Introduction to Asian American Studies: Race and War
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I found the discussion of neo-conservative Asian Americans in the Omatsu reading to be fairly applicable to my personal life, since I have a few family friends that fit this description. In particular, one of the biggest policy issues that they take issue with is affirmative action in educational institutes since they believe that quotas for underrepresented minorities take away seats that belong to more deserving Asians. I think that this is illustrated by the ongoing lawsuit against Harvard University that was filed by a conservative advocate who has a history of opposing affirmative action. What they fail to understand is that blacks and latinos still remain underrepresented despite affirmative action, and that if anything, white students are those that are taking the place of Asians.
A big part of what I think makes someone a neo-conservative Asian is the internalization of the model minority myth. These people truly believe that Asian culture is what propels them to success without considering structural factors that disproportionately affect other minorities. They also tend to ignore the struggles of Asian-Americans who do not have access to the same resources and who suffer from discriminatory practices. In my experience, Asian-American neo-conservatives usually come from middle or upper class families that valued education and also had the time and assets to focus on it. They overly ascribe their success to internal factors without acknowledging situational ones.
Even though we didn’t get to talk too much about neoliberalism directly in class, I thought that the Omatsu reading really helped me understand the emergence of the “corporate assault” staged by big companies in the late 70s-80s, and its connections to the Asian American movement. It makes a lot of sense that an Asian American movement focusing on “‘merit,’ ‘qualifications,’ and ‘objective’ criteria” (Omatsu, 74) would emerge in an era where neoliberalism places a heavy emphasis on “individuals as entrepreneurs and enterprises” rather than as members of communities (Neoliberalism handout). The hyper-selectivity of Asian immigrants to America also helps obscure structural injustices, creating the conditions for the “neoconservative” Asian American, as described by Omatsu.
After the activity we did in class with keywords, I think it’s clear that lots of us in the class would want to see the Asian American movement reconnect with the 50s-60s movement’s focus on community, revolution and third-world-consciousness. However, I’ve been thinking that the way that capitalism has shaped (a certain, privileged subset of) the Asian American population today makes it hard to execute such a return. For myself, I couldn’t imagine talking to my parents about “third world solidarity” when the reason they uprooted their lives and came to America was to escape “third world” conditions, and I would find it really hard to talk about revolution and quote Mao (as Omatsu and some other authors we’ve read do) knowing my parents suffered through the cultural revolution. Of course, the population of Asian in the U.S. is far from homogenous, but this stream of “hyper-selected” Asian immigrants doesn’t seem to be slowing down any time soon. How might we use an understanding of neoliberalism and capitalism to also include these populations in an Asian American movement?
Neoliberalism was a concept that was largely unfamiliar to me – I had heard the term thrown around in various discussions, but didn’t understand what it really meant, much less the implications that it has in the status of Asian Americans and the postracial state. All of the readings last week contributed to my new understanding of neoliberalism. I knew that the conception of Asian Americans as a model minority was a myth, but I didn’t realize how harmful it was to other subgroups of Asians, like Southeast Asian Americans, which the Tang piece really put into perspective for me.
It bothers me that there are so many East Asians who buy into neoliberalism and think that they are contributing more to the free market because of superior cultural practices, ignoring the systemic and institutional advantages afforded to them. Positioning Asian Americans as the ideal neoliberal citizens also castigates other minorities, especially African Americans. My conclusion is that the idea of neoliberalism is dangerous, too often goes unclarified, and is unfair to those that already are often silenced.
Class reflection:
After our class last week, I felt reenergized in a lot of ways, especially when we did the popular education activity. The exercise of listing key words (liberation, community, solidarity, inclusion, coalition, anti-capitalism) that we hope the Asian American movement will shift towards gave me a better sense of my current role as a student at an academic institution and I felt hopeful about the future. I remember watching the Grace Lee Boggs documentary in the beginning of the semester and how many of the people involved with activist movements in Detroit around the late 1960s- 970s began to feel disillusioned, angry, and hopeless; I was struck by how a deep sense of pessimism seemed to play a significant part in fracturing and immobilizing activist movements. I feel that now, a lot of people my age describe themselves as pessimists in regards to the future because of the seemingly endless barrage of horrible things happening in our world today – from wars to systemic poverty to the degradation of the planet. When I think about how we can move towards liberation, community, solidarity, inclusion, coalition, anti-capitalism, I think of how critical it is to not only critique the world we live in today, but also believe strongly that another world is possible. Many of the speakers who came to visit our class have been organizing and effecting change for long stretches of their lives already, and I think that they’ve been able to sustain their work and keep going (and avoid burnout) because they are hopeful that another world is both possible and necessary.
Pan’s Beyond the Model Minority Myth was, I feel, a text that allowed us to come full circle in the class, as a chance to almost reflect on all that we have read and learned in class and through text. The context of the history and social movement was almost nonexistent for me when we first had the class focused on the model minority myth and allyship on February 19th and since then, with speakers such as Nhan Ngo, April Chou and Tara Ohrtman talking to us about activism and social movement and the Pop Ed exercise, I can more clearly understand the particular way that race is viewed and treated today and how it came to be. Through the Tang reading especially though, it is crucial to stand in solidarity with those whose voices may not be heard because they are ‘invisible’. This approach seems to directly oppose the attitudes of the neo-conservative Asian Americans mentioned in the Omatsu reading take. The widespread nature of these views among Asian Americans (as we discussed in class) is thus indicative of how much more education, awareness and solidarity needs to happen – and with this class and the great work that so many of the people we read from/about this semester, shows that though there’s still a long way to go, that the future is hopeful.
