Week 3

Such intimate entanglements between racial formation and the state thus remind us that all racial identities are always preeminently political identities.
-Nicholas De Genova

Race politics in the United States have been that of perpetuation of “the other” in order to maintain a hegemonic White society based on exclusion and White privilege. Through immigration laws, racial formations, and racial triangulation respectively, Ngai, De Genova, and Kim address the ways in which Asians and Latinos have been subjugated and maintained as socially stigmatized groups. The large immigration of both these populations has “modified the racial map of the nation” (Ngai 8) and drastically altered the previously pervading notion of a Black-White binary.

The racialized experience of both Asians and Latinos is fundamentally different than that of African Americans. De Genova suggests both groups can be historically placed in parallel with Native Americans. He specifically distinguishes the African American experience, one that was “fully encompassed within an ‘American’ social order of white power and prestige” (2) with that of the Native American, typically seen as an outsider “with an excess of ‘culture’” (5) and thus an inability to assimilate to that same social order. Asians specifically, Kim notes, have been subject to a problematic triangulation, where they are valorized while also ostracized from society in maintenance of White dominance. This valorization is seen through the creation of the model minority myth, placing Asians above other disenfranchised groups due to material success. The model minority myth reinforces the notion that all races are expected to follow the same trajectory, notwithstanding the wholly structural discrimination and unequal opportunities available. By creating a “good minority/bad minority opposition” (Kim 118), and thus relating the “good” minority to whiteness, society and media perpetuate the racial domination and superiority of whites, both socially and civically, over people of color.

Continued racist practices enforced by institutions, policies, and the media, attempt to idolize one sector of the population while demonizing another, blatantly seen in the model minority myth. Racialized institutions specifically target certain groups, from Blacks to Latinos, and currently Arabs, as a means to cultivate certain political agendas. Regardless of the historically targeted minority group, the maintenance of White racial domination is an interminable structure to keep non-whites powerless. And although no longer blatantly directed by the government, the inherent structural racism of this society cannot be disregarded.