Despite Your Tiger Mother, or Your Other Racial Half Will Not Save You from What the World Thinks of Your Blackness

Publication Date

9-1-2018

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Meridians

Volume

16

Issue

1

DOI

10.2979/meridians.16.1.05

First Page

39

Last Page

48

Abstract

In this personal essay, the author analyzes what it means to be black and Asian American in a nation where racial capital determines social value and non-black immigrants are encouraged to uphold and abide by anti-black systems, policies, and practices. Narrating her experience as a black Chinese American woman, the author reflects on having received anti-black messages throughout her childhood and how her need for healing has paralleled her work which challenges existing racial logic that casts Asian Americans as a model minority in competition and conflict with black people who are cast as social failures. Recognizing this racial/racist logic as one that allows white America to absolve itself from its central role in maintaining structural oppression, the author argues for the continued calling out of anti-blackness in all spaces—public and intimate, white and non-white—while carving out a path to empowerment, creativity, and freedom for herself and her daughter.

Department

African-American Studies

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