We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation (19 page)

Worried for their safety, Wong’s family left after the Exclusion Act. But when he was seventeen, Wong decided to return to San Francisco, where he found work as a cook. In this way his story was like your own grandfather’s, except that your grandfather’s destination was Hawai’i. Wong returned again to China to marry and have a child and sailed back to the Bay Area in 1897. That’s when he was detained. Wong was different from most other American-born Chinese only in that he decided to fight to have his citizenship recognized.

In the 1898 majority opinion, Supreme Court Justice Horace Gray wrote that the law was clear: “The [Fourteenth] Amendment, in clear words and in manifest intent, includes the children born, within the territory of the United States of all other persons, of whatever race or color, domiciled within the United States.” The decision sealed the concept of birthright citizenship, an inextricable part of the foundation upon which present-day American diversity has been built. Indeed, its reliance upon the Fourteenth Amendment provided a perfect example of how the very idea of an immigrant or an Asian American is predicated upon the freedom struggle of African Americans.

The word “citizen” confers rights, rights that are invisible, that really appear only when they are denied. This is why Claudia Rankine has written of Blackness through the concept of “citizen,” where the struggle to express the rights of citizenship too often outlives the body. You live in a racial state that formally denies difference, but in practice avows it, through the barrel of a gun or the conferring of papers.

The migrant is stateless, an embodied nowhere, a political nonbeing. But migration is what people do, on trains, as in Jacob Lawrence’s great renderings, or on leaky boats or the undercarriages of buses you see in the flows of your nightly image stream. People migrate from hunger, war, poverty, hatred. They migrate because their homes have sunk, their homelands have been destroyed. They are no different from butterflies who migrate from the cold that would kill them. Sometimes, as with the Tohono O’odham, Apache, Yaqui, they become migrants because borders have crossed them. Sometimes they flee on rafts across the South China Sea, sometimes they die on rafts crossing the Mediterranean.

Migration is always a choice to live. The opposite of migration is not citizenship. It is containment, the condition of being unfree shared with all who are considered less than citizens. The migrant reminds the citizen of the rights that they should be guaranteed.

Nations are made of papers. Papers make the border. Papers also turn the migrant into the immigrant. The word “immigrant” is a formal legal term. It centers not the person, but the nation in which the person hopes to become a citizen. “Migration” centers bodies. “Immigration” centers bodies of law. The immigrant is therefore always troubled by the question of status: “legal” or “illegal.” When the immigrant is between the migrant and the citizen, their freedom—and others’ freedom, in turn—depends upon the answer.

How can a human being be illegal? Laws come from people. That is to say, they come from citizens. And yet what does it mean to be a citizen? Here you recall that there was a tragic coda to Wong Kim Ark’s story. He had been declared a citizen at a time when the law denied the right of naturalization to Asians not born in the United States. Yet later in life, Wong migrated back to China, never to return. In other words, he did what all those casual racists told you that they wanted you to do, over and again—to go back where you came from, except of course, like you, Wong had not come from China.

What does it mean to be in-between? It means one can afford to sit on the fence, decide not to take a stand, to always reserve the privilege—while the battle rages all around—to disengage. Did Wong disengage? You cannot be sure.

You have never been one to sit on the fence. But you constantly worry about what it means to engage. You have learned that between intention and liberation, a lot, maybe everything, can go wrong.

Two decades after Wong Kim Ark’s case was settled, two men of Asian descent petitioned to become citizens. Neither Takao Ozawa, a Japanese American, or Bhagat Singh Thind, a South Asian American, had been born in the United States. Yet Ozawa had lived in Hawai’i and graduated from high school in Berkeley. Thind lived and worked in San Francisco. Their status was “illegal.” Both sought naturalization. They were also in-between. Each of them petitioned to have the Supreme Court make them citizens because they were not Black, and so, they argued, they deserved to be afforded the rights of whites.

Both of them lost. Until the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, all but a tiny number of men, women, and children like Wong, Ozawa, and Thind would be able to become “legal.” These cases still trouble you.

You have said to Asian Americans that it’s time to get off the fence. It’s time to declare your Asian Americanness. But where will you all land?

The University of California at Irvine was the first university outside of Hawai’i to become majority Asian American. During the 1990s, Asians and Blacks in the segregrated fraternity and sorority system enjoyed rich exchanges, and out of this ferment sprang many of the first Asian American choreo dance groups influenced by hip-hop and Black Greek stepping.

Then came the decadence. In 2013, a video of four frat brothers from Lambda Theta Delta, Irvine’s oldest Asian American fraternity, surfaced on YouTube showing them lip-syncing to Justin Timberlake’s “Suit & Tie.” As it went viral, you and millions of others gaped in disbelief when a member came to mime Jay-Z’s lines in blackface. At a place that seemed to have become the center, to borrow Long T. Bui’s phrase, of Asian America’s “model majority,” the incident seemed proof that Asian Americans had just wanted to get down with Blackness until they could get up with whiteness.
⁴

Late in 2014, Brooklyn rookie cop Peter Liang drew his gun while on a vertical patrol in an East New York housing project. He opened an eighth-floor door with the gun and, startled by a sound, fired a bullet into the unlit stairwell. It ricocheted and struck Akai Gurley, a young Black father, dead in the heart. Gurley had done nothing but decide not to take the elevator in the moment before Liang fired his gun. As Gurley lay bleeding to death, Liang offered no medical aid and fretted to his partner that he would lose his job.
⁵

You had grown up around the Honolulu Police Department, where over the generations, the Queen’s guardsmen and their descendants had gone to work. You knew what it meant to truly serve and protect. You had also lived, worked, and experienced enough in the hoods of Cali to learn exactly what it meant to exist in fear of the police. You were outraged at Liang’s recklessness and heartlessness.

