Asian Americans and the Politics of the Twenty-First Century

I use Asian Americans’ political participation to examine how the racialization of Asian Americans manifests in the political field, and how such processes shape Asian Americans’ racialized experiences and identity. Based on interviews with 95 Asian American political candidates and organizers in Houston, Texas, the findings show that, regardless of respondents’ motivation for participating in politics, most of them have encountered racial discrimination based on the “perpetual foreigner” racial trope in the political field and have observed how race dictates the way politics operates in the United States. The racialized experiences in politics lead to these organizers’ awareness of their Asian American racial status and their belief that political participation is a means to assert their political belonging to U.S. society and to transform their marginalized racial status. This facilitates their sense of linked fate with other individuals with Asian heritages in the United States and sustains their political activism. The findings suggest that Asian Americans are going through a process of racialized incorporation in the political field, as they are “sorted” along racial lines when becoming part of the U.S. hierarchical political system.

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Identifying the Unidentified Race: A Study of Normative Features of Commonsense Knowledge of Racism in Asian Members’ Online Interaction

Zhang

2024

Sociology of Race and Ethnicity

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This article adopts an interactionist approach to examine the normative features and the everyday reproduction of commonsense knowledge regarding race and racism in social interaction among Asian members. Specifically, applying conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis to forum interactions in online Asian American communities, I focus on the interactional phenomenon where recipients of a racism report, in responding to the report, make relevant the perpetrator(s)’ race that is not identified in the report. I identify three sets of practices adopted by members: (1) directly assuming the perpetrator(s)’ race, (2) asking about the perpetrator(s)’ race, and (3) implicating the perpetrator(s)’ race through telling second stories. I show that members’ patterned practices point to their orientations toward a normative expectation that “Whites” are the perpetrators of anti-Asian racism and a common assumption that perpetrator(s)’ race matters when making sense of anti-Asian racism. However, such proposed racial common sense can be contested by coparticipants. I demonstrate that commonsense knowledge regarding race and racism is normatively and morally organized so that disagreements and contestations over the use of such knowledge are often treated by participants as arising from normative/moral breaches. Implications on studies on racism and relative positioning of racial groups in the contemporary U.S. context are also discussed.

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Asian Americans and the Politics of the Twenty-First Century

Cited by 3 publications

References 52 publications

Gendered Panethnic Solidarity: The Experiences of Asian American Women in US Electoral Politics

Gendered Panethnic Solidarity: The Experiences of Asian American Women in US Electoral Politics

Asian Americans’ Racialized Incorporation into the Political Field

Identifying the Unidentified Race: A Study of Normative Features of Commonsense Knowledge of Racism in Asian Members’ Online Interaction

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