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This essay offers a political phenomenology of some of the underlying structures of Asian American identity practices.Specifically, I focus on anti-Asian stigmatization and some of the self-evaluative emotions and self-making strategies with which Asian Americans respond in forming or maintaining their identities.I begin by situating Asian American experiences within the wider political framework.U.S. society is configured by a kind of orientalist liberalism in which Asian Americans are marked by a distinctive form of racism and xenophobia while at the same time their civic-cultural practices have been characterized as benignly assimilative and hailed as a model for other racial minorities.In contrast to much public discourse as well as some of the assimilation literature in the social sciences, I examine the problematic racialization of various kinds of self-consciousness among Asian Americans, particularly the self-regard of those who try to deracialize themselves in order to assimilate into the mainstream.To better understand the values and worldly engagements involved here, I consider emotion and self-evaluative emotion, and particularly the lived experience of shame, self-contempt, and the affective validation frameworks they presuppose.I then unite the discussion of political context and of emotive experience to give an account of various kinds of Asian American responses to anti-Asian stigmata and the conditions that give rise to them.Though I believe my account pertains to many kinds of Asian American, and even non-Asian American, identity practices, I recognize that some identity practices lie outside of the discussion that follows.If this essay is plausible, it may contribute to three kinds of projects.First, the essay may add another voice to the chorus that critiques the use of Asian American assimilation practices as a sign of democratic progress or of a post-racial America.Second, in philosophy, there is so little discussion about Asian American lived experience and politics, so the essay may shed a little light, at least in philosophy, on some aspects of Asian American civic and racial conditions.Finally, the essay may add to efforts that show how affectivity and politics can be deeply linked, and thus how philosophy of emotion and political philosophy can be mutually illuminating.Relatedly, unlike some sectors of political philosophy, affectivity is never excluded from phenomenological analyses of racial experience and identity.Nevertheless, more can be done to show how affectivity can be productively foregrounded, and I hope to have offered a reasonable account in this vein. The Politics of Assimilation: Preliminary ThoughtsAssimilation is remarkably complex.So, at the start, four context-setting ideas are briefly discussed.The aim here is primarily to clarify the general approach I take to the matter and delimit the scope of inquiry.First, following the primary meanings of the term "assimilate," there are two very general ways of thinking about assimilation, and they need integration.According to one way, the framing idea is of an entity or collective absorbing an external element. 1 Consider, for example, the works of two widely different political philosophers, Herbert Marcuse and John Rawls.The former connects critical theory with psychoanalytic psychology -see, for example, One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society [2 nd ed.] (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991).The latter connects liberal contract theory with Aristotelian moral psychology -see his A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971).Whether their connective work is plausible is of course another issue.2 Political white supremacy, whether or not this title has been adopted, has been conceived as one of the major political traditions of the U.S.And some go further to argue that it has been at the core of the U.S. polity.For just a sampling, consider Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s [2 nd ed.
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