LINDA MARTÍN ALCOFF

LATINO/AS, ASIAN AMERICANS, AND THE

BLACK–WHITE BINARY

(Received 5 November 2002; accepted 6 November 2002)

ABSTRACT. This paper aims to contribute toward coalition building by showing that,
even if we try to build coalition around what might look like our most obvious common
concern – reducing racism – the dominant discourse of racial politics in the United States
inhibits an understanding of how racism operates vis-à-vis Latino/as and Asian Americans,
and thus proves more of an obstacle to coalition building than an aid. The black/white
paradigm, which operates to govern racial classifications and racial politics in the U.S.,
takes race in the U.S. to consist of only two racial groups, Black and White, with others
understood in relation to one of these categories. I summarize and discuss the strongest
criticisms of the paradigm and then develop two further arguments. Together these argu-
ments show that continuing to theorize race in the U.S. as operating exclusively through
the black/white paradigm is actually disadvantageous for all people of color in the U.S.,
and in many respects for whites as well (or at least for white union households and the
white poor).

KEY WORDS: Asian Americans, assimilation, blacks, identity, immigration, Latino/as,

race, racism, whites

If W.E.B. DuBois were alive today, he would probably tell us that the
problem of the twenty-first century will prove to be the lines between
communities of color, or the question of cross ethnic relations.1 In the 2000
United States presidential election, the voting bloc for candidate Al Gore
consisted of a majority in each of the following groups: every minority
ethnic group, white women, and union households. This coalition actually
constitutes a slim majority of the population, and thus its unity is poten-
tially a powerful force. However, U.S. presidential elections are of course
not determined by the popular vote but by the electoral college, a procedure
that not only has the power to overturn the popular vote nationwide but,
even more importantly, the urban vote, which now carries the majority of
the population and is increasing. If we eliminated the electoral college the
urban population would therefore determine the presidency, which would
mean real enfranchisement for people of color for the first time in U.S.
history.

1 I am grateful to David Kim, Emily Lee, Arlene Dávila, Frank Kirkland, David
McLean, Angelo Corlett, and Howard McGary for their comments on this paper.

The Journal of Ethics 7: 5–27, 2003.

© 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
6 LINDA MARTÍN ALCOFF

It is unlikely that the electoral college will be eliminated anytime soon,

but even if this were to happen, political power for people of color would
require building coalitions, the difficulty of which has been brought home
by recent city government elections in New York and Los Angeles. This
paper is an attempt to make a contribution toward coalition building by
showing that, even if we try to build coalition around what might look
like our most obvious common concern – reducing racism – the dominant
discourse of racial politics in the U.S. inhibits an understanding of how
racism operates vis-à-vis Latino/as and Asian Americans, and thus proves
more of an obstacle to coalition building than an aid. First and foremost,
of course, we must begin to talk more with one another.
There are many important similarities between the history of oppression
specifically faced by Latino/as and Asian Americans in the U.S. Histori-
cally, both groups were often brought to this country as cheap labor and
then denied certain political and civil rights, thus making them a more
vulnerable and exploitable labor force once on U.S. shores (a practice
that continues to this day in sweatshops in many cities on the east and
west coasts and on the U.S.–Mexican border, and in the erosion of even
basic protections or emergency hospital services for “illegals”).2 And both
groups are often coming from countries of origin that have been the site
of imperialist wars, invasions, and civil wars instigated by the cold war,
some of which involved the U.S.’s own imperialist aggressions such as
in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, El Salvador, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia,
Nicaragua, Guatemala, Korea, the Dominican Republic, and most recently,
Colombia.3 In this sense, many of these immigrants had experience with

2 See Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, 3rd edition (New
York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1988); Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American
Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996); Gary Okihiro, Margins and
Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1994); Earl Shorris, Latino/as: A Biography of the People (New York: W.W. Norton
and Company, 1992); Roberto Suro, Strangers among Us: Latino Lives in a Changing
America (New York: Vintage Books, 1999); Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture
in 19th Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); A Different Mirror:
A History of Multicultural America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Jack Kuo
Wei Tchen, New York Before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture
1776–1882 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1999).
3 See e.g., Tom Barry, Beth Wood and De Preusch, Dollars and Dictators: A Guide
to Central America (New York: Grove Press, 1983); Roger Burbach and Patricia Flynn,
The Politics of Intervention: The United States in Central America (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1984); Noam Chomsky, Year 501: The Conquest Continues (Boston: South
End Press: 1993); Eduardo Galeano, Guatemala: Occupied Country (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1967); Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of
a Continent, Translated by Cedric Belfrage (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973);
 LATINO/AS, ASIAN AMERICANS, AND THE BLACK–WHITE BINARY 7

the U.S. Government, direct or indirect, well before they became refugees
or immigrants there. There are also similarities that Latino/as and Asian
Americans share with other people of color after they go there: having to
continually face vicious and demeaning stereotyping along with language,
education, health care, housing and employment discrimination, and being
the target of random identity based violence and murder (random only
in the sense that any Mexican farm laborer or Asian American or Arab
American or African American or Jewish person would do).
Perhaps because of their similar genealogy as sources of cheap, easily
exploitable labor, there are also some important commonalities between
the ideological justifications and legal methods that have been used to
persecute and discriminate against Latino/as and Asian Americans.4 Both
have been the main victims of “nativist” arguments which advocate
limiting the rights of immigrants or foreign-born Americans, and both have
often been portrayed as ineradicably “foreign” no matter how many gener-
ations they have lived here. Yet an account of these nativist-based forms of
discrimination and persecution has not been adequately incorporated into
the civil rights paradigm of progressive politics.
The discourse of social justice in regard to issues involving race has
been dominated in the U.S. by what many theorists name the “black/white
paradigm,” which operates to govern racial classifications and racial
politics in the U.S., most clearly in the formulation of civil rights law
but also in more informal arenas of discussion. Juan Perea defines this
paradigm as
the conception that race in America consists, either exclusively or primarily, of only two
constituent racial groups, the Black and White . . . In addition, the paradigm dictates that
all other racial identities and groups in the United States are best understood through the
Black/White binary paradigm.5

