Are Asians black? The Asian-American civil rights agenda and the contemporary significance of the black/white paradigm.

• Author: Kim, Janine Young

1. INTRODUCTION

   The phrase "civil rights movement" evokes the powerful words and images of the mass movement by Black Americans in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s. In recent years, however, Asian Americans have increasingly laid claim to a place in the history of the struggle for civil rights. Just as Derrick Bell harkens back to Dred Scott v. Sanford(1) as the first of the "leading cases" in civil rights,(2) Hyung-Chan Kim's anthology of Asian-American civil rights cases and essays recalls cases such as Yick Wo v. Hopkins(3) as proof of Asian Americans' longstanding participation in the development of civil rights law in the United States.(4)

   When tensions within American multicultural, multiracial society exploded in Los Angeles in 1992, not only history but immediate reality itself seemed to insist on the inclusion of Asian Americans within the larger discourse on civil rights. Because what began as an arguably Black (Rodney King)-White (LAPD officers) conflict transformed into multiracial strife involving not only Black and White Americans but also Latinos and Asian Americans, the riots brought into sharp relief the complex racial interrelationships within Los Angeles. As a result, two race scholars announced that the riots "marked the beginning of a new period of U.S. racial politics,"(5) one that must "decisively break with the bipolar model of race."(6) Since then, the black/white paradigm has been a subject of increasing academic debate; the controversy has likely entered the popular consciousness as well, due to the highly publicized conflict between Angela Oh and John Hope Franklin within President Clinton's race relations commission.(7)

   Although existing legal scholarship on the black/white paradigm generally assumes the paradigm to be a biracial model of racism that focuses exclusively on the relationship between Black and White Americans,(8) an explicit definition is rare and difficult to find.(9) The dearth of legal scholarship that endeavors to outline the contours of the black/white paradigm is problematic not only because the inadequacy of the paradigm is an often unexplored and unchallenged assumption, but also because the assumption may be incorrect or misleading.

   This Note focuses on the (uneasy) relationship between the black/white paradigm and the Asian-American civil rights agenda. My primary project is to intervene in the seemingly unproblematic discussion of the black/white paradigm in order to caution that current race discourse oversimplifies the paradigm and fails to articulate the full cost of its abandonment. One reason for my argument is that a paradigm once so powerful should not, as a principle, be discarded without serious analysis. A second, more compelling, reason is that the black/white paradigm retains contemporary significance despite demographic changes in American society. It is, therefore, imperative that race scholars understand the paradigm's enduring resonance and potential before concluding that it nevertheless ought to be abandoned. It is my belief, however, that the paradigm is important to the Asian-American civil rights agenda today and that to eliminate it from race discourse would mean losing an important tool for living in and understanding our evolving, racially stratified society.

   Part II of this Note very briefly summarizes some scholarship on the black/white paradigm and questions the boundaries and assumptions embedded within the scholarship. Part III clarifies my own assumptions about race and race relationships--namely that they are constructed and therefore unstable--and identifies six dimensions of the black/white paradigm. These six dimensions, through which I attempt to (re)define the black/white paradigm, are elaborated in Part IV. Finally, Part V is devoted to addressing the objection that the black/white paradigm is inapplicable to the Asian-American civil rights agenda by analyzing immigrants' rights and affirmative action through the lens of the paradigm as I envision it.

2. "BLACK/WHITE": SCHOLARSHIP ON THE PARADIGM

   Condemnation of the black/white paradigm is usually premised on the argument that the nation is no longer Black and White but multiracial, such that the paradigm has become obsolete. This critique of the black/white paradigm suggests that many scholars reduce the black/white paradigm to serve a purely descriptive function; the paradigm was acceptable in 1960 when ninety-six percent of the minority population was Black, but now that Black Americans constitute only fifty percent of the people of color, the paradigm can no longer stand.(10)

