Someone who gets it!
Asian American, the term used to describe Kang and millions of others whose ancestry can be traced back to the continent of Asia, has never truly fit.
In his book, Kang takes aim at the idea of a cohesive, Asian American identity and calls for a reimagination of it instead.
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Growing up in Boston and North Carolina as the child of Korean immigrants, how did you think about yourself in terms of race?
At the beginning, I didn't think about it very much. I think that there was some form of suppression because my parents are so aggressively assimilative. Part of me wonders why they were like that. But at the same time, I also think that they saw that as the only method of survival. They thought, perhaps correctly, that if they [worked to assimilate] then their kids would have an easier path to moving up in America.
By the time I started noticing that I was different -- sometime around second, third or fourth grade -- I found myself identifying more with the Black students at our school than the White students.
Yes! This is the first step along the path to Americanness (which your Eurocentrist parents never discovered)!
Isn't there value in drawing parallels between the discrimination faced by early Asian immigrants and the challenges that Asian Americans face today?
I think it's okay to say we as a people might [be discriminated against] as other people have had it happen before us. That's a little different than saying we are those other people.
To think about these things clearly, we need to think about the distinct mass of people who came post-1965 as perhaps even its own identity. I've felt more in common with [a former coworker whose family came from Nigeria post-1965] than I did a whole host of other Asian people, especially those who had long histories in the United States.
Well done! This is what we need!
Do you see any value in a broad, umbrella term like Asian Americans?
I would just ask why "immigrant" wouldn't work better.
There's something about the post-1965 immigration experience that would lend itself to a great deal of solidarity that would be broader than just the Asian American category. It would bring in these sort of natural alliances that already exist.
If you go to a Korean restaurant in Los Angeles and you go into the kitchen, you're going to see Mexican dudes and El Salvadoran dudes talking to Korean dudes in some mix of Korean and Spanish. Those types of examples are everywhere. If we can create a capacious idea of identity that includes those types of moments, that's a much stronger form of identity and will make people feel more politically active than this term that we seem to argue about what it actually means.
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If we change the politics and make it about the concerns of poor immigrants, then suddenly there are absolutely open pathways to all sorts of solidarity with different people. I think that's in the end what we want.
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It requires a type of treason against one's class and one's race. That's what's necessary at this point. I do think it's difficult. I do think that most people won't do it. But I do think if a small group of very influential people do it, that it will be massively influential.
The solidarity we really want is between all victims of Western colonialism, but what is proposed above is already much better than dividing people by ethnic background.
The book itself is a question of why we accept the political identities that are given to us. Is there a way we can think about our lives to try and create better political possibilities that we might not have thought of before? If the book does anything, I hope that it empowers people to think through their own lives and maybe come up with something better than I can of how we should navigate the next 20 to 30 years.
We should spend the next 20-30 years (or however long it takes) killing every aspect of Western civilization everywhere it can be found in the world. America is destined to take a leading role in this, but first the US has to recognize itself as American instead of Western.
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