He argues that this paradigm operates even in recent anti-racist theory such
as that produced by Andrew Hacker, Cornel West, and Toni Morrison,
though it is even clearer in works by liberals such as Nathan Glazer. Openly
Elaine H. Kim and Eui-Young Yu, East to America: Korean American Life Stories (New
York: New Press, 1995); Gary Okihiro, “Comparing Colonialism and Migrations, Puerto
Rico and the Philippines,” paper delivered at Duke University, February 17–19, 1995;
Victor Perera, Unfinished Conquest: The Guatemalan Tragedy (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993); Armando Uribe, The Black Book of American Intervention in
Chile, translated by Jonathan Casart (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975).
4 Leslie Bender and Daan Braveman, Power, Privilege, and Law: A Civil Rights Reader
(St. Paul: West Publishing Company, 1995).
5 Juan Perea, “The Black/White Binary Paradigm of Race,” in Richard Delgado and
Jean Stefancic (eds.), The Latino/a Condition (New York: New York University Press,
1998), p. 361.
8 LINDA MARTÍN ALCOFF

espousing this view, Mary Francis Berry, former chair of the U.S. Civil
Rights Commission, has stated that the U.S. is comprised of “three nations,
one Black, one White, and one in which people strive to be something
other than Black to avoid the sting of White Supremacy.”6 To understand
race in this way is to assume that racial discrimination operates exclusively
through anti-black racism. Others can be affected by racism, on this view,
but the dominance of the black/white paradigm works to interpret all other
effects as “collateral damage” ultimately caused by the same phenomena,
in both economic and psychological terms, in which the given other,
whether Latino/a, Asian American, or something else, is placed in the
category of “black” or “close to black.” In other words, there is basically
one form of racism, and one continuum of racial identity, along which all
groups will be placed. The black/white paradigm can be understood either
descriptively or prescriptively (or both): as making a descriptive claim
about the fundamental nature of racializations and racisms in the U.S., or
as prescribing how race shall operate and thus enforcing the applicability
of the black/white paradigm.7
Several Latino/a and Asian American theorists, such as Elaine Kim,
Gary Okihiro, Elizabeth Martinez, Juan Perea, Frank Wu, Dana Takagi,
and community activists such as Bong Hwan Kim have argued that the
black/white paradigm is not adequate, certainly not sufficient, to explain
racial realities in the U.S. They have thus contested its claim to descriptive
adequacy, and argued that the hegemony of the black/white paradigm in
racial thinking has had many deleterious effects for Latino/as and Asian
Americans.8 In this paper, I will summarize and discuss what I consider
the strongest of these arguments and then develop two further arguments.
It is important to stress that the black/white paradigm does have some
descriptive reach, as I shall discuss, even though it is inadequate when
taken as the whole story of racism. Asian Americans and Latino/as are
often categorized and treated in ways that reflect the fact that they have
6 Quoted in Frank Wu, Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White (New York:
Basic Books, 2002), p. 34.
7 I am grateful to Frank Kirkland for helping me to see this distinction.
8 Richard Delgado, “The Black/White Binary: How Does It Work?” in Richard Delgado
and Jean Stefancic (eds.), The Latino Condition (New York: New York University Press,
1998), pp. 369–375; Elaine H. Kim, “Between Black and White: An Interview with Bong
Hwan Kim,” in Karin Aguilar-San Juan (ed.), The State of Asian America: Activism
and Resistance in the 1990s (Boston: South End Press, 1993), pp. 71–100; Elizabeth
Martinez, “Beyond Black and White: The Racisms of Our Time,” in Richard Delgado
and Jean Stefancic (eds.), The Latino Condition (New York: New York University Press,
1998), pp. 466–477; Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams; Perea, “The Black/White Binary
Paradigm of Race”; Dana Y. Takagi, The Retreat from Race: Asian-American Admissions
and Racial Politics (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992); Wu, Yellow.
 LATINO/AS, ASIAN AMERICANS, AND THE BLACK–WHITE BINARY 9

