Asian Americans and Anti-Blackness

Abstract

Scholarship is less about producing or revealing everlasting, universal truth than it is about engaging the ever-changing world around us in a critical and open-ended way. Revisiting scholarship from an earlier period allows us to reconsider academic research in relation to the specific political context in which it emerged, as well as the unfolding political contexts in which it continues to be read and put to use. It is an opportunity to think through the temporality of the ideas in question. Are they still relevant, less relevant, or perhaps differently relevant, in a new age? I am grateful for this chance to revisit “The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans” (1999), and I thank the editors, Christian Hosam and Sonya Chen, for conceiving and executing this project with dedication, insight, and skill. We live in the shadow cast by recent political events, whose flagrancy and intensity have surprised even the most pessimistic among us. From the police murder of George Floyd to the racially disparate impacts of COVID-19 to the rise of anti-Asian hate to the white nationalist insurrection at the Capitol to the assault on voting rights, we are reminded what a central role race plays in organizing U.S. social and political life. White resentment, briefly shamed into disguising itself after the civil rights era, has lost its shame and is stalking the land again like a rageful, hungry ghost. The preexisting fissures in the foundations of our democracy widen. When the Black Lives Matter movement called for a response to George Floyd’s murder—and to policing, racial capitalism, and the carceral system more broadly—an estimated 15–26 million Americans took to the streets. It was the nation’s largest and most multiracial protest in history. But how will these historic events be understood and remembered? Whoever controls the narrative controls the future. One Republican-led state legislature after another is now prohibiting the teaching of “critical race theory,” defined as anything that suggests racism has been integral to U.S. history. The ideological fix is in. Simply trying to understand race is now, more than ever, an act of political resistance. We must undertake it with a new sense of urgency. I thank the authors in this Dialogues section for approaching their charge in this spirit. Together, they note racial triangulation’s contributions to our understanding while also offering thoughtful and rigorous criticisms of where the theory is underspecified, where its conceptual focus is too narrow, and where it simply gets things wrong. All of the authors convey a sense of how important it is to get our understanding of racial dynamics