Racial Tensions Are Not So Black and White

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February is Black History Month, a time for commemorating the accomplishments of Black Americans. It is also a time to reflect on the evils of white supremacy. For much of Black Americans’ history, however, the white majority has not been the sole adversary; the position of Blacks in American society has also been defined by tensions with other minorities. Of such minorities, Asian Americans were, and still are, a prominent example. Just look at Edward Blum’s recent lawsuit suing Harvard and UNC admissions offices for using affirmative action to discriminate against applicants: Asian Americans are being positioned as plaintiffs to challenge a practice that has historically benefited Black Americans. This lawsuit is a contemporary echo of racial tensions that date as far back as two centuries ago. Despite these tensions, Asian Americans and Black Americans have more in common than both groups realize. Only in connecting through these commonalities while celebrating each other’s differences can both minority groups strive together in the fight against white supremacy.

A Brief History

While Blacks have labored on American soil since the early seventeenth century, the first Asians arrived in the United States in the early 1800s. By the post-Civil War era, large numbers of Chinese laborers had immigrated to the U.S. in search of gold and opportunities for work. White plantation owners, who no longer had ownership over the newly emancipated Black population, looked upon Chinese immigrants favorably for their relative lack of bitterness against white society and willingness to work for lower wages. The roots of a myth that upholds Asian Americans as “model minorities” thus took hold.

The model minority myth thrived in the decades following World War II. After the U.S. victory in the war, Japanese Americans released from internment camps worked hard to avoid detainment and climbed to the upper rungs of the American social ladder. In 1965, the Immigration and Nationality Act allowed Asian immigrants with typically already well-off American relatives or capacity for skilled labor—a hallmark of higher education—to enter the United States.

Naturally, these immigrants became financially successful, oftentimes even more successful than many members of the white middle class. The model minority myth praised such Asian Americans—mostly Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese, and Korean Americans—for being able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. It coaxed well-off Asian Americans into assimilating to white society while shaming other minority groups, including Blacks, even at the expense of poor Asian Americans, such as Hmong and Vietnamese Americans, who were refugees of war. Consequently, diverse ethnic groups were lumped together as faceless minorities under the generic label of “Asian American,” and anti-Black narratives were spread within American society.

Asian Americans consist of diverse ethnic groups that are reduced to a singular racial label (Source: Pew Research Center).

The positive perceptions of Asian Americans accompanying the model minority myth came at the cost of xenophobia. As Asian immigrants became top earners in the U.S., many Americans blamed those of Asian descent for taking jobs, labeling them as the “yellow peril.” This bitterness seeped into the Black community as well. When Asian immigrants like Korean Americans arrived in the United States, they often encountered challenges to acquiring well-paying jobs in mainstream American society. Many resorted to opening their small businesses, which were most easily started in the cheapest, and often Blackest, neighborhoods. As more Asian Americans moved near Black neighborhoods and absorbed racist anti-Black myths, Black Americans felt the strain of economic competition and racist microaggressions. Moreover, due to racist redlining practices conducted during much of the twentieth century, Black Americans were unable to take loans to start their own businesses and felt increasing resentment for Asian American business owners.

Ultimately, Black Americans and Asian Americans face the same enemy: white supremacy. In creating the model minority myth, white supremacy neglected Black Americans’ centuries of oppression and racialized the success of a few educated individuals who faced persecution in the U.S. for a far shorter time. In inventing the yellow peril, white supremacy directed anger over socioeconomic inequality against Asian Americans when the real culprits were corporations and politicians who promoted unjust employment practices. However, Black Americans and Asian Americans have misunderstood each other to such a degree that identifying the common enemy has been especially difficult. These misunderstandings have led to massive racial tensions.

Opposition and Unity

Arguably the most explosive Black-Asian racial tensions erupted in the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, in which the acquittal of police officers who brutally assaulted Black civilian Rodney King resulted in fiery waves of protest and social unrest. This was not the first time racial tensions resulted in riots in Los Angeles. In 1965, the arrest of a Black man suspected of driving while intoxicated by a white officer triggered the Watts Riot. The namesake riot of the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles drove out merchants and opened business to Korean American shop owners in nearby Koreatown. As contact between Korean Americans and Black Americans increased in the following years, Korean Americans accused their Black neighbors of robbery and crime while Black civilians accused Korean American shop owners of discrimination and taking economic advantage of their communities.

Race relations were further complicated by the fact that Black Americans were poor minority customers with whom Korean American shop owners could only communicate in limited English; interactions between the two groups were rife with misinterpretation. Fatal incidents soon surfaced. In 1991, a Black man robbed a Los Angeles liquor store and shot its two Korean American employees. Then, in 1992, a Korean American shop owner shot and killed a Black high school freshman following an accusation of shoplifting.