been positioned as either “near black” or “near white,” but this is not nearly
adequate to understanding their ideological representation or political
treatment in the U.S. One might also argue that, although the black/white
paradigm is not descriptively adequate to the complexity and plurality
of racialized identities, it yet operates with prescriptive force to organize
these complexities into its bipolar schema. Critics, however, have contested
both the claim of descriptive adequacy as well as prescriptive efficacy. That
is, the paradigm does not operate with effective hegemony as a prescriptive
force. I believe these arguments will show that continuing to theorize race
in the U.S. as operating exclusively through the black/white paradigm is
actually disadvantageous for all people of color in the U.S., and in many
respects for whites as well (or at least for white union households and the
white poor).
I want to start with a story that exemplifies the close association
between Latino/as and Asians in the ideological traditions embedded in
the legal history of the U.S. In 1854 the Supreme Court of the State of
California defined Chinese Americans as Indians, that is, Native Amer-
icans. This ruling came about after a white man, George W. Hall, was
convicted of murder based upon the eyewitness testimony of a Chinese
American. Hall’s lawyer appealed the conviction by invoking the law that
said “no black or mulatto person, or Indian, shall be allowed to give
evidence in favor of, or against a white man.”9 In support of his claim that
this law was relevant to Hall’s case, the defense lawyer cited the hypothesis
that all Native peoples of the Americas were originally from Asia and
traveled to the Western hemisphere over the Bering Straights. Thus, he
argued, the Chinese American man was actually the racial ancestor of
Native Americans, and because the latter were excluded from testifying
in court, this Chinese man should be excluded also. The Supreme Court
of the State of California accepted this argument and upheld the appeal,
freeing Hall, and thus linking the legal status of Asian Americans and all
those with indigenous American ancestry, a category that includes many
or most Latino/as.
The story does not end there. The Supreme Court of the State of
California was concerned that as a scientific hypothesis the Bering straight
theory might one day be disproved, which would then destroy the basis for
Chinese exclusion in the courts and allow them to give testimony. In order
to avoid this outcome, the Court decided to embellish the arguments made
in appeal. Justice Charles J. Murray interpreted legal precedent to argue

9 Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams, p. 50; see also Stanford Lyman, Color, Culture,
Civilization: Race and Minority Issues in American Society (Chicago: University of Illinois
Press, 1994).
10 LINDA MARTÍN ALCOFF

that the terms “black” and “white” are oppositional terms, from which he
concluded that “black” must mean “nonwhite” and “white” must exclude
all people of color. Thus, by the law of binary logic, Chinese Americans,
after having become Native American, then also became black.
Of the many questions that one might like to go back and pose to
Murray, perhaps the most obvious is the following: if “black” and “white”
are oppositional terms, then, instead of “black” meaning “nonwhite,” does
it not just as logically follow that “white” could mean “nonblack,” in which
case all people of color except African Americans would be white? This
conclusion is no more or less fallacious or absurd than Murray’s conclusion
that “black” means “nonwhite,” a conclusion that exceeded even the “one
drop rule” in holding that one can be black even if one has no African
ancestry at all.
Although this case began with a strategy to link the Chinese to Amer-
ican Indians, it ends in a ruling that prescribes a black/white binary. And
it suggests that by use of the black/white binary to conceptualize all racial
identities in the U.S., and by defining whites as those without one drop
of “other” blood, it became possible to separate whites out (in reality,
a specific group of whites), and then protect and maximize white privi-
lege.10 Even though it coalesces the conditions of the various communities
of color into one rubric, suggesting the possibility of solidarity, it also
defines them essentially by their relation to whites, as non-whites. “White”
becomes the pivot point around which all groups are defined. This
allowed the state to make one all-purpose argument against the rights of
non-whites, thus increasing the efficiency with which it could maintain
discrimination.
Asian Americans and Latino/as have been tossed back and forth across
this black/white binary for 150 years.11 To continue with the example of
10 I use the term “white privilege” and “white power structure” in this paper not to imply
that all whites hold power or are privileged over all nonwhites in all cases, but to signal
the ideological racialization of the power structure in the U.S., a power structure which is
also obviously gendered despite the fact that many men are oppressed within the U.S. The
ruling elites are mostly white men, but it is mere ideology to believe that this translates into
true empowerment for all of the white and or male workers, immigrants, prison population,
unemployed, and so forth. The present hierarchy makes use of white supremacist and male
supremacist ideology to justify its rule, though it has no interest in truly sharing its power
even among these categories.
11 See Ian F. Haney López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New
York: New York University Press, 1996); Sharon M. Lee, “Racial Classifications in the
U.S. Census: 1890–1990,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 16 (1993), pp. 75–94; George A.
Martinez, “Mexican Americans and Whiteness,” in Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic
(eds.), The Latino Condition (New York: New York University Press, 1998), pp. 175–179;
Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams; Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formations
 LATINO/AS, ASIAN AMERICANS, AND THE BLACK–WHITE BINARY 11

Chinese Americans, in 1860 Louisiana, Chinese Americans were classi-

fied as white. By 1870 they were classified as Chinese. But in 1900, the
children of Chinese and non-Chinese parents were reclassified as either
white or black. Other states had similarly convoluted histories of classifi-
cation. In 1927 the U.S. Supreme Court ended this confusion and defined
the Chinese as nonwhite, thus more firmly subjecting them to all the
segregationist and Jim Crow legislation then in effect. Similar stories of
variable racial classification can be told about Mexicans in Texas and in
New Mexico, Japanese in California, and other groups. Needless to say,
the variable classifications tell a story of strategic reasoning in which argu-
ments for legal discriminations are deployed against people of color by
whatever opportune classification presents itself in the context.
Contrary to what one might imagine, it has not always or even generally
been to the advantage of Asian Americans and Latino/as to be classi-
fied as white.12 An illustration of this is found in another important legal
case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954, just two weeks before
they issued the decision in Brown vs. Board of Education. The case of
Hernandez vs. Texas involved a Mexican American man convicted of
murder by an all white jury and sentenced to life imprisonment.13 His
lawyer appealed the conviction by arguing that the absence of Mexicans
on the jury was discriminatory, making reference to the famous Scottsboro
case in which the U.S. Supreme Court overturned (after many years) the
conviction of nine African American men on the grounds of an absence of
African Americans from the jury. But in the Hernandez case, the Supreme
Court of the State of Texas ruled that Mexicans were white people of
Spanish descent, and therefore that there was no discrimination in the
all-white make-up of the jury. Forty years later, Hernandez’s lawyer, James
DeAnda, recounted how he made his argument appealing this ruling:
Right there in the Jackson County Courthouse, where no Hispanic had served on any kind
of a jury in living memory because Mexicans were white and so it was okay to bring them
before all-white juries, they had two men’s rooms. One had a nice sign that just said MEN
on it. The other had a sign on it that said COLORED MEN and below that was a hand-
scrawled sign that said HOMBRES AQUI [men here]. In that jury pool, Mexicans may
have been white, but when it came to nature’s functions, they were not.14

