"Near-White" or "Just like Blacks": Comparative Cartographies and Asian American Critique

The question is multilayered. Is yellow black or white? is a question of Asian American identity. Is yellow black or white? is a question of Third World identity, or the relationships among people of color. Is yellow black or white? is a question of American identity, or the nature of America's racial formation. Implicit within the question is a construct of American society that defines race relations as bi-polar—between black and white—and that locates Asians (and American Indians and Latinos) somewhere along the divide between black and white. Asians, thus, are "near-whites" or "just like blacks."

Gary Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams

Multiculturalism in the US has produced such dynamic and contingent subjects within which the hyphen ceases to be a sign of resistance to the American nation but rather becomes the marker of a contingent ability of those with such an identity to switch from one side of the hyphen to the other but at other times to challenge the American nation with this contingency.

Inderpal Grewal, "Transnational America: Race, Gender and Citizenship after 9/11"

At approximately 12:45 a.m. on 3 March 1991, three days after President George H. W. Bush declared a ceasefire in the (first) Persian Gulf War, police pulled over a white Hyundai in Lake View Terrace, a racially mixed, middle-class neighborhood in northeast Los Angeles.¹ As court documents, eyewitness accounts, and George Holliday's video would incontrovertibly establish, this was by no means a routine traffic stop.² Indeed, the driver of the vehicle was black motorist Rodney King, a recent parolee whose initial evasion of authorities precipitated an eight-mile pursuit involving two California Highway Patrol (CHP) officers, multiple Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) patrol cars, and a police helicopter.³ After vacating the vehicle, King was—under Sergeant Stacey C. Koon's supervision—summarily tased, kicked, and brutally beaten by Officers Theodore Briseno, Timothy E. Wind, and Laurence M. Powell. Holliday's home video (excerpted and distributed to local, national, and international news outlets) captured what a Time magazine reporter later characterized as an 81-second "danse macabre of casual, almost studied, violence," punctuated by a total of 56 billyclub hits to King's head, torso, and legs.⁴

Nevertheless, an even greater spectacle of interracial violence and interethnic unrest would occur in the juridical aftermath of the now infamous Rodney King verdict. On 29 April 1992, at 3:15 p.m., a Simi Valley jury (comprising 10 whites, 1 Asian, and 1 Latino) acquitted Briseno, Wind, Powell, and Koon of excessive force charges.⁵ Almost two hours later, over the course of the next five days, South Central Los Angeles became a bona fide war zone, an epicenter for mass unrest, federally mandated martial law, National Guard occupation, and the destruction of more than 800 buildings. Contrary to the black/white contours that foregrounded the Rodney King case, Korean shop owners—culturally misunderstood inheritors of "perpetual foreigner" nativism, model-minority benefactors of antiblack/anti-Latino racism, and seemingly willing actors in an established racial hierarchy—were Los Angeles's chief economic victims. Half of the estimated one billion dollars in damage involved Korean-owned groceries, liquor stores, and shops.⁶

When Mayor Tom Bradley lifted the citywide curfew on 6 May 54 people were dead, 2,000 denizens injured, and 12,000 Angelenos arrested (Song 5). Situated against this cataclysmic backdrop, the last decade of the twentieth century discursively called forth what Min Hyoung Song provocatively characterizes a "strange future," a pessimistic outlook evident in narratives of "national ruin," concerns over impending "decline," and emblematized by tumultuous race politics, class conflict, inner-city violence, and reinvigorated nativism (1). These contestations—which dramatically underscore enduring legacies of systemic racism...