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Black Asian, White Asian: Racial Histories and East Asian Choices in the White Settler State
Tze Ming Mok
In memory of Moana Jackson:
江海所以能為百谷王者, 以其善下之, 故能為百谷王
.
1
Coming to terms
East Asians in white countries live within language in a way that is ambiguous, racialised and
tense. We are the eternal foreigner, yet when hiding behind our mother tongues, we refer to
white people as ‘foreigners’. In English we call white people by their preferred non-racial
term – ‘Kiwis’, for example – which then becomes our racial term for white people. When
bothered by strangers on the phone, we say we don’t speak English in fluent English and
hang up. We assimilate, in other words, to the contextual purpose of words, as though the
uses of words are the point, even as they deny their own meanings. This contradictory
pragmatism is the hallmark of a self-protective and diasporic culture, and it is something I
bring with me, perhaps, to the uses of race discourse.
Most people place little importance on the difference between ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’.
Some sociologists of ethnic and racial formation agree with them. They observe that whether
the relevant terms are ‘racial’ (like Black, Brown or white, which refer to physical
characteristics) or ‘ethnic’ (like Māori, Scottish, Chinese, which refer to culture and identity),
their meanings are socially constructed via the same racialising process and for the same
purpose – namely, the marking out of otherness, whether that is done via the body or via
culture, for the maintenance of social hierarchy.
2
This means that for social justice work, the
‘sharp distinction between the two concepts becomes unnecessary’.
3
So what is this book for? Notably, this conceptual merging of racial and ethnic
formation (for the purposes of the work), arises from American contexts where race has been
the starting point, and ethnicity is what has expanded the discourse beyond totalising
narratives of the body. In Aotearoa it is the other way around, where we are still waiting to
1
‘The moana is rangatira of a hundred valley streams, due to its skill in waiting beneath them. A hundred
valley streams flow down to meet their leader.’ My translation of a passage from Laozi 老子, Dao De Jing 道
德經, chapter 66.
2
See Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 3rd edn, Routledge, New York,
2014; Howard Winant, ‘Race and Race Theory’, Annual Review of Sociology, 26 (2000), pp.169–85; Kimberly
McClain DaCosta, Making Multiracials: State, Family, and Market in the Redrawing of the Color Line,
Stanford University Press, Palo Alto, 2007. See also the special topic issue of PMLA, ‘Special Topic:
Comparative Racialisation’, 123, 5 (2008).
3
DaCosta, Making Multiracials, p.213; see also Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc J.D. Wacquant, An Invitation to
Reflexive Sociology, University of Chicago Press, 1992.
take what is needed from the vocabulary of critical race theory, so we can speak clearly about
race, racism and white supremacy, and do the work of undoing it.
Much of the impetus for this essay was matua Moana Jackson’s patient invitation to
tauiwi of colour, at a wānanga on constitutional reform, to decolonise and understand our
own culture and history, before prioritising our own acquisition of Indigenous knowledge and
taonga such as te reo Māori.
4
With regard to our history in Aotearoa, Chinese people in particular, including me,
have written at length about how racial tropes of the ‘yellow peril’ were constructed and
deployed as a key oppositional premise of establishing a ‘White New Zealand’ colonial state,
at the expense of Māori sovereignty and status as the founders of the first independent state of
‘New Zealand’.
5
Infamously, precarious Chinese migrant workers in the extractive settler
economy were painted as rapacious, pestilential, colonising threats by the white press, as if
‘white people are looking in a mirror, but do not like what they see’.
6
These tropes still
pervade popular consciousness in the West, summoning regular outbreaks of street violence
against people who look like us, including in Aotearoa. In response, some East Asians have
supported and built decolonial anti-racist solidarity movements with tangata whenua and
other people of colour, based on our rights and responsibilities as tangata Tiriti, in order to
shuck off the limitations of life as a disposable layer of the racial hierarchy.
7
But undoing white supremacy and colonialism also requires acknowledging East
Asians’ colour-based privilege in white societies now, how our own pre- and post-colonial
cultural history has generated racial thinking, and deeper analysis of how we do relate to
whiteness in that racial hierarchy. Examining this doesn’t always land us in the morally
4
Moana Jackson, presentation at the Matike Mai Wānanga with Moana Jackson, organised by Asians
Supporting Tino Rangatiratanga, Mt Roskill War Memorial Hall, 15 July 2019.
5
On the use of the racial trope of the ‘yellow peril’ as a key oppositional premise, see K. Emma Ng, Old Asian,
New Asian, Bridget Williams Books, Wellington, 2017; Manying Ip, ‘Chinese Immigration to Australia and
New Zealand: Government Policies and Race Relations’, in Chee-Beng Tan (ed.), Routledge Handbook of the
Chinese Diaspora, Routledge, London, 2013, pp.172–91. On its use to undermine Māori sovereignty and He
Whakaputanga (that is, the first declaration of independence of the state of ‘Niu Tireni’), see Asians Supporting
Tino Rangatiratanga, ‘Commentary on Aotearoa New Zealand’s Histories Draft Curriculum’, Te Tangi A Te
Ruru, https://tetangiateruru.org/2021/05/28/astr-commentary-on-aotearoa-nz-histories-draft-curriculum
(accessed 28 June 2022).
