Book Review: Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism by Jonathan Tran

By Raymond Chang

R

ace is a complicated reality. The racial structures and hierarchies have been in place for so long that its permutations and manifestations are on the one hand, predictable and obvious, but on the other hand, complex and highly nuanced. Therefore, I appreciate people who are charging the way forward on race scholarship – especially from a Christian perspective.

Dr. Jonathan Tran’s Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism is a seminal text for those who are interested in understanding how the construction of race systematically justified domination and exploitation and how the mere existence of Asian Americans complicates the racial discourse as we know it. Tran calls all people, but more specifically Christians, towards a more faithful Christian ethic that is not beholden to the powers and principalities that preserve and promote the racial hierarchies through racial capitalism, but instead lead us towards a vision of the church that is truer to a vision of God’s Kingdom.

This is a necessary companion to Dr. Willie Jennings’ The Christian Imagination. If you found yourself blessed and transformed by the work of Jennings, you will be deeply impacted by the work of Tran. If you haven’t read Jennings, pick up both. They should be required readings in every seminary and Christian college.

Purchase your copy here today: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0197617913/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i1

Here is an excerpt from Jonathan Tran’s Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism:

I grew up at a time in America when racism was both accepted and expected. America in the 1970s and 1980s was coming to terms with the civil rights movement, and hence awakening to the nation’s long history of colonialism, settler expansion, land enclosure, genocide, chattel slavery, Chinese exclusion, Jim Crow, lynching, internment, segregation, and so on. For many parts of American life, civil rights and all that the movement stirred bore little significance, and life for them went on as it always had. At least that seemed the case for the people around me.

As a recent immigrant from Vietnam, the force of this followed me throughout my childhood. The period witnessed America’s war on drugs and the growth of the carceral state, of the ghettoization of urban life and the evisceration of rural communities, each exercised through systemic racist domination of housing, education, employment, the environment, and everything that sustains life. The period also saw the triumph of neoliberal capitalism, that political economy (with its left-branded identity politics and contraction of class considerations) born of the belief that the market and the state needed each other if elites were to survive eventualities like the civil rights movement and all it symbolized. Heady days to be sure.

Being a young Vietnamese immigrant in this period was pretty simple. You survived. In my case, that meant hiding and running from the racial bullying that chased me everywhere as our family migrated through poverty in pursuit of whatever version of the American Dream distantly directed our lives. Words like “Nip” and “Chink” daily told me who I was, that I did not belong, and that my kind were not wanted. I ended up in a lot of fistfights, sometimes after kids called me “Bruce Lee”—apparently, the irony escaped me. Back then, you did what you needed to do. Now when I think about the violence, it terrifies me, both the need to survive and the things done to survive.

In the preceding decades, before my family’s arrival, America had fought three costly wars with people who looked like me, first with Japan, then with Korea, and finally Vietnam, each with diminishing success.  As soldiers returned home to America in 1975, 120,000 Vietnamese war refugees, my family included, came with them. Even as a child I could tell that it was hard for most Americans to understand what to do with the Vietnamese showing up in their neighborhoods, schools, and churches. To them, we Asians seemed to sit somewhere between American defeat and American redemption, embodying the whole range of what the Vietnam War came to represent. Defeat or redemption—depending on the day, life as an immigrant could go either way.

As a child I suffered being Asian American at a time when Asian Americans were viewed as perilous. I had few friends, having already moved thirteen times during our first decade in America. By then I had experienced enough accepted and expected racism that race would forever color my life. I had been taught by Americans (non-White as much as White, I should say) that being Asian American was bad. I had been taught by my family that being Asian American was good, and indeed, worth fighting for, literally and otherwise. If I learned to detest those Asian Americans who looked down on Asian Americans, who were embarrassed by their own kind, likely I was projecting my own tendency for a socially taught self-hatred.

Things began to shift as my family found some semblance of financial security. My brother and sister made their way to university and college, which eased, no matter how hard I made it on myself, my own way into university and the middle class. My mom’s success as a real estate agent allowed me to stay at the same high school for four years—an eternity compared to all the change we had seen prior to that. Although my high school academic record could not outrun the difficult early years, those four years created enough of a foundation for me to find my academic and professional footing in college, and eventually within American Christianity.

