Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism contrasts two approaches to antiracist theory and practice. The first emphasizes racial identity to the exclusion of political economy. This approach’s prevalence, in the academy and beyond, now rises to the level of established doctrine. The second approach views racial identity as the function of a particular political economy—what is called racial capitalism—and therefore analytically subordinates racial identity to political economy. The book develops arguments in favor of the second approach. It does so by employing case studies of two Asian American communities: a Chinese migrant settlement in the Mississippi Delta (1868–1969) and a religious base community in the Bayview/Hunters Point section of San Francisco (1969–present). While focused on groups and persons (i.e., the Delta Chinese and Redeemer Community Church) the book more broadly examines racial capitalism’s processes and commitments (i.e., the Delta Chinese business model and Redeemer’s “deep economy”) at the sites of their structural and systemic unfolding. Constructively, the book proposes reframing antiracism in terms of a theologically salient account of political economy. In pursuing a research agenda that pushes beyond the narrow confines of racial identity, the book reaches back to trusted modes of analysis that have been obscured by the prevailing antiracist orthodoxy. Approaching race through political economy will not get at everything that racism is, and does, but it gets at what can be managed, and in the last resort lived. Accordingly, the book invites readers into a different life with race and racism, reimagining what they are and are doing.
In this essay I argue that Christian political participation as envisioned by those I term “Augustinian democrats”—a group of Protestant ethicists following a path cleared by Jeffrey Stout’s 2004 Democracy and Tradition—is founded upon an elegantly rendered political ontology, but leaves incomplete a description of the practical task and place of the church. My contention is that this incompletely developed practical task is not accidental to the manner in which these Augustinians complete the speculative, ontological task. The completion of the speculative task combined with the incompletion of the practical task, I conclude, nevertheless results in a hybrid and especially interesting picture of personhood that points to an understanding of Protestantism as the attempt to recover human individuality within Christianity.
“The Parable of the Shrewd Manager” in Luke 16 illuminates some important features of Asian American life. Like the parable’s central character, Asian Americans live under a set of cultural expectations where success is achieved by accepting terms set by others. In America, those terms are often defined racially, where access gets indexed to one’s ethnicity, or to perceptions of one’s ethnicity. The terms can be of great benefit and can come at great cost, as was the case for managers in Jesus’ day. Understanding Asian American life requires the recognition of both sides of this dynamic. This article first examines the parable and then draws out its relevance for Asian American and Asian American Christian life, concluding with some thoughts on the relative status of normative judgment in the context of racialization.
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