Now-Time Asian America
Megha Ralapati and Dan S. Wang
Asian America, Re-called
The term Asian American was coined by historian and organizer Yuji Ichioka in a time of crisis, the crucible of 1968, and adopted by young people of Filipino, Japanese, and Chinese descent. Downplaying their cultural separations in favor of building up a new identity they called Asian American, they responded to the brutalities of their government at home and abroad with the idealism of unity and the power of collective action. Inspired by the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, in parallel to the indigenous and Chicano struggles, the original Yellow Power movement unleashed a new consciousness. As those movements faded, the term Asian American evolved into a catch-all demographic term, hollowed of its own history. But in times of upheaval its origins resurface as a collective awakening and an agenda.
Sometimes events conspire to refresh Asian American identity, into one that mobilizes a social force with a raised consciousness and an increasing political power. The murder of Vincent Chin in 1982, which revealed the brutality of heartland economic xenophobia and a justice system completely unrecognizing of anti-Asian hatreds, galvanized Asian Americans in just such a way. Nineteen years later, as the US response to 9/11 enabled government abuses and intrusions at scales unseen since J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, another formation of Asian Americans became visible. Victimization by and resistance against the security state linked the moral authority of Japanese American critics of wrongful incarceration to the rampant profiling of South, Central, and West Asians in a fruitless search for “terrorists.”
This Is Now-Time
We believe that the events of this year have yet again reopened the Asian American project with ferocity, imploring our rearticulated unity. The choices before us as a nation and a planet call on our collective will, one that Asian Americans are equipped to guide. We stand in now-time, a term Walter Benjamin coined as he witnessed the Weimar descent into fascism: that moment of indeterminacy and possibility. With this text we hail our Asian American colleagues, friends and family, our juniors and our elders, who we especially honor through this effort: all and any for whom the descriptor Asian American means belonging to the future we want.
The Asian America of 2020 is certainly not that of ’68, ’82, or even 2001. And as the pathways of migration continue to evolve, that composition will continue to diversify. Asian America makes less sense as a unity based on continental origins or cultural affinity than as a shared consciousness that we must raise and renew for ourselves. Consciousness raising is a praxis, and as Thich Nhat Hanh says, truth is found in life, not merely conceptual knowledge. How might we think Asian American, do Asian American, live Asian American in this moment?
If it sounds like an existential project, it is. But it is one grounded in a straight-lined historical evolution founded on a consistent demand for dignity, justice, and freedom. Thinking/doing/living Asian American, whether driven by the militant youth zeitgeist of 1968 or the struggle for civil liberties and constitutional protections in the post-9/11 world, is a cumulative unfolding of a people brought together through ten thousand strands of history who find themselves struggling for recognition, fair treatment, and the freedoms that pulled us or our ancestors to this land. It is an understanding that the freedoms we expect and demand for ourselves must become reality for all who call themselves American.
Now Asian American consciousness meets another call to self-actualization. Going into 2020, the looming November elections guaranteed an elevated level of anxiety. Then COVID-19 swept the US, beginning a series of local and regional outbreak waves enabled considerably by abdicated leadership. And just as a widespread lockdown began to ease in May, the George Floyd Rebellion erupted, reigniting the Black Lives Matter movement as a fully global and sustained phenomenon. Here we are, in the midst of what Jelani Cobb calls “a crisis cubed.” The uptick in violence has only added to the urgency of an activated Asian American politics and, more importantly, clearly articulated principles. From the family separations at the southern border to the continued brutalization of Black brothers and sisters, to the native communities hardest hit by COVID-19, to the economic ruin of Americans not insulated by wealth; the theaters of incarceration, xenophobia, corporate greed, and government neglect demand of Asian America unity and action.
Rest assured, there is nothing monolithic in this unity. It is a fertile site for generative struggle, cultural collaboration, and mutual recognition. The various constituencies making up Asian America have always been linked through logics of war, a global economy, migration narratives or minority status. Let us instead connect through our abundance, expand our shared humanity, and build a more nourishing society collectively.
Re-membering Asian America, Re-membering America
There is nothing simple about Asian America in 2020: we are of Indian, Chinese and Thai descent; Filipino, Bhutanese, Pakistani and Vietnamese; of Korean, Japanese, Lao, Tibetan, Fijian, and Bangladeshi origins — the list goes on. We have been minority ethnicities within various majorities: Gujuratis in Trinidad, Hmong in St. Paul. We may speak English, Bengali, or Shanghainese, our mother tongues, fluently or like a child. Our American-born parents perhaps never boarded a plane bound for an overseas destination, or we touched US soil only a year ago. Some of us are atheist or were ingrained with a deep spirituality. Ismaili from India or from Malaysia. Theravada Buddhist from a Thai family or Zen Buddhist from a Japanese lineage. Or any variety of Christian. Or Muslim. And so many of us — or our children — are discovering elements of our cultural inheritances for the first time. We may adopt or be adopted. And we are differently gendered and differently abled, often proudly. Our contributions to the economy are similarly wide ranging. We may work in tech, finance, medicine, or education. Or in entertainment or the arts. In restaurants and research labs. We may run small businesses, do domestic work, or be unemployed. The Asian American roll call is lengthy and ever growing, a mosaic of endlessly subdividable profiles. In other words, Asian America in its essence is diversity.