in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s (New York: Routledge, 1986); Clara
E. Rodrı́guez, Changing Race: Latino/as, the Census, and the History of Ethnicity in the
United States (New York: New York University Press, 2000).
12 Although this is a fact that could possibly change, and we need to watch carefully
future developments.
13 G. Martinez, “Mexican Americans and Whiteness”; Suro, Strangers among Us.
14 Suro, Strangers among Us, p. 85.
12 LINDA MARTÍN ALCOFF

In fact, in Texas not only were Mexicans subject to Jim Crow in public
facilities from restaurants to bathrooms, they were also excluded from
business and community groups, and children of Mexican descent were
required to attend a segregated school for the first four grades, whether
they spoke fluent English or not. Thus, when they were classified as
nonwhite, Latino/as were overtly denied certain civil rights; when they
were classified as white, the de facto denial of their civil rights could not
be appealed.
Although the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Supreme Court of
the State of Texas decision in the Hernandez case, its final decision
indicated a perplexity regarding Mexican American identity. The U.S.
Supreme Court did not want to classify Mexicans as black, nor did they
want to alter the legal classification of Mexicans as white; since these
were the only racial terms they thought were available, they ended up
explaining the discrimination Mexicans faced as based on “other differ-
ences,” left undefined. Thus, oddly, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld that
there was racial discrimination against Mexicans, but denied that Mexicans
constituted a race.15
One clear lesson to be learned from this legal history is that race is a
construction that is variable enough to be stretched opportunistically as the
need arises to maintain and expand discrimination. The fact that Latino/as
and Asians had to be put into either one of two categories – black and
white – has not been of benefit to them. Nonetheless, one might take these
legal cases to indicate that discrimination against African Americans was
the paradigm case which U.S. courts stretched when they could to justify
discrimination against other nonwhites, and thus to provide support for the
black/white paradigm of race.
The distinguished historian John Hope Franklin argued in this way at
the first official meeting of the Race Relations Commission which was
convened by former U.S. President Bill Clinton to advance his initiative
for a national dialogue on race. Franklin maintained that “racism in the
black/white sphere” developed first in North America when slavery was
introduced in the Jamestown colony in 1619 and has served as a model
for the treatment of race in the U.S. Attorney Angela Oh, also serving on
the commission, argued against Franklin on this point, using the example
of the uprising of April 29, 1992 in Los Angeles to show that the specific
history and racist treatment of Asian Americans needs to be accounted
for in order to understand what occurred during that event. “I just want
to make sure we go beyond the black-white paradigm. We need to go
beyond that because the world is about much more than that . . . ,” she
15 Haney López, White by Law, pp. 182–183.
 LATINO/AS, ASIAN AMERICANS, AND THE BLACK–WHITE BINARY 13

said.16 Frank Wu, commenting on this exchange, tries diplomatically to

unite both sides, affirming that “African Americans bear the greatest bur-
den of racial discrimination” and that the Los Angeles uprising needs to be
understood in relation both to African American history as well as Korean
American history (and, I would add, Latino/a history, since Latino/as were
the largest number of arrested). Wu advocates the following:
Whatever any of us concludes about race relations, we should start by including all of us
. . . Our leaders should speak to all individuals, about every group, and for the country as
a whole. A unified theory of race, race relations, and racial tensions must have whites,
African Americans, and all the rest, and even within groups must include Arab Americans,
Jewish Americans, white ethnicities, and so forth. Our theory is an inadequate account
otherwise.17

The question Wu does not address directly is whether the continued

acceptance of the black/white paradigm will allow such a comprehensive
account.
The reality of race in the U.S. has always been more complicated than
black/white. The initial exclusionary laws concerning testimony in court,
as mentioned earlier, grouped “blacks, mulattoes, and Native Americans.”
The Chinese laborers brought to the West in the 1800’s had specific rulings
and ideological justifications used against them, restricting their right not
only to vote or own property but even to marry other Chinese. This latter
ruling outlasted slavery and was justified by invoking images of Asian
overpopulation. To avoid reproduction, Chinese women were allowed to
come as prostitutes but not as wives, a restriction no other group faced. The
Mexicans defeated in the Mexican–American War were portrayed as cruel
and cowardly barbarians, and although the Treaty of Guadalupe–Hidalgo
ratified in 1848 guaranteed the Mexicans who stayed in the U.S. full rights
of citizenship, like the treaties with Native Americans neither local govern-
ments nor the federal courts upheld the Mexicans right to vote or respected
the land deeds they held before the Treaty.18 By the time of the Spanish–
American War of 1898 the image of barbarism used against Mexicans
was consistently attributed to a Latin-Catholic heritage and expanded
for use throughout Latin American and the Caribbean, thus subsequently
affecting the immigrant populations coming from these countries as well
as justifying U.S. claims of hegemony in the region.19 The so-called Zoot
Suit riots in Los Angeles in 1943 targeted Mexicans and their ethnically
16 Wu, Yellow, pp. 32–35.
17 Wu, Yellow, p. 36.
18 See Acuña, Occupied America; Shorris, Latinos.
19 Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges,
and Border Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
14 LINDA MARTÍN ALCOFF

