Asian Americans and Racial Politics: A Postmodern Paradox

Abstract

IN THE CONTEMPORARY TERRAIN OF RACE POLITICS IN AMERICA, THE EXPERIENCES OF Americans illustrate a postmodern paradox. The category Asian resides on the periphery of racial politics in American society. Although Americans are frequently active participants in racial politics, their experiences are, for the most part, not defined by racial politics. Their experiences are defined relative to others' experiences, and, most important, are not seen as constitutive in and of themselves. Both popular and academic understandings of are shaped and defined by the categories black and white. In this conventional frame of black/white relations, Americans are perceived to be either like whites or not like whites, or alternatively, like blacks or not like blacks.(1) The fact that Americans are neither black nor white has meant that Americans have functioned as a wild card in racial politics -- their experiences are frequently ignored or appropriated by others (i.e., non-Asians) in discourses about race. For example, nothing more dramatically illustrates the sideline position of Americans in race talk than the 1992 post--Los Angeles riot discussions that took place, to borrow Elaine Kim's phrase, the heads of Korean-Americans.(2) On the other hand, Americans, the fastest growing group in the U.S. according to recent census figures, are frequently found at or near the center of race-related issues in the U.S. During the 1980s and early 1990s, Korean Americans emerged as embattled anti-heroes against blacks in New York City and Los Angeles; Vietnamese gangs more ruthless than their Chinese competitors were discovered in New York City's Chinatown; the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights reported that persons of ancestry suffer a disproportionate share of hate and bias crimes; and, the presence of a growing minority population, including Asians and Hispanics, set in motion fierce political battles over redistricting in New York and California. Americans are simultaneously central to race politics and yet often peripheral to discourses about race politics. What is postmodern about this condition is that the apparent solution -- adding the category Asian to discussions about race -- produces yet another layer of paradox. For the category Asian is itself an unsettled and contradictory set of identities (Lowe, 1991; Espiritu, 1992).(3) For example, claims that Americans, like many blacks, support a civil-rights agenda must be balanced against 1992 election results, which show that Asians were proportionately more likely than any other racial group, including whites, to vote for ex-President George Bush. I do not mean to suggest that the categories black and white are not also unsettled and troubled. Like other identities that we thought we knew -- including black, white, woman, and gay -- the meaning of Asian is variably determined and claimed through discursive and political struggles.(4) In this article, I explore the relationship between Americans and racial politics by looking at a recent controversy over American access to higher education. The controversy over American admissions, 1983--1990, although often overlooked as an eventful development in race politics, should, I suggest, be seen as an historically pivotal chapter in the evolution of American postwar understandings of race and equity. That the debate over American admissions frequently passes unrecognized as both reflective and constitutive of changes in racial politics in America reinforces my central point: the category Asian is interior to racial politics at the same time that it is peripheral to racial discourses. American Admissions Beginning in the early 1980s, American students and faculty accused the top universities of using quotas and ceilings to limit the enrollment of American applicants in higher education. …

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