6
Tze Ming Mok, After a Long Silence’, in Janet McAllister (ed.), Life on Volcanoes: Contemporary Essays,
Beatnik Press, Auckland, 2019, p.18.
7
See Pounamu Jade Aiken and Mengzhu Fu, ‘Racism in Peril? Mutual Aid and Solidarity in the Face of New
Zealand’s History of White Supremacy against Chinese and Māori’, Te Tangi A Te Ruru, 22 April 2021; Tze
Ming Mok, ‘Race You There’, Landfall, 28 (2004), pp.18–26.
comfortable space of ‘solidarity among colonised peoples’, as emblematised by the
conversation below, from my doctoral research in London.
8
‘You’re either White or you’re Black,’ said one of my interviewees, a thoroughly
working-class and middle-aged Turkish Cockney ‘… Is there any other colours?’ He
laughed. ‘I know some people would say Chinese are yellow, but that’s stupid. You’re
either White or you’re Black.’
‘Okay,’ I said, with a knowing sense of dread, ‘am I White or Black?’
‘You?’ he said with a hint of incredulity that I would even ask this, ‘You’re White!’
I took this in, and inquired as to the status of my husband, an Indian.
‘Oh, he’s Black.’ No question.
How can Asians be white? Or, for that matter, Black? It was a statement about perceived
hierarchy and alignment, dovetailing neatly with colour, which is what ‘race’ boils down to: a
concept that can be used as a ‘master category’ that encompasses ethnicity and hints at
superseding it, as structure swallows agency.
9
The master category
Modern theories of ethnicity hold that it is self-defined, but held together by social and
cultural practice, and, crucially, the collective memory of and belief in – but not necessarily
the fact of – a common descent or homeland.
10
You and your community’s memories define
your ethnic group, in a generative tango with the Other. By comparison, the nineteenth-
century biological concept of ‘race’ is a system of categories constructed around physical
characteristics. This system is driven, in the view of broadly Marxist historians, by
consolidation of the capitalist world system – that is, the creation of globally networked
capitalism via the tool of imperialist extractive economies that were based on slavery.
11
8
Interview by author towards PhD Research, unpublished transcript 2017. See also Tze Ming Mok, ‘Inside the
Box: Ethnic Choice and Ethnic Change for Mixed People in the United Kingdom’, PhD thesis, London School
of Economics and Political Science, 2019, p.242.
9
Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 3rd edn, Routledge, New York,
2014. 106.
10
See Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 2nd edn, Cornell University Press, New York, 2008; Anthony
D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1986; Thomas Hylland Eriksen, ‘The
Cultural Contexts of Ethnic Differences’, Man, 26, 1 (1991), pp.127–44.
11
See Michael Banton, Racial and Ethnic Competition, Cambridge University Press, 1983; George M.
Fredrickson, Racism: A Short History, Princeton University Press, 2002; Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery,
Capricorn Books, New York, 1944.
The invention and popularisation of biological ‘race’ as a concept was heavily
dependent on these world-spanning colonial systems of domination, acquisition and
exploitation.
12
As the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates explains, ‘race is the child of racism, not the
father’; as for the grandfather of ‘race’, historian Eric Williams famously observed that
‘[s]lavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery’.
13
In other
words, the capitalist imperatives of imperial expansion required the legitimation of control
over named and defined people and territories for extractive production. This eventually
required the shifting of the legal and moral basis of domination from Christianity – too easy
for enslaved people to opt into – to something with a harder boundary. ‘Race’ as an
organising principle was thus constructed and implemented to serve the economic and legal
needs of slave economies in the Americas. This explains its tendency to centre on physical
Blackness, stripped of ethnicity, culture or religion. Theories about ‘intermediary’ or ‘buffer’
races varied, giving a sense of being made up around the edges of this core imperative, and
solidifying in ways that were useful to specific local colonial contexts and purposes.
14
This is why former slaveholding-societies with large Afro-descendant populations
officially still count and talk about ‘race’. Meanwhile, countries in Oceania that were
colonised after the abolition of the slave trade, such as Aotearoa, officially count and talk
about only ‘ethnic group’.
15
Consequently, even using the term ‘race’ in Aotearoa has a weird
mouthfeel. For white people, naming race – by saying ‘white people’, for example – directly
addresses racialised power structures, with terrible impacts upon white fragility. Meanwhile,
minorities feel the discomfort of using terms that flatten our ethnic and cultural experiences,
take away our agency, and seem to have anachronistic and racist associations.
Indigenous Oceanic thinkers might reinterpret racial discourses according to their own
tikanga, in explorations of decolonial agency, including in this book. But for East Asians the
12
See Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, ‘From Bi-Racial to Tri-Racial: Towards a New System of Racial Stratification in
the USA’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 27, 6 (2004), pp.931–50; Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, ‘More than Prejudice:
Restatement, Reflections and New Directions in Critical Race Theory’, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 1, 1
(2015), pp.73–87.