   While the descriptive function is a significant aspect of the black/white paradigm, it is not the paradigm's only, nor its most important, function. Thus, a rejection of the paradigm based solely on its apparent failure to reflect racial demographics underestimates its sophistication and fails to explain its longevity. Recent race scholarship by Asian-American and Latino/a scholars has relied on this oversimplified, descriptive version of the black/white paradigm.(11) The works of Robert Chang, a leading Asian-American race theorist, and Juan Perea, a Latino scholar who has grappled directly with the "dominant and pervasive character" of the black/white paradigm, are particularly thoughtful.(12) Still, neither Professor Chang nor Professor Perea takes the discussion of the paradigm much further than Michael Omi and Howard Winant's seminal work on the racial formation theory and their 1994 critique of the black/white bipolar model.(13) This Part will summarize these scholars' representations of the black/white paradigm and question some of their assumptions and prescriptions.

   1. Omi and Winant and the Los Angeles Riots

      Michael Omi and Howard Winant's project in Racial Formation in the United States is to explore the construction of race. They argue that race is not essential, but social and political; the concept of race can and is transformed through political struggle and socio-historical processes generally.(14) They call this continual process of constructing and reconstructing race "racial formation."(15) The theory of racial formation embraces the notion that race is not merely a classificatory system based on the distinctions among human bodies at any given moment, but that it also contains traces of past struggle over, and present understanding of, social and political relationships.(16)

      In the epilogue to the second edition of Racial Formation in the United States, written after the 1992 Los Angeles riots, Professors Omi and Winant seem to address the prevalence of the black/white paradigm.(17) They reject the project of dichotomizing race and identify five problems in the black/white conception.(18) First, they argue that the complex nature of race relations must be analyzed in light of changing dynamics within and among racial groups. Second, they suggest that biracial theories ignore issues specific to non-Black, non-White racial groups. Third, in a related point, they argue that biracial theories also ignore the different consequences of policies such as affirmative action or welfare to different racial groups. Fourth, they assert that the black/white model overlooks "particularities of contemporary racial politics" such as nativism,(19) Finally, they posit that the model marginalizes or eliminates other--non-Black, non-White--voices in race discourse.

      These critiques provide important insights, but Professors Omi and Winant clearly indicate that their critiques are aimed at biracial theorizing because the privileging of the Black-White relationship ignores "widespread and multiracial discontent."(20) There is, however, a difference between a focus on the Black-White relationship and the black/white paradigm, and Professors Omi and Winant's discussion does not clarify to which they object.

   2. Juan Perea and Race Paradigms

      Juan Perea's The Black/White Binary Paradigm of Race: The "Normal Science" of American Racial Thought(21) can be seen as an extension of the discussion Professors Omi and Winant began in Racial Formation. Professor Perea attempts to prove the existence of the black/white paradigm by applying Thomas Kuhn's study of paradigms to race discourse.(22) Professor Perea finds that even as paradigms help us to frame knowledge, they also exclude and distort by defining, and thus limiting, relevancy.(23) Accordingly, he defines the black/white paradigm as "the conception that race in America consists, either exclusively or primarily, of only two constituent racial groups, the Black and the White."(24) Professor Perea then documents the ways in which the black/white binary paradigm has excluded the experiences and struggles of Latinos and other non-Black, non-White groups by examining textbooks and history books that purport to deal with the race problem in general but focus primarily on the struggles of the African-American population.(25)

      Professor Perea focuses largely on the effect of the black/white paradigm on scholarship and "normal research" on race.(26) I emphatically agree with Professor Perea that the absence or marginalization in scholarship of other racialized groups such as Latinos, Asian Americans, and Native Americans is harmful not only to these groups, but to the richness of race discourse in general. But I disagree with his suggestion that the black/white paradigm has an unimportant role in forming or understanding the racial identities and positions of non-White, non-Black groups and individuals(27) because, as I attempt to demonstrate in Part IV, the black/white paradigm is more sophisticated than Professor Perea's narrow, race-specific definition of it.

      Moreover, the ultimate purpose of Professor Perea's discussion remains somewhat confusing. He states that he opposes the use of paradigms and instead advocates the development of an inclusive and particularized understanding of race.(28) Although he denies that his "new...