We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation (18 page)

You didn’t know yet of these words, but in the islands these ideas were natural as salt-soaked trade winds. As you became Asian American, you figured that you had an advantage over all your friends born on the continent, even those who had come from countries where whites were also a minority.

Your peers in college were struggling to figure out who they were. They had been especially hobbled by the violence of negation, external and internal, everyday and irruptive. Some of them had never met another Asian apart from their parents. Some of them had never really known white people, growing up in what the professors called “ethnic enclaves.” All this was unfamiliar to you. But you were there with them in Asian American Studies 20A, everyone trying to figure out what they had in common with the person sitting next to them. Together you were going to learn how to be Asian American.

There was an instability at the heart of Asian Americanness. Panethnicity, you learned, was a creation of the state—a provocation turned census category. The state had been blunt and overbroad. It lumped all kinds of people of Asian and Pacific Islander descent together. It created new margins—if you were Filipino, Pacific Islander, South Asian, or Southeast Asian, were you really Asian? In classes, students debated fiercely: Did identity always need to be shaped from above? How can the object become the subject? Asian American Studies needed to constitute Asian American culture as much as it needed to describe it.

In your arrogance, your fury for living born of Local pride, ignorance, and insecurity, you had it all figured out already. You thought maybe you didn’t even need the class, but for the fact that that’s where the girls were. Your swagger was a gift of birth. You and your folks put Tabasco sauce in your saimin and ate your BBQ mix plate with chopsticks. You spoke your own pidgin: the sentences were structured as if spoken in Japanese, rich with loanwords from Hawaiian, Portuguese, Cantonese. You were a cultural chameleon, had spent a lifetime training in adaptation and code switching. Some days you probably felt like you came from superior stock. You wanted everyone, especially your Asian American friends, to come visit Hawai’i, see the proof.

*   *   *

Governor Ariyoshi gave that famous speech in 1980, during a period in which his government had come under fire from Filipino, Native Hawaiian, and Samoan activists who claimed that the state had discriminated against them in employment and educational opportunities.

The state administration was run predominantly by Local Japanese, Nisei who had come through the public schools at the height of the territorial Americanization campaigns. After World War II, this generation joined the Democratic Party in large numbers, and became the vanguard of the multiracial working-class and nascent middle-class movements. This was where the idea of the Local had been forged—in multilingual labor meetings, on pidgin-chattering playgrounds, around luau tables, and at
kanikapila
jams. By the mid-1950s, the culturally Local majority—finding institutional expression in family associations, labor unions, the Democratic Party—had dislodged the
haole
Republican planter-oligarchy.

But two decades after statehood, Filipinos, Native Hawaiians, and Samoans were severely underrepresented in public jobs and disproportionately trapped in low-achieving public schools. Ariyoshi’s speech had been delivered partly as a retort to those ethnic groups. It was a warning to wait their turn, because in Hawai’i we valued peace over justice, a peace that was ethnic in nature, and American in conception.

Jonathan Okamura’s point was that Local identity had been forged in different circumstances than those that continental Asian Americans confronted. And the narrative of the Local—that the rest of the world was bigoted and racially divided, Hawai’i was the exception pointing to peace—blinded them to justice. How strong were these “lessons of tolerance,” to have left the islands still so stratified?

But to Asian Americans on the continent, the idea of an identity forged in struggle—in epic labor uprisings on the plantations and in the shipyards and a rich hybrid culture birthed in work camps and schoolyards—was a powerful metaphor for their struggle against white racism. Building Asian Americanness was a bottom-up project of unity in diversity. But also, what could be more “e pluribus unum” than people from all these ancient warring cultures figuring out how to get along on American soil?

