Cartography of Afro-Asian relations in America: co-racialization and nanohealing

Abstract

In public discourse, there has been hostile communication between Asian and Black communities in the US. This article proposes co-racialization as a lens in examining Asian and Black Americans’ relationality. Co-racialization occurs in and across space and time, in that individuals and groups with various and uneven resources shape their views of themselves and their counterparts. Seventy-two Asian Americans and Black Americans were interviewed. Through the concepts of “racial project” and “hydraulic and nanoracism,” I trace the ways in which these co-racializations are mediated. Themes of their “home and neighborhood as space of mediation;” “segregated learning institutions with hydraulic racism mediated by pop culture;” and “perpetual tensions and nanoracism in the ‘fuzzy zones’” emerged. This article calls for nanohealing—an intentionally sustained relationality-building rooted in on-the-ground spaces of interactions and mediation—as an imperative part of co-racialization to resist the thin relationality between racial minorities.