specific style of dress. The attempts made to geographically sequester and

also to forcibly and totally assimilate Native American groups were not
experienced by any other group, and had their own ideological justifi-
cations that combined contradictory images of the Great Chain of Being
with the romanticized Noble Savage. Native peoples were represented as
vanquished, disappearing, and thus of no account. The paradigm of an
antiblack racism intertwined with slavery does not help to illuminate these
and other specific experiences of other nonwhite groups, where ideologies
often relied on charges of evil, religious backwardness, horde mentalities,
being a disappearing people, and other projections not used in regard
to African Americans. The hegemony of the black/white paradigm has
stymied the development of an adequate account of the diverse racial
realities in the U.S., and weakened the general theories of racism which
attempt to be truly inclusive. This has had a negative effect on our ability
to develop effective solutions to the various forms racism can take, to make
common cause against ethnic and race based forms of oppression and to
create lasting coalitions, and has recently played a significant role in the
demise of affirmative action. I will support these claims further in what
follows.
Critics of the black/white paradigm have argued that, although all
communities of color have shared the experience of political and economic
disenfranchisement in the U.S., there are significant differences between
the causes and the forms of this disenfranchisement. Bong Hwan Kim, a
Korean American community leader who has worked both as the Director
of the Korean Community Center of East Bay in Oakland, CA, and as
Director of the Korean Youth and Community Center in Los Angeles,
blames the black/white binary for disabling relationships among people
of color and even for creating the conditions leading to the Los Angeles
civil disaster of April 1992, in which 2,300 small Korean owned busi-
nesses were destroyed by mostly Latino/a and African American looters.
Kim cites the xenophobia marshaled by African American leader Danny
Bakewell before the looting occurred, and argues that the Korean Amer-
ican community had been and continues to be systematically rendered
incapable of responding to such rhetoric because they are not recognized
in the media as a player in racial politics.20 Elaine Kim explains:

It is difficult to describe how disempowered and frustrated many Korean Americans felt
during and after the sa-i-ku p’ok-dong (the April 29 “riots”). Korean Americans across

20 See Kim, “Between Black and White: An Interview with Bong Hwan Kim.” Some
give the figure of destroyed businesses as 2,700; see Edward T. Chang, “America’s
First Multiethnic ‘Riots,’ ” in Karin Aguilar-San Juan (ed.), The State of Asian America:
Activism and Resistance in the 1990s (Boston: South End Press, 1993), pp. 101–118.
 LATINO/AS, ASIAN AMERICANS, AND THE BLACK–WHITE BINARY 15

the country shared the anguish and despair of the Los Angeles tongp’o (community),
which everyone seemed to have abandoned – the police and fire departments, black and
white political leaders, the Asian and Pacific American advocates who tried to dissociate
themselves from us because our tragedy disputed their narrow and risk-free focus on white
violence against Asians . . . the Korean Americans at the center of the storm were mostly
voiceless and all but invisible (except when stereotyped as hysterically inarticulate, and
mostly female, ruined shopkeepers . . .).21

Similar to the Mexicans in Texas, the Koreans have been denied the legal
or socially recognized category of being a politicized group at the same
time that they are made subject to group based scapegoating. Moreover, as
this event demonstrates, the black/white paradigm of race is incapable of
theoretically or politically addressing racism among communities of color,
or racism, in other words, which is not all about white people.
A response to this line of reasoning might be that it is white supremacy
which is at the root of the conflictual relations among communities of
color, and responsible for their acceptance of stereotypes manufactured
by a white dominant power structure. Thus, on this reading, what occurred
in Los Angeles can be reductively analyzed as caused by white supremacy.
Although I do find explanatory arguments that focus on political economy
often compelling, it is far too simplistic, as I think Karl Marx himself knew,
to imagine cultural conflict as the mere epiphenomenon of economic forces
with no life or grounding of their own. To blame only white supremacy for
what occurred in Los Angeles would also deny power and agency to any
groups but the dominant, which is increasingly untrue. We must all accept
our rightful share of the blame, whatever that turns out to be in particular
instances, and resist explanations that would a priori reduce that blame to
zero for communities of color.
Supporting the arguments of both Elaine Kim and Bong Hwan Kim,
Juan Perea argues that because of the wide acceptance of the black/white
paradigm, “other racialized groups like Latino/as, Asian Americans, and
Native Americans are often marginalized or ignored altogether.”22 He
points out that the concerns of Asian Americans and Latino/as cannot be
addressed through immigration legislation because all are not immigrants,
which is one of the reasons to reject the claim of some ethnic theorists
that these groups will follow the path of European immigrants in gradual
assimilation and economic success (the other reason to reject this claim is
their racialization).23
21 Kim, “Between Black and White: An Interview with Bong Hwan Kim,” pp. 71–72.
22 Perea, “The Black/White Binary Paradigm of Race,” p. 361.
23 The issue of who counts as an immigrant has some variability. On the most extreme
definition, only those peoples indigenous to North America would not count as immi-
grant, which would cover American Indians and some Latino/as. In more common usage,
16 LINDA MARTÍN ALCOFF

