linear descent from an originary mythic (geographic, familial, cultural) site of authentic and pure Asianness. If, however, we understand identity through Glissant’s “Poetics of Relation,” in which “each and every identity is extended in and through a relationship with the Other,” then Kochiyama’s and Boggs’s Asian Americanness is not confounded by their deep and expansive relationship with Black communities and struggles; by contrast, it is only in and through these relationships that we can glimpse how, and with what meaning, they emerge as Asian American.

Yuri Kochiyama’s activism is a key example of how cross-racial grassroots solidarity enacts “spectacular opacities” that make her simultaneously “invisible” or “opaque” to the public yet visible in her coalitional commitment to a politics of liberation across communities of struggle. In C. A. Griffith’s and H. L. T. Quan’s (2010) documentary film When Mountains Take Wing, Angela Davis and Kochiyama reflect on the lack of credit given to women of the civil rights and Black Power movements. Kochiyama states, “People know who almost all the big names were.” Davis joins her in finishing the statement: “But not the women who did the real work.” As Davis affirms this general statement on women’s invisibility in the civil rights and Black Power movements, she does so as one of the few women famous for her activism in these movements and beyond. Kochiyama, on the other hand, is much less popularly known. Davis then continues, “If we want to encourage young people to continue to do the organizing work that

will lead to social movement that will have a radical impact we have to legitimize the role of the organizer, which means, also, the work that women, that you’ve [pointing to Kochiyama] done.”

In this exchange Davis at once legitimizes Kochiyama’s legacy of doing the “real” work of organizing in social movements that have had a radical impact and characterizes this work as “women’s work.” Such work does not yield the kind of fame enjoyed by a public political activist whose name everybody knows, by Kochiyama and Davis’s own account. Documentation of the details of Kochiyama’s political legacy and the work she mobilized exposes her political work as decidedly grassroots, coalitional, and radical in its orientation. Kochiyama’s political visibility was thus decidedly routed through and rooted in her commitment to coalitional boundary crossing and the relationship-building processes integral to sustaining a coalitional movement. The goal of coalitional boundary crossing is not vertical communication with the state or general public, but rather horizontal communication with those with whom one seeks to build new horizons of liberation. This “real” work of organizing in social movements remains invisible but generates a coalitional visibility that communicates solidarity across racial-ethnic boundaries of difference. Because the goal of this “real” work is not visibility to the public, Kochiyama’s role in doing this “real” work renders her opaque except among those with whom she is mobilizing for social change.

That Kochiyama became radicalized through the Black Power movement serves as a model of Asian American feminist politics that affirms Asian American racial identity formation routed horizontally through people of color liberation rather than vertically toward model-minority assimilation. Her invisibility to the public lies in the rupture of Asian American root identity and the presumptions of insularity attached to model-minority racial formation. Within this rupture, however, we glimpse an Asian American coalitional visibility recognized and honored by the communities (Asian and Black) to whom she committed her life’s work.

Similarly, Grace Lee Boggs (1998, xv) notes her own “habit of self-effacement” in the introduction to her autobiography: “As the only Chinese American present at political meetings, I tried not to draw attention to myself and was visibly embarrassed whenever I was singled out for praise. During the turbulent 1960s people used to joke about my ‘passion for anonymity.’ ” She goes on to write specifically about the significance of her racialized gender identity as a Chinese American: “Had I not been born female and Chinese American, I would not have realized from early on that fundamental changes were necessary in our society. Had I not been born female and Chinese American, I might have ended up teaching philosophy at a university, an observer rather than an active participant in the humanity-stretching movements that have defined the last half of the twentieth century” (xi). Her statement echoes Lorde’s emphasis on Women of Color coalition politics as happening through meaningful connection across our nondominant differences, in which we affirm the wisdom born of inhabiting these differences. Boggs makes clear that her identification with Black freedom movements does not happen in spite of her locus as a Chinese American female but rather because of it. The activation of her Chinese American resistant subjectivity came through her becoming an “active participant in the humanity-stretching movements” led by African Americans (xi). That she calls the Black freedom struggles “humanity-stretching movements” is significant insofar as she recognizes the capacity to stretch her sense of being a Chinese American female self through identification with Black struggle. This sense of identification invokes María Lugones’s (2003, 85) understanding of “identification” as a self-transforming epistemic shift that requires suspending one’s familiar assumptions about one’s identity to enable a faithful witnessing of one’s self and the worlds one inhabits through the eyes of those differently oppressed. In Boggs’s case, her immersion in Black struggle allowed her to read her own liberation as interdependent with that of Black peoples.