But when he was indicted, months after the officer who had strangled Eric Garner was let off, you watched as Chinese American protesters raised signs saying “Justice for Peter Liang! Stop Scapegoating!” You read in disbelief the words of a spokesperson for a supposed Asian American civil rights coalition that no one had ever heard of before: “If it was not for Ferguson and not for Staten Island, Peter Liang might not have been indicted.”

Did they really believe the killing of Akai Gurley should be less indictable because it came at the hands of an Asian American officer? Were they really arguing that if hundreds of thousands of people had not taken to the streets in a freedom movement against state violence, this Chinese American police officer would have been afforded all the privileges offered a white cop who had taken the life of a Black person? If they thought Liang’s indictment was unfair, the real question was still: Compared to what? They wanted Peter Liang to be seen as white, and Asian Americans to be afforded all the privileges of whiteness.

When Liang was convicted, they cried out again over the supposed injustice of it all. But when Liang was sentenced, by an Asian American judge no less, to five years’ probation, they were silent. Maybe, you mused, their protests had worked. Or maybe, even if they had not protested, it still would have gone this way. Soon Ja Du, the Korean American shopkeeper whose 1991 killing of fifteen-year-old Latasha Harlins over a bottle of orange juice was fuel for the fire that became the Los Angeles riots, had also been sentenced to five years’ probation. Like Liang, she never served a day in prison.

One night you are in a public panel discussion in San Francisco about the TV show
Fresh Off the Boat
, of all things, and you find yourself redirecting a question about whether Eddie Huang is guilty of cultural appropriation because of his use of hip-hop. The crowd has leaned in, because you are the Asian American face of hip-hop scholarship, or some such shit like that. And you catch yourself wanting to talk about how Asian Americans are guilty of much worse than rocking a backward snapback and above-the-knee shorts with sockless high-tops. Through their successful anti-desegregation lawsuits, they have made The City’s premier high school 65 percent Asian, and destroyed equal opportunity for Blacks and Latinos. Asian Americans are the least segregated racial group in the region and in the country, and there are some in the community who would use that power to make things worse for other communities of color. But saying all this might not be wise. So instead you mumble something vague about resegregation in The City, and when the event is over you’re still troubled. Why did you hold back?

An older Chinese American woman comes up to talk to you, practically runs up on you, and says she wants to ask what you meant by resegregation. She says that her husband is an activist, does great things for the community, and is a leader of the efforts to support Asian Americans in the public schools by getting rid of “quotas” for Blacks and Latinos. You’re horrified. You tell her you disagree with her husband. As she stares at you, you hear yourself telling her that you don’t believe he is doing anything to help Asian Americans.

“
I want to know what is wrong
,” she retorts, her eyes growing wide and her voice rising, “
with wanting to protect our people from discrimination?
”

It’s over. You want to walk away from her at this point. You want to walk away from being Asian American.

You know her story just by hearing her Sunset District accent, by seeing the stress lines on her face. You recognize this anger. All those times they were taunted, beaten, humiliated in the schoolyard or the street, all those people in authority who made them feel subhuman, all those jobs or homes they never got because of the color of their skin, all those times they played by the rules only to see a white person get ahead. You can feel her rage. Or rather, you think you can feel her rage. Maybe in this moment you’re not really Asian American.

And now you should shut the fuck up and go home, but you can’t. You tell her the days are over when Asian Americans should think only in terms of their self-interest, that Asian Americans ought to think about what it means to fight for justice and equity for all. You ask her, quite loudly and quite rhetorically, if she wants to defend a public school system in which the resources are allocated disproportionately to Asian Americans. Is that what she wants? Because if that’s what she wants, that’s not your idea of an equal and just society.

You feel good. You know you’re right. Of course you’re right.

Now she’s shouting at you and people are staring. The crowd that has gathered looks at her with a bit of pity, not because they have any idea what the two of you have been arguing about, but because your provocations have made her emotional. That’s when you finally walk away.

But later, when the night is over, you can’t help but ask yourself: Who is the real Asian American here?

*   *   *

You went to college on the continent and became Asian American.

You tried it on like a suit and tie, or a suit of armor, and it fit OK. You got older and your body changed. It grew wings and calluses. The suit felt too tight. You left it in the closet and laced back up your Adidas.

You held close the ideals of your teachers and the people you admired—Grace Lee Boggs, Yuri Kochiyama, Fred Korematsu. But you worried that their names would sound dry on your lips, because you didn’t have the words yet to say what you really wanted to say. You wanted an identity that would be not just a weapon but a tool, something that would not just bludgeon but build, that would not only justify your pain—inherited and accumulated—but let you stay open to the world, let you connect and grow.

You had children and they clarified you. Chinese, Filipino, and Hawaiian blood coursed through them. Things had not changed that much. They would still be seen as their grandparents and parents had been seen. But when you saw and heard your son stand in the spotlight before a mic telling audiences his family’s stories, you knew that things had changed enough for them to know that their eyes were never too small, nor their noses too wide, their skin too brown, their bodies too weak, their minds incapable.

When you were their age, you weren’t so sure. They had already surpassed the grand Asian Americanness of your youthful imagination. Now you hope they and their peers are learning to see everyone in their full humanity—their difference, their beauty, their glory; that they are learning compassion and a sense of proportion, learning to see beyond their own pain toward other people’s suffering, toward the real justice they and those with whom they share this vision might be able to create together.

You know now that there has to be an ethics of identity, an expansive, moral design to the way one lives. When they choose to fight, because you know that someday they will have to, you hope it will not be merely for greater numbers and more power if those numbers lead away from equity, if that power is used to perpetuate injustice and inequality. You hope that they will know the only thing worth fighting for, as Grace Lee Boggs taught you, is to “create more human human beings and more democratic institutions.”

CONCLUSION