Credit: (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Asian Americans are again at the center of a nationwide debate on race, being pitted — or pitting themselves — against Black, Indigenous and Latino communities.

This nationwide conversation is on the heels of oral arguments earlier this month in the U.S. Supreme Court on the merits of affirmative action. One of the lawsuits was co-signed by Asian Americans who say race-conscious admissions practices in higher education discriminate against them. And leading up to Election Day, Asian Americans in New Jersey were targeted with a political mailer from former President Donald Trump staffer Stephen Miller’s new company. The mailer claimed that President Joe Biden’s initiatives to boost Black and Latino job hiring are “racist” toward white and Asian Americans.

Some members of AAPI Montclair, an Asian American and Pacific Islander social justice organization, said Miller’s company sent the advertisements to people with Asian last names because non-Asian neighbors didn’t receive them. Susan Andersen, an Asian American Montclair resident, said she felt the timing of the mailer’s arrival just days after the Supreme Court hearings was suspicious. She did not receive a mailer and believes it was because she does not have an Asian last name, but her other Asian American friends did.

“The thing that really upsets me about this is that Asians, once again, are used either as a pawn by people in power … to pit our communities against other communities of color,” said Andersen. “Historically, we’ve been brought in as cheap labor and then … (we) just become scapegoats.”

A vocal minority

According to a survey by a group of Asian American organizations, 69% of registered Asian American voters support affirmative action. But it’s a vocal 31% that are pushing back against race-conscious admissions and potentially other diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives because they believe these policies harm Asian Americans. Scholars and advocates say Asian Americans who believe this may internalize the “model minority myth,” the white supremacist idea that Asian Americans are successful because they are hardworking and quiet.

That is a stereotype rooted in white supremacy that paints Asian Americans monolithically as reserved and wealthy — and more importantly, it pits them against Black, Indigenous and Latino communities by faulting those groups, and not systemic racism, for not having the same supposed successes as Asian Americans.

“For generations those in power have been trying to pit Asian communities against other people of color so that we don’t have strength in numbers. They’re trying to undermine the relationship between Black, brown and Asian communities in order to create an imbalance in the power structure,” said Amol Sinha, executive director of ACLU-NJ, who also received the mailer.

White Americans in power have pitted Asian Americans against other people of color, specifically Black Americans, since the beginning of their immigration history, said Balmurli Natrajan, anthropology professor at the Department of Community and Social Justice Studies at William Paterson University. When Chinese Americans came to work on the railroads during the 1800s, the quality of labor was compared with that of their Black colleagues, Natrajan said, all the while experiencing racism of their own.

“Chinese labor (was) also weaponized in representations that (were) racist, but specifically designed to put down African American labor and their work ethic,” said Natrajan.

Natrajan said that the model minority myth gained a “pernicious edge” in the 1960s during the Black Power movement and as America allowed the immigration of skilled or highly educated Asian Americans in the following decades. These were Asian immigrants that were not previously a part of America’s racial dynamics who also came in with a higher socioeconomic status.

Asian ‘success stories’

A “culture of poverty” thesis emerged in America, Natrajan said, which essentially said that a cycle of poverty kept Black, Indigenous and Latino Americans poor. Japanese Americans were also depicted in the media as “success stories” for overcoming racism and incarceration during World War II — and then came the comparisons with other people of color.

“It erases the structure of racism,” Natrajan said. The model minority myth “neglects the racial logic of anti-Blackness that then creates some kind of a graded hierarchy of non-white groups — groups who will never be white, but who will be anti-Black at the same time,” he said.

The model minority myth also ignores the complexities of Asian Americans, Natrajan said. Asian Americans have some of the highest wealth disparities and varying immigration stories, and “neglects the complex history of migration and immigration policies that selects who comes here,” Natrajan added.

“People don’t talk about Cambodians and Laotians and Vietnamese (who) were then very different from some other folks coming from East Asia and South Asia. And not economically necessarily only, but also because of the refugee status and the trauma of being subject (to) imperialist wars,” Natrajan said.

The key question, Natrajan said, is “who creates this wedge and who is used in it” — because it is a part of colonial white supremacy’s creation of a racial hierarchy. Natrajan added that the racial wedge between Asian Americans and other people of color is “primarily designed to produce a colorblind racism. Or even to allow racism to continue while denying its existence.”

Feeling overlooked

Some Asian Americans feel overlooked in America’s history and feel that the discrimination against them is ignored — the height of media and public conversations around anti-Asian hate during the COVID-19 pandemic explored this topic. But Natrajan and other advocates who spoke to NJ Spotlight News said that both can be true: Asian Americans can speak about the discrimination they experience while also acknowledging they have a proximity to whiteness that other people of color do not have.

“We do need to foreground the need for us to be not part of the weaponry of racism, which wants a fragmentation of all people of color,” Natrajan said.

What’s most concerning, scholars and advocates say, is that the current conversations about Asian Americans feeling discriminated against by affirmative action or other race-conscious hiring practices detracts from the issue at hand: systemic racism blocking the success of people of color. These discussions also ignore, they say, the long history of solidarity between Asian Americans, Black Americans and other people of color.

“I would just want people to really educate themselves about why these programs like … diversity initiatives came to be prioritized. It’s really about addressing systemic racism and addressing inequality for everybody. So … don’t try to internalize this model minority myth (that’s) actually harmful for us,” Andersen said.