6 Ways Asian Americans Perpetuate Settler Colonialism
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Settler colonialism describes a particular type of domination in which settlers migrate to a region intending to stay there permanently, while also establishing themselves as sovereign over the land. In the United States, settler colonialism is an ongoing process premised on the "vanishing Indian" myth, while continually dispossessing Indigenous people of their land and resources and glossing over centuries of Native survival and resistance. Though unintentional, there are a number of ways the Asian American community perpetuates settler colonialism.
As major social justice movements like #BlackLivesMatter and #NoDAPL have garnered national media attention, many Asian Americans have been wondering how they fit into the conversation about race in the United States. Asian Americans, though themselves subjected to white supremacy, are also complicit in occupying Indigenous land. Recognizing and countering the ways in which we contribute to the oppression of others allows us to stand more firmly in solidarity with people fighting for liberation around the world.
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1. Embracing "American dream” rhetoric.
If you grew up in an immigrant community, you've almost definitely heard at one point or another about the mythical promise of the American dream – the idea that anyone, through wits and hard work, can achieve a successful and prosperous American life. While this idea is particularly seductive for immigrants who came from Asia hoping to escape from war, poverty, or social unrest, it erases the fact that Asian American settlement is part of a continuing occupation of Indigenous land.
Even when the American dream is couched in the language of fairness and equal opportunity, like putting people of color on the same footing as white people, it ignores the fact that white privilege and resources come from the centuries-old and ongoing process of dispossessing Indigenous people of their land.
2. Using “hapa” to describe mixed-race Asians without Native Hawaiian ancestry.
The term "hapa haole", meaning part Hawaiian and part other, was coined by the Native Hawaiian community in resistance to the depopulation and divisions caused by European settlement. Native Hawaiian scholar Maile Arvin describes: "For Native Hawaiians, 'hapa' is a way to claim and recognize those of us with multiracial ancestry as being integrally part of the lahui, or the Kanaka Maoli nation… 'hapa' identity was one way Native Hawaiians could refuse racial 'blood' logics, and insist that we were still growing as a nation, not dying out."
However, hapa has been embraced by many Asian Americans as an umbrella term to describe "anyone of mixed heritage with partially Asian or Pacific Islander ancestry", as defined by MIT's Hapa Club. Columbia University's Hapa Club expands the term further, describing the group as a space for all students of mixed ethnicity. In the process, "hapa" becomes decontextualized from its origins in Native Hawaiian resistance to settler colonialism, and the fact of Asian American complicity in the continued domination of Native Hawaiians is erased.
Wei Ming Dariotis, a mixed-race Chinese American scholar, highlights this power dynamic: "To have this symbolic word used by Asians, particularly by Japanese Americans, as though it is their own, seems to symbolically mirror the way Native Hawaiian land was first taken by European Americans, and is now owned by European Americans, Japanese and Japanese Americans and other Asian American ethnic groups that numerically and economically dominate Native Hawaiians in their own land."
3. Embracing diasporic identity without centering whose land we’re on.
The Asian American diaspora is a far-reaching and global phenomenon, and much of the art and literature associated with it rightfully struggles with the idea of being "too foreign for America, too American for the homeland." Understandings of a diasporic Asian American identity have tended to focus on the events that displaced us or our elders from our home communities, as well as the ongoing oppression that Asian Americans face under white supremacy. Many of us may embrace our in-between status as a kind of "borderlands" identity that transcends national or cultural identification, never fully belonging to any of the spaces we inhabit.
As we come to terms with not truly feeling at home on any land, however, we must still acknowledge the reality that we are settled on Indigenous land. This website, while a work in progress, tells you exactly whose land you are living on.
Quechua scholar Sandy Grande criticizes the way that "liminal spaces" and "border identities" are becoming more prevalent in activism and academia, to the detriment of Indigenous identities. She comments that "the undercurrent of fluidity and sense of displacedness" that permeates these conceptions of diasporic identity "runs contrary to American Indian sensibilities of connection to place, land, and the Earth itself… as the physical and metaphysical borders of the postmodern world become increasingly fluid, the desire of American Indian communities to protect geographic borders and employ 'essentialist' tactics also increases."
