Reading "The Loneliest Americans"

I listened to Jay Caspian Kang’s book on Asian American identity, The Loneliest Americans. I’ve read some of his journalistic work. This is a lot like that, for better and for worse- what happens when you send a feature writer to do… ome other kind of writer’s job. A historian? I don’t know. Kang’s prose is good. I don’t think he’s bullshitting us. And, of course, I’m white. I am not Asian. I can’t speak to his reflections on the Asian or Asian-American experience from a place of my own experience.

One thing I am, though, is a historian. Kang’s history isn’t too bad- he puts a lot of emphasis on the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act, which opened up immigration to people from Asian countries, favoring highly educated migrants. This act created a permanent divide in Asian life in the US between those who came after 1965 (and their descendants) and the descendants of the immigrants, mostly Chinese and Japanese, who came during earlier eras of restriction. These two populations had radically different experiences. Perhaps ironically, the phrase “Asian-American” was coined by Bay Area radicals, a few years after Hart-Cellar passed, all of whom were products of the earlier Asian culture, those shaped by Chinese restriction and Japanese internment. These experiences weren’t those of people like Kang’s Korean parents. This is only the biggest of the many divides — religion, national origin, above all class — that causes Kang to dwell on the artificiality of “Asian-American” as an identity.

Kang’s history is good. Alas, his historiography has some real issues that cut to the heart of his analysis. And honestly, it doesn’t even feel good to talk about, because it involves critiquing the work of one of the realest dudes to ever draw an academic paycheck in this country. Kang borrows a lot from Noel Ignatiev, who was a teacher of his and who appears personally in the book through anecdotes about the author’s life. He came to the academy via decades of radical working class organizing, where he thought hard about racism, one of the great obstacles to solidarity. Ignatiev was both an absolute mensch (by all accounts I’ve seen), and a dude who’s main contribution to his field of history is one bad meme: “how X became white,” as in his best known book, How the Irish Became White.

Gotta hand it to Routledge- that’s a great cover design.

With the best intentions, Ignatiev really dropped the ball on that. To the best of my knowledge, no serious historian of race and immigration in America thinks that a process of “becoming white” characterizes the experience of most European immigrant cultures. As historians have carefully and thoroughly documented, however cruel the treatment of Irish immigrants was or how dehumanizing depictions of them were, they were from colonial times onward considered white; as in, not black, not red, and if not equal to whichever standard set by Mayflower descendants, on the same side of the color line as Anglos.

Indeed, they were always considered white by the measure that counted most: according to the Naturalization Act of 1790 that formed the base of all subsequent immigration law, citizenship was available to all “free, white” inhabitants of the US over 21. Irish were always considered white by that definition. There was never any legal challenge to that, and most attempts to put anti-Irish sentiment into law aimed at lengthening the time of residence for citizenship, restricting voting/officeholding more based on residency time, etc., applied to all immigrants (but given how many immigrants were Irish, it was clear who the targets were).

Immigration history in the last few decades has explored how the same dynamic worked with other immigrant groups (a favorite of mine, about Italians in Chicago, is titled “White On Arrival”). In some marginal cases, especially in the west and south, you could argue that some European groups were judged to be white or not, or went back and forth depending on time or place- Portuguese, Armenians, and edge cases involving people from the Balkans, the Middle East, and Latin America. But, by and large, European migrant groups — many of whom faced repellent prejudice and even violence on the basis of origin — were on the white side of a color line that defined – continues to define – American life. Whiteness is, indeed, a construct. But Ignatiev’s model for its construction does not match the historical record.

One thing that helped cause this confusion, as “White On Arrival” pointed out, was that nineteenth and early twentieth century use of the word “race” had connotations that ours doesn’t. It meant something closer to what we now call “ethnic group,” though could also mean any group of people with ties of descent (including families). Many did believe that Italians, Irish etc were inferior “races” in that sense. They had a lot of ways to be bigoted! When people back then wanted to make clear they meant what we now call race, they often said “color” (hence the phrase you sometimes hear, “race, creed, and/or color”). And most of what we now call “white ethnic groups” were always understood to be, by color, white.

We still talk about this or that group “becoming white” because it’s convenient shorthand for assimilation. I use it in casual conversation, sometimes. Activist culture keeps it alive, but I think they do so more because it’s a meme, and it came from a man deeply embedded in organizing culture, than because of what it means. There’s implications in the old “whiteness studies” paradigm that Ignatiev helped seed — like how many early figures in the field thought the way for white Americans to surrender their white privilege was to embrace their ethnic (and hence, supposedly, pre-white) roots — that wouldn’t be very welcome on the scene today. It’s a strange confluence that keeps “becoming white” as a historical concept in front of us, and shows the power of a good phrase.

Kang uses the “becoming white” thing as a main component of his argument. Asians are on the escalator to whiteness, just like Jews (whose experience he sometimes borrows as a flawed analogue) once were, in his telling. Asian-Americans need to figure out a way to gain full citizenship while not accepting the racism inherent in whiteness, in his telling, while simultaneously refusing false lame versions of their own history and culture that get sold back to them, both by assimilationists and radicals. Kang makes clear he’s not an activist (even if he admires many of the ones he meets in his reporting, in contrast to others in his cohort- not Asian-Americans, but Gen X features writers). His concerns are more existential — subjectivity, more or less — and sometimes a little pedantic- avoiding being wrong, like lumping the experience of Asians together.

