Between black and white: the coloring of Asian Americans.

• Published date: 22 December 2015
• Author: Chanbonpin, Kim D.
• Date: 22 December 2015

I. INTRODUCTION

While reporting on the civil unrest that followed the police killing of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri last August, Fox News host Bill O'Reilly became enraged when his guest Megyn Kelly suggested that race-based privilege (1) shields White (2) people from police violence while it simultaneously subordinates Black people. (3) After the brief on-air debate, O'Reilly penned a follow-up for the "Talking Points Memo" segment on his eponymous show. (4) O'Reilly asserted that White Privilege was a fiction and held out the economic successes of Asian Americans (5) as incontrovertible proof of his claims. Noting that Asian Americans have a lower unemployment rate than White Americans, O'Reilly demanded:

 So, do we have Asian privilege in America? Because the truth is
                 that Asian American households earn far more money than anyone
                 else. The median income for Asians, [sic] close to $69,000 a year
                 it's 57,000 for whites $33,000 for black--so the question becomes
                 why? And the answer is found in stable homes and in emphasis on
                 education.... That is why Asian Americans, who often have to
                 overcome a language barrier, are succeeding far more than
                 African-Americans and even more than white Americans. Their
                 families are intact and education is paramount. (6)
                

The popular resonance of the Model Minority Myth (7) as articulated by O'Reilly above, has led other commentators to wonder whether Asian Americans have, like other ethnic immigrant populations (8) before them, "become White." (9)

Musings like O'Reilly's expose the Black/White binary that frames race discourse in the United States. More accurately described as "White-over-Black," (10) the power in this model's imagery is the clear distinction between the two racial categories and the strict separation between them. The binary is not merely a social or cultural byproduct; law has always played a central role in defining and regulating racial categories. Anti-miscegenation statutes, for example, were promulgated for the express purpose of maintaining the stability of the color line demarcating the racial hierarchy upon which the slave trade and chattel slavery depended. (11) By prohibiting marriages between Black and White persons, the states ensured that racial mixing would not threaten to destabilize the rigid divisions that kept the races separate and allowed White supremacy to thrive. (12)

Within the bounds of this socio-legal dichotomy fall Asian Americans. (13) O'Reilly asserts that Asian Americans occupy a privileged position as compared to other groups in the United States. (14) If Asian Americans hold any type of privileged status in today's racially-stratified society, (15) however, this certainly was not always the case. Throughout history, Asian Americans were the special targets of federal and state laws written to specifically exclude them from the polity. (16) Because "the yellow peril" (17) posed by Asian immigrants and their descendants was an equal threat to the rigid racial divisions that organized U.S. society, states with significant Asian American populations expanded enforcement of their anti-miscegenation statutes to regulate marriages between Asians and Whites. (18)

Lawsuits over the anti-miscegenation laws were not battles over the power of the states to regulate marriage--all parties conceded that; (19) instead, Asian American litigants fought over how they ought to be classified within the racial framework erected by those laws. Caught in the racial bind set by the Black/White binary, Asian Americans made several attempts to obtain the legal benefits of citizenship by claiming a stake in "Whiteness." (20) The marriage cases are only one example. Whiteness claims by Asian American litigants proliferated in the twentieth century, in areas as disparate as immigration and naturalization to education and equal protection. (21) In hindsight, these Whiteness claims can be viewed as entirely instrumental, or they can be viewed within the context of colorism--how a preference for light skin within communities of color complicates a race analysis. This Article takes the latter approach.

As in other ethnic and racial groups, colorism plays a significant role in the social interactions in and among Asian Americans. Investigating colorism in the Asian American community provides insights into how group members construct their own racial identities in relation to the broader race-stratified society. A colorism inquiry is a necessary intervention into the existing discourse of Asian American identity construction because it complicates common understandings of the Black/White binary in ways that shed new light on inter- and intra-racial relationships.