Roberto Suro argues that the black/white binary disadvantages

Latino/as and other people of color who are not African Americans
by forcing them to adopt the strategies of civil rights litigation even
though it was “not particularly well-suited to Latino/as” who are a much
more diverse group.24 For example, any meaningful redress of economic
discrimination affecting Latino/as and Asian Americans will need to
disaggregate these groups, as some “target of opportunity” programs today
in fact do, since the gap between median incomes in Filipino and Japanese
households, or between Puerto Rican and Cuban households, makes aver-
aging these incomes useless as an indicator of economic success. Richard
Delgado argues that “If one’s paradigm identifies only one group as
deserving of protection, everyone else is likely to suffer.” Current civil
rights legislation, in Delgado’s view, has provided legal advantages for
African Americans, unwittingly perhaps, over other people of color. I
do not take Delgado to be implying that the legislation has effectively
benefited the African American population and been applied forcefully
and universally, but that the language of the law, however much it has
yet to be applied, identifies only one group and this is a problem. Just
as the protection of the right of property advantages the propertied, and the
protection of free speech
increases the influence of those who are articulate and can afford microphones, TV air
time, and so on . . . the Equal Protection Clause produces a social good, namely equality,
for those falling under its coverage – blacks and whites. These it genuinely helps – at least
on occasion. But it leaves everyone else unprotected.25

Put in more general terms, these arguments can be summarized as

follows:
1) The black/white paradigm has disempowered various racial and
ethnic groups from being able to define their own identity, to mark
their difference and specificity beyond what could be captured on
this limited map. Instead of naming and describing our own identity
and social circumstance, we have had descriptions foisted on us from
outside.
2) Asian Americans and Latino/as have historically been ignored or
marginalized in the public discourse in the U.S. on race and racism.
This is a problem for two reasons, first, because it is simply unfair
to be excluded from what concerns one, and second, because it
“immigrants” refer to more recent arrivals. Thus Asian and Latino/a families who have
lived in the U.S. for multiple generations are no more “immigrant” than the German and
English families here.
24 Suro, Strangers among Us, p. 87.
25 Delgado, “The Black/White Binary: How Does it Work?” pp. 370–371.
 LATINO/AS, ASIAN AMERICANS, AND THE BLACK–WHITE BINARY 17

has considerably weakened the analysis of race and racism in the

mainstream discussions. To explain the social situation of Asian
Americans or Latino/as simply in terms of their de jure and de facto
treatment as nonwhites is to describe our condition only on the most
shallow terms. We must be included in the discussions so that a more
adequate account can be developed.
3) By eliminating specificities within the large “black” or nonwhite
group, the black/white binary has undercut the possibility of devel-
oping appropriate and effective legal and political solutions for the
variable forms that racial oppression can take. A broad movement for
civil rights does not require that we ignore the specific circumstances
of different racial or ethnic identities, nor does it mandate that only
the similarities can figure into the formulation of protective legisla-
tion. I will discuss an example of this problem, one that concerns the
application of affirmative action in higher education, at the end of this
essay.
4) Another major disadvantage of eliminating specificities within the
large “black” or nonwhite group is that one cannot then either under-
stand or address the real conflicts and differences within this amalgam
of peoples. The black/white paradigm proposes to understand all
conflicts between communities of color through anti-black racism,
when the reality is often more complex.
5) For all these reasons, the black/white paradigm seriously undermines
the possibility of achieving coalitions. Without being a conspiracy
theorist, it is obvious that keeping us in conflict with each other and
not in coalition is in the interests of the current power structure.
I would add to these arguments the following two.
6) The black/white binary and the constant invocation of all race
discourses and conflicts as between blacks and whites has produced
an imaginary of race in this country in which a very large white
majority confronts a relatively small black minority, which has the
effect of reenforcing the sense of inevitability to white domination.
This is not the reality of racial percentages in almost any major urban
center in the country today. Nonwhites outnumber whites in New York,
NY, Miami, FL, Chicago, IL, Atlanta, GA, and Los Angeles, CA, and
come very close in San Francisco, CA, Dallas, TX, and Washington DC.
The original intent of the electoral college was to protect small states
and create a buffer between the hoi polloi and the U.S. Government,
but the current effect of the electoral college given these changed demo-
graphics has the added “advantage” of disenfranchising the occupants of
18 LINDA MARTÍN ALCOFF

