“They Be Hating, But We Stay United”: Cross-Racial Feminist Memory Activism in Black-Asian Coalition Building

• In Event: The Problematics of Racial and Ethnic Coalition-Building in an Era of Explicit Threat

Abstract

Dominant scholarship on Black-Asian relations in the United States has been shaped by a conflict paradigm that positions these communities as inevitably antagonistic. In the current political landscape, where principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion face direct assault, understanding how cross-racial coalitions form and endure is especially urgent. Yet existing frameworks focus on the conditions that make coalition difficult, offering less insight into how activists actually produce and sustain solidarity over time.
This article addresses this gap through the concept of cross-racial feminist memory activism: practices of building coalition by working simultaneously across three temporal dimensions. Drawing on interviews, digital ethnography, and archival analysis of the Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities project, a collaboration between Black Women Radicals, the Asian American Feminist Collective, and the Asian American Writers' Workshop sustained from 2020 to 2025, I trace how activists reframe dominant conflict narratives and recover suppressed solidarity histories, produce shared experiences of care and joy that sustain coalition across structural division, and create accessible archives designed for adaptation by future movements. Crucially, feminist commitments transform each dimension of this work: centering difference rather than erasing it, attending to power asymmetries within the coalition itself, and treating care as political infrastructure.
The article argues that new thinking about cross-racial coalition requires attention to narrative and memory, not only present-tense organizing. Coalitions falter partly because dominant narratives render them unimaginable. The activists in this study challenge that dynamic directly, making conflict narratives objects of critical analysis while producing alternative memories of solidarity that future organizers can inherit. This framework shifts scholarly attention from whether cross-racial coalition can exist to how it is actively built, and offers practical insight into the relational, affective, and archival infrastructure through which coalitions endure beyond the crises that catalyze them.

Author

• Jiyoun Yoo, University of Illinois at Chicago