13
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 2015, p.7; Eric Williams,
Capitalism and Slavery, Capricorn Books, New York, 1944, p.9.
14
On theories about ‘intermediary’, ‘buffer’ or ‘middleman’ races, see Thomas C. Patterson and Frank Spencer,
‘Racial Hierarchies and Buffer Races’, Transforming Anthropology, 5, 1–2 (1994), pp.20–27; Edna Bonacich,
‘A Theory of Middleman Minorities’, American Sociological Review, 38, 5 (1973), pp.583–594. On their
solidification, see Bonilla-Silva, ‘We Are All Americans! The Latin Americanization of Racial Stratification in
the USA’, Race and Society, 5, 1 (2002), pp.3–16; Bonilla-Silva, ‘From Bi-Racial to Tri-Racial’; Jill Olumide,
Raiding the Gene Pool: The Social Construction of Mixed Race, Pluto Press, London, 2002.
15
See Ann Morning, ‘Multiraciality and Census Classification in Global Perspective,’ in Rebecca C. King-
O’Riain, Stephen Small, Minelle Mahtani, Miri Song and Paul Spickard (eds), Global Mixed Race, NYU, 2014,
pp.1–15.
work is different. Not only are we embedded in the racialised structure of a settler state that
deploys us as settlers ourselves; for Chinese and Japanese people particularly, our cultures
and traditions arose from empires that were based on ideologies of our own supremacy and
colonisation of other Asians.
16
I wonder what Dr Jackson thought Chinese New Zealanders
would see when we pulled back that colonial curtain?
The raw and the cooked
The pseudo-scientific European concept of biological ‘race’ arrived in China in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the era of global Western imperialism. But mainland
China was never colonised outright by the West, meaning that Han Chinese theorists put their
own ‘Yellow Race’ at the top of the hierarchy, battling ‘the White race’ for supremacy, with
‘Brown’ and ‘Black’ races at the bottom.
17
Prior to this, formative ideologies of racial and
ethnic supremacy had already been present in the deployment, for two millennia, of the Hua–
Yi or ‘civilized’ versus ‘barbarian’ dichotomy.
18
The backstory of Han Chinese ethnicity is the tale of an assimilationist state that
became an assimilationist ethnostate, ‘snowballing’ over the centuries into an ethnic signifier
defined in opposition to ‘barbarians’ to the south and north.
19
Various ‘barbarian’ peoples
were assigned as either ‘raw’ or ‘cooked’, according to their perceived degree of
civilisational advancement, with the Huaxia or Han civilisation (as represented by the state)
as both the chef and diner. This food preparation and consumption metaphor was an
administrative tool of medieval Chinese colonial expansion into the south and the
assimilation of its peoples.
20
Throughout the centuries, governing ideologies ebbed and
16
Japan’s racial logic in its colonial expansion of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and its alignment with
Nazi Germany as ‘Yellow Aryans’, is a vast topic that I will not be covering here.
17
See Frank Dikötter, ‘Group Definition and the Idea of “Race” in Modern China (1793–1949)’, Ethnic and
Racial Studies, 13, 3 (1990), pp.420–32; Thomas S. Mullaney, James Leibold, Stéphane Gros and Eric Vanden
Bussche (eds), Critical Han Studies: The History, Representation, and Identity of China’s Majority, University
of California Press, Berkeley, 2012.
18
China’s state-centric ‘civilisational’ assimilation of human resources and populations had long been defined
in the historical record in terms of cultural and ethnic superiority, as well as racial or phenotypical difference,
just not in the nineteenth-century terms of biological racial superiority. See Marc S. Abramson, ‘Deep Eyes and
High Noses: Constructing Ethnicity in Tang China (618–907)’, PhD thesis, Princeton University, 2001; Marc S.
Abramson, Ethnic Identity in Tang China, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2011; Gil Raz,
‘“Conversion of the Barbarians” [Huahu] Discourse as Proto Han Nationalism’, Medieval History Journal, 17, 2
(2014), pp.255–94.
19
See Nicoli di Cosmo, ‘State Formation and Periodization in Inner Asian History’, Journal of World History,
10, 1 (1999), p.1; Dikötter, ‘Group Definition and the Idea of “Race” in Modern China (1793–1949)’; Mullaney
et al., Critical Han Studies: The History, Representation, and Identity of China’s Majority.
20
See Magnus Fiskesjö, ‘On the “Raw” and the “Cooked” Barbarians of Imperial China’, Inner Asia, 1, 2
(1999), pp.139–68; Raz, ‘Conversion of the Barbarians’; Zhiqiang Yang, ‘From Miao to Miaozu: Alterity in the
Formation of Modern Ethnic Groups’, Hmong Studies Journal, 10, 1 (2009), pp.1–28.
flowed between, on the one hand, more racially ‘diverse’ yet colonialist and assimilationist
notions of national Huaxia culture, and a solidifying ideology of a core Han chauvinist
ethnostate on the other.
