Black-Asian Solidarities and the Impasses of ‘How-To’ Anti-Racisms

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Friday, May 21, 2021 | 5:30PM to 7PM

During the 2020 summer of global uprisings in defense of Black life, widely circulated anti‐racist reading lists created heightened demand for books that promised to teach readers how to examine their internalized racism. Situated in U.S. racial liberalism’s extensive literary genealogy, anti‐racist “how‐to” literature has historically swooped in during moments of heightened racialized confusion to restore narratives of American exceptionalism. This literature sustains the tenuous promise that racism is something that one can challenge in interpersonal relationships and by following specific steps toward individualized behavior correction.

Building on a broader body of work that has critiqued liberal anti‐racisms for detracting from abolitionist struggles against racialized injustice, this presentation based on an article by Prof. Elizabeth Hanna Rubio specifically frames the limitations that “how‐to anti‐racisms” place on transgressive multiracial coalition building. Through ethnographic analysis of discourses and practices that move through various sites of contemporary Black‐Asian American activist encounters, Prof. Rubio builds on Black and radical women of color feminist theorizations of solidarity to show how “how‐tos” destabilize coalition building by overdetermining resolutions to conflict. She argues that in “settling” anti‐racism into a repertoire of predetermined steps, how‐to‐ism constrains the contradiction, anger, and uncertainty that is fundamental to forging the radical accountability central to abolitionist work.

Article: https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/nad.12139

Author Bio

Elizabeth Hanna Rubio will receive her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Irvine (June 2021). She will continue on as a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow at UCLA's Asian American Studies department. Building on her background as a community organizer, Rubio writes about the fraught politics of multiracial coalition-building in immigrant justice spaces and the complexities of thinking immigrant justice through an abolitionist lens. Her current project explores these themes through four years of ethnographic research with undocumented Korean American organizers in Southern California, Washington D.C., and Chicago. You can find her work published in Amerasia Journal, The Journal for the Anthropology of North America, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Cultural Anthropology Fieldsights, and other mediums.