cities generally and people of color specifically from influencing national

electoral outcomes. If the popular vote determined elections, the cities
would have the determining numbers of votes, since this is where the
majority of U.S. citizens now live and where the trend of movement is
toward. The numbers and concentrations of people of color in the U.S.
means that we are quickly moving past the politics of recognition, where
people of color clamor for recognition from the all powerful majority,
and reaching the politics of power negotiation, where we can negotiate
from a position of power rather than having to rely exclusively on moral
appeals. The white majority will not maintain its near hegemonic political
control as new configurations of alliances develop.26 Moreover, the white
majority is far from monolithic, splintering most notably along gender and
class lines: the gender gap has widened in electoral politics along with the
gap between union and non-union households (the two largest gaps in the
last presidential election), with droves of white women and white union
members voting the same as the majority of people of color.
Thus, thinking of race in terms only of black and white produces a sense
of inevitability to white domination which is not empirically supportable.
I believe this issue of imagery is very significant. Whites must come to
realize that maintaining white dominance for much longer is simply not
a viability, short of fascism, or significantly expanding the fascist treat-
ments that many communities already experience. By maintaining the
black/white binary we only persist in falsely representing the realities of
race in the U.S.; by opening up the binary to rainbow images and the like
we can more accurately and thus helpfully present the growing and future
conditions within which political action and contestations will occur. This
is in everyone’s interests. For this reason, the increasingly high profile
of Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Latino/as is all to the good.
It may also someday lead away from the imagery of oppositionality, or
mutually exclusive interests, which the very terms black and white have
long conveyed, and move toward an imagery of pluralism (which has some
of its own problems, I realize, but which can more readily recognize the
diverse ways in which alliances and differences can occur).
7) The next argument that I would make in regard to the black/white
binary is that it mistakenly configures race imagistically as exclu-
sively having to do with color, as if color alone determines racial
identity (which has not been the case even for African Americans),
and it makes it seem as if between African Americans and European
26 This could explain the jockeying for position among the Democrats and Republicans
for African American and Latino/a voters, respectively. If those groups unite with opposing
sectors of the white majority, white majority rule is ensured.
 LATINO/AS, ASIAN AMERICANS, AND THE BLACK–WHITE BINARY 19

Americans all the other races must be lined up somewhere on this

continuum of color since “white” and “black” clearly represent the
polar extremes. There is certainly a racist continuum of color operat-
ing in this and in many countries, but this continuum is not the only
axis by which racism operates.

Some have taken the horrific reality of the hierarchy of adoption prefer-
ences in the U.S., that runs basically from white to Asian to Latino/a to
black, as indicative of the existence of this continuum of color. Related to
this idea is the claim made by some that Asian Americans and Latino/as
will eventually “become” white, so let me address this first. The claim
that Asians and Latino/as will become white is first of all premised on
the assumption that we have two choices of racialized identities: white
and black. If a group is not economically and politically located at or
near the bottom of the society, which the black/white paradigm associ-
ates exclusively with “blackness,” then such a group is assumed to have
achieved “whiteness.” What this claim forgets, among other things, is
the significant racial and class variety within each of these large amalga-
mated groups. Moreover, the discrimination faced by Asian Americans and
Latino/as will not likely lose its focus on language and cultural issues;
the more Latino/as there are, the more virulent “English Only” campaigns
become. The claim also ignores the overwhelming evidence showing that
most Latino/as persist in their identities for multiple generations, against
their own economic interests.27 And it seems inapplicable entirely to
Asian Americans, who may be represented as having some so-called white
attributes, but who have never been legally or socially accepted here as
white.28
There are three major differences between the groups who have had
“success” in becoming white, and Latino/as and Asian Americans. The
groups I am referring to here, and about whom there is some very good
historical research emerging, are the Irish and (white Anglo) Jewish Amer-
icans. Whether Jews have wholly made it is debatable; they seem to move
back and forth, as they did in Germany. For the Klu Klux Klan, still influ-
ential in many parts of the U.S., Jews are not white. And even the U.S.
mainstream, one might suggest, seems able to accept an Alan Greenspan

27 Juan Flores, From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Michael Jones Correa, Between Two Nations: The
Political Predicament of Latinos in New York City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998);
Clara E. Rodrı́guez, Puerto Ricans: Born in the U.S.A. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991).
28 Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams; Vijay Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Wu, Yellow.
20 LINDA MARTÍN ALCOFF

as “finance czar” but not a Jewish President of the U.S.29 The U.S. has
already had Irish presidents.
In regard, however, to the differences between Irish and Jews on the one
hand and Asian Americans and Latino/as on the other, the first obvious
significant difference is in their racialized differences based largely on
color and physical appearance. The Irish and Jews can “blend in” to U.S.
society in a way that Asian Americans and most Latino/as cannot. The
admission of the Irish and Jews into the category “white” did not require
challenging the idea that superior characteristics come from European
societies, and that superior characteristics are correlated to light skin color.
If nonwhites or non-light-skinned people were to become white, white-
ness would begin to deconstruct, perhaps mutating to a cultural and ethnic
designation which still is marked by superiority, but it is not obvious that
whiteness is on the threshold of deconstruction. Thus, to admit Asians and
Latino/as into the category would cause necessary changes that were not
necessary for the Irish and Jews.
The second difference is historical. The Irish and Jews represent bad
memories within Europe, memories of colonialism and genocide, and thus
they operate as the symbolic representation of Europe’s moral failings.
The Irish and Jews do not have that symbolic meaning in the U.S, and in
fact may carry the opposite symbolic meaning in representing the idea that
“anyone” can make it and be accepted here, even those who were despised
in Europe. In contrast, African, Mexican and Native Americans, most
notably, among others, represent a symbolic reminder of the hollowness
of claims to white moral superiority. The Irish and Jews are not a psychic
threat to the ideological supremacy of white identity in the same way that
many Latino/as, Asian Americans, and certainly African Americans are.
A third major difference concerns perceived assimilability, although
here the Irish and Jews must separate. The Irish are perceived as entirely
assimilable; Jews only partly so because of religion (which is another
reason Jews tend to be moved back and forth). Latino/as, to the extent
they are European, come from a Spanish Catholic culture considered pre-
modern and less civilized, and to the extent they are also indigenous,
come from a culture perceived as totally different than Anglo-European.
The symbolic opposition between “east” and “west,” or the Orient and
the Occident, is well-known to be a major prop of the Anglo-European
self-image fomenting a plethora of such dichotomies as between “individu-
alism versus collectivism,” “democracy versus despotism,” and future-