Identification, as Kochiyama and Boggs enact it, does not involve sameness or commonality and thus evades the dangers of mimicry. Boggs (1998, xi) notes the inability of the FBI to make sense of her presence as a non-Black Asian American in the Black movement, leading them to describe her “as probably Afro-Chinese.” This FBI classification of Boggs illustrates what Brooks (2006, 8) describes as “the hostile spectator’s epistemological resistance” to read Asian Americans beyond anti-Black insular model-minority racial representations. While Boggs admits to following her African American husband, Jimmy Boggs, in the early years of her involvement in Black community organizing in Detroit, she clarifies this process as part of the epistemic shift that transforms her and prevents superficial mimicry of Black identity in the struggle. Although not center stage in meetings, Grace Lee Boggs was working to understand the intimate connections between her liberation and those in the Black communities where she lived and learned about the world. She writes, “In the 1950s I rarely went to a community meeting without Jimmy and would usually just listen or ask questions” but goes on to clarify that later, “having worked in the city and socialized with Jimmy’s friends and Correspondence readers for years, I felt I had something to contribute. I was beginning to feel comfortable with the we pronoun,” (Boggs 1998, 118). Boggs, like Kochiyama, emerged into a coalitional “we” through the hard work of coming to see her Asian American female self as interdependent with Black struggle.

Kochiyama and Boggs exhibit resistance to state violence through coalitional connection where the jury to which they give themselves up to enact justice is the communities of color with whom they seek solidarity rather than the mainstream public and its racist, (hetero)sexist filters. Their visibility as Asian American women activists is routed through their intentionally resistant reach beyond the rigid state- defined racial-ethnic boundaries of who constitutes their own people, and thus involves a refusal to invest in the principle of noninterference as integral to their pursuit of justice and well-being. Boggs and Kochiyama thus remain opaque to those invested in the singularity and insularity of “root identity” and in model-minority racial and gender expectations of Asian Americans. They emerge as visible and intelligible as Asian American when we use an Asian American feminist lens grounded in the epistemic truth of Glissant’s “Poetics of Relation” (1997, 11). Asian American racial positioning as always tangential makes us especially disposed to recognize the dangers of insular and singular “root identity” modes of resistance and to face the relational and interdependent reality of all struggles. The potential visibility of a truly resistant (rather than complicit) Asian American identification demands cross-racial alignment, and thus a process of coalitional self-making that can rupture the divisive public lens of model- minority insularity.

THE COALITIONAL IMPERATIVE OF THE RACIAL THIRD SPACE

A central premise of my argument is that Asian American racialization as “neither black nor white” arms Asian Americans with a grenade that can explode or reinforce racism’s suicidal divisions. By racial third space I mean the consigned locus of Asian American racial subjects. Homi Bhabha (1994, 39) uses the term third space to refer to an unrepresentable in-between space that “eludes the politics of polarity” as it confounds the colonizing investment in boundaries erected to create and police fictive notions of purity. Gloria Anzaldúa (1999) similarly theorizes the racial third space as the site of concrete fleshy intersubjective negotiations that exceed and counter the racial state’s reductive and normative abstract either/or logics. As an in-between space that explodes the fictions of institutional boundaries, all flesh- and-blood racialized subjects inhabit the racial third space in their resistance against racial reduction.

Asian Americans, however, inhabit the unrepresentable “third space” not only in their flesh-and-blood resistance but also in their hegemonic racialization as neither-black-nor-white model minorities. As Claire Jean Kim (1999) argues in her theory of racial triangulation, Black and white are two poles of the

socially enforced US racial continuum of “relative valorization” with Blackness positioned as the hegemonic prototypical domestic symbol of nonwhiteness and racial degradation. Kim situates Asian Americans as racially indeterminate US subjects who become legible as US racial subjects when read in relation to the US black/white binary. The question posed in the title of Kim’s 2004 article, “Asian Americans are People of Color Too … Aren’t They?” captures this hegemonic consignment of Asian Americans to racial uncertainty between black and white and the corresponding suspicion of our capacity for cross-racial solidarity with other nonwhite peoples. How we respond or don’t respond to this question either disrupts or reinforces our anti-Black construction in service of white supremacy. As Soya Jung (2014) so powerfully puts it, “We are either left or right of the color line. There is no sitting that out. … Our options are invisibility, complicity, or resistance.”

