With previous APIA posts said, I don’t think that you can:

1) say that there isn’t anti-blackness in a lot of our communities or step away from the fact that it needs to be addressed (and we can’t shy away from it or try to resolve it behind closed doors).

2) compare the experience of all APIA oppression as equivalent to all other POC oppression. We face colorism, colonialism, racism, xenophobia, sexism, fetishization, objectification, exploitation and all sorts of damaging impacts of white supremacy and Eurocentrism. BUT we don’t experience it in the same way or same degree as other POC. Just as there is a variant gauge of experienced oppression within our communities. As a sansei male, my experienced oppression is very different than the experienced oppression of an undocumented APIA woman. We need to honor that the same variant gauge of oppression exists in the broader POC lived experience.

colorblinding:

I don’t have time to make another big post because I really have to get back to work, but I just wanted to make a few points.

• I’m really bothered by the way some people keep throwing around ideas of how Asian Americans buy into antiblackness or engage in white supremacist ideology as blanket statements. Especially if you consider that Asian America is comprised of extremely diverse groups, including Asian diasporic communities and migrants, some of whom not only have issues with antiblackness, but with xenophobia of any nationality other than their own as a whole. This is a phenomenon that is not specifically anti-black and is complicated by the question of nationality, ethnicity, and citizenship which are often not examined or even considered by people on Tumblr who mobilize such ideas. 
   
• Asian Americans who buy into white supremacist ideas often come from or descend from colonial or postcolonial situations where such buying-in means survival, and these behaviors often become ingrained and are not challenged by existing communities and social conditions in which they live. This is not to say that this is not an issue, but to make blanket statements about Asian Americans without really understanding or explaining the sheer complexity of the statement, is troubling. 
   
• Asian Americans are not and do not always actually identify as Asian Americans due to the very diasporic/migrant nature of the community. Many Asian Americans have national allegiances to their home country — to this day my parents, for example, do not consider themselves American, and still say they are Chinese even though they work and live in America and are naturalized American citizens. First and second generation diasporic citizens can also have tension in their nationality. (I have days when I’ll say something along the lines of “We Chinese” or “those Americans” and I am second generation.) It is important to examine how diasporic communities relate to America to really understand how to situate them within conversations on race which cannot be understood as universally applicable. Race and understandings of race are not transnational; American conceptions of race and Western conceptions of race in particular, are very different from the way, say, China or Japan or the Phillipines thinks or talks about race, ethnicity, and nationality. 
  
  I might add that there is another racial community which completely rejects Asian American identity, and that community happens to be the Hawaiian community. Both the native Hawaiian and local Asian Hawaiian community reject the mainland term of Asian American due to the way in which the very term mobilizes and reinstates American colonialism and exceptionalism within Hawaii. (In fact, anyone who would attempt to force that identity upon Native Hawaiians and Local Hawaiians are considered “haole.”)  
   
• Asian America includes huge communities that include migrant and undocumented workers and trafficked peoples who are exploited for hard labor in illegal sweatshops within the Continental U.S., domestic workers, sex slaves (not sex workers, which is different, but slaves who are literally sold), in restaurants, and in construction. These groups tend to be overwhelmingly Southeast Asian (Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam) or from the Fujian Province of China. 
  
  
•  You cannot talk about Asian America without talking about transnational Asian identity or Western imperialism, colonization, and conquest both historically and presently in Asia.  To talk about race and Asian America and to not consider the transnational ways in which Asians are still exploited under neocolonial conditions for America’s corporate and national interests is to not really understand the complexities of exchange that are critical to Asian American identity as a whole. 

Okay, with that said, I have to get back to work. 

I do also feel with this around the blanket statements around APIA folks. I think that also ties back in to the lost history that bankuei put as his first point in that post. We have been radical, we have been engaged. Not all APIA, of course. but the lost history that evades many/most of our communities is also unrepresented to non-APIA folks as well. APIA folks have been part of social movements, racial justice, and solidarity for a long ass time. a LOOOOONG ASS TIME.

I also want to highlight the important complex around Hawai’i that was made. We can’t force our identities on people in their own land. We were exploited and brought to help facilitate the colonial oppression of another group of sisters and brothers (part of why I hate the H-word). We should not forget that.

For me at least, I prefer the terms APIA and POC. I think part of my drive towards APIA is around inclusivity and solidarity with other PI folks, even though our experiences can be/are very different.

Creating blanket statements for our communities is problematic and ties back into some of that marginalizing narrative. We are here. We’ve been here. We are complex (in all the senses of the word) and we are diverse. There is still work for us to do in many of our communities- let’s not lose that, but let’s also not forget that many of us are conscious and engaged around our identities as people of color, some more radical than others.

bankuei:

People seem able to hold two objects in their hands, but not two thoughts in their heads.