If difference is the baseline norm, unity emerges as a periodic deviation, as peaks and valleys. The valleys are the oppressions that hit us as groups and subject us to racialized mistreatment. The peaks are the collective victories, when we overcome injustices as a group and act together to improve conditions for all. Asian America is, in its most enlightened formation, an expression of oneness, that corny American idea, e pluribus unum. But unlike the one-way assimilation of the melting pot, Asian American unity is provisional, the result of solidarity work in accordance with the political requirements of the moment. By choosing to identify in common we refuse to let our differences be the separations that uphold our oppressions.
By looking at our history, Asian America has produced examples of peoples collectivizing across difference; making of our components a unified and engaged social body for the purposes of creating change. Can we, in fact, be a model for how to unify our vast, diverse nation such that we push for changes that will benefit, not just our own communities, but everyone? As adrienne maree brown says, to create a world that works for more people, for more life. Let us understand that being Asian American is a process guided by values of our choosing. We are the authors of our own culture, the architects of our own power.
Toward that end, we propose the following to support our mindful political engagement: let us refuse to define ourselves solely by our oppression and instead raise our shared consciousness to generate the changes we want to see.
Let us refresh for our contemporary conditions the ideals of achievement, material wealth and success with trust in each other, collective memory and imagination, and deep connection to the Earth.
Let us embrace the sacred, non-linear notions of time that structured many of our ancestors’ worlds, perhaps considering ancient practices as not-new approaches to today’s problems.
Let us nurture our capacity to hold multiple identifications steady all at once. Let us continue to evolve our minds such that we accumulate real wisdom over time and thus become the elders our society needs.
Let us cultivate humility and gratitude for the cultural abundance we have inherited.
Let us refuse to be the false solution to the state-sponsored “problem” of being Black in the United States.
Let us do our best to live peacefully in times of upheaval, understanding that change is the only constant, while growing joy and resisting despair.
Let us understand the liberation that beckons from within our compassionate practices.
Let Us Demand
Asian American power is immanent, residing as latent potential and emerging when we collectively act for a more just and caring society. This is no vague and dreamy desire but rather an acknowledgment of the profound consequences of our country’s convergent crises going unaddressed. The contemporary conditions beg for collective solutions, for policies of universal scale, for real inclusion. COVID-19 has made it perfectly clear that our country must fundamentally restructure its health insurance model, restart a federal pandemic response team, and at a deeper level, recommit to basic science education. The antihuman police killings of Black people coupled with the alarming spike in anti-Asian racism spells out the need for renewed Civil Rights protections and a meaningful overhaul of law enforcement. The devastated economy cannot be righted without a serious wealth redistribution. And as an inversion of the acute crisis of the pandemic becoming an extended affliction, the slow crisis of climate change is rapidly quickening. Let us mobilize with the knowledge that Asian American interests largely align with the broadly progressive agenda that would benefit other people of color, urban and rural communities alike, and the vast majority of working people in all sectors.
We know that these are big demands, and that they will be hard-won. But we also know that another four years of a Trump administration may snuff out hope for the national course correction required to grow the things we want to see. With less than seven weeks until November 3, our first course of action is very clear: we must defeat Donald Trump resoundingly, and we must win Democratic control of the Senate.
We know that some, maybe many, from our communities dispute this view. If this is you, with respect and love we ask you to reconsider your true reasons. If this is somebody you know, we ask that you make a plea for them to reconsider. For those in agreement, we ask that you engage fully for this November. That begins now, with getting registered to vote and helping others to register. It continues with staying abreast of the down ballot contests, with donating what time or funds you can to support candidates opposed to Trump, with plugging into the grassroots efforts to safeguard votes in what will be weeks of rampant electoral suppression and subterfuge. We cannot accept anything less than a fair and democratic election this year.
A Movement Recharged
The message of unity, democratic participation, and cultural affirmation is not new. We have our stalwart organizers and scholars to thank for building up reservoirs of Asian American consciousness over the generations. And yet, it feels like a re-awakening. The proof of engagement is everywhere. From the world of fashion, well-known designers are responding to the president’s barely veiled scapegoating. From Asian American actors and media figures come op-eds and PSAs to combat the rise in anti-Asian hate. The novelist Viet Nguyen deconstructs the model minority myth in a long form essay for Time.com, calling attention to the contradiction embodied by the Hmong American policeman Tou Thao, one of four officers charged in the senseless murder of George Floyd. The next generation is making visible the work of solidarity, hashtagging #AsiansforBlackLives all over social media. We see it in the continuing advocacy of organizations like Asian Americans Advancing Justice.
We have never been more visible than right now. The Democratic Veep is a child of immigrants, and whose ancestral home is Tamil Nadu, India — an outpost of radical justice movements in its own right. And in one of the ironies of the moment, journalists note that the rise in harassment of East Asians is happening even as Asian Americans are making a pronounced national contribution due to our disproportionate presence as healthcare workers and in the medical sciences. More than ever before, Asian Americans are demonstrably capable of responding to the injustices we experience. And we can do more to lead the way toward the society we want.
Let us produce something we can proudly call Asian America, a cultural and political tide for the twenty-first century. Let us be agents in articulating and evolving our own consciousness. Let us refuse to be defined as regressive voting blocs to be manipulated by others. More variegated but also far more numerous and influential than in generations past, when activated by a common consciousness today’s Asian America can be the most compelling Asian America ever.
instagram: @nowtime_asianamerica
