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5 Negotiating Racial Hierarchies Critical Incorporation, Immigrant Ideology, and Interminority Relations Well, environmental justice is like, it’s like your, it’s sort of like your basic right in the constitution. . . . And I just, like, basically believe that environmental justice, like, like, the right for everyone to live in a healthy safe environment, you know. —Lon (interview, 7 December 1998; emphasis in original) The post-1965 demographic revolution has changed the racial landscape of many urban areas. Settlement patterns of new immigrants indicate that it is an urban phenomenon (Waldinger and Lee 2001) and one that is shaped by class status. Ethnic and racial minorities are beginning to form majorities in many cities (Camarillo 2004), and processes of acculturation are shaped more by interaction between nonwhite groups than by contact with white people or a core American culture (Kasinitz 2004:293). These demographic shifts demand that we examine the interminority relations emerging from the changing racial dynamics (Võ and Torres 2004), particularly the prospects for cross-racial/cross-ethnic coalitions to contest existing racial hierarchies and to dismantle related structures and processes of racial inequality in the United States. In recent times the media and some academic analyses have portrayed African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinos as competing for scarce resources and political inclusion rather than as potential allies and coalition partners (Lie 2004; Camarillo 2004). These encounters and interactions between racial and ethnic groups in the contemporary U.S. urban landscape are fashioned by larger economic and political structures, government policies, and racialized perceptions and misperceptions. Nevertheless, opportunities exist at the local level to create cooperative cross-racial relations through, for example, efforts to keep neighborhoods free of crime and drugs (Camarillo 2004) or coalitions to address environmental pollution or improve schools in the local community. Võ and Torres (2004:310) call such opportunities “border spaces” where racial groups interact, sometimes with overt or covert tension and other times quite amicably. APEN is one such border space; operating within an environmental justice framework, it advocates for common struggle with other communities of color and resists artificial racial boundaries in favor of fluid, multiple identities where race, class, gender, and generation intersect. In this chapter I analyze the macro- Negotiating Racial Hierarchies 83 and microlevel processes that create possibilities for and constraints to challenging structures of racial difference. Specifically, I examine the impact that involvement in AYA/LOP and community organizing has had on second-generation Laotians’ political identities and collective self-understandings (Brubaker and Cooper 2000:7) around race. As I demonstrated in Chapter 2, Laotians in northern California share a common economic, social, and environmentally impacted context with their African American and Latino neighbors. While many analysts would assume that in this common material context lies the potential for shared class interests across race (see, for example, Murguia and Forman 2003: 72; Camarillo 2004), I argue that the possibilities for and limits to APEN’s goal of engendering critical racial subjectivities and a sense of being “kindred people” (Okihiro 1994:34) are also influenced by an “immigrant ideology” (Cheng and Espiritu 1989) among Laotians and their children, as well as shaped by racialized perceptions and stereotypes. At the same time, this immigrant ideology, together with class position and the desire for ethnic distinctiveness, also shapes the possibilities for identification and solidarity with other Asian Americans. I analyze second-generation Laotians’ particularistic self-understandings, or one’s sense of one’s social location and the range of experiences related to it (Brubaker and Cooper 2000:17), around “race.” Processes of racialization in the United States affect Laotians in contradictory ways. Though the migration of Laotians to the United States emerged because of the history of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia and the deep entanglement of Laotians in the Vietnam War, Laotians arrived as refugees with high aspirations for rebuilding their lives and obtaining opportunities for their children. These aspirations and a sense of optimism are prevalent among their children, though as I demonstrate below, it is a gendered phenomenon. Moreover, as Asian Americans, they are perceived by the dominant society as the “model minority.” Second-generation Laotians are acutely aware of the racialization processes that attribute racial power and prestige to white people and assign black people to the bottom of the racial hierarchy. At the same time, dominant representations of Laotians and other Southeast Asians as refugees, poor, and dependent on welfare also positions them at the black pole. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2004) argues that the positioning...

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