Ian Haney Lopez’s (1996) analysis of the so-called prerequisite cases for US citizenship at the beginning of the twentieth century demonstrates that racial legibility of US citizenry (in its legal sense) has been defined primarily through the portal of whiteness or Blackness. Before 1952, anyone seeking naturalization as a US citizen had to claim legal classification as either white or Black. While those who were neither Black nor white who brought their case for citizenship to the Supreme Court could have chosen to prove their eligibility through the portal of Blackness, only one did (Lopez 1999, 35). Lopez underscores the court’s ultimate reliance on “common knowledge” for what constituted the boundaries of white identity to rule on one’s citizenship eligibility. As the courts invoked “common knowledge” to define white as that which was not nonwhite, they concomitantly marked the specific boundaries of nonwhiteness, barring different ethnicities from US citizenship (20). The parameters for proving “Black” citizenship required a more restrictive criteria of demonstrating African ancestry (20), while proving a claim to white racial identity required proving that one was not not-white. As such, the failure of Asian appeals to state legibility as not-not-white not only blocks us from legibility as US citizen-subjects but also trains us into habits of active dissociation from, and devaluation of, Black people as a key strategy for achieving state recognition of US belonging.

I am thus invoking the consigned racial third space of Asian America to understand the voiced frustrations of Asian Americans about our sense of racial invisibility as US subjects of color (often expressed in relation to a hypervisible Blackness) and the particular communicative barriers toward a racial visibility that does not feed anti-Black state logics. Because the black/white binary is central to the construction of our racial ambiguity, it necessarily shapes our resistant possibilities both in maneuvering the model-minority construction to evade violent targeting by the racial state and in rupturing model- minority erasures of state-sponsored racism against us. To illustrate, Asian Americans who reject “honorary white” racist positioning reinscribe anti-Blackness when claiming visibility as aggrieved racial minorities just like Black people (Roshanravan 2018). The Peter Liang case referenced at the start of this chapter is instructive here. Asian American protests against Liang’s indictment for Akai Gurley’s murder challenged a criminal justice system that would indict an Asian American for a crime that white officers systemically commit without similar consequences. These protests thus name the criminal justice system as racist against Asian Americans just like Black people because the system failed to let Liang kill Black people without accountability like other white police officers.4

In short, Asian American hegemonic consignment to the racial third space in the United States compels us to face the ever-present choice between becoming legible to the US public either through a portal of whiteness that prescribes closed insularity away from other nonwhite peoples, or through a portal that effectively commits one to forge an identity in relation to those ejected from the purview of white inclusion. The model-minority racial project seduces Asian Americans to choose the portal of whiteness, inscribing and prescribing their insularity from Black community as innate to the “modelness”

of Asian racial disposition. Liang, in his NYPD uniform, exemplifies performance of this model Asianness, as he became part of a state agency whose mission historically has been to “protect and serve” white supremacy.5 Both Liang’s murder of Gurley and his subsequent indictment protected and served white supremacy, not only in the destruction of Black life (the ultimate violent dissociation from Blackness), but also in offering the courts a nonwhite token through which to feign police accountability for the systemic state murder of Black people.

Wu Yiping, a coordinator for the protests against Liang’s indictment, further evidences the anti-Black logic of this “model” Asianness in his suggestion that the Chinese immigrant community’s insular focus on their careers accounts for Chinese-Black hostility over Liang’s case (Wang 2016). In this statement, Yiping reinforces the model-minority construction of Asians as the respectable racial minority (who keep to themselves and focus on their own socioeconomic mobility) by invoking its corollary construction of Black people as the unruly racial minority (who lack the discipline to stay out of trouble and achieve careers that would lift them out of public housing). As Alex Quan-Pham and Kat Yang-Stevens (2016) document, news outlets wasted no time portraying Akai Gurley as a criminal with a prior record of arrests whose death at the hands of cops was justified if not inevitable. Gurley’s constructed criminality amplified the model-minority portrayal of Peter Liang as a well-intentioned “rookie cop” who made an innocent “mistake” and thus did not deserve to be indicted or serve jail time (Quan-Pham and Yang- Stevens 2016). Yiping’s coordination of the nationwide protests against Liang’s indictment and his public comments about the ensuing Asian-Black intercommunity tensions reinforce these presumptions by dismissing and vilifying Black rage as based on a “misunderstanding” rather than the systemic state murder of Black people. Through Yiping’s complicity with the institutionalized model-minority discourse, we see the animation of an authorized version of Asianness, portrayed as more disposed to rational civil discourse and state-prescribed insularity, which draws hostile boundaries against other nonwhite groups while “protecting and serving” white supremacy. The corollary construction of the irrational, raging, unruly Blackness of Akai Gurley’s family and community is essential to animating this authorized version of model “Asianness.”