Armed Korean Americans defending shops during the 1992 LA Riots

After the police who assaulted and arrested Rodney King were acquitted, rage within the Black community spilled out onto the streets of Los Angeles. Much of the anger was directed towards Korean Americans in Koreatown due to years of tense race relations and incidents. Black protesters looted Korean American property, and in the absence of protection from police, Korean Americans banded together and responded with gunfire. In the end, half of all property damage due to the 1992 riots was incurred on Korean-American-owned shops. The riots were an inflection point for the Korean American community. Realizing that they could no longer be invisible to American society, as evidenced by the absence of police in Koreatown, Korean Americans became much more involved in political activism. Arms sales increased in the Korean American community, and more Korean immigrants began to assume Korean American identity. From the community emerged a conservative movement that embraced law and order, rallied support for Republicans, and emphasized differences between Korean Americans and Black Americans. The Los Angeles riots of 1992 had become a hallmark of division between Black Americans and Asian Americans.

Focusing solely upon such divisive elements, however, ignores the historic instances of solidarity between the Black community and Asian American community. While the 1992 riots in Los Angeles left bitterness among Korean Americans and Black Americans, they also sparked the formation of a liberal Korean American activist group that sought to work together with other minorities to fight racism. Two decades prior to the riots, Chinese American youths in San Francisco’s crowded and poverty-stricken Chinatown formed the Red Guard Party to fight government oppression, joining forces with the leaders of the well-known Black Panthers and studying the organization’s ideas.

Around the same time, the Black Students Union collaborated with the Asian American Political Alliance and other minority coalitions to call for university campus reform in a movement called the Third World Liberation Front. At the height of the Civil Rights Movement, ex–Japanese-American-internee Yuri Kochiyama worked with Malcolm X to campaign for human rights, and Japanese Americans and Black Americans worked together to desegregate public facilities. Racial conflicts such as those of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots should hardly be considered the sole defining factors of relations between Asian Americans and Black Americans. However, their presence indicates that even though Asian Americans and Black Americans are bound in the same struggle against racial oppression, there are still improvements that should be made to race relations.

The Black Community and Asian American Community Today

The Black-Asian unity of the past has carried over to today’s contexts of social unrest. When teenage Hmong American Fong Lee was shot by police eight times in 2006, Black protesters joined the Asian American community to condemn police brutality against its poorest members. In the Black Lives Matter protests, Asians For Black Lives marched with Black protesters in solidarity. To fight the recent wave of anti-Asian hate brought on by COVID-19, Black activists stood together with Asian American community leaders in #StopAsianHate.

Historic racial tensions between Black Americans and Asian Americans, however, have carried over to today as well. Among collaborating Asian American and Black communities, activists cannot agree on a common approach to address policing, which many Asian Americans view as essential to law and order but many Black Americans view as a vehicle of brutality. Although the majority of Asian Americans support affirmative action, a policy that benefits Black Americans in college admissions, many Chinese Americans are staunch opponents of the practice and participate in social media conversations that promote anti-Black propaganda. In more brutal interactions, four Black women in Philadelphia were recently charged with an anti-Asian train attack for verbally assaulting Asian American students and physically assaulting an Asian American bystander who came to the students’ aid.

Once again, the racial tensions between Black Americans and Asian Americans today are due to misunderstanding. For example, Asian Americans frequently circulate news of incidents such as the Black-on-Asian train attack in Philadelphia, but the fact is that such incidents are extremely rare; in fact, the majority of attacks against Asian Americans are carried out by white perpetrators. Misinformation that hides this fact threatens to unnecessarily divide Asian Americans and Black Americans. Similar misinformation is spread in ethnic media like WeChat, a platform that is particularly popular among Chinese Americans, which has promoted unsubstantiated rumors that Ivy League schools have quotas for Asian admittees and fueled resentment against Black students.

The solution that builds long-term solidarity is to identify white supremacy as the dividing wedge between the Asian American and Black communities. In the case of disagreements over policing, while some Asian American activists may feel strong support for police, history gives Asian Americans little reason to challenge police reform: police in the 1992 Los Angeles Riots neglected Korean Americans in favor of guarding the white and wealthy cities of Beverly Hills and West Hollywood; police who arrested a Georgia shooter in 2021 ignored his six Asian American victims and merely commented that the shooter was having “a really bad day.” Upon observing the history of the police’s relationship with Asian American communities, Asian American activists may actually feel inclined to join Black activists in movements for police reform and abolition. In the case of affirmative action, it should be recognized that Edward Blum, a white man, is campaigning not for an end to anti-Asian discrimination, but for a change in policy that would benefit white applicants at the expense of minority applicants. By masquerading in the name of justice for Asian Americans, the affirmative action lawsuit divides Asian Americans from Black Americans to advance white supremacy.

When Black Americans and Asian Americans both recognize these divisive devices, solidarity will be the natural response. Asian Americans’ interests have been largely aligned with those of Black Americans, but even the few incidents of racial tensions and relatively sequestered instances of anti-Black racism in Asian American social circles signify that there is still much work to be done. Black history month tends to focus mostly on the Black community and white supremacy, but let this last point be a point of reflection for all the races in between.