Early in high school, I had a friend named Cliff. Actually, Cliff was my only friend. Among the poorer kids at Katella High School, we found each other in large part because we each had no one else. Cliff and I had only each other, but that hardly mattered to us. We made a life of it, playing games we made up, the rules of which only we knew, catching bugs in the stream running through the apartment complex where I lived, riding on the handlebars of a bike we somehow both owned, together making do as kids often do. Cliff was poor, really poor.

At the time, Cliff and his family lived in—or rather, out of—the Motel Tampico, all their worldly possessions kept in trash bags for easier transport when the motel kicked them out, as it regularly did, because they couldn’t pay the weekly rent, which they regularly couldn’t. Cliff was one of the very few Black kids at Katella, which was mostly White, increasingly Latinx, with a handful of Asian Americans, typical of many Southern Californian schools at the time.

Cliff and I had a lot in common, but some of the differences were pretty pronounced. While my family was, like many immigrant families, moving out of poverty, his family seemed stuck in a system that seemed intent on keeping Black people poor. I could look around and find others who looked like me at Katella—some, to be sure, members of gangs or dropping out of high school, but also among the academic types headed for college. Cliff looked around and saw no one like him, and the images offered by the broader society made his prospects pretty dim. We were both poor, but I, despite myself, had lots of opportunities. Cliff, despite himself, had few.

Over the years, like many friends, we drifted apart. Cliff’s family moved in and out of the motel and I found a home among the college-bound kids. Still, we always had that connection, of having found a place with each other when we had no place with others. Whenever we ran into each other, I felt that connection. Still now—decades later—I feel it.

At one point, I believe I was fifteen, Cliff asked me for help. He was being harassed by a group of racist skinheads at Katella. He told me that they regularly chased him after school, bullied him on campus, making learning impossible, and that he was scared. I remember he cried as he told me. I had seen these kids around. They never bothered me, probably because I wasn’t Black and because as a fringe group, they didn’t bother the more established groups like the kids I hung around at that point. It greatly distressed me that skinheads were picking on Cliff, but I did not know what to do. If the teachers Cliff told were powerless to protect him, what could I do? I felt as scared and helpless as I had all those years growing up and moving around. So, I did nothing. Or nothing significant. I think I told Cliff that the skinheads would move on and find someone else to pick on and that he would be okay. I told him, in other words, that he needed to survive and that he would.

Later we lost touch. I never found out what happened, never bothered to ask, perhaps scared that things had gotten worse, likely frightened by the responsibility that would come with the answers. Maybe the skinheads backed off. Perhaps Cliff ’s family moved on from Katella and his troubles. I don’t know. I only know that I did nothing, when I might have done something.

I’ve often thought about that childhood, its desperations and terrors, when thinking about whether the current conversation on race and racism gets us very far, or if it instead leaves us cornered. For a long time as an academic, the conversation’s antiracism served me well enough. I fell in, which meant focusing on racial identity, pushing for diversity, working through a White/ Black binary, and contenting myself with the idea that those it ignored would eventually get a hearing. I put aside any sense that American antiracism marginalized those already marginalized by racism or that Asian Americans troubled its dominant narratives.

Despite the internal contradictions, I held to the antiracist line of thought for the simple reason that I had already committed so much to it. I gave a ton of energy to writing about and working on issues of racial equity and diversity in my scholarship and at my university. I occupied roles in the institution that allowed me to mentor scores of students, and I made it a point to work with non-white students as often as I could. I considered it a responsibility and a privilege to use whatever advantage I had to benefit the cause of racial minorities, assuming leadership positions, serving on committees, building relationships, pressing administrators.

While neither my scholarship nor my roles specifically focused on race and racism, those topics and texts came up consistently, as they always had. I created my department’s first course on race and racism, led institutional efforts against racial bias, sent emails to provosts and presidents, pushed for hiring and retaining minority faculty. I even won the university’s “Diversity Award,” something I joked rotated between the handful of us active faculty of color. All in service to an antiracism that I thought I could not fail to follow.

Over time, however, it became harder to ignore suspicions that the way we talk about race and racism, where so much is given to racial identity, is problematic, that there is something off about the idea that who I am reduces to what I am racially. Racial identity as a basis of common life increasingly struck me as at once too easy and too hard, too easily settled and too conceptually unwieldy. I also worried that our vaunted hopes for cross-racial solidarity rested on a mistake—a belief in distinct racial kinds—that would in the end defeat itself. Mostly I thought it odd that antiracists showed so much confidence in racial identity.