21
This state-centric assimilationist and colonising inheritance has laid
the foundations of the ‘re-education’ camps and slave labour system of the Uyghur genocide.
China aims to ‘cook’ the Uyghurs until they are fully consumed by the Han nation, just as
model minority Chinese descendants in the West attempt to ‘cook’ themselves as a gift to the
white state. We have in our own history ready-made culturally oppressive concepts, which
we have all too easily turned on ourselves as well as others.
Asian-Asians and not-Asian Asians
Our existing intra-Asian racisms include the racial-hierarchical implications of the divisions
within the constructed ‘Asian’ category itself. For example, what did it mean when freshly
elected Labour MP Naisi Chen announced to a crowd gathered to ‘Stop Asian Hate’ in 2021
that she and Melissa Lee (Korean, National Party) were the only two Asians in Parliament?
Chen’s political party alone has five other Asian MPs, including two Ministers, one of whom
was the Minister for Diversity, Inclusion and Ethnic Communities at the time.
22
As it is used by New Zealand officialdom, ‘Asian’ aims to be a pan-ethnic geographic
category that takes in a vast hemispherical sweep. Like ‘Pacific peoples’, it is intended to
refer to any ethnic group that is indigenous to that region.
23
But Chen was deploying the most
common vernacular usage of the term ‘Asian’ in Aotearoa, which is racial, not
‘geographically pan-ethnic’. She may as well have said that she and Lee were the only
representatives of ‘the Yellow Races’ in Parliament.
In modern attempts to ‘de-race’ anachronistic terminology, specific ethnic terms map
poorly onto old racial terms, while broad geographic terms map slightly better, as the areas
are larger and the concepts broader. But they still disintegrate at the edges and the seams.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the split between East and South Asians – in other
21
See Abramson, Ethnic Identity in Tang China; Erica Brindley, ‘Barbarians or Not? Ethnicity and Changing
Conceptions of the Ancient Yue (Viet) Peoples, ca. 400–50 BC’, Asia Major, 16, 1 (2003), pp.1–32; Mullaney
et al., Critical Han Studies: The History, Representation, and Identity of China’s Majority; Ying-Shih Yu, Trade
and Expansion in Han China: A Study in the Structure of Sino-Barbarian Economic Relations, University of
California Press, Berkeley, 2021.
22
Asian-identified MPs elected at New Zealand’s general election of 2020 were: from the Labour Party, Dr
Ayesha Verrall (Maldivean and Pākehā), Priyanca Radakrishnan (Singaporean-Indian), Marja Lubeck (Dutch,
Indonesian and Chinese), Dr Gaurav Sharma (Indian), Vanushi Walters (Sri Lankan Tamil), Naisi Chen
(mainland Chinese); from the Green Party, Golriz Ghahraman (Kurdish Iranian); and, from the National Party,
Melissa Lee (Korean).
23
This is why Indo-Fijians don’t get to be ‘Pacific Peoples’ in the census, but are a subcategory of Indians, and
hence ‘Asians’, much to their chagrin.
words, between ‘Yellow’ and ‘Brown’ Asians, or, as my Turkish interviewee might have put
it, White Asians and Black Asians.
24
In the UK ‘Asian’, as the term is most commonly used, means ‘Brown’, which means
that East Asians cannot be ‘Asian’ in the UK because East Asians are ‘Yellow’. Meanwhile,
‘Asian’ in street usage in New Zealand means ‘Yellow’, so South Asians cannot be ‘Asian’
here, because they are ‘Brown’. While the results are mirrored, the racial basis for the rules
are the same. We frequently make gestures here towards pan-ethnicity, cultural
commonalities, or regional technicalities with the official definition of the ‘Asian’ ethnic
category, often for the purposes of political solidarity – but the shadow of race, and therefore
the racial hierarchies that the term casts in its day-to-day use, are inescapable.
When Asians were Black
The use of Blackness to set the colour line, to define what ‘race’ is, and to delineate
whiteness remains the cornerstone of race discourse in white countries, even ones that
historically have very few Afro-descendant Black people. White New Zealanders’ use of
racial terms like ‘Black’, sometimes to describe but mostly to insult Pacific peoples and
Māori, have not been attached to any existing pseudo-scientific race thinking or geographic
rationalisations about who a ‘Black’ person is. Racists can be very lazy about racism. In this
way, Polynesian people – themselves classified as ‘Aryans’ by one branch of nineteenth-
century race scientists – become ‘Black’ in the mouths of heartland New Zealand racists.
Even where there are no Black people, racism is forced to invent them.
25
There has been reappropriation, Indigenisation or rejection of the notion or label of
Blackness, in diverse ways, by the many groups that are Indigenous to Oceania and Australia.
This needs to be done in careful relationship with actual descendants of the Black African
diaspora who live here. Much of this is addressed elsewhere in this book, and it is not my
story to tell.
But let me tell you about the time that Asians became Black.
