In America as it currently exists, the interests of Asian communities and Black communities are inherently opposed.
I will repeat myself: in America as it currently exists, the interests of Asian communities and Black communities are inherently opposed.
As a Chinese American immigrant, I have come to realize that there is a fundamental conflict within the Black-Asian alliance against racism. Let’s talk about that conflict.
We can begin by talking about history. Asian immigrants were largely excluded from America until the 1960s, due to policies like the Chinese Exclusion Act which blocked Chinese people from immigrating to the United States. Because of this exclusion, many Asian Americans are recent immigrants or have immigrant parents or grandparents. We share common immigrant experiences in all their joys and sorrows: lying alone in bed while our parents worked multiple jobs, carrying foreign food in our school lunchboxes, translating for our relatives over the phone, separation from the touch of our ancestors.
Equally, when Asian immigrants come to live in America, we share the experience of living in a country that was built on a foundation of colonialist theft and genocide of Indigenous peoples and the brutal enslavement of Black people. When we come to live in America, immigrants benefit from this theft and enslavement, just as European settlers did before us.
The backgrounds of Asian immigrants, undeniably, are diverse. Some are refugees fleeing from violent wars or authoritarian governments; some come for investment and business opportunities. Some come from minority ethnic groups or countries ravaged by colonialism; others held the power in their origin countries. Many Asian immigrants have no other choice when we come to America. But whether immigrants arrive in America to flee death or to make a buck, we are expected to be three things: grateful, patriotic, and above all, loyal.
To hammer in these expectations, it is written into the Oath of Citizenship that an immigrant “will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic…[and] bear true faith and allegiance” to the United States. The Oath does not encourage immigrants to investigate and dismantle America’s colonialist, racist, and oppressive endeavors. In fact, if Asian immigrants with darker skin were to do so, they might be labelled anti-American at best, and a terrorist at worst (Exhibit A: the vitriolic attacks against Congresswoman Ilhan Omar). Instead of questioning, Asian immigrants are expected to assimilate. Whether an Asian American person is a progressive liberal or a Trump supporter, for many of us, there is at least a kernel of the idea of loyalty.
Asian immigrants’ lives, our labor, and our wealth are expected to prop up the American endeavor, as racist and colonialist as it is. Even if we consider ourselves “good” liberals, we “deserve” to be here because, as “people of color,” we are simply helping America live up to its liberal reputation as a diverse melting pot: a “nation of immigrants.” The famous poem by Emma Lazarus engraved at the base of the Statue of Liberty, an icon of immigration and the American Dream, reads: “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, / I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Like past immigrants before us, we are expected to accept that the benefits and profits of our lives were — and still are — achieved by pushing Black and Indigenous people to the margins. This is the true implication of the American Dream narrative. This is what it means to assimilate. This is what it means to be a “good immigrant” and a “model minority.” This is what it means to be like those who came before you.
The American Dream is simply another way of saying Manifest Destiny. And Manifest Destiny is oppression.
We talk about the anti-Blackness in Asian America as if there is no reason for it, as if it appeared from thin air. It is a false belief that simply rooting out anti-Blackness or anti-Asianness or racism would solve the problem. We have a bigger problem: one of the biggest contradictions between “Black-Asian alliance” is the immigrant narrative. I am not saying that Asian immigrants should not come to America at all, or that we must leave and “go back where we came from” — most of us have no other choice but to stay. But we Asians cannot continue to live here without swallowing the hard truth: in America as it exists, we participate in its Manifest Destiny.
A scholar of Christianity once pointed out that Christian believers tend to think of themselves as the protagonist with which the Bible sides: as David or Jesus, and never as Goliath or King Herod — the underdog and never the oppressor. Their self-identification with the underdog makes Christians blind as to how they might be the giant or the wicked king. The scholar was applying this parable to Christians but let us see what happens when we apply it to immigrants. Asian Americans have faced our hard share of racism and discrimination, but the very identity America assigns to us is built upon a rotten foundation. How do we acknowledge the experiences of Asian immigrants who arrive and live in America without incorporating their experiences, their labour, and their wealth into the totalizing colonist American Dream that is one of the root sources of anti-Black racism and oppression?
How do Black communities and Asian communities ally, when the framework that we are given or forced into seems to force us into inherent conflicts of interest? Not that we cannot, but according to the existing framework…we cannot. Until we break with this totalizing American Dream narrative and make something different. And we must do it ourselves because America as it currently exists has no interest doing it for us.
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The kernel of this text was inspired by online conversations with the Daniel Ballow about relationships between Black and Asian communities in the United States.