Disrupting the anti-Blackness of model-minority logics requires exhibits of Asian-Black solidarity that explicitly counter weaponized state constructions of US Asians as insular “model minorities” that can be readily wielded against Black lives. As such, being seen in our specific racialized experience as Asian Americans who identify as US people of color requires an ever-evolving (self-)understanding of Asian American identity that is interdependent with (but not the same as) Black struggle. Accordingly, Asian Americans enter tricky terrain when attempting to express our need to be seen as active subjects in struggle against racial subordination. We can experience (with differing degrees of intensity) the seductive illusion of relative privilege in our model-minority racialization; and regardless of our (in)ability or refusal to give uptake to the illusion, we simultaneously suffer the psychic pain of not being seen in our struggle against racial subordination. Yet, as Kochiyama and Boggs demonstrate, the politics of not being seen is often a necessary aspect of doing the “real” work of organizing in movements for social justice. Remaining opaque to the public in one’s resistance to state-sanctioned oppressions can also be and has been an important insurgent Women of Color strategy of survival against racist dehumanization and distortions. Let’s turn to this infrapolitical avenue of survival and the obstacles it presents for Asian Americans seeking to undo our “unnatural invisibility” (Yamada 1981).

PERILS OF ASIAN AMERICAN INFRAPOLITICS

James Scott (1990, 19) defines infrapolitics as “a wide variety of low-profile forms of resistance that dare not speak in their own name.” Infrapolitical resistance is thus operative through its capacity to

remain unrecognizable as resistance to the oppressive systems being resisted. If, in Scott’s terms, the “public transcript” presumes Asian Americans to be insular and obedient model minorities, Asian American infrapolitical resistance to white supremacy would rely on this “public transcript” to enact its “hidden transcript” of resistance (xii). Jid Lee’s “The Cry-Smile Mask: A Korean-American Woman’s System of Resistance” offers an important example of how infrapolitical resistance, when not combined with more publicly communicable disruptive modes of resistance, reinforces the anti-Black racist underpinnings of the model-minority racial project.

Lee begins her essay with an anecdote in which one of her former students, a forty-year-old white woman named Susan, who, in Lee’s company, responds to a Black man’s kindness with the comment, “I wish they were all like him. He’s so nice. No bitterness or anger. If all Black people were like him we would be in heaven” (2002, 397). Uneasy, Lee responds to the incident by thickening her “cry-smile mask,” which, in her words, she has “worn since she came to the United States in 1980” to cope with the racist “burden of smiling [that] always fell upon me” (397). After historicizing this “cry-smile mask” as a culturally specific reference to her Korean cosmology, Lee explains that the mask allows her to maneuver Orientalist expectations toward coalitional possibilities. She performs her expected smile in the face of racism, “opening a door” that, she hopes, will invite, even seduce, cross-racial perception of the “cry behind the smile” (398). This “cry behind the smile” signifies people of color struggles and suffering erased by racism’s epistemic commitments to remain blind to the violence it enacts.

Lee acknowledges that the “cry-smile mask” risks feeding the “racist love” of those who expect Asian Americans to accept white racism cheerfully. She responds to this charge by insisting on the significance of “long-term” change that overrides any retrenchment of the model-minority stereotype (399–400). The dialogue enabled by the “cry-smile” mask, Lee argues, outweighs the racist stereotypes it seemingly reinforces to the extent that the dialogue is essential to inviting others to see the “cry” (oppression of people of color) behind the “smile.”

The relational dynamics of racism generally, and the specific implications of her own in-between racial locus, however, are absent from Lee’s account of the efficacy of her cry-smile mask in challenging racist logics among white people. This is particularly evident when she compares her “cry-smile” mask to the mask of survival described in Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask.” She writes of her connection to African American literature, “I could identify with African Americans as a whole race, because I could feel what they felt, and because I had to wear a mask—much like their own—to survive” (400, emphasis added). Dunbar’s poem describes the “mask” that African Americans have to wear to maneuver in white/Anglo racist culture while painfully communicating the “double consciousness” in the very act of wearing the mask. Dunbar, like Lee, suggests that white expectations shape the mask and that the decision to wear the mask is not about subordinating oneself to these expectations but instead about cultivating strategies to survive and maintain a resistant sense of self. Nevertheless, Lee’s claim that she identifies “with African Americans as a whole race” because she “could feel what they felt” ignores how the very expectations that shape Lee’s mask thicken the layers of the mask of racist expectations that African Americans have to wear.

