Dwelling in “Minor Feelings” Will Get You Nowhere
The reconciliation of Black and Asian communities in this country needs a new direction.
While the recent tragic death of Michelle Go committed by a Black homeless person in the New York City subway station shook the public, the sentiment around anti-Asian violence has resurfaced in the mainstream narrative. With the national “Black Lives Matter” movement focusing on defunding the police, the call for more policing in the name of “public safety” and “stop Asian hate” has grown equally competitive. Though contradictory, both are in the name of fighting racism. Observed by the New York Times, it is as though Blacks and Asians are not able to build bridges and reconcile.
Nothing appears to be new in such an impasse. The problem is, how to move forward?
Minor feelings?
Reflections on Black-Asian relations find Asians trapped between Black-White tensions. In her award-winning bestseller book Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, Cathy Hong Park writes, “Asian Americans inhabit a vague purgatorial status: not white enough nor black enough; distrusted by African Americans, ignored by whites unless we’re being used by whites to keep the black man down.”
To bring Asians to the discussion of racism, authors like Hong tend to focus on individual acts and personal sufferings from racism. As her book title minor feelings suggests – “the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned and dismissed.” Hong then describes how she experienced these “minor feelings’’ when she faced racial epithets or when her writing was likened to that of other Korean writers.
The problem to these anti-racist writers then, is one of ignorance, dismissiveness and lack of recognition of Asian Americans in the mainstream narrative. Decrying being used as a model minority, Hong blames the lack of Asian Americans representation among the elites – “Nonexistent in politics, entertainment, and the media, and barely represented in the arts.”
The solution then, is to have a seat at the table in the system. Identity and representation over substantive political demands. Therefore, it wasn’t surprising to hear celebrities from the Black community like Jay Z openly sing, “gentrify your own hood before these people do it,” as if destruction is good — as long as those who commit it are from your neighborhood.
In the Asian-American community, we can easily find the counterparts. Look no further than New York City, where Hong lives: Margaret Chin, the first Chinese-American Council Member, represented Manhattan Chinatown for 12 years. During her time, a young generation of Asian-Americans made inroads into the upper echelons — such as Jonathan Chu the banker, landlord and cultural philanthropist; and Wayne Ho, CEO of Chinese-American Planning Council (CPC), the largest Asian-American social service organization in the country.
These “Asian-American representatives” spare no effort in making their “minor feelings” known in their arenas, and receive millions upon millions in return:
Margaret Chin: pocketed the money of the real estate industry and supported the racist Bloomberg and DeBlasio rezoning plans that denied the community equal land use protections against luxury developments as granted to the predominantly white and wealthy community to the north.
Jonathan Chu: as highlighted last year in the news, is the board co-chair of the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) which accepted $35 million from Mayor de Blasio to support his new jail plan in Chinatown. He also displaced Jing Fong, the largest restaurant in Chinatown, causing 180 workers to lose their jobs and the community to lose an important center.
Wayne Ho: helped CPC get tens of millions from the State government under the banner of “Stop Asian Hate” while forcing women of color home attendants to work 24-hour workdays for only 13 hours of pay. CPC is also working with a rich developer to build a luxury high-rise in the Lower East Side, which will cause rent and real estate tax increase in the surrounding area and escalate the displacement of low and middle-income families and small businesses.
If these ethnic representatives were White people, it would be no problem for social justice writers and activists to call them out as racists and White supremacists. But with an Asian face, suddenly they become the success story of fighting racism. It begs the question for those who advocate for people-of-color representation in the system: do you really want to end racism, or do you just want people of color to maintain it?
Even worse…
To maintain the system, it is not enough to just advocate to join the ruling class. It is also paired with maintaining the myth of the oppressed people as a numb and passive mass.
As Hong continues to emphasize Asian-American invisibility, she implicitly blames the communities and states there is no movement among Asian Americans, that they are threatened to “disappear” from the public eye and become “ghosted.” Hong writes, “Among the working class, Asians are the invisible serfs of the garment and service industries.”
In reality, there has been a long-standing visible and vocal movement among Chinese working-class communities fighting for more control over their workplace, housing, and health conditions. In Chinatown, home attendants are rising up to stop the inhumane 24-hour workdays, while restaurant workers are taking the lead to unify the community and hold Chu and the City government accountable for displacement.
