Asian Americans in an Anti-Black World

An exploration of how Asian Americans are uniquely positioned relative to whites and Black people in the U.S. racial order.

Claire Jean Kim (Author)

9781009222259, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 29 June 2023

400 pages
23.6 x 16.1 x 2.8 cm, 0.74 kg

'Sure to elicit controversy and debate, Kim offers a stunning and provocative account of the racial positioning of Asian Americans in a pervasively anti-Black social order. In a work of enormous breadth, she challenges prevailing narratives and paradigms of Asian American history and politics by illustrating how Asian Americans have benefitted from anti-Blackness. Grasping the functionality of 'better than Black' for white supremacy becomes essential to imagining how anti-Asian racism might be framed and contested.' Michael Omi, University of California, Berkeley

Where do Asian Americans fit into the U.S. racial order? Are they subordinated comparably to Black people or permitted adjacency to whiteness? The racial reckoning prompted by the police murder of George Floyd and the surge in anti-Asian hate during the COVID-19 pandemic raise these questions with new urgency. Asian Americans in an Anti-Black World is a groundbreaking study that will shake up scholarly and popular thinking on these matters. Theoretically innovative and based on rigorous historical research, this provocative book tells us we must consider both anti-Blackness and white supremacy—and the articulation of the two forces—in order to understand U.S. racial dynamics. The construction of Asian Americans as not-white but above all not-Black has determined their positionality for nearly two centuries. How Asian Americans choose to respond to this status will help to define racial politics in the U.S. in the twenty-first century.

Introduction: Better Asians Than Blacks
Part I. Exclusion/Belonging
Part II. Ostracism/Initiation
Part III. Solidarity/Disavowal
Coda: Asian Americans and Anti-Blackness.

Subject Areas: Constitution: government & the state [JPHC]