24
When we get to Southeast Asians ‘in the seams’, things break down even more. As per the literature referred
to in the previous section, in some nineteenth-century European race texts ‘Malays’ are their own ‘race’ but in
others they aren’t; in some Chinese traditions the southern ‘barbarians’ may become Hua but not Han;
sometimes they are included as ‘Yellow’ and sometimes designated ‘Brown’; while Bonilla-Silva predicts that
Southeast Asian ethnic groups experiencing downward segmented assimilation will become part of the
‘collective Black’ in the US while middle-class East Asians will become ‘honorary white’.
25
See Allan Hanson, ‘The Making of the Maori: Culture Invention and Its Logic’, American Anthropologist, 91,
4 (1989), pp.890–902.
‘Political Blackness’ was a term used in the UK from the 1960s to the 1980s, as a
means by which working class South Asians allied with Black Caribbean and Black African
activists against racism, before eventual fragmentation into smaller identity-based
movements.
26
These Asians were not only from the subcontinent, but also part of ‘racially
mixed’ Caribbean communities produced by a history of sugar, slavery and indenture –
present, for example, in the genealogy of Stuart Hall, who spearheaded Black British cultural
studies and postcolonial thought. As ‘British Blackness’ rather than American Blackness, it
was explicitly postcolonial or decolonial, and the term was ‘performative, relational and
dialogic rather than literal’. As an umbrella term for organising, over the years the term was
increasingly ‘sweaty’ – gripped nervously, contested, and worried over as an implement
being wielded constantly and in danger of blowing away.
27
‘Political Blackness’ arose from a common vernacular of what Blackness was in post-
war Britain. In my doctoral research interviews, whether tertiary educated, politicised or not,
older South Asian and Middle Eastern descended working-class respondents would still use
the term ‘Black’ intermittently when speaking of themselves, their parents, and other people
from their communities. They used this term in the context of having dark skin colour rather
than African descent, or in the context of a collective cohort’s experience of direct and
institutional racism across migrant ethnic groups. Sometimes it would pop up as ironic self-
effacement, similar to the term they used when sometimes describing themselves as ‘a Paki’,
reflecting or sardonically retelling racist language they’d been exposed to, without quite
getting to reclamation.
28
It was not hard to see how activism had seized upon this existing
vernacular, rather than the other way around. As with Polynesian people, nineteenth-century
British race pseudo-scientists had earlier classed these ‘Black’ Pakistanis, Indians and Middle
Eastern ethnicities as ‘Aryan’, in support of some of the practicalities of their colonial rule.
29
26
See Claire Alexander, ‘Breaking Black: The Death of Ethnic and Racial Studies in Britain’, Ethnic and Racial
Studies, 41, 6 (2018), pp.1034–54; Paul Gilroy, Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures,
Serpent’s Tail, London 1993; Stuart Hall, ‘New Ethnicities’, in Kuan-Hsing Chen and David Morley (eds),
Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, Routledge, London, 1996, pp.441–49; Stuart Hall, ‘Old and
New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities’, in Les Back and John Solomos (eds), Theories of Race and Racism: A
Reader, 2nd edn, Routledge, London, pp.199–208.
27
See Yasmin Gunaratnam, ‘Black British Feminisms: Many Chants’, Feminist Review, 108, 1 (2014), p.4; Sara
Ahmed, ‘Black British Feminism, it is Collective and Collaborative’, Media Diversified, 30 October 2014,
https://mediadiversified.org/2014/10/30/black-british-feminism-it-is-collective-and-collaborative (accessed 12
July 2022); Hall, ‘New Ethnicities’; Aditya Chakrabortty, ‘I’m Bengali and I’m Black – in the Same Way That
My Parents Were’, Guardian, 30 October 2014, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/30/bengali-
black-ethnic-minorities-racism (accessed 12 July 2022).
28
Tze Ming Mok, ‘Inside the Box’.
29
See Romila Thapar, ‘The Theory of Aryan Race and India: History and Politics’, Social Scientist, 24, 1–3
(1996), p.3; Ida Roland Birkvad, ‘The Ambivalence of Aryanism: A Genealogical Reading of India-Europe
Connection’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 49, 1 (2020), pp.58–79.
Who is ‘Black’? Whoever they say is Black, whenever and wherever it is convenient for
maintaining a social hierarchy. A parallel theoretical concept from the Americas is ‘the
collective Black’, whose membership is designated via the racialisation of poverty and class
rather than conventional racial categories.
30
Although anecdotally they would not necessarily have been excluded from gathering
under the umbrella in some contexts of activism, East Asians in the UK were not visible in
the ‘politically Black’ alliance. Despite some outsized influence of Chinese descendants in
Caribbean culture, the bulk of East Asians in pre- and post-war Britain were Chinese people
from Guangdong or Hong Kong.
31
They were subject to racist exclusion from the mainstream
labour market and were politically powerless, and thus would have had common interests
with the ‘Politically Black’ movement, but usually operated outside of the communities and
labour conditions that forged South Asian, Caribbean and African working-class solidarity in
the factories, the railways, the health service and the unions.
