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S TAY I N G V I E T NA M E S E occurs on, and against, racialized terrain. In this chapter I focus on themes of race and racialization—and, by implication , the unmarked norm of whiteness—as they impact Vietnamese American social life. By making “race” an explicit component of my analysis and interpretation of Vietnamese American community-building and placemaking in Orange County and Boston, I bring to the foreground issues that have not been analyzed in prior scholarship on Vietnamese Americans: among these are the racialization of the war in Viet Nam, the impact of the presence of ethnic Chinese in Vietnamese American places, and the relationship between race and place-making. As racialized minorities, Vietnamese are not considered “white” either on the official U.S. census or in social scientific discourse. Indeed, my fieldwork suggests that their inclusion into U.S. society requires that, collectively, they stay Vietnamese. Being “Vietnamese” qualifies their Americanness, signifying both racial and ethnic distinction. This chapter emphasizes the impact of racial formations not only on individual perspectives on community and identity but also on the contrasting patterns of Vietnamese American community-building and place-making between Orange County and Boston. The Racialization of Ethnic Places Treating Vietnamese American community and place in racial rather than ethnic terms requires a thoughtful and deliberate departure from sociological convention. Many influential mainstream social scientists still embrace ethnicity and the bootstrap model of upward mobility that accompanies the ethnic framework. Meanwhile, they relegate the concept of race to a physical/heritable component of ethnicity, reject race as an idea with popular resonance but no scientific merit, or reserve race as a topic concerning only African Americans.1 If America is racist, they might argue, it is so only Chapter 2 Q: Nationality? A: Asian. 37 for the “darkest” Americans; as a U.S. minority group that at this historical juncture is understood to be better-than-black but not-quite-white, Asians are thought to be somehow beyond racism.2 Consequently, putting the terms “race” and “place” together brings to mind black ghettos and Latino barrios, but never Asian ethnic enclaves. This social scientific reticence to deal with the broad empirical realities of race is buttressed by political discourse , where a false logic of egalitarianism paraded by neoconservatives of color has convinced the larger public that racism is a thing of the distant past.3 Importantly, the idea that Asian Americans epitomize the nation’s model minority often serves as “proof” that racism is over.4 To some readers , therefore, the application of a racial frame to Vietnamese American place-making and community-building probably appears not only unnecessary , but ideologically biased and therefore without scientific merit. Yet decades of respected scholarship in the interdisciplinary fields of African American studies, Asian American studies, and recently, American studies underscore the centrality of race for U.S. social life and the construction of a U.S. national identity, in both the past and the present.5 What is race?6 In this chapter, “race” refers to a produced and constructed category that marks one group of human bodies apart from another. Race turns into racism when those bodily markings are treated as signs of innate inferiority or superiority and serve as the justification for discursive and material practices of exclusion at successively larger scales of social space: families, communities, cities, the nation. The origins of race and racism as we know them today in the United States go back to the transatlantic slave trade of the fourteenth century.7 Racism is observable today not only in empirical patterns of racial segregation, but also at a more fundamental level, where U.S. collective notions of citizenship, freedom, and humanity still reflect a deeply racialized understanding of the world.8 A basic assumption of this chapter is that while we prefer to blame race and racism on a handful of ignorant and prejudiced people, race and racism are perhaps more meaningfully described as entrenched social and historical facts, generated and preserved by complex interactions among the global economy, the nation-state, and social movements based in civil society . Put another way, the production and construction of racial categories in the United States may be seen as a consequence of shifts in global markets , war, annexation, and colonization, and as the outcome of policies regarding citizenship, immigration, property ownership, miscegenation, prisons, jobs, schools and housing, families, and reproductive rights.9 38...

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