#racefiles

“To my fellow Asian American men: can we re-envision Asian American masculinity to be anti-racist, womanist, queer, and liberational beyond our own identities? Can we make space for the criticisms of our women of color peers, and confront the certain privileges and powers that come with being Asian men in America, rather than attempting to use those same privileges to silence and shame those who raise critical questions?” -Mark Tseng Putterman

"Asian Americans are exceptional not because of meritocracy, but because our migration patterns and particular histories led to an aggregate state of relative privilege, in service to a set of agendas. We got invited to the real hustlers convention, even if just as the kitchen help, and learned that anti-blackness and settler logic are the poker chips for maintaining white economic and political dominance.

But there was once another strategy. As Asian Americans, we decided who we were alongside Black, Chicano, and Native American liberation movements, understanding ourselves as insurgent subjects of U.S. empire. Our identity is interracially defined. Like others, our liberation depends on black freedom. We can’t go back in time to the 1968 Third World Liberation Strike – the world has changed and so have we. But we can embrace an authentic Asian American politics that is rooted in history, shaped by current conditions, and unapologetically antiracist. We can make more visible our own stories of exploitation, vigorously refuse the complicities of excess, and set fire to the last 75 years of model minority myth making. Some of us were part of making that myth. Now all of us who call ourselves Asian American must work to undo it.

The racial justice movement needs us. Our experiences of war, imperialism, and the enticement to anti-black racism are necessary to push back against corporate plunder and state collusion, to dismantle the apparatuses of racialized violence. We must remember that as committed as Yuri Kochiyama was to black liberation, her experiences also shaped the thinking of Malcolm X. Mahatma Ghandi’s insurgent politics and strategies against British imperialism shaped Dr. King’s commitment to non-violence. From Ferguson to Palestine, follow the money and power in local police forces and detention centers, and you’ll find yourself at the doorstep of empire. Criminalization is the domestic face of imperialism. We are stronger together, and we must forge a strategy to demand state power that disciplines capital and serves the people, not the other way around.

It is time for Asian Americans to unleash model minority mutiny, link arms with the struggle for black liberation, and together, finally turn the world right side up. Let’s build the analysis, forge the commitments, and create the strategies we need for a united front against white supremacy."

Soya Jung

Scot Nakagawa

Good try, Eugene, but there are so many things wrong with this that I can hardly think where to begin. Just as a sampler, here are five: