Manipulated Panethnicity

Tiffany Do

ASA 2 Section 2
Week 3 Blog

In response to Omi and Takagi’s “Situating Asian Americans in the Political Discourse of Affirmative Action:”

I really enjoyed reading this article because it explained in detail how Asian Americans have been co-opted by the political Right and Left in order to argue against or for affirmative action, respectively. I found connections between this reading and the two readings from Week 1 and 2 that I discussed in my blogs for those weeks. For my Week 2 blog, I talked about how Soya Jung’s article “Why Ferguson Matters to Asian Americans” reinforced the Black-White racial binary. This racial binary is discussed in this article. Depending on what side you’re looking at, Asian Americans are either seen as more White or more Black; they are being defined relative to other races rather than having their own identity. This renders Asian Americans invisible, despite their presence in these political debates. For my Week 1 blog, I discussed the section in Glen Omatsu’s “The ‘Four Prisons’ and the Movements of Liberation” where Omatsu describes how Asian American neoconservatives are being co-opted by the Republican party to serve their own political agenda. The same thing is happening here. There is a trend of Asian Americans being used as little game pieces for political purposes. We identify as Asian American and use our panethnicity for political purposes and unity. Other people are doing the same thing but it doesn’t seem to be as beneficial.

Questions:

How can we reclaim our panethnicity as a source of political and social power for ourselves rather than a source of manipulation by others?

How can we reclaim this panethnicity while doing justice to the vast amount of diversity within the Asian American population?

source: https://www.opencongress.org/wiki/images/b/bb/Affirmative_action_shirt.jpg

I chose this picture because it is a nice way of summing up the beliefs of the political Right when they argue against affirmative action. They try to make it sound as though colorblindness is the way to go when America is clearly not post-racial.