“Asians Are the Least Troublemaker”: Navigating Racial In-betweenness in Korean American Community-based Spaces

Abstract

While Asian Americans have long been positioned as a deserving and productive racial foil to problematic and unworthy Black and Latinx communities, in recent years, they have been more frequently portrayed as actively politicized in opposition to other communities of color. Despite this portrayal in the media, social science research reveals a much more complicated portrait of Asian American racial positioning that explores how Asian Americans diversely navigate their racial in-betweenness, or what Leslie Bow calls racial interstitiality. Contributing to this research, this article analyzes how Korean Americans, as a racialized ethnic group, engage with Whiteness and their own racial position within co-ethnic community spaces. Drawing from a multi-sited ethnography of a Korean language school and an ethnic supplementary academy (called hagwon) in the Chicago suburbs, the article argues that co-ethnic community spaces are active sites of racialization that both challenge and reproduce White dominance. In these spaces, Korean Americans forged counter-narratives for their children but simultaneously reified dominant narratives relating to Whiteness, anti-Blackness, and Asian Americans. The findings strengthen scholarly understandings of how Asian Americans understand their racial identities in relation to others, the role of community institutions in racialization, and how the damaging logics of White supremacy can seep into non-White spaces.