This truth is particularly significant when one considers Lee’s decision to wear the “cry-smile mask” instead of confronting Susan for her anti-Black racism. Susan’s wish that all Black people were “kind” and “nice” (instead of bitter and angry) articulates institutionalized racist expectations that demonize Black people as bitter and angry relative to “model” Asian qualities of compliance and accommodation. The survival/resistant strategy of Lee’s “cry-smile mask” relies on a closed insularity. As she explains, because Susan was no longer her student, she “could not correct her” (396). Lee’s “cry-smile” requires and allows her to not interfere in the racism expressed by and toward people outside the institutional

bounds of her own people. While Lee’s felt connection with Black struggle aspires to coalition, she reduces Blackness to a source of inspiration from which she draws but to which she does not contribute. Her identification with Black people reduces the differences between Asian American and African American struggles to a generic ahistorical experience of racism that in turn presumes the capacity to utilize systems of resistance (like the infrapolitical smile in the face of racism) with similar consequence. This mode of identification contradicts the Women of Color politics of affirming and insisting on the specificity of our nondominant differences as a source of strength in coalition building. As such, Lee’s system of resistance illustrates the perils for Asian Americans who use infrapolitical modes of survival that rely on the model-minority public transcript to stealthily maneuver in the face of racism.

Lee’s strategic refusal of spectacular rupture of state-sanctioned racist optics is not accompanied by an inward turn to honor or foster the possibility of coalitional relations between Asian American and Black communities. While insularity may serve as one tool in the resistance/survival tool kit against white supremacy, its capacity to reinforce the model-minority racist optic of Asian Americans (and Black Americans) requires that its use be accompanied by exhibits of cross-racial coalitional boundary crossing. The current Asians4BlackLives mobilizations demonstrate this truth in their strategic disruption of public transcripts of Asian American model-minority insularity to enact an Asian American feminist praxis of coalitional visibility.

POETICS OF RELATION: IDENTIFYING WITH BLACKNESS

We have now established the following claims: recognition of Asian Americans as US racial citizen- subjects who suffer and resist state-sponsored racism requires collectively disrupting our public transcript as uncertain in our political orientation between whiteness and Blackness; and Blackness exists on this socially enforced US racial continuum as the hegemonic prototypical domestic symbol of nonwhiteness. Given both of these claims, it follows that Asian American racial visibility as people of color divested from anti-Black racism requires exhibiting Black identification. By “Black identification” I mean a process of recognizing one’s interdependence with Black racial formation, which María Lugones (2003, 97) defines in terms of coming to see oneself through another’s, in this case Black people’s, eyes.

This process of identification is tricky because recognition of interdependence ought not be mistaken for an invitation to mimic, co-opt, or otherwise empty Blackness of its lived cultural specificity. The various mobilizations under the Asians4BlackLives campaign illustrate an important communicative shift toward Asian American demands for visibility. Instead of an “us too!” logic, the campaign makes Asian Americans visible as inextricably coalitional with other people of color—most explicitly, with the very Black communities against which Asian Americans are racially intelligible as model minorities in the United States. If “the problem of communication is primarily about recognition and disposition to communicate,” as Gabriela Veronelli (2015, 122) states, then the Asians4BlackLives campaign tackles the problem head on. Not only does the campaign explicitly recognize the historical pain and resistance of the Black struggles motivating the Black Lives Matter movement, but it also enacts a coalitional disposition to intercultural communication by turning inward to self-definition in and through gestures that signal a commitment to learn about and understand Black lives.

That is, the Asians4BlackLives campaign ruptures the racial state logic that relies on nonwhite cross- racial antagonism and disconnection and instead issues a public cross-racial coalitional rescripting of Asian America. In the words of Audrey Kuo (2017) of Asian Pacific Islanders for Black Lives (Los Angeles), “We want to be visible but not for the sake of visibility but to call out to others to join us … to build bigger coalition.” To resist visibility for visibility’s sake is to refuse transparency to a racial state rooted in white supremacy and to resist the divisive logics that structure its filters of public visibility.

Instead, Kuo emphasizes that Asians4BlackLives actions seek a communicative visibility, one that issues a call for others disposed to end violence to join them in “building bigger coalition.” The breadth and depth of these coalitional efforts are evident in the fact that many of the collectives and networks communicating Asians4BlackLives solidarity are queer identified and feminist and incorporate strategies for consciousness-raising about anti-Black racism in Asian American communities and the Black Lives Matter movement.6 As such, the Asians4BlackLives campaign can be understood as emerging from a Women of Color coalitional feminist genealogy in which queer women of color have always led the way.