Some have portrayed the Asian American narrative—you have too—as a heroic one. But even as you tell this story, you wonder at the impossibility of Asian Americanness. There has been no Middle Passage to shape it, no common colonizers’ language, except English, to express it. Sometimes you scroll through your Facebook page, and your Black or Chicano friends have posted a video or a quote or a news item of Black or Chicano folks doing something beautiful, ironic, or sad under the line “I love us.” And it makes you think of your friend Eric Liu’s question “Who is us?”

The category of Asian American sprawls: sixth-generation toddlers and undocumented teens; crazy-rich coeds chilling on Rodeo Drive or in Singapore Air first-class and couples on public assistance packing their meager belongings under eviction notices; architects and oncologists, nannies and bus drivers, seamstresses and factory bosses; class divisions that reflect the displacements of the Cold War and congressional preferences for the not so tired and not so poor; innumerable histories colliding, even in a single family. Yet here you are, the evidence of American warfare and familial risk and survival, making yourselves through panethnic coupling and an emergent culture of image, story, song, food. A tiger clan, a model fucking minority, a blueprint for multicultural democracy. You too are the exception and the exceptional. When you are summoned, you too may teach the rest of the world exactly how to get along.

You know there are white parents who are moving their children out of public schools that have “too many Asians.” You know that pundits like Bill O’Reilly talk up “Asian privilege” not out of concern for other people of color but because of a fear that whiteness itself might be eclipsed. What does it mean to be the evidence that racism is not real? To be fetishized by colorblind liberals and white supremacists alike? To be so innocuous that teachers and policemen and figures of authority mostly allow you the benefit of the doubt? To be desired for your fluid, exotic, futuristic, yielding difference? What does it mean to be the solution? For you, the Duboisian question is turned upside down. It haunts you.

*   *   *

Most of your life you have been in-between. The scholarship kid who wasn’t a “hardship case” but still served your peers on the lunch line and wiped up after their cafeteria messes. The striver-class townie whose working-class grandparents lived in the country. The yellow face neither FOB nor ABC. The other nonwhite slamming in the mosh pit, cranking at the go-go, or getting down at the hip-hop jam.

You remember that children’s rhyme. Actually, Rosie O’Donnell and Shaquille O’Neal reminded you:

Ching Chong Chinaman

Sitting on a fence

Trying to make a dollar

Out of fifteen cents

You remember trying to find your way between Black and white. You had taken every class you could with Ronald Takaki. He was the Seiji Ozawa of ethnic studies, a poof of white hair, a big laugh that shook his whole slender frame, an intensity that burned the sun. He had grown up not far from you, gone to the same school you did. His voice reminded you of your folks, their rainbow optimism and sugarcane pace. He joked about his surfing prowess and talked story like your uncles. He had been one of the first professors of Afro-American studies at UCLA. He taught you about slavery, slaughter, repression, the white imagination, the American mosaic. He gave you signposts, analogs, dots to connect.

You followed Ling-Chi Wang, bespectacled and serious, an authentic Chinatown renegade who, along with his barricade-storming comrades in arms, had stood up to the American war machine, the Six Companies, and the Kuomintang. He had the mind and the aloof mien of a master strategist. You drew close to him when he disclosed in a near whisper all the elaborate plots that the powerful had hatched to deny Asian Americans our basic rights. When he told you of how the university had implemented plans to deny Asian applicants admission in order to please its white alumni, you pictured yourself as a soldier in an important battle.

It’s these battles that continue to unsettle you. Dr. Wang had exposed a national trend among elite universities to cap admissions of Asian American students, not unlike what they had done two generations before to Jewish American students. Every pronouncement Dr. Wang made—which you and your fellow student activists repeated with less care and precision but much more fervor—was about fighting discrimination against people of color, preserving both affirmative action and a meritocracy that was supposed to treat white and Asian applicants equally. Soon, Asian American students were organizing all across the country—at UCLA, Brown, Yale, Stanford, Michigan, and elsewhere. They were ambushing college presidents with pickets, writing papers that deconstructed the racial impact of admissions policies, organizing community town hall meetings.