1. Asian Americans were lynched, run out of town, murdered, deported, and put into concentration camps.  Asian Americans suffered terrible violence and oppression.

2. Asian Americans now suffer lesser oppression than many other POC, and are held up as a “model minority” as a tool to show why all the other POC are terrible people, and often recruited to engage in perpetuating the oppression.

#1 seems to always be the thing people want to erase.  It’s important to erase it, because it invalidates the sales job that #2 provides.   See, when there is less oppression, people succeed more.  (which, points out all too well, when you see other POC as collectives failing, then you have to go, “Oh, look, oppression, and where does it come from?”)

That said, erasing the past is part of what makes it so easy for many Asian Americans to hop on the anti-blackness bandwagon - when you forget that you, too, were a lynching target, then all the “Negroes LOL!” hate shit seems like it puts you above them.  

That is, of course, until someone decides you overstep your bounds and you realize, just cause they let you in the house, don’t mean they stopped considering you a slave…

So, this is how I look at it - when I see people don’t know about our history - I look at us for not studying it, for not acknowledging it (and calling out white power structures who inflicted it upon us), I look to the white people who erase that history every day, who minimalize it, who try to slap me on the back and tell me, or us collectively, we’re not “like those people over there”, and I look to the education system that makes that all happen.

You know who I look to way last at the end of that line?  The fellow POC who may be ignorant, but it’s not their fault between white erasure, and the all-too-often Asian American complicity in making it seem like we’ve always been the best of friends and not that they’ve gone hard on us and seem to never care when we end up dead.

I point to racism as a society wide version of an abusive family. You have the abuser, and a whole lot of the family trying to side with the abuser so they, too, don’t get hit.  And the one person in the family everyone blames, because no one is willing to stand up and acknowledge who the true source of suffering is.

There’s a whole lot of ways POC reinforce shit on each other, but as far as I’m concerned White Supremacy is the source and the head, and that will always get my first attention.

This is important <3 APIA folks, we have a responsibility to recognize our history, the structures that are in place, the forced division that makes us “sorta POC, but close to white, so…” and we need to educate ourselves. No one else will do it for us. We need to stand with our POC sisters and brothers, address colorism, stand up to white supremacy and white washing. I mean, I know I usually come off as another angry asian- but DAMMIT, WE NEED TO BE ANGRY AND REMEMBER THAT BEING ANGRY, A POC, AND RADICAL IS OK. FUCK, IT’S NECESSARY!

Remember- we’re only a “Model Minority” in that we’re willing to hollow ourselves, throw others under the bus, and adopt whiteness over our bodies and souls. And at the end of the day- no matter how “model” you are, they still pull their eyes back, ask where you’re really from, and fetishize your body as if it were just a doll for their desires.

It’s APIA history month, let’s make sure we use the last few days to remember the struggle that we have had, still have, and how interconnected we are with other POC.

midori-fairy:

Ignored by mainstream media, Asian Americans turn to online videos

hanguknamja:

Catch Kevin Wu’s latest comedy program on YouTube, and you might think he’s nothing more than a young Asian American talking to a camera in his bedroom. But almost each of his shows command at least 2 million views — rivaling the nightly TV audiences of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

A disproportionate share of YouTube’s top personalities are minorities, a striking contrast to the most popular shows on mainstream television, where the stars are largely white. These minority-produced, home-grown shows are drawing massive audiences — the top one has 5.2 million subscribers — enough to attract the attention of major advertisers.

“A lot of U.S. marketers are leaving minority audiences on the table,” said Seneca Mudd, the director of industry initiatives at the Interactive Advertising Bureau. “Advertisers would ignore that trend at their own peril.”

Among the 20 most-subscribed-to channels on YouTube, eight feature minorities. Most are Asian American. .. Nearly 80 percent of minorities regularly watch online videos, compared with less than 70 percent of whites, the Pew Internet & American Life Project says.

Wu, who ranks 11th among YouTube channels, said he does not intentionally target Asian American issues. But those viewers more easily understand his jokes on dating, stereotypes and the generational clash between parents and kids, he said. “I just tell my stories honestly, and usually Asian Americans will relate to me because they say, ‘That’s how I am and with my parents,’ ” he said.

For minorities, the medium offers a way to push back against stereotypes on network television, said Maureen Guthman, the head of brand strategy and acquisitions for the African American-focused channel TV One. Blacks can present themselves “completely unfiltered and without [someone] telling us, ‘You’ve got to be more this’ or ‘You’ve got to be more that,’ ” she said.