Cultural commentary video essayfrom @glass__museum

Transcript

Aren't the problem, white supremacy is. Weijians are really having a moment right now, what with Leve and her Weijian avengers. So ever since the New York Weijian meetup, a lot of critics have taken to arguing that the meetup reflected a tendency among Weijians to center whiteness. And while these criticisms do raise legitimate concerns about inclusivity and privilege, my main gripe with discourse is that it mistakes the symptom for the system. Because the problem isn't weisians who think they're better for being part white. Heck, there are full Asians out there who also think weisians are better for being part white. There will always be weird ass outliers. The real problem is internalized white supremacy, which affects everybody, not just Asians. There's a recurring pattern in contemporary political discourse to reframe systemic issues as problems of individual identity. People are asking which individuals are morally guilty of centering whiteness instead of deconstructing why whiteness hold power in the first place. In other words, people are focusing on what philosopher Nancy Fraser calls recognition politics. And in her essay From Redistribution to Recognition, Fraser offers a useful framework to understanding the limits of representation in politics. She argues that political struggle has increasingly shifted towards an emphasis on cultural recognition as opposed to economic redistribution since the late twentieth century, and that this shift has made it so that our remedies for injustice remain affirmative as opposed to transformative. While affirmative remedies aim to correct unfair outcomes within the existing system, transformative remedies aim to restructure the system that generates the inequality in the first place. Representation is thus an affirmative remedy, and it unfortunately seems to be the hill that Asian American political discourse has been dying on for the past decades. The push for increased Asian representation indeed marks progress when it comes to cultural recognition, as it extends visibility to a group that was previously excluded from any mainstream attention. But it does so without changing the structure that produced that exclusion in the first place. So in the case of the Wazian meetup, we can and definitely should call for more mixed Asian representation beyond just Wazians. But at the same time, increased visibility won't do anything to change the white supremacist system that privileges mixed white identities to begin with. Now unlike many white leftist men, I don't think identity politics are entirely useless and neither does Frasier. And Deitchy emphasizes that categories unfairly biased against some are institutionalized in the state and the economy. Meanwhile, economic disadvantage impedes equal participation in the making of culture, and so the result is often a vicious cycle of cultural and economic subordination. And so to remedy this, we need mechanisms of both redistribution and recognition. Increasingly, however, the struggle for recognition has become the dominant form of political conflict. And this is where the danger lies. When cultural recognition starts to replace economic transformation as the primary goal of politics, when they good, in fact, possess a dialectical relationship. But this is exactly what happens in online discourse. Discourse. A big part of the critique against the Wazian meetup is that the organization hosting the event is advertised as half Asia spring rank yet the majority of their events cater to Wazians. Now is this assumption of whiteness as the default harmful and exclusionary? Yes. But it's the same unspoken assumption that underlies everything in a white supremacist society. White supremacy ensures that all culture is created around the normative assumption of whiteness, while marginalized identities are relegated to the periphery. Even as inclusivity increases, these systems are rarely dismantled. Instead, the dominant framework simply stretches to accommodate a little more. There's a reason why most celebrities of color in the mainstream are often half white. Racial difference is a lot more acceptable when it's softened through proximity to whiteness. And so inclusion exists, but only ever as a deviation from the norm. And at the end of the day, what are we trying to be included into anyway? Because while everyone's busy fighting for a seat at the table, that table stays exactly the same.