AsianCrit through Ethnic Studies Education: An Asian American Critical Race Solidarity Framework

• In Event: Sophisticated Racial Tools: Expanding the Explanatory Power of Critical Race Praxis

Abstract

Objectives
For critical race scholars in education, we are at a pivotal moment to reflect on our commitments to the project of education and the insistence on embodying a praxis that actualizes and advances our commitments. In this conceptual paper, we discuss Asian American model minority racialization in context of anti-Blackness, forever foreign-ness with settler colonialism, and anti-Asian racism via empire. We engage examples of Ethnic Studies praxis to offer a sharpened (re)articulation of Asian critical [race] theory (AsianCrit), illuminating the potential and power of CRT in education work to better contend with the racialization of diasporic peoples and toward ideological clarity in the face of state-sanctioned dehumanization and genocide. We build on this discourse and offer an Asian American critical race solidarity framework that enacts an intersectional and relational racial analysis and praxis.

Theory/Sources
AsianCrit and Ethnic Studies Education are theoretical foundations for our conceptual paper. Asian Americans have used CRT in both legal and education discourse to address the complex racialization of people of Asian descent in the United States. Asian American critical race legal scholars documented a legacy of state-sanctioned, anti-Asian discrimination and violence, and problematize the marginalization of Asian American perspectives in critical race work (Chang 1999; Matsuda 1993). Asian American education scholars applied Asian critical [race] theory (AsianCrit) to discern how formal institutional policies and informal social practices impact the racialization of Asian Americans as model minorities and perpetual foreigners, and the subsequent treatment of Asian Americans in education (Authors; Iftikar and Museus 2018).

Findings
We advance an Asian American critical race solidarity framework concerned foremost with valuing a relationality to shared struggles in the US and in diaspora; struggles connected primarily against empire and other instantiations of supremacy. A guiding ethic of this framework is understanding solidarity as ‘a contingent political project rather than some kind of natural, essential, transhistorical alliance’ (Kelley 2019, 71). We propose three directions for an Asian American critical race solidarity framework to remain relevant and responsive to Asian American communities alongside all communities pursuant of justice: (1) an interrogation of Asian American complicity in anti-Blackness and a deep commitment to Black liberation; (2) an examination of settler colonialism among Asian Americans and the everyday resistance to its perpetuation; and (3) the decolonial and anti-imperialist imperative of an Ethnic Studies praxis within CRT in education—the latter of which is less of a concern among CRT scholars (Authors).

Significance
As diasporic Ilokanos and Asian Americanists, formally trained in Ethnic Studies Education and CRT, we channel the urgency we find ourselves in to interrogate AsianCrit toward a more incisive approach to CRT overall. We highlight the importance of an anti-imperialist, decolonial lens and ethic to move us toward a liberatory politic and offer a critical race solidarity framework that sharpens CRT as a tool for analysis and praxis. Our offering of an Asian American critical race solidarity framework centers racialization processes as relational and reveals how anti-Blackness and settler colonialism among Asian Americans are outcomes of US empire.

Authors

• Tracy Lachica Buenavista, California State University - Northridge

• Edward R. Curammeng, California State University - Dominguez Hills

• Stephanie Cariaga, California State University - Dominguez Hills