These collectives make Asian American struggles publicly visible as they issue a powerful and unequivocal statement of solidarity with Black Lives Matter. The public declaration of Asian-Black solidarity makes Asian Americans nonsensical to those unwilling to read beyond the state logics of model-minority racial and gender representation. However, their interlocutors are other Asian Americans and Asian immigrant communities and Black communities of struggle, not the racial state. They lay bare the state violence that structures communication from Asian America to Black America without reducing them to sameness. As the Queer South Asian National Network (QSANN) states, “We are committed to drawing connections between Islamophobia, caste-based oppression, privilege and complicity, xenophobia and profiling, and anti-Blackness in ourselves, our communities, and the imperial US” (2015, 1). As they go on to describe the horror of watching South Asians profiled as “terrorists” and murdered by police officers, they simultaneously call for a “model minority mutiny,” recognizing that the racial project seduces us into complicity with the long history of surveillance, criminalization, incarceration, and murder of Black people. Calling forth the embodied knowledge of state and interpersonal violence in both South Asian and Black communities, QSANN enacts Women of Color feminist methodologies of doing “theory in the flesh … where the physical realities of our lives—our skin color, the land or concrete we grew up on, our sexual longings—all fuse to create a politic born out of necessity” (Moraga 2015, 19).

The call for solidarity demands that we remember Black freedom struggles from which Asian immigrants have benefited immensely. These statements circulate through public media, giving Asian Americans political visibility as accomplices in the struggle against anti-Black racism. By rupturing model-minority and Orientalist logics, the campaign generates an opacity of who/what Asian Americans are and thus creates space for us to turn back to our communities of place and “commit to undoing anti- Blackness at home, working against Islamophobia, and challenging our identity within the model minority myth” (Queer South Asian National Network 2015). These exhibits of Asian-Black solidarity are thus not about seeking recognition from the racial state or visibility as people of color just like Black people in the general public. The emphasis is on refusing insularity that promotes cross-racial antagonism and simultaneously enacting horizontal coalitional boundary crossing and relationship building, which (re)define what it is to be Asian American and to whom we must be accountable in our resistance against white supremacy. Exhibiting Asian-Black solidarity enables an Asian American feminist praxis of coalitional visibility that simultaneously ruptures the racist optics of the state and generates an opacity that creates space for Asian Americans to stretch our sense of self and possibility as interdependent with the Black community.

Because the model-minority myth solidified through an anti-Blackness coded in heteropatriarchal family-centered gender conservatism, model-minority mutiny must also refuse the heteropatriarchal gender ideologies that underwrite model-minority respectability (Wu 2015, 183). Freedom, Inc., a collective rooted in the Hmong and Black communities of Madison, Wisconsin, makes this indelibly clear as they actively generate public materials that feature Black and Southeast Asian American solidarity and coalition that center queer and trans experiences. In one of their youth organizing campaigns, two

Freedom, Inc., leaders, one queer/trans and Black identified, the other a Hmong-identified woman, explain their definitions of leadership in terms of loving and creating family against what they’ve been told is family, against blood kin. In the last line of the video clip, they define Freedom, Inc., as “queer and trans Southeast Asian and Black leading so what we can get free because we know that our liberations are tied together” (Freedom, Inc. 2016). Their emphasis on championing modes of loving and building queer and trans family within Black and Southeast Asian communities embraces Cathy Cohen’s (2004) call for “deviance as resistance” since the loving and building of coalitional community transgresses heteropatriarchal traditions and norms of respectability within both communities of color. In other words, the Freedom, Inc., leaders exhibit a commitment to coalitional boundary crossing rather than a closed insularity by redefining who constitutes family beyond rigid state-sanctioned heteropatriarchal boundaries. In doing so, they disable the racialization of Asian Americans as respectable relative to Black deviance and in turn create a bridge toward more liberatory definitions of love and family.

The opacity generated in these displays of Asian-Black solidarity is evident in the epistemological resistance to Asian American presence in solidarity acts with the Black community. In his Politico account of covering a Black Lives Matter protest in Milwaukee, Aaron Mak (2016) reflects on the Black readings of his Asian presence as communicating solidarity while others questioned his presence, asking, “You’re Asian.… Why are you even here?” The latter question exposes the incomprehensibility of Asian- Black solidarity given the public transcript of Asian Americans as model minorities committed to an insularity that prescribes hostility or at best indifference to Black people and their struggles. Asian Americans showing up for Black lives is nonsensical when read through state logics. One must erase Asian presence from Black coalitional movements to keep dominant state constructions intact.