32
To my knowledge, white people have also never called Chinese or East Asian people
‘Black’. The laziness or structural convenience that assigned previously ‘non-Black’ people
as ‘Black’ by default didn’t extend to abandoning this specific category of ‘the Yellow
Races’, who were simply too pale to be ‘Black’.
When Asians are white
Being assigned in white settler states as an intermediary ‘middleman’ race in the hierarchy
above ‘politically Black’ groups, or being historically assigned by your own people as a
superior ‘Yellow Race’ in competition with the ‘White Race’, locks East Asians into a
strange relationship in the diaspora with whiteness, modes of white-becoming, and
complicity in the repression of darker groups. Scholars of the Asian American diaspora have
been very focused on how East Asians are shut out of becoming white – that is, busting the
myth of honorary whiteness –
33
whereas non-Asian race theorists have been more blunt
30
See Bonilla-Silva, ‘From Bi-Racial to Tri-Racial’.
31
See Tao Leigh Goffe and Deborah A Thomas, ‘Bigger than the Sound: The Jamaican Chinese Infrastructures
of Reggae’, Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 24, 3, 63 (2020), pp.97–127; Timothy Chin, ‘Notes
on Reggae Music, Diaspora Aesthetics, and Chinese Jamaican Transmigrancy: The Case of VP Records’, Social
and Economic Studies, 55, 1 (2006), pp.92–115.
32
See Tze Ming Mok and Lucinda Platt, ‘All Look the Same? Diversity of Labour Market Outcomes of Chinese
Ethnic Group Populations in the UK’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 46, 3 (2018), pp.1–21; Mary
Pang and Agnes Lau, ‘The Chinese in Britain: Working towards Success?’, International Journal of Human
Resource Management, 9, 5 (1998) pp.862–74; R.C.M. Chau and S.W.K. Yu, ‘Social Exclusion of Chinese
People in Britain’, Critical Social Policy, 21, 1 (2001), pp.103–25.
33
See George A. Yancey, Who Is White? Latinos, Asians, and the New Black/Nonblack Divide, Lynne Rienner
Publishers, Boulder, 2003; Janine Young Kim, ‘Are Asians Black?: The Asian-American Civil Rights Agenda
about perceiving middle-class East Asians, in particular, as increasingly white-adjacent or
honorary white in the racial hierarchy of the settler state.
34
Under what conditions do we ‘get to be white’? Here I briefly discuss three modes of
white-adjacency and their accompanying tragedies, applying to diversity mascots, model
minorities, and honorary whites. This is not a standard academic taxonomy but a set of
convenient descriptive concepts that I use to compare particular behaviours and
accommodations.
My diversity mascot is a ‘token’ produced by a specific contemporary middle-class
whiteness that is rebuilding itself as ‘cosmopolitan’, rebooting older notions of imperial
mastery over diverse non-white cultures and knowledge of them. Central to this is acquiring
and displaying multicultural capital.
35
Middle-class Asians, East Asian women, and
decorative elements of Asian culture are often deployed in cosmopolitan white spaces that
continue to exclude any hint of the ‘politically Black’ or ‘the collective Black’. The diversity
sought is explicitly not class diversity. A school or a neighbourhood may be at risk of being
‘excessively white’ and thus unsophisticated and non-elite
36
, but just add ‘colourful’ middle-
class Chinese and Indian people – who are as much avoiding Māori and Pasifika
neighbourhoods as pursuing white proximity – and it becomes ‘diverse’, even as it replicates
ethnic self-segregation and institutionalised racial hierarchies.
The tragedy of the ‘diversity mascot’ is to attain representation at the expense of
power or action. It is a way of actively doing and being nothing.
37
This is nowhere more
apparent than in the New Zealand Parliament, where Asian MPs in the two major parties have
historically had some of the lowest-rated performances in the House, because they are present
only as static cultural products that white-dominated political parties consume and display to
and the Contemporary Significance of the Black/White Paradigm’, Yale Law Journal, 108, 8 (1999), p.2385;
Nadia Kim, ‘Critical Thoughts on Asian American Assimilation in the Whitening Literature’, Social Forces, 86,
2 (2007), pp.561–74; Adriana Valdez Young, ‘Honorary Whiteness’, Asian Ethnicity, 10, 2 (2009), pp.177–85;
Min Zhou, ‘Forever Foreigners or Honorary Whites? The Asian Ethnic Experience Today. By Mia Tuan’,
Social Forces, 78, 2 (1999), pp.816–18; Jiannbin Lee Shiao, ‘The Meaning of Honorary Whiteness for Asian
Americans: Boundary Expansion or Something Else?’, Comparative Sociology, 16, 6 (2017), pp.788–813; K.D.
Chanbonpin, ‘Between Black and White: The Coloring of Asian Americans’, Washington University Global
Studies Law Review, 14, 4 (2015), p.638.
34
See Bonilla-Silva, ‘From Bi-Racial to Tri-Racial’.
