When the Model Minority Myth Shook Up San Francisco Politics: Sinocentric Asianization and the Manipulation of Social Justice Discourse in a Local Election

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

Abstract

In 2019, the San Francisco Board of Education (SFBOE) voted to destroy Victor Arnautoff’s (1936) mural The Life of Washington in San Francisco’s George Washington High School, against the will of several Native American leaders (Tucker, 2020). This decision, made during the Covid-19 pandemic, signaled the district’s anti-racist and decolonial commitments. However, the SFBOE’s seeking to destroy what it deemed to be depictions of violence against Black and Indigenous people was seen by San Franciscans as a distraction from resuming normal school operations following Covid-19 disruptions. Three SFBOE Commissioners were later recalled over operational failures, fiscal mismanagement in 2022. This paper’s purpose is to look at how Chinese American San Franciscans were both made synonymous with the entire Asian American community and targeted to support the recall and white abstract liberal agendas that censored of evidence of the occupation of Indigenous land (Bonilla-Silva, 2017). I argue that (1) that majoritarian logics place Chineseness as synonymous with, and dominative of, the Asian American panethnic community, and (2) the Chinese American community was co-opted into complicity by mobilizing settler colonial logics and model minority logics rather than solidarity with Native Americans in the 2022 SFBOE recall.

This paper’s theoretical framework draws on and brings together two extensions of Critical Race Theory: AsianCrit and TribalCrit, which center the unique needs of Asian Americans and Indigenous people, respectively. I do so to center how Asian Americans are “Asianized” as a monolith under white supremacy but that, often, non-Chinese communities have to bear the burden of enacting strategic (anti-)essentialism against that panethnic lumping (Iftikar & Museus, 2018). As well, TribalCrit asserts that colonization, like racism, is endemic to American society and that policy towards Indigenous peoples are rooted in imperialism, white supremacy, and assimilationism (Brayboy, 2006). These lenses elucidate how, under settler colonialism and white supremacy, Asian Americans are racialized in close proximity to whiteness and as settlers are brought into complicity with the occupation of Indigenous lands by mobilizing the model minority myth by whiteness.

I use this lens to conduct a brief visual analysis of Arnautoff’s (1936) The Life of Washington and a critical discourse analysis of the City and County of San Francisco’s Voter Guide for the School Board Recall Election and news commentary leading up to the election (Gee, 2014). These two data are important because they show the thematic development of the argument against the SFBOE and how Chinese Americans were both conflated with Asian Americans and bought into complicity with carceral policies using the model minority myth (Shange, 2019).

This paper contributes to AsianCrit literature by foregrounding the Sinocentric conceptualization of the PanAsian community. Furthermore, this paper contributes to education research’s understanding of Asian Americans in relation to other racialized communities and the complexities of Asian Americans’ relational racialization in education by highlighting how Chinese Americans, themselves victims of a curriculum of violence and erasure, were co-opted into active complicity with settler occupations and the erasure of another racialized community.

Author

• Kyle L. Chong, Michigan State University