Despite Your Tiger Mother, or Your Other Racial Half Will Not Save You from What the World Thinks of Your Blackness

In this personal essay, the author analyzes what it means to be black and Asian American in a nation where racial capital determines social value and non-black immigrants are encouraged to uphold and abide by anti-black systems, policies, and practices. Narrating her experience as a black Chinese American woman, the author reflects on having received anti-black messages throughout her childhood and how her need for healing has paralleled her work which challenges existing racial logic that casts Asian Americans as a model minority in competition and conflict with black people who are cast as social failures. Recognizing this racial/racist logic as one that allows white America to absolve itself from its central role in maintaining structural oppression, the author argues for the continued calling out of anti-blackness in all spaces—public and intimate, white and non-white—while carving out a path to empowerment, creativity, and freedom for herself and her daughter.