35
See Alastair Bonnett, ‘How the British Working Class Became White: The Symbolic (Re)Formation of
Racialized Capitalism’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 11, 3 (1998), pp.316–40; Michelle Christian, ‘A Global
Critical Race and Racism Framework: Racial Entanglements and Deep and Malleable Whiteness’, Sociology of
Race and Ethnicity, 5, 2 (2019), pp.169–85; Steve Garner, ‘A Moral Economy of Whiteness: Behaviours,
Belonging and Britishness’, Ethnicities, 12, 4 (2012), pp.445–64.
36
Garner, ‘A Moral Economy of Whiteness’, p.453.
37
See Sara Ahmed and Elaine Swan, ‘Doing Diversity’, Policy Futures in Education, 4, 2 (2006), p.96.
build multicultural capital.
38
In short, they’re cooked. This lack of effectiveness is an affront
to many Asian New Zealanders who are used to higher levels of ‘model minority’
achievement from public-facing Asians.
The model minority myth is a foundational concept of Asian diaspora studies. It is a
myth of perfect integration promulgated in white settler states so that Asians can be used as a
‘wedge’ population to counter political interests and claims of Black and Indigenous
people.
39
The model minority myth should also be viewed as an extension of well-known
colonial divide and rule policies involving the construction or capturing of intermediary
communities in the service of state administration or commerce, especially groups of ‘racially
mixed’ people and those of non-Indigenous descent.
40
East Asians in the West have
internalised this story, both knowingly as myth and uncritically as learned behaviour. At its
heart it is a tragic pursuit of honorary whiteness via socio-economic achievement and through
‘straight-line assimilation’ – divesting oneself of publicly visible ethnic or cultural traits
(unlike diversity mascots, who are valuable to whiteness only because of their visible ethnic
and cultural traits). The tragedy comes, as Asian American writers argue, from the fact that
there is no true acceptance or equality, no matter how well Asians ‘cook’ themselves for
absorption into the white society.
41
As we know from high school, to try too hard to be
accepted is to always be an outsider because of your obvious desperation to belong.
However, I would argue that some of us do get to be white, some of the time. We
should admit it, and we should also talk more about how it works. White people become
trapped in denial of their whiteness, even as it is blindingly obvious to others; East Asians
38
See Sapna Samant, ‘Asian New Zealanders Deserve Better than Asian MPs Chosen by Pākehā Bosses’, The
Spinoff, 23 August 2017, https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/23-08-2017/asian-new-zealanders-deserve-better-than-
asian-mps-chosen-by-pakeha-bosses (accessed 12 July 2022).
39
See Vijay Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2000; Min Zhou,
‘“Asians Are Doing Great, so that Proves Race Really Doesn’t Matter Anymore”: The Model Minority Myth
and Sociological Reality’, in Stephanie McClure and Cherise A. Harris (eds), Getting Real About Race:
Hoodies, Model Minorities and Other Conversations, Sage, Los Angeles, 2017, pp.91–99.
40
See Bonacich, ‘A Theory of Middleman Minorities’; Robert Blanton, T. David Mason and Brian Athow,
‘Colonial Style and Post-Colonial Ethnic Conflict in Africa’, Journal of Peace Research, 38, 4 (2001), pp.473–
91; Chong Guan Kwa, ‘The Colonial State in the Making of a Peranakan Community’, in Chong Guan Kwa and
Bak Lim Kua (eds), A General History of the Chinese in Singapore, World Scientific, 2019, pp.233–44,
https://doi.org/10.1142/11195 (accessed 12 July 2022); Olumide, Raiding the Gene Pool; Everett V. Stonequist,
The Marginal Man: A Study in Personality and Culture Conflict, Scribner, New Yok, 1937.
41
See Ng, Old Asian, New Asian; Viet Thanh Nguyen, ‘Asian Americans Are Still Caught in the Trap of the
“Model Minority” Stereotype. And It Creates Inequality for All’, Time, 26 June 2020,
https://time.com/5859206/anti-asian-racism-america (accessed 13 July 2022); Min Zhou, ‘Are Asian Americans
Becoming “White”?’, Contexts 3, 1 (2004), pp.29–37; Min Zhou, ‘Asians in America: The Paradox of “The
Model Minority” and “The Perpetual Foreigner”’, Sorokin Lectures 43, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon,
2012; Zhou, ‘Forever Foreigners or Honorary Whites?’.
would do well not to fall into the same trap, even as other groups look at us and say: ‘You’re
white!’.
Outside of historical apartheid or fascist regimes, I view honorary whiteness, like
‘white-passing’, and ‘political Blackness’, as an activity and not a permanent status. It is a
privileged behaviour that is contingent not only on class but also on active participation in
reinforcing white supremacy. This can even be through the deployment of explicitly ethnic
traits to oppress others, with a level of agency over this cultural capitalisation that our poor
‘consumed’ diversity mascots cannot attain. A good example of this is the pop-psychologist
and lawyer Amy Chua who theorised, badly but influentially, that the ethnic Chinese
naturally have a ‘Triple Package’ of cultural traits that has led to success in the West ahead of
other groups.
