Anonymous asked:
navyasarchive-deactivated201905 answered:
“For non-Black Asian Americans who actually did grow up in Black neighborhoods, it’s one thing to absorb their culture, it’s another to monetize and exploit Blackness. They are effectively being rewarded for Blackness in a way that Black people are not.
Second, Asian Americans resent the model minority stereotype because we often feel it obscures our suffering and flattens our humanity. Thus, some seek to break out of that mode not by questioning the class and racial hierarchy that we are deeply complicit in, but by extracting Blackness. Awkwafina has even said that she got into hip hop, and her associated persona, because there was something “subversive about hip hop.”
Kenyon Farrow writes in his incredible piece “We Real Cool?: On Hip-Hop, Asian-Americans, Black Folks and Appropriation”: “If first-generation White European immigrants…could use minstrelsy…to not only ensure their status as White people, but also to distance themselves from Black people, can Asian Americans use hip hop (the music, clothing, language and gestures, sans charcoal makeup), and everything it signifies to also assert their dominance over Black bodies, rather than their allegiance to Black liberation?”
Third, despite Black people discussing and writing extensively about the fact that hypervisibility does not equal privilege, the fervor around “Crazy Rich Asians” and the incessant comparisons to “Black Panther” feels like we are resentfully chasing the hypervisibility of Blackness.The fight for media representation has become one of the most prominent rallying cries among Asian Americans. But applauding performers who trade in caricatures merely asserts our feigned dominance over Blackness and our aspiration to ascend to Whiteness. If we wish to subvert White hegemony, we must step away from this imitation of Whiteness’ exploitation of Blackness.”
