The Los Angeles rebellion of 1992 was a flashpoint in which the struggles of blacks, Latinos, and Asian Americans converged with explosive consequences. Dubbed the nation's first “multiracial” riot, it drove home the point that racial dynamics in the United States cannot be understood through a simple black–white framework. The events in L.A. were only the most dramatic example of interminority conflicts that have emerged in many American cities during the post-1965 era, as economic restructuring and immigration have brought racial/ethnic groups into more extensive contact with one another, reshaping their identities and relationships and creating new pressure points for conflict. Rapid economic and demographic change has also opened up new possibilities for coalition and cooperation among racial/ethnic groups, from electoral politics to grassroots community activism. Asian Americans, often depicted as an “interstitial” group and a potential “swing vote,” have played and will continue to play a key role in interracial conflicts and coalitions in American politics.Although we focus on the post-1965 period in this article, conflict and cooperation between Asian Americans and other communities of color date back into the 1800s.
This article sheds light on the pending affirmative action lawsuit filed by Asian American plaintiffs against Harvard University by providing a brief history of how Asian Americans have been figured (and have figured themselves) in U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudence on race-conscious admissions in higher education. It shows that the figuration of Asian Americans has played a critical role in the legal-ideological project of despecifying Black subjection and disavowing racial positionality in the U.S. social order, from Bakke to the present, and argues that a new ‘sociometry’ of race is necessary to help us understand and challenge persistent structures of racial power.
Dangerous Crossings offers an interpretation of the impassioned disputes that have arisen in the contemporary United States over the use of animals in the cultural practices of nonwhite peoples. It examines three controversies: the battle over the 'cruelty' of the live animal markets in San Francisco's Chinatown, the uproar over the conviction of NFL superstar Michael Vick on dogfighting charges, and the firestorm over the Makah tribe's decision to resume whaling in the Pacific Northwest after a hiatus of more than seventy years. Claire Jean Kim shows that each dispute demonstrates how race and species operate as conjoined logics, or mutually constitutive taxonomies of power. Analyzing each case as a conflict between single optics (the optic of cruelty and environmental harm vs the optic of racism and cultural imperialism), she argues for a multi-optic approach that takes different forms of domination seriously, and thus encourages an ethics of avowal among different struggles.
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