Beyond Invisibility and Myths: Asian American Youths’ Zine-Making Around Anti-Asian Violence, Anti-Blackness, and Cross-Racial Solidarity

• In Event: Reframing Asian American Racialization and Interrogating the Specificity of Anti-Blackness

Abstract

Purpose. Discourses around anti-Asian violence often revolve around non-intersectional lenses of Asian American invisibility, monolithism, and model minority myth (MMM) (Poon et al, 2016). Few conversations interrogate the specification of anti-Blackness in the racial triangulation of Asian Americans (Kim, 2018); even fewer frame critiques around Asian Americans’ relationality to white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and racial capitalism (Author, et al, 2023) to examine gains and losses reaped from participating in, and/or refusal of the MMM. Yet, if Asian Americans are to engage in cross-racial coalitions with Black and other non-Black communities of Color, we must foster “thick solidarity” (Liu & Shange, 2018, p. 190); disrupt our perceptions of invisibility, monolithism, and MMM; and guide us toward collective racial healing.


In this study, we focus on how Asian American youth discern their racialization as Asian Americans in relation to white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and anti-Asian violence. We ask: How do youth perceive their racial positionality within the contexts of anti-Asian violence, anti-Black racism, and white supremacy? How do they envision cross-racial solidarity and radical racial healing with and alongside Black and non-Black communities of Color?


Framework. Grounded in conceptualizations of systemic racism where white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and racial capitalism interlock to re/create racial oppressions and inequities (Author, et al, 2023), we contend that Black and non-Black people of Color may gain/lose proxy privileges (Liu, 2017) for their complicities to/refusal of systemic racism. The precarity of Asian American racial positioning, thus, is partly connected to our participation in white supremacy and anti-Blackness (Kim, 2018). Using critical race counterstorytelling methodologies (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002), we center youths’ of Color experiential knowledge around their racializations. We recognize that counterstories are temporally recursive (Otero, 2022), thus, the medium for critical reflexivity should include multimodal/mixed-art forms (Turner & Castle, 2023). Zine-making can invite youth to engage in deep excavation of their racializations in pursuit of thick solidarity and collective racial healing (Mosley, 2023).


Methods/Data. As co-authors of this qualitative study, we identify as multi-ethnic-Asian American women who are college faculty or high-school youth. We discuss a community-based, counter-storytelling zine-making workshop series wherein 75 middle/high school Asian American youth examined their racializations as non-Black people of Color. Through deductive and inductive coding of fieldnotes, artifacts/zines, interviews, and researchers journals we identified themes around racializations. We present four young women’s “zines” (e.g. origami-sculptures, graphic-novel) made from repurposing found-materials (magazine-cutouts, cardboard-boxes, calendars, photos) to illustrate their sense-making of racializations.


Findings. Youths’ zines cohered with their family/home/ancestors, gendered-racial identities, racial healing, cross-racial solidarity, and community. Yet while youth recognized roots of white supremacy and anti-Blackness undergirding the racial triangulation of Asian Americans, they maintained non-intersectional views of MMM, invisibility, and monolithism.


Significance. Our study underscores place- and time-making for critical reflexivity essential in cross-racial solidarity work, highlighting zine-making as a counterstorytelling form that facilitates introspection. Cultivating critical racial consciousness and cross-racial solidarity among youth requires teaching beyond history and experiences to include intersectional examination of systemic racism and the gains/losses reaped from in/conformity.

Authors

• Rossina Zamora Liu, University of Maryland

• Nandini Wagle, Centennial High School, University of Maryland

• Renee Wu, Sentinel High School

• Rolonda L. Payne, University of Maryland