Asian Americans for Action and the Carceral Logic of the Model Minority

This essay intervenes in interdisciplinary scholarship on race and Asian Americans by reframing the model minority neither as a “myth” nor a nondiscursive political positionality, but rather as a carceral logic. Examining archival materials surrounding Asian Americans for Action (AAA)’s activist newsletter in 1960s and 1970s New York City, this article considers the interplay between race, carcerality, and the Asian American movement as they negotiated the rise of the model minority figure. Here, the model minority did not only operate to perpetuate negative or “false” stereotypes about Asian Americans, but to rationalize a carceral regime, including both prisons and transnational militarization. This article argues that AAA’s anticarceral rhetorics are significant for understanding how Asian American grassroots activism facilitated a rebellious and insurgent “Asian America” against this carceral legibility of the model minority. In particular, the essay focuses on three recurring themes in AAA’s newsletter: their discourse around the McCarren Internal Security Act; their discussion of political prisoners; and their discussion of transnational US militarization. As I suggest, their rhetoric and activism surrounding these topics produced a vocabulary for articulating Asian American racialization as intimately tied to global and domestic carceral violence, thus providing a basis for a transnational and coalitional approach to conceptualizing Asian American identity and politics. Such an examination of AAA thus offers important takeaways for considering the Asian American movement, the model minority, and the relationship between carceral institutions and Asian American racialization.