Comparison and Coalition in the Age of Black Lives Matter

Ironically, or perhaps fittingly, I began writing this on November 9, the day after the troubling election night that proved to be a testament to the resilience of white racist fear and entitlement, as well as a shift (in the United States, one that happened much earlier in other places in the world) from the reigning governmentality of neoliberal multiculturalism to neoliberal authoritarianism. In this context, the question that animates this forum—that is, why Black Lives Matter is relevant to Asian American studies and vice versa—is all the more pressing because it seems clear to me that this election result is a backlash against the very real successes of the Black Lives Matter movement.

By that movement, I mean not only the social-media-based activism that sprang up in support of and in the aftermath of the mass protests in Ferguson, Missouri, following the police killing of Michael Brown, but the Movement for Black Lives, a coalition of more than fifty organizations. Indeed, "Black Lives Matter" can be used as shorthand to gesture to the resurgent energies of a number of coalitional movements led by and for black people. One example is the Moral Mondays movement in North Carolina, and the Historic Thousands on Jones Street coalition that preceded it, which mobilized a vibrant coalition around an interconnected set of issues, including voting rights, environmentalism, reproductive justice, labor rights, and public education, to name just a few.¹ The concerted efforts at voter suppression in that state, enabled by the Supreme Court's 2013 repeal of the Voting Rights Act and by racial gerrymandering that was so severe that a federal panel of judges ruled it unconstitutional, is not simply evidence of the regressive forces that contributed to the outcome of the presidential election, but a panicked response to the undeniable impact and power of such movements.²

As a matter of fact, Black Lives Matter must be contextualized within an even larger landscape of contemporary antiracist, anticolonial, and coalitional activism that has transformed our communities. I speak of not only the decades of prison abolitionist organizing against state violence that is the backdrop of Black Lives Matter,³ but also the vibrant movements built by undocumented immigrants and the resolute claims to Indigenous sovereignty and challenges to development and environmental degradation led by Idle No More and the water protectors who mobilized against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock. At a moment when the casualization of whole industries and the general turn toward service economies is supposed to make labor impossible to organize, we've witnessed renewed energy in union activism in such disparate sectors as fast food, domestic work, and college athletics.⁴

My point is that we can read the backlash politics made manifest in the election results as a symptom of the success of antiracist, anticolonial movements, rather than evidence of their failure. These movements have succeeded in undermining the bedrock structures of white racism and settler colonialism of the United States and in so doing have created spaces for new possibilities and opportunities. I also want to emphasize the coalitional and intersectional nature of these movements that led to their successes and that is all the more important now. All of these movements bring together a variety of interests and constituencies. They cross racial and national boundaries as they also highlight the ways in which racial groups are internally heterogeneous. Led by women, queers, and transgender and genderqueer people, they insist that these issues, from police violence to environmental devastation, are inherently issues of gender and sexuality. Asian American activists and organizations have been important, if not necessarily the most visible, contributors to many of these struggles.

In this context, how is Asian American studies relevant to this age of Black Lives Matter and vice versa? This raises a broader question of the role of scholarship and pedagogy for social movements. As this is a meditation on Black Lives Matter published in an academic journal with a largely academic audience, I am not dismissing the importance of Asian American activists and organizations outside of...