You have noticed that nowadays they don’t teach this history in Asian American Studies. It’s not that heroic.

On matters of race, America teaches everyone to think in binaries—zero or one, this or that. There is no in-between. You know this, you refuse this, but you know how hard it is to complicate a conversation the Other prefers not to have.

You no longer believe in meritocracy. You believe now that merit is never neutral—what really is?—and that the rules are there mostly to preserve power. The right things happen for the wrong reasons. There are no pure worlds. There are only guiding values and the work of making spaces and identities in common. But it was not easy to learn this.

You thought it was a bougie Asian American thing to be most upset not when the rules are stacked, but when the rules are not followed. You mocked all the scare-quote “activists” organizing their campaigns against racist salespeople at the Acura dealer or “Ching-Chong” T-shirts at Abercrombie & Fitch. They were sold a colorblind consumer fantasy and they couldn’t buy it. But you were the one who got your peers to change the name of your student activist group from the Student Coalition on Asian Admissions to the Student Coalition for Fair Admissions. And you wince now thinking about that, how fungible fairness is, how fungible bodies not yours are.

Back then, you thought anger was part of what it meant to be Asian American. Still, at the community forums, you were stunned by the immigrant parents’ rage.
How dare they ruin our American dreams? We have only tried to play by the rules.
You feverishly joined the fight. You wrote op-eds, you lobbied powerful men. You helped drag the chancellor into a state senate meeting where he was forced to lose face. The administration undid all the little rule changes that had led to the steep drop in Asian admissions. They appointed a patient, empathetic Sansei man to implement a new process that might be more transparent and race neutral.

But success had opened the door to the conservative right. They believed that fighting over the rules—like showing how hundreds of Asian applicants were eliminated from consideration when the university doubled the weighting of SAT Engish scores—was sandbox stuff. So after the battle was won on campus, national anti–affirmative action activists flattened the nuances, turned up the binaries.

They said that good Americans were being hurt by so-called quotas. You knew that when they pointed to Asians, they really meant whites. But soon you saw Asians filing lawsuits from San Francisco to Boston to undo public school desegregation orders and consent decrees. You knew most of Asian America favored affirmative action and opportunity programs by more than two to one.
²
But you were also learning that well-funded right-wing institutions knew how to use quotas when it suited them.

Demagogues quickly followed, mobilizing white electorates. More often than they lost, they won. Magnet high schools and “highly selective” universities became more Asian, sometimes even more Asian than white, while numbers of Black, Latino, American Indian, and Southeast Asians admitted plunged. And twenty years later, whites were still three times as likely to be admitted to selective universities as Asians with a similar academic record.
³

You felt dumb. You were the bougie Asian American. You were part of the ruination. You were Eldridge Cleaver’s definition of the problem. Eventually you retreated, depressed and broken, from politics.

*   *   *

Gloria Anzaldúa, George Helm, and Jessica Hagedorn all realized that in-betweenness can create the stuff of epics. It is the mental geography through which we make the crossings that define us. It can also be a place of refuge. In Hawai’i,
pu’uhonua
were sites of mercy, where a warrior on the wrong side of the battle might find safety, where fugitives might find absolution. There, in between the space of the gods and the space of humans, they might rehabilitate and redeem themselves through moral, spiritual, and physical work. But these places were never meant to be places of permanent separation or disengagement. You did not go into a
pu’uhonua
to leave the world but to someday return to it. Unearned sanctuary is not a home.

These days, when demagogues talk about building walls, closing borders, checking papers, and sending people back where they came from, you think a lot about the story of Wong Kim Ark, a man who lived in between. He was born in 1873 and raised in the heart of San Francisco’s Chinatown, long before it was a tourist curiosity, back when it was a segregated ghetto. In that era, Irish immigrant laborer Denis Kearney organized the Workingmen’s Party of California, which blamed Chinese labor for stealing jobs from white workers. By 1882, Kearney had succeeded in getting Congress to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act.