This explains Soo Ah Kwon’s (2013, 75, 86) observations in her ethnography of Asian American youth organizing in the San Francisco Bay Area, where “campaign discourses about youth incarceration and criminalization rarely mentioned Asian and Pacific Islander youth,” and “at many campaign actions, these youth were overlooked as targets of state incarceration or criminalization unlike their African American or Latino/a counterparts.” The cloud of confusion generated in the rupture of state logics of representation renders Asian Americans opaque to the state in their coalitional presence, opening avenues beyond the halting grip of the racial state to generate coalitional conceptions of Asian American feminist (inter)subjectivity through the eyes of communities against whom we are racialized. Evidence of these avenues includes conference calls organized between members of Asians4BlackLives and the Black Lives Matter networks to strategize Asian-Black solidarity (Tom 2015). Such strategies rely on remaining opaque or invisible to the state and open to the diversity that opacity protects. As QSANN (2015, 3) explains, “Part of challenging anti-Blackness in ourselves and our communities is crafting a new narrative of what it means to be South Asian in the US.” Without doing so, the survival/resistant strategy of infrapolitical insularity cannot but reinforce the model-minority racial project and its reliance on anti- Black racism.

TOWARD AN INSURGENT WOMEN OF COLOR EPISTEMIC LOCUS

Our racial positioning as always tangential makes us especially disposed to recognize the dangers of closed insularity and singular modes of resistance and to face the relational and interdependent reality of all community struggles. The potential visibility of a truly resistant (rather than complicit) Asian American identification demands cross-racial alignment and thus a process of coalitional self-making that can rupture the divisive public lens of model-minority insularity. The current Asians4BlackLives mobilizations build on the political legacies of Grace Lee Boggs and Yuri Kochiyama to illustrate a pathway toward Asian American feminist visibility through the “spectacular opacities” of coalitional

boundary crossing. Becoming visible through participation in Black freedom struggles, these Asian American political subjects and movements reject an Asian American visibility routed through a “poetics of disconnection” seduced by and supportive of US racial state logics of legibility and insularity.7 Asian American feminist visibility routed through a praxis of horizontal coalitional boundary crossing thus clarifies the racial third space of Asian America as an insurgent epistemic locus that opens toward a Women of Color consciousness of our interdependent realities and possibilities.

NOTES

  1   Officer Liang testified that he did call for an ambulance when he discovered that Gurley had been shot. However, there is no evidence in the radio transcripts submitted to the court that he did indeed call for an ambulance (Nir 2016).

  2   In “The Coalitional Imperative of Asian American Feminist Visibility,” I use post-Liang manifestations of Asian American visibility to map the anti-Black traps of “us too!” appeals for Asian American visibility (Roshanravan 2018). This chapter focuses on the coalitional possibilities of an Asian American feminist visibility and strategies for achieving them.

  3   Lorde (1984, 111) defines “non-dominant differences” as those positive life-giving differences constitutive of our complex (inter)subjectivity, which the racial state necessarily distorts to protect and promote the divisive logics of racism, (hetero)sexism, and other interlocking dominant structures of oppression.

  4   For further elaboration of the anti-Black traps of Asian American uses of analogy to Black struggle against systemic racism, see Roshanravan (2018).

  5   In “From the Convict Lease System to the Super-Max Prison,” Angela Davis (2000) traces the history of policing and imprisonment as an ongoing legacy of white supremacy and its investment in the enslavement, exploitation, and disappearance of Black peoples.

  6   These groups include Queer South Asian National Network; Freedom, Inc.; and National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, to name a few.

  7   Leslie Bow (2010, 127) coined the term poetics of disconnection to reference disavowal of a “self-implicating Blackness” experienced by Asian Americans in the segregated US South to affirm their greater proximity to valorized whiteness.

REFERENCES

Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1999. Borderlands / La Frontera: Toward a New Mestiza Consciousness. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Boggs, Grace Lee. 1998. Living for Change: An Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bow, Leslie. 2010. Partly Colored: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South. New York: New York University

Press. Brooks, Daphne. 2006. Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910. Durham, NC: Duke University

Press. Chin, Frank, and Jeffrey Paul Chan. 1972. “Racist Love.” In Seeing through Shuck , edited by Richard Kostelanetz, 65–79. New York:

Ballantine. “Christopher Kwok Defending Chinese Protestors at Peter Liang Rally (2-20-16).” YouTube video. www.youtube.com/watch?

v=zwIEOtkLlaA. Accessed January 18, 2018. Cohen, Cathy. 2004. “Deviance as Resistance: A New Research Agenda for the Study of Black Politics.” Du Bois Review 1 (1): 27–45. Davis, Angela. 2000. “From the Convict Lease System to the Super-Max Prison.” In States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons, edited by Joy James, 60–74. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Democracy Now! 2016. “As Officer Who Killed Akai Gurley Gets No Jail Time, Asian Americans Debate Role of White Supremacy.” April 21. www.democracynow.org 2016/4/21/as_officer_who_killed_akai_gurley.

