Examining the Modernist Foundation of Anti-Blackness, Anti-Latinidad, and Anti-Indigeneity in the Colonial Production of APIs

• In Event: Examinations of the Relational Racialization of Asian Americans in Education

Abstract

Purpose

This linguistic anthropological paper examines how Polynesian (i.e., "Poly"; from the Samoan and Tongan archipelagos) and Fijian-Indian diasporic youth negotiated racialization within a predominantly Black, Latinx, and Polynesian working-class community in the California Bay Area.

Theoretical Framework

The racialized rendering of Polynesian and Fijian-Indian youth in this study is intimately tied to what the author has referred to as an orbiting, modernist White supremacist “ideology of oppressionlessness.” While this ideology has been more popularly rendered through the lens of White supremacy as the “model minority myth” (Reyes, 2009), this paper deliberately names “oppressionlessness” to call attention to the purpose of the ideology: to leverage racialized populations, like “Asians” and “Pacific Islanders,” to rationalize and legitimize the White supremacist order.

Methods and Data Sources

This paper emerges from over 1,000 hours of critical feminist and ethnographic research over 8 years in the space-time of the 2010s to early 2020s in the California Bay Area (“Bay Grove”). The primary site was an after-school space (“Critical Feminisms Club”) within a public charter high school (“Bay Grove High School”).
The author is a 3rd generation Cantonese diasporic subject, raciogendered as an Asian cishet male, who grew up within predominantly Latinx working-class communities. This paper reflects anti-colonial self-study, and the author’s subsequent alignment with an intergenerational movement of scholars who have denaturalized colonial practices of studying racialization (Rosa, 2019; Reyes & Lo, 2009).

Findings

An ideology of oppressionlessness reinforced the racial underdetermination of Polynesian youth as “Black,” in contrast to local colonial authorities (e.g., police) who increasingly racially (re)constituted and overdetermined Polynesian youth as “Poly” (i.e., Polynesian). The racial and linguistic production of the category of “Poly” progressed as authorities saw the need to engage in population management of a large Polynesian diaspora that refused and challenged the normative positioning of “APIs” as being in ontological opposition to Blackness, Latinidad, and Indigeneity. Likewise, an ideology of oppressionlessness functioned to ontologically erase Fijian-Indian diasporic youth, a racialized condition that was made possible by their relatively small numbers within the community. Fijian-Indian youth were able to be erased in a manner that served to solidify the White supremacist order, which required “Asians,” and specifically “South Asians,” to be racially prone to social, cultural, and economic success.
Much to the concern of local authorities, Black and Latinx youth who came to bear witness to the colonial violence experienced by Poly and Fijian-Indian youth came to recognize and further question the legitimacy and possibility of success within the White settler capitalist order. Mirroring historical politics that preceded the development of a widely circulating ideology of oppressionlessness in the 1950s and 1960s, Black, Latinx, Poly, and Fijian-Indian youth developed co-conspiracies that hold implications for sustaining, developing, and revitalizing movements for collective freedom.

Significance

Studies continued to follow European-descended logics that position “Asians” and “Pacific Islanders” as unimportant, or irrelevant, to understanding processes of racialization. This paper substantiates the crucial function of Asians and Pacific Islanders to the maintenance of White supremacy’s modernist racial order.

Author

• Casey Philip Wong, Georgia State University