Asian American Critical Race Theory: Antiblackness, Settler Colonialism, and an Ethnic Studies Praxis

• In Event: 67.058 - Dismantling Institutional Racism in Asian American and Pacific Islander College Student Experiences

Abstract

Purpose: In this conceptual paper, we (re)theorize an Asian American critical race theory (AACRT) that is not just responsive to Asian Americans, but all communities pursuant of struggles toward justice. The objective of this paper is twofold: 1) to offer scholars who conduct work on Asian American educational issues a primer on Asian American CRT and 2) to conceptualize an AACRT that better addresses Asian American racialization as complicit in anti-Blackness and settler colonialism.

Theoretical Framework: Among the first efforts to articulate an Asian American CRT was Chang’s (1993) Asian American Legal Scholarship (AALS) framework. AALS acknowledges historical and contemporary anti-Asian, nativist racist violence; problematizes Asian American racial positioning as model minorities, and subsequent exclusion from that which constitutes People of Color; and emphasizes experiential narratives to capture the complexity and material impact of racism against Asian Americans. Education scholars have since drawn from AALS to dismantle the model minority myth through an examination of the differential racialization between Asian Americans and other People of Color, and among Asian American ethnic groups; and with respect to postsecondary access and success (Teranishi, 2002; Teranishi, Behringer, Grey, Parker, 2009). Museus and Iftikar (2014) laid out the tenets of an “AsianCrit” education framework in which they guide scholars to critically historicize the racialized educational experiences of Asian Americans, center Asian American voices in critical race discourse, and emphasize the utility and value of community-based praxis. Yet, the current political moment reflects an emboldened white supremacy and an urgency for critical race scholars to revisit the fluid racial positioning of Asian Americans.

Method: To accomplish our goal, we conducted a critical literature review of 20 of the most frequently cited scholarship within the fields of law and education that centered CRT and Asian American experiences.

Significance: We propose three directions that scholars can take to better resist against the white supremacy that both impacts and is perpetuated by Asian Americans and other communities of color. First, we need to interrogate Asian American complicity in anti-Blackness. While there are Asian American critical race efforts to be what we call “post-model minority” (e.g., Poon et al., 2016), and work that examines how the internalization of the model minority perpetuates anti-Latinx sentiment (Buenavista, 2018), scholars must also interrogate how this specific racialization is grounded in anti-Black processes that facilitate racial divisiveness and Black dehumanization. Second, Asian American education scholars simultaneously critique the “perpetual foreigner” trope and enact the notion of “Asian as immigrant” (Han, 2006), yet we rarely account for the ways Asian Americans are also settlers and actively participate in settler colonialism (Fujikane & Okamura, 2008; Goodyear-Ka’opua, 2013). Such considerations enable a nuanced understanding of how settler colonialism and other logics of power inhibit robust accounts of racialization. Last, we call on scholars of color to unhook ourselves from our fidelity to the law—a field grounded in white supremacy—and to honor the scholarship produced by and for people of color: ethnic studies. Taken together, a reconceptualized AACRT encourages a move towards building a coalitional strategy in education to resist current attacks on all minoritized communities.

Authors

• Tracy Lachica Buenavista, California State University - Northridge

• Edward Ryan Curammeng, California State University - Dominguez Hills