Freedom, Inc. 2016. “Leading So We Can Get Free.” Freedom Inc. Queer Media Campaign 1.5. www.youtube.com/watch? v=iWBww6__Tqc.

Glissant, Édouard. 1997. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Griffith, C. A., and H. L. T. Quan. 2010. When Mountains Take Wing: Angela Davis and Yuri Kochiyama—a Conversation on Life, Struggles, and Liberation. Film. Quad Productions.

Hine, Darlene. 1989. “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West: Preliminary Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance.” Signs 14 (4): 912–20.

Hong, Grace Kyungwon. 2006. The Ruptures of American Capital: Women of Color Feminism and the Culture of Immigrant Labor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Jung, Soya. 2014. “Why Ferguson Matters to Asian Americans.” Race Files (blog), August 20. www.racefiles.com/2014/08/20/why-ferguson- matters-to-Asian Americans.

Kim, Claire Jean. 1999. “The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans.” Politics & Society 27 (1): 105–38. ______. 2004. “Asian Americans are People of Color Too … Aren’t They?” AAPI Nexus 2 (1): 19–47. ______. 2016. “The Trial of Peter Liang and Confronting the Reality of Asian American Privilege.” Los Angeles Times, April 21.

www.latimes.com/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-peter-liang-Asian-American-privilege-20160421-snap-story.html. Kuo, Audrey. 2017. “Feminist Solidarities / Black Lives Matter.” Roundtable, Association for Asian American Studies conference, Portland,

Oregon, April 15, 2017. Kwon, Soo Ah. 2013. Uncivil Youth: Race, Activism, Affirmative Governmentality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lee, Jid. 2002. “The Cry-Smile Mask: A Korean American Woman’s System of Resistance.” In This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation, edited by Gloria Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating, 397–402. New York: Routledge.

Lopez, Ian Haney. 1996. White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race. New York: New York University Press. Lorde, Audre. 1984. Sister/Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press. Lugones, María. 2003. Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions. Lanham, MD: Rowman and

Littlefield. Mak, Aaron. 2016. “ ‘You’re Asian, Right? Why Are You Even Here?’ ” Politico Magazine, August 23.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08/milwaukee-protests-Asian American-black-lives-matter-214184. Moraga, Cherríe. 2015. “Entering the Lives of Others: Theory in the Flesh.” In This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 4th ed., edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, 19. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Nir, Sarah Maslin. 2016. “Officer Peter Liang, on Stand, Breaks Down as He Recalls Brooklyn Killing.” New York Times, February 6. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/09/nyregion/officer-peter-liang-in-emotional-testimony-describes-the-night-of-a-fatal-shooting.html.

Quan-Pham, Alex, and Kat Yang-Stevens. 2016. “Akai Gurley the ‘Thug,’ Peter Liang the ‘Rookie Cop’ and the Model Minority Myth.” Truthout, February 26. www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/34988-akai-gurley-the-thug-peter-liang-the-rookie-cop-and-the-model-minority- myth.

Queer South Asian National Network. 2015. “South Asians for Black Power: On Anti-Blackness, Islamophobia, and Complicity.” September 11. https://queersouthasian.wordpress.com.

Rao, Sameer. 2016. “Asian Americans Demand #Justice4Akai.” Colorlines. www.colorlines.com/articles/Asian American-activists-demand- justice4akai-protest-outside-major-chinese-language-papers.

Roshanravan, Shireen. 2018. “The Coalitional Imperative of Asian American Feminist Visibility.” Pluralist 13 (1) (Spring): 115–30. Scott, James. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Tom, Alex. 2015. “Black Lives Matter Allies in Change.” Interview by Margi Clarke and Preeti Shekar. Reimagine!

www.reimaginerpe.org/20-1/clarke-shekar. Veronelli, Gabriela. 2015. “The Coloniality of Language: Race, Expressivity, Power, and the Darker Side of Modernity.” Wagadu 13

(Summer): 108–34. Wang, Hansi Lo. 2016. “ ‘Awoken’ by N.Y. Cop Shooting, Asian American Activists Chart Way Forward.” Code Switch: Race and Identity, Remixed, April 23. www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/04/23/475369524/awoken-by-n-y-cop-shooting-Asian American-activists-chart- way-forward.

Wu, Ellen. 2015. Color of Success: Origins of the Model Minority Myth. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Yamada, Mitsuye. 1981. “Invisibility Is an Unnatural Disaster: Reflections of an Asian American Woman.” In This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, 35–40. New York: Kitchen Table Women of Color Press.