Review Essay: Race, Rights, and the Asian American Experience

Achieving the nexus between theory and practice remains elusive. While it is a frequently espoused goal, only a select few are possessed of the unique set of strengths that actually permit them to pursue the audacious project of practicing theory and theorizing practice. For the most part, theory and practice continue to be thoroughly divorced. Scholars shamble around by themselves in the ivory tower; activists rage alone against the machine. One unhappy result is that the prospect for engaged and engaging scholarship is dimmed.

Fortunately, in Race, Rights, and the Asian American Experience by Angelo Ancheta, none of the familiar signs of disjunction are evident. In fact, one of the greatest strengths of the book—which is best understood as an extended, synthetic essay on how Asian Americans alternately shape and are shaped by civil rights law (xii)—is precisely that it is a work of synthesis. With varying degrees of success, it combines scholarly perspectives generated from studying racism with practical insights won from fighting it. This synthesis is made possible because Ancheta is at once a grounded practitioner of the law, having once served as executive director of the San Francisco-based Asian Law Caucus, and a well-versed scholar, having once taught at the UCLA School of Law. The book decisively reflects his experiences. Written by someone who is as much an “observant participant” as “participatory observer,” the book can be situated at the intersection of diverse range of fields: the sociology of racial inequality, civil rights and immigration law, Asian American legal scholarship (an emergent, distinct strand of critical race theory), and Asian American studies. ¹

The book’s central argument is straightforward. Existing civil rights law is predicated on a binary model of “race relations” that can satisfactorily address neither the historical experiences of Asian Americans nor their contemporary legal and political circumstances, particularly the challenges wrought by continuing Asian immigration. “When questions of civil rights move beyond a black-white dichotomy,” Ancheta writes, “rights and remedies become problematic and Asian Americans are often left without the full protection of the law” (13). In particular, the unique kind of racism faced by Asian Americans—fueled by nativism, xenophobia, linguistic differences, or in a different vein by the model minority myth—is not seen by the law as subject to civil rights protection, hence leaving Asian Americans distinctly vulnerable as a racial(ized) group.

Ancheta begins the book with familiar episodes of Asian American history: racial and national-origin restrictions on Asian immigration, Japanese American internment during WWII, post-1965 immigration. Having put his concerns into historical perspective, he then proceeds to establish his theoretical and legal framework, adopting a racial formation perspective and outlining the basic features of traditional civil rights and anti-discrimination law—with an emphasis on their limits as tools for addressing racism.

With these preparatory chapters underfoot, Ancheta moves on to his strongest and most original contribution to Asian American scholarship: three substantive chapters that examine, partly from the knowledgeable viewpoint of an expert participant, the relation between Asian Americans and specific areas of civil rights and immigration law. Chapter three looks at what Ancheta calls “outsider racialization,” a process whereby Asian Americans are constructed not simply in racial terms—although the process does hinge importantly on racial phenotype—but rather in terms of citizenship. “Outsider racialization” can be weak in cases where Asian Americans are seen as immigrants (“immigrant” racialization) or strong where Asian Americans are seen as aliens (“foreigner” racialization). In either case, civil rights law affords uneven and incomplete protection for Asian Americans, whose physical appearance subjects them to discrimination based on the (possible) misperception that they are either immigrants or foreigners.

Chapter four discusses the implications of the law’s inconsistency and unevenness in questions of race versus citizenship. In particular, it explores the historical origins and contemporary abuses of federal plenary power in matters relating to immigration. It also shows how incongruent standards of judicial review—different standards for federal versus state cases, for...