42
East Asian participation in honorary whiteness parallels nineteenth-century Chinese
notions of the ‘Yellow Race’ ascending to a position of supremacy alongside the ‘White
Race’ rather than assimilating into dominant white culture. While the model minority
approach encourages attainment or ‘self-cooking’ as a way of transcending discrimination
(anyone can climb the ladder!), the honorary white approach leverages existing socio-
economic privileges and actively encourages discrimination against other groups (kicking
away the ladder).
This contrast feels like the difference between the behaviour of Asian immigrant
parents, working their way up out of the ethnic enclave, and their entitled children (like me).
The case of Jerome Ngan-Kee and the Mercy Pictures controversy is particularly illustrative
of this dynamic. Ngan-Kee co-curated an exhibition at his dealer gallery titled ‘People of
Colour’, which showcased different national, ethnic and political flags, including Nazi and
far-right symbols alongside Māori and other Indigenous flags, accompanied by text from a
far-right transphobic thinker, a year after a white supremacist had murdered fifty-one Muslim
people at prayer in the Christchurch terror attacks.
43
An Asian curator in ‘Art School
Edgelord’ mode, uncritically deploying white supremacist imagery, appeared to me to be the
epitome of honorary whiteness. Edgelords do not have responsibilities to a community,
because they inhabit an unmarked whiteness; the notion of artistic freedom is wielded as a
42
See Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld, The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall
of Cultural Groups in America, Penguin, New York, 2014. With both authors being lawyers rather than social
scientists, the theory rested heavily on confirmation bias and was poorly evidenced.
43
See Jasmin Sing Anevili and Quishile Charan, ‘Open Letter in Regards to the Mercy Pictures Exhibition’, 8–
14 September 2020; Jessica Tyson, ‘Auckland Gallery under Scrutiny for “People of Colour” Exhibition’, Te
Ao: Māori News, 11 November 2020, www.teaomaori.news/auckland-gallery-under-scrutiny-people-colour-
exhibition (accessed 13 July 2022).
symbol of their social mastery and immunity to consequences. However, the public backlash
to the show was significant, and Ngan-Kee eventually issued a lengthy personal apology
online, promising to make himself accountable to affected communities face to face. His
business partners disavowed and mocked the apology on the gallery’s official social media
page. He had failed to maintain his honorary whiteness.
Ngan-Kee’s apology ‘to the communities’had the authentic ring of ‘Asian Shame’
before one’s parents, where one admits to failure and to not being good enough.
44
The act of
expressing shame seems itself a way to return ‘to the communities’. Model minorities are
vulnerable to shame and stigma for being Asian, while the status of honorary whites is
dependent on the shameless exercise of white privilege in the face of Asians.
45
The tragedy of
the honorary white mode is to do dumb shit like a white person, but to regret it like an Asian
– because you’ve harmed communities that you thought you’d let go, but then found that they
haven’t let you go.
Letting go and not letting go
It doesn’t always concern me if the discourse of ‘race’ is foreign, because I am comfortable
with the foreign as a ‘foreigner’, and because, as I have argued, problematic racial concepts
are not foreign to me or to my culture. To repeat myself, I’ll use anything that maps our
terrain, as long as it can help us be free of it.
46
And although I do not argue that terms like
‘politically Black’ or ‘collective Black’ can be used as identities here and now, Asian New
Zealanders can learn from the history of the solidarity work that went into political
Blackness, beyond and within the ‘Asian’ category. I also hope to see privileged East Asians,
in particular, generate an intersectional politics of solidarity by unravelling our moments of
honorary whiteness.
Aotearoa sociologists Arama Rata and Faisal Al-Asaad have proposed that
whakawhanaungatanga might act as the foundation for an anti-racist politics of solidarity that
can be a true alternative to state-directed and white-mediated settler colonial ‘diversity’.
47
Like te reo Māori, it is extended to us as a gift; I sometimes wonder whether we deserve it
44
See Jerome Ngan-Kee’s apology at Tāmaki Anti-Fascist Action, Facebook post, 8 November 2020,
www.facebook.com/tafanz/posts/2862664543973628 (accessed 3 May 2021).
45
See David Haekwon Kim, ‘Shame and Self-Revision in Asian-American Assimilation’, in Emily S. Lee (ed.),
Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, And Race, State University of New York Press, Albany, 2014,
pp.103–32.
46
Tze Ming Mok, ‘Lost in the Forest’, in Chris McDowall and Tim Denee (eds), We Are Here: An Atlas of
Aotearoa, edited by Chris McDowall and Tim Denee, Massey University Press, Palmerston North, pp.116–17.
47
See Arama Rata and Faisal Al-Asaad, ‘Whakawhanaungatanga as a Māori Approach to Indigenous–Settler of
Colour Relationship Building’, New Zealand Population Review, 45 (2019), pp.211–33.
before doing the work of examining and undoing our complicity in whiteness. Yes, I am
always returning to the work, as though we’ve all been on holiday. Perhaps this is a part of
my immigrant inheritance, my cultural mode of productivity, of busyness and survival. But I
also acknowledge that it is not always the right mindset when what is required is unwork and
a relaxing of our grip, in order to let go of one thing, and move towards another.