Those workers see through the racism perpetrated by the “Asian-American representatives,” or the “high-class Chinese,” who benefit from the system and look down on folks of the same color. For years, the Chinatown workers organized to actively bust the myth of the “happy slave” or “invisible serf,” myths that foster the resentment and attacks from other races who think immigrants are “stealing their jobs.” They fight the racism in their own community.
These stories are curiously absent from the narratives of Hong and the like. By continuing to promote the invisibility of the Chinese working class struggle and narrowly fixating on the individualized manifestations of systemic racism, intellectuals and activists like Hong are helping to keep systemic racism itself intact.
System racism is fundamentally propelled by those holding power to divide people in order to benefit the monied interests. Our government has long made laws and policies to fuel hatred among the working class, to divide us from one another, so that the ruling class – whether they are White, Black, Asian or Latino – can enrich themselves further when they deepen our exploitation, steal our wages, break our health, and destroy our communities. These elites of course won’t openly attack Asian seniors and women in the street, but it is their maintenance of racism that subjects us to the daily violence of long work hours or displacement from our homes or community, giving rise to the daily slights, insults, and violent attacks based on race.
Unfortunately, many of the anti-racist writers and activists, hoping to climb up the ladder in the system, have no interest eliminating systemic racism. Perhaps, they do not truly want to escape the “vague purgatorial status,” so that they can continue to receive praise and money for denouncing racism while still enjoying the bourgeois privileges and concessions that come from being used as a model minority.
The historical roots
A brief look at the history of systemic racism in the US will help us find an answer to a different solution.
Near the end of slavery, Lincoln sent an emissary to China in 1862 to seek the replacement to slave labor—the Chinese—to build the railroads and work the fields at a cheaper price than paying former slaves. Chinese laborers were brought in to build the railroads, to work in the fields, and to break strikes. The ensuing anti-Asian sentiment among American workers led to the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned not only future immigration but also denied the citizenship of the approximately 300,000 Chinese already in the US. Chinese workers were then relegated into their ethnic enclaves or Chinatowns, similarly to how the government relocated Native Americans to reservations, and similarly to how newly freed Blacks were segregated under Jim Crow.
In the 1960s, in order to quell Black protest, LBJ’s Great Society programs delivered services to Black communities, while framing the crisis as a Black problem and poverty rooted in the “tangle of pathology” of the Black family. These programs served to mask systemic racism by redirecting blame to the failings to people of color themselves.
The “model minority” narrative fit well into this narrative, by stressing hard work, compliance, and self-help to climb up the ladder. By dismissing the wealth gap within Asian American communities and attributing Asian-American success to individual effort and family unity, the “model minority” narrative was used as evidence that racial and ethnic groups could succeed in the existing structure without addressing systemic racism.
Under Reagan’s successive onslaughts on organized labor, in 1986 the government enacted a provision of the immigration law which created a new underclass of workers with no rights — undocumented workers (see our previous post). Chinese, Latino and other immigrants working without work authorization were suddenly criminals under this law. As a result, greedy employers sought them out to work for subminimum wages, pitting them against Black and other American workers who were then forced to compete with an underclass of workers, undermining the unity of the working class.
Subsequent administrations have been maintaining such criminalization and division, whether they are Democrats or Republicans. Even under the Obama administration — viewed as progress for racial justice — police brutality, poverty in low-income communities of color and criminalization of immigrants continued and even got worse. Representational politics will not eliminate systemic racism and heal the divisions in our community. It will, however, fatten some model minorities with some crumbs.
Going beyond “solidarity” and “minor feelings”
Those in power want us to narrowly focus on the issue of policing, and it works — as the tenuous solidarity between Blacks and Asians is unraveling over it. It serves as a distraction from the more fundamental questions: Whose interests do the police serve? What order do the police maintain? Many activists and writers are not able to provide a clear answer, at best paying lip service to maintain solidarity. But the popular parlance of “solidarity” only posits the other group at most as an “ally,” supporting a cause or demand that they deem is not in their own interest. Hence, activists constantly retreat to the shell of “minor feelings” when pitted against another group we are supposed to be “in solidarity” with.
Unlike the ambivalent mire we find at the end of Hong’s book and in mainstream media, our communities are organizing to move this impasse. We can learn from the Chinatown and Lower East Side community in NYC and call out the racism from within our own communities. We can move past this impasse by recognizing our common exploitation, perpetrated by the government — with its arms such as the police — and its collusion with capital. We can move past this impasse by uniting across race to fight the systemic racism that divides us, destroys our communities, and pervades all aspects of our lives. With true unity, we can move past this impasse together.