Globalizing racial triangulation: including the people and nations of color on which White supremacy depends

ABSTRACT Racial triangulation theory brilliantly conjoins, at once, two different types of racialized hierarchies, thereby allowing more than the metrics of standard anti-African American racism (“the color line”) to be theorized. This is one of the hallmarks of the pathbreaking model. At the same time, this essay chronicles how racial triangulation falls prey to the common social science tendency of US centrism, nation-state singularity, and catch-all models, omitting the influence of (neo)imperialism, (neo/post)colonialism, neoliberalism, and other foundational projects of global and American racism. For instance, U.S. empire – i.e., militarist, capitalist, cultural dominance – means that most Asian ethnic groups experienced racial injustice and a version of racial triangulation in their sending countries before migration; in turn, the pre-migrant context profoundly shapes how the US racializes/positions these groups (often vis-a-vis one another) and how the margins respond. In addition, racial triangulation privileges eastern-descent ethnics, overlooks anti-South Asian American racism in the post-1980s and post-911 era, underappreciates Asian/Asian American resistance, and neglects to theorize those positioned at the intersection of “inferior” and “foreigner” (of which former President Barack Obama is emblematic). In spite of the (constructive) criticism, in this era of Covid-19 racism, the Atlanta Massacre, widespread state murder of Black Americans, anti-Latinx/-Mexican nativist racism, and Muslim Bans, we need to expand racial triangulation theory, not dismiss it.