Asian Americans in an Anti-Black World

Where do Asian Americans fit into the U.S. racial order? Are they subordinated comparably to Black people or permitted adjacency to whiteness? The racial reckoning prompted by the police murder of George Floyd and the surge in anti-Asian hate during the COVID-19 pandemic raise these questions with new urgency.

Asian Americans in an Anti-Black World is a groundbreaking study that will shake up scholarly and popular thinking on these matters. Theoretically innovative and based on rigorous historical research, this provocative book tells us we must consider both anti-Blackness and white supremacy―and the articulation of the two forces―in order to understand U.S. racial dynamics.

The construction of Asian Americans as not-white but above all not-Black has determined their positionality for nearly two centuries. How Asian Americans choose to respond to this status will help to define racial politics in the U.S. in the twenty-first century.

Claire Jean Kim is Professor of Political Science and Asian American Studies at University of California, Irvine. Her writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and Ms. Magazine. Her two previous books, Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict and Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species and Nature in a Multicultural Age, have both won best book awards from the American Political Science Association. Kim has been a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study and the University of California Humanities Research Institute.