Well, I’m not in a place to recommend an existential stance to anyone and certainly not to people whose existence is quite different from mine, such as people of Asian descent. I do think if Kang had a more rigorous framework through which to view the history of race and immigration in America, he might be able to hoist his head a bit further from his navel than he does in his more melancholy moods.

For one thing, Kang gives a backhanded compliment to the consistency of what he normally (rightly) understands to be shaky constructs of race and ethnicity when he insists that there must be shared experience to create an ethnic or racial identity. His forebears never experienced exclusion (though they surely would have had any of them tried to get on a boat to the US at the wrong time) or internment, therefore, any identity he could share with people whose forebears did experience these things has to be false, inauthentic. Well… I’m pretty sure none of my white forebears were around for the American Revolution, and certainly not for the first Thanksgiving, but that collection of micks, dagos, and heebs certainly came to identify with the default-white American identity that harkens back to such WASP-y happenings. And why shouldn’t they? It’s all made up, anyway!

I’m being glib, here. But so is Kang- though in his case he’s almost entirely humorless with it (he depicts himself as a diffident, somewhat unpleasant guy- I appreciate the honesty though I bet he’s not too bad, really). A lot of history went into making what happened a few towns over from me in 1775 relevant to people who have no personal or familial tie to it. And, despite the proclamations of an influential Asian-American who Kang doesn’t discuss (descendant of interned Japanese, so not in Kang’s precise clade), history isn’t quite done yet.

In the interest of both fairness (I should put cards on the table- Kang has) and relevance (so this isn’t just pedantry about historical frameworks), I’ll stake a claim about the future. I don’t think Asians — and here I mean whoever a baseline chud thinks is Asian, like how Du Bois defined being black as “having to ride Jim Crow in Georgia” — will ever be seen as white in the sense that (Ashkenazi, but who’s counting?) Jews are. As the crises of the twenty-first century worsen, either fascism will prevail, or a civilization that does some sort of reckoning with racism will. In the former, we can expand from present reality to all sorts of lurid scenarios, from partial Asian-American participation in fascism (complete with role as identifiable scapegoat if things fail) to full on group persecution, and if you believe it can’t get that far, you don’t know history. In the latter, you could see a lot of different things, but one figures an insistence on assimilation to whiteness wouldn’t be one of them.

Kang could no doubt wax poetic about the inevitable failures of prediction. But all I’m doing is working off present reality with a considerably more rigorous historical model than his. Indeed, the two main options are basically parodic versions of what we’ve already got, the “rooftop Korean” or the “‘good’ ‘multicultural’ worker bee” dichotomy Kang illuminates. None of them involve becoming white.

I don’t want to make the book sound all bad. Kang’s pretty good when he descends from these high level overviews based on bad historical interpretations down to the specific. His stuff about Korean-American cultural institutions — test prep centers, restaurants — is interesting. I didn’t realize that most stateside Korean restaurants are culinarily stuck in South Korea’s 1970s, i.e., serving the foods poor Koreans dreamed of eating when substantial numbers of them started emigrating here. He has some good stuff on “MRAzns,” an online community that combines anti-imperialist and anti-racist rhetoric with the “men’s rights” crowd obsession on lurid sexual scenarios and toxic harassment methods.

Even in these parts, though… I can’t help but feel dissatisfied and really, it comes down to authorial ethos. It’s not an Asian thing, either, I don’t think, except maybe insofar as Kang has consciously adopted a stance that we whites don’t commonly associate with Asians: a bit of a sneering aesthete, a guy who wanted to be a Kerouac who grew up to be a man who realizes he won’t be, wouldn’t really want to be, but who still resides at some noneuclidian angle simultaneously above and beneath most subject matter. For someone who gets that authenticity, especially as sold to partially-deracinated people like immigrants and their kids, is something of a con, he’s still fine dinging others for lacking it, or for lacking whichever degree of self-awareness we ought to have (and which, in Kang’s own telling, drove him to drugs and despair at times). Beyond being irritating, Kang’s focus on authenticity, ethos, and his feelings makes his work less interesting. For example, he doesn’t deign to really dig into how the MRAzns came to their ideas, how they square the circle of anti-imperialism and paying just way too much attention to who’s dating whom- he just recounts being “yelled at.”

At least he’s quite sincere and unironic about it, especially about the need for Asian-Americans, however defined, to engage in movements for racial justice, even if they’re imperfect and certainly don't fit Asian America perfectly (how could they, given the population’s heterogeneity?). His prose is good, and he can ask and answer questions well when he takes a mind to. But the book's fundamental problems — a psychologizing, personalistic take on things combined with an outright fallacious approach to the history of the subject matter (two things that often go together, I find) — mostly overshadowed its virtues as I listened to it.

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Mithra is unsure why Fāther is pointing the Staring Rectangle at her from under the table