Success Won't Save Us: How White Supremacy Uplifts and Threatens the South Asian American Experience

• In Event: South Asia and the Diaspora

Abstract

The role of white supremacy in the Asian American experience needs to be articulated in order to both better understand 1. how Asian Americans can have a simultaneous trajectory of high socio-economic status and constant pushback and exclusion from the nation, and 2. how to dismantle the conditions that give rise to these challenges. The question of whether Asian Americans are either achieving or facing violence is a mistaken one. The two realities do not exist in an either/or manner. Instead, they are two sides of the same coin. The Asian American conundrum is to be accepted and expunged from the nation, seemingly simultaneously. The extreme economic, residential, and even marital integration of many Asian Americans does not mean that race has lost relevance either in general or for them in particular. The common assumption that assimilation means the declining significance of race is wrong. I explain this through both theory and a case study of South Asian immigrant doctors and nurses and the role of anti-Blackness in their "model minority" conditions.

Author

• Pawan Dhingra, Amherst College