Part II addresses colorism in the Asian American community, and demonstrates both how Asian Americans have been racialized within the Black/White binary as well as how that dichotomy has impacted processes of internal self-identification based on color and skin tone within Asian American communities. Part III presents three examples of the racialization of Asian Americans by U.S. courts. In each case, the Asian American petitioners claimed that they were white in order to avail themselves of specific privileges that accompanied Whiteness. These efforts to claim White racial identity by and for themselves were unsuccessful. (22) More recently, however, Asian Americans find themselves on the threshold of becoming "Honorary Whites," (23) as evidenced by O'Reilly's adherence to the Model Minority Myth. Part IV will consider whether Asian Americans are presently being invited to join the ranks of Whiteness and how the status quo of White supremacy and anti-Black subordination is supported by the creation of this intermediate category.

Part V begins with an interrogation of the Model Minority Myth. Read within the context of the Black/White binary, the Myth presents a choice for Asian Americans--to either accept or reject invitations to Whiteness. Lawsuits by Asian American plaintiffs challenging affirmative action programs in higher education provide contemporary case studies upon which to explore some available options--to join the ranks of Whites or to engage in anti-subordination work through interracial coalition. Being attentive to how and where Asian Americans fit into the racial structure of the United States--and how that structure may be reproduced in color hierarchies within the Asian American community--can provide insights into where and how Asian Americans can participate in interracial coalitions for racial justice. Part VI concludes this Article.

II. COLORISM IN THE ASIAN AMERICAN COMMUNITY

The prevailing paradigm for understanding and discussing race relations in the United States is the Black/White binary. Although many have embraced the binary as a valuable tool for framing contemporary discussions about race relations, several legal scholars have decried the dichromatic model as inaccurately representing the nation's numerous and varied racial and ethnic groups. (24) One development which the existing critiques of the Black/White binary have not yet fully accounted for, however, is the growing body of literature on colorism. Colorism is a useful intervention into the existing discourse of Asian American identity construction because it complicates prevailing understandings of the Black/White binary of race relations. Furthermore, because color preferences are likely to change subject to time and geographical contingencies, (25) colorism discourse offers an alternative, perhaps more agile, method of mapping the complex interactions of race and identity politics.

Racism and colorism are distinct, but related forms of subordination. Sociologist Margaret Hunter defines colorism as "a process that privileges light-skinned people of color over dark in areas such as income, education, housing, and the marriage market." (26) Colorism, therefore, is a particular manifestation of the broader, systemic problem of racism. (27) As Hunter notes: "The hierarchy employed in colorism, however, is usually the same one that governs racism: light skin is prized over dark, and European facial features and body shapes are prized over African features and body shapes." (28)

In the Asian American community, colorism is the product of a complex set of social and historical interactions with gender, immigrant, generational, and class dimensions. (29) Within Asian ethnic groups, differences in skin color frequently determine social standing and marriageability. (30) Colorism is a multifaceted system of subordination and influences not only the way that in-group members treat each other, but also how outsiders treat in-group members, and how in-group members treat outsiders. (31) Investigating how colorism operates in the Asian American community yields important insights about how anti-Black prejudice is formed and deployed. Therefore, it is necessary to acknowledge how Asian American groups assert agency both in constructing their own identities and also in "redeploy[ing] structures of racial oppression against others." (32)

In the Asian American community, (33) colorism exists as a result of an ideology of White supremacy imposed by European colonialists, but also because of a pre-existing preference for white skin that predates sustained contact with Europeans. (34) Ancient Japanese believed that light skin was an indicator of spiritual purity. (35) In China, the association between wealth and fair skin dates back to before the Qin Dynasty. (36) In countries with long histories of European and U.S. colonialism, the Philippines, India, and Vietnam, for example, preference for light skin is closely connected to social and cultural values enforced by White colonial regimes. (37)

Whatever its origin, colorism persists in Asia today. In the melodramatic world of Filipino teleseyres (soap operas), for example, color prejudices play out on the small screen with alarming frequency. (38) One of the...