Class Reflection
Like Annabelle, the activity we did in class finding the keywords we hope that the Asian-American movement will move towards (liberation, community, solidarity, inclusion, coalition, anti-capitalism) was heartening for me — I hope we can internalize the need for collective action/consciousness that these keywords encourage. I also think we can draw a strong connection between the emergence of neoliberalism and the shift in the keywords towards the 90s/the 2018 keywords we also brainstormed last week. Neoliberalism works, in part, by touting the idea of “individual freedoms” alongside the freedom of the market. As we seemed to agree on in class, the 2018 words (such as “assimilation”, “representation”, “privilege”, “appropriation”) show a marked shift towards the individual — individual privileges and representation, rather than collective liberation and ideology. They are also relatively apolitical compared to the previous words/words that we hope to move to, and focus mainly on culture. In “A Brief History of Neoliberalism,” David Harvey calls on Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, saying that in order to keep certain issues from becoming politically contentious, “political questions become ‘insoluble’ when ‘disguised as cultural ones’” (ch. 2) . It seems like this may be the state that the Asian American movement is in now — pushed off as a “cultural” question, and highly individualistic, to prevent material and political analyses of the larger systems in place.
Class Reflection
After last week’s class I felt incredibly empowered to take an active role in the Asian American movement and be a part of the change our class agreed we wanted to see in the coming years. It was particularly moving to hear Dr. L speak about how the reason she was there, and thus the reason we were able to even take this class, was because of those student strikes at San Fransisco State and UC Berkeley. However, it was also sad to see how slowly Princeton is moving compared to other schools. While I understand the schools have different backgrounds and demographics, it still angered me to see the changes many west coast schools in particular have been able to see while Princeton is still struggling to offer more than 2 Asian American studies classes each semester. At the same time, I was left feeling very hopeful for growth. As Tara and April from the previous class said, it is important that we remain present and active for longer than our four years at Princeton, and I think that’s one of the most difficult things we can do. It’s easy to see this school as a temporary time, that we can come back to once a year to celebrate the memorable and fun times we had together. But if we want to make the change we said we wanted to see, both on and off Princeton’s campus, the passion and fire for intersectional political activism needs to remain strong and remain a priority like it has for the Vietnamese-American guest speaker who spoke earlier this semester. I hope to be a part of that change.
I had similar feelings to those of my classmates about the pop-ed activity. I was mostly shocked by how traditional it seems Princeton has been in regards to Asian-America Studies, despite the progress that has clearly been made by people like Tara and April to help give us classes like this. I also really enjoyed our brief discussion around statistics and data, though I wish we could have taken those ideas further. I think it has been very clear to us throughout this course that numbers can be tools of racial division and criminalization; however, I still wonder if there are ways to quantify the pain and suffering caused by racism and oppression. I understand the argument that one can’t express human experience in numbers, but I still feel there are ways to characterize pain numerically. After all, quantitative analysis, though rooted in basic governing mathematical and scientific principles, is itself a subjective process. As I believe someone pointed out, quantitative analysis and ethnography are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and I think there is great value in both. However, I can see how, in the eyes of a skeptic, numbers are more convincing, which is why I would hope to continue this discussion further as we search for opportunities for action and activism.
It’s been interesting to explore how the concept of “freedom” and “openness” and “allyship” and “solidarity”, all inherently good terms, when taken to their extremes nevertheless create the exact environment opposite to what these terms should create. Because of their positive nature, I think there is a tendency to over-emphasize their importance, and in doing that to also become overconfident that we have already achieved these goals in our society, when in fact that overconfidence represents an inability on our end to grapple with a society or situation that opposes these terms. An example of this is the concept of color-blindness, which though in theory is a wonderful idea, in practice is a facade for sweeping deeper systemic issues of racism or oppression under the rug. I don’t understand neo-liberalism that much, but from what I can gather it suffers from these sorts of issues, being a set of ideas that rose to oppose more conservative Keynesian economic ideas. There seems to be an overconfidence or overreliance on the market’s ability to make things right, when we know that the market never behaves as we hope it would.
I have nothing more to add to my peers’ comments about the pop-ed, and only hope the one we present next week can be half as insightful/fun!
In some ways, I’ve often felt extremely ashamed of Asian Americans in contemporary society. Especially as an Asian American in the arts, a space that demands the formation of communities of support, I’ve felt that Asian Americans can often be self-interested and not as inspired to be involved in efforts of collective protest. It’s a common thread to hear among Asian American actors that the black community is often more supportive of Asian American artists than Asians themselves. But through our readings and discussions, looking at the past Asian American movements that were much more focused on liberation and community, I’ve begun to understand that this shift in values can be attributed to neoliberalism, and this larger ideal of the “individual” and making it on your own. Especially as new immigrants, this idea of picking yourself up by the bootstraps can be especially significant and may result in this more fragmented Asian American movement we see today.