Asian Americans in a World of White Supremacy and Anti-Black Racism: Reply to Asibong, Merchant, and Tummala-Narra

In their responses, Asibong, Tummala-Narra, and Merchant speak to Asian Americans’ plight for survival within the American racial hierarchy. In my reply, I build on their insights to further elucidate the Asian American relationship to white supremacy and anti-Black racism. In framing this exploration, I use Isabel Wilkerson’s notion of Caste system, which places Asian Americans in the middle between the dominant caste (whites) and bottom caste (Blacks). I introduce the concept of the malleable racial object, to describe the role to which Asian Americans have been relegated. I further posit that the Asian American position contains trauma-based identification with the aggressor/dominant caste and dissociated fear of being met with the fate of the bottom caste. Drawing from Robert Stolorow’s work on emotional kinship and Jessica Benjamin’s work on going beyond the binary of doer and done to, I make some suggestions on achieving racial repair through shared finitude and the ethic of “We are in this together.”