But these were unformed thoughts kicking around inside my head amid what felt like settled agreements about how we should talk about race and racism. This dominant narrative held as antiracism’s sine qua non the establishing, securing, and asserting of racial identity, its self-interpreting and self-realizing singularity. It took its cues from urbane notions of diversity and representation and specialized in wokeness and whiteness, sophisticated discourses pressed into service by ordinary processes like research agendas and institutional diversity awards. Like everyone in the academy, I wanted this story to be true and just assumed that it was, no matter the minority reports suggesting otherwise. What else could I believe considering what I had already given myself to? I also sensed that others had questions, but that the reigning academic orthodoxy made it difficult for those questions to find the light of day.

The questions reached a tipping point, especially after a deep dive into the literature confirmed old suspicions and illuminated unexplored pathways. Black Marxism was a revelation, combining rigorous critical analysis with practiced commitments to liberation. So was an ethnographic turn in religious studies, which mixed easily with long-standing theological investments in radical democratic theory and the procedures of ordinary language philosophy.

Once there, provocations like that of Jay Caspian Kang opened things up: “‘Asian-American’ is a mostly meaningless term. Nobody grows up speaking Asian-American, nobody sits down to Asian-American food with their Asian-American parents and nobody goes on pilgrimages back to their motherland of Asian-America.” As did Paul Gilroy riffing on “strategic” uses of race: “I feel uncomfortable with that idea, because once some of these images, some of these rhetorics, some of these political ideas are out of the box, they are loose in the world. And it’s delusional to imagine that you can orchestrate them, even for the good.”

Now on a different path, it became increasingly clear to me that something was wrong, that our collective thinking about race and racism had grown stale, even decadent, and that the hope of developing an effectively liberative agenda that began and ended with racial identity was not only a losing proposition but a cursed one. I wondered about a different conversation, or at least other ways of entering into the current one, prior pathways that had been forgotten (or prematurely dismissed) and new thinking yet to be had.

Pondering the options, I knew enough to know that the answer could not be postracialism and its blindness to the realities of racialization. Critical theory had shown us how race had been ideologically invented for the purpose of dominative exploitation. The lesson to be learned from that discovery could not be willful ignorance of the ongoing consequences of domination. But neither could it be a renewed commitment to racial identity. The latter fails to grasp the meaning of race ideology just as the former draws the wrong conclusion from it. We would need something beyond the Scylla of postracialism and the Charybdis of doubling down on racial identity.

Pressing beyond the limited options, this book reframes conversations about race and racism from racial identity to political economy. In framing matters in terms of political economy, Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism reaches back to a trusted mode of analysis that has been obscured by the prevailing antiracist orthodoxy. Approaching race through political economy will not get at everything that racism is, and does, but it gets at what can be managed, and in the last resort lived.

Accordingly, this book invites readers into a different life with race and racism, reimagining what they are and are doing. What that life involves is laid out in the following pages. Present throughout are my family and our migration from poverty to wealth, our version of that dream still directing our lives. Informing the book’s many arguments are America’s wars with Vietnam, Korea, and Japan, and the nation’s long history of colonialism, settler expansion, land enclosure, genocide, chattel slavery, Chinese exclusion, Jim Crow, lynching, internment, segregation, and so on. And there is Cliff, my powerlessness and cowardice then, and the desperations we bear and the hopes we risk. This book circles back on a story, of doing something, of acknowledging some- thing, or failing to, in light of a story I have come to live.

To view the recent conversation with Jonathan Tran by Raymond Chang and Isaiah Jeong:

Photo courtesy of Oxford University Press

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Pastor Raymond Chang is the president of the Asian American Christian Collaborative, a pastor, and writer. He regularly preaches God’s Word and speaks throughout the country on issues pertaining to Christianity and culture, race and faith. He has lived throughout the world (Korea, Guatemala, Panama, Spain, China), traveled to nearly 50 countries, and currently lives in Chicagoland, serving as a campus minister at Wheaton College. Prior to entering vocational ministry, Raymond worked in the for-profit and nonprofit sectors, and served in the Peace Corps in Panama. He is currently pursuing his PhD. He is married to Jessica Chang, who serves as the chief advancement and partnerships officer of the Field School.