"As we consider the politics of exile," writes Amazigh activist Nuunja Kahina, "we must step outside ourselves to question: where are we in exile, and on whose backs?"
4. Forgetting that Indigenous peoples on the Asian continent are engaged in struggles for survival or self-determination, often against our respective nations of origin.
From Chinese and Japanese expansionism to the Third World national liberation movement across Southeast Asia, the past century has been a time of intense political change in the Asia Pacific, witnessing the birth and development of many nation-states. During the continent-wide process of political upheaval and national formation, many Indigenous ethnic groups in Asia were displaced from their homes or incorporated into other nations through the conquest of their territory.
As Asian Americans, we may be unaware of political tensions within Asia, particularly when we already feel removed from those countries by years or generations of diaspora. Alternatively, we may romanticize the idea of returning to those same countries as "going home." But given our ties to these nations, we also have a responsibility to attend to the violence being done to Indigenous peoples in them – from Tibet and West Papua's struggles for self-determination against China and Indonesia, respectively, to the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous minorities in places like Xinjiang and Bangladesh.
5. Accepting the myth of the model minority.
If you’ve ever heard that “Asians are just so hard working!” or that East Asian “Tiger Moms” naturally produce the most talented kids, you’ve heard the continuation of a centuries-long racist myth that identifies certain Asian cultures (usually East Asian) as intrinsically successful, while pushing down Black and Native cultures as intrinsically “backwards” or impoverished.
While it may sound like a compliment, the truth is that the perception of “natural” Asian American success is harmful for all marginalized people. Historically, “docile” and “obedient” Asian laborers were used by white capitalists to keep Native workers in line. And this same pattern plays out in contemporary society: For Asian Americans, the model minority myth squashes individuality, sets unrealistic expectations of success, and creates distance from pressing social justice issues that affect all of us. For Black and Indigenous communities, it justifies violence and punishment through the idea that they are somehow at fault for systematic inequalities. And for all of us, it discourages solidarity among different racial movements that are all working towards the same goals of equality and justice. It’s time to do something about a #ModelMinorityMutiny.
6. Not standing in solidarity with Native Americans or other marginalized groups.
It’s easy to identify all the ways in which Asian Americans have been discriminated against throughout history, from national acts banning the immigration of Chinese into the U.S. to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II to the “bamboo ceiling” that prevents Asian Americans from reaching their white counterparts in the workplace. But when we focus only on injustices done unto Asian Americans, we ignore the ways Asian Americans contribute to injustices done unto others. The reality is we are all interconnected!
For example, Asian Americans have displaced Native Hawaiians to make up the largest ethnic group in Hawai’i. But historically, Asian American civil rights movements have focused on underrepresentation without acknowledging the role Asians played in making Native Hawaiians even less represented. As Candace Fujikane with the University of Hawai’i explains, “In their focus on racism, discrimination, and the exclusion of Asians from full participation in an American democracy, such studies tell the story of Asians’ civil rights struggles as one of nation building in order to legitimate Asians’ claims to a place for themselves in Hawai’i.”
In another example, during World War II, one Japanese American internment camp in Arizona used forced Japanese labor to build American Indian reservations; in other words, one displaced group was used to help displace another.
The bottom line is that it is ridiculous to think that any social justice movement or marginalized group exists in isolation, including Asian Americans. So much more can be accomplished when we stand in solidarity with others. Take the “Yellow Peril supports Black Power” movement of the 1960s, which asserted that the struggles of one minority group affected all minority groups. Today, Asian American activists continue to rally in support of racial justice by backing movements protesting the North Dakota Access Pipeline that would encroach onto sacred Standing Rock Sioux land and writing a crowdsourced letter to their families about why Black Lives Matter. Asian Americans may have been historically socialized into complicity with systems of violence, but many of us also understand that we will never be free until all of us are free.