29 Vice presidential candidate Joseph Lieberman, the first Jewish candidate for such a
high national office, was criticized from all sides for emphasizing his Jewish identity “too
much.”
 LATINO/AS, ASIAN AMERICANS, AND THE BLACK–WHITE BINARY 21

oriented versus backward oriented societies. The very definition of Asian

culture given in these orientalist constructions is to be non-western and
incapable of assimilation. The possibility of synthesis is not considered.
This issue of assimilability has become more rather than less important in
recent years, with political theorists such as Peter Brimelow and Samuel
Huntington making open claims to continue the dominance of European
cultural traditions, against liberal immigration laws and cultural integra-
tion, and asserting that the very survival of “western civilization” is at
stake.30
Because of these three major differences, I cannot see Asian Americans
and Latino/as “becoming” white; it is still proving difficult enough to be
seen as “American.”
Thus, the claim that Asian Americans and Latino/as will become white
ignores the issue of color and other differences, takes no notice of the
varying symbolic meanings represented by these groups, and forgets the
problem of “assimilability.” It returns us to the problem of misidentifi-
cation discussed earlier, refusing to recognize the complexity by which
people can be vilified. To give another example of this complexity, Asians
and Jews can be grouped together in the ways that their cultures have been
seen as in some respects superior, threatening, and monolithic. In other
words, unlike for African Americans and Latino/as, Asians and Jews are
not seen as having inferior intelligence or primitive cultures, yet they are
seen as essentialized groups with collective goals to take over the world
and/or evil intent toward those outside their groups (the “yellow peril”
and “Jewish world conspiracy”). This kind of ideology requires specific
analysis, because it operates differently vis-à-vis, among other issues,
affirmative action concerns in regard to higher education. The most recent
issue that has arisen since September 11, 2001, involves the representations
of Arab Americans, a group that is very much racialized. Yet again, their
racialization works in specific ways mediated by ideological claims about
their cultures and most notably the religion of Islam.
Racial oppression works on multiple axes, I would argue, with color
being the most dominant and currently most pernicious. But color is not
exhaustive of all the forms racial oppression can take. The most pejora-
tive terms used against Asian Americans often have a racial connotation
but without a color connotation – “Chinks,” “slant-eyes,” and for the
Vietnamese, “gooks.” These terms denigrate a whole people, not a partic-
ular set of customs or a specific history, and thus parallel the essentializing

30 Peter Brimelow, Alien Nation: Common Sense about America’s Immigration Disaster
(New York: Random House, 1995); Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and
the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998).
22 LINDA MARTÍN ALCOFF

move of racist discourse that universalizes negative value across a group

that is demarcated on the basis of visible features. The two most pejorative
terms widely used against Latino/as in this country have been the terms
“spic” – whose genealogy references people who were heard by Anglos as
saying “no spic English” – and “wetback.” The first invokes the denigration
of language, the second denigrates both where people came from and how
they got here: from Mexico across the Rio Grande. Mexican Americans
were also called “greasers” which connoted the condition of their hair, not
their skin color. Thus, these terms demonstrate the possibility of a racial-
ization and racism that works through constructing and then denigrating
other racialized features and characteristics besides color. We might think
of these as two independent axes of racialization that operate through phys-
ical features other than color, and through genealogies of cultural origin.
There is, then, the color axis, the physical characteristics other than color
axis, and the cultural origin axis.
The discrimination against Asian Americans and Latino/as has also
operated very strongly on a fourth axis of “nativism.” Nativism is a
prejudice against immigrants; thus it is distinct, though often related to,
xenophobia or the rejection of foreigners. Rodolfo Acuña explains that
historical nativism is also distinct from anthropological nativism, which
refers to a “revival of indigenous culture,” because historical nativism
refers to the belief of some Anglo-Americans that they are “the true
Americans, excluding even the Indian” because they represent in their
cultural heritage the “idea” of “America.”31 On this view, the problem with
Asian Americans and Latino/as is not just that they are seen as foreign;
they are seen as ineluctably foreign, from inferior cultures (morally and
politically if not intellectually), incapable of and unmotivated toward
assimilation to the superior mainstream white Anglo culture. They want to
keep their languages, demand instruction in public schools in their primary
languages, and they often maintain their own holidays, cuisines, religions,
and living areas (the latter sometimes by choice). Despite the fact that
Mexican Americans have been living within the current U.S. borders for
longer than most Anglo-Americans, they are all too often seen as squat-
ters on U.S. soil, interlopers who “belong” elsewhere. This “xenophobia
directed within” has been especially virulent at specific times in U.S.
history, during and after both world wars for example, and is enjoying a
resurgence now with the war fever and hysteria against Arabs or anyone
wearing a turban, the serious erosion of civil liberties for racially profiled
groups, the political rhetoric of Pat Buchanan, the right wing disc-jockeys
31 Acuña, p. 158. It is also distinguished from “indigenism,” or the view that only those
peoples indigenous to a land have moral rights to its occupation.
 LATINO/AS, ASIAN AMERICANS, AND THE BLACK–WHITE BINARY 23

who make jokes about beating up illegal immigrants, and the “scholarly”
best-selling books like Alien Nation that warn “Americans” that their
loose immigration laws will forever alter the racial make-up of the U.S.
if left unchecked, and that altering our racial identity will have the dire
consequences of undermining the basic cultural and democratic values that
make the U.S. what it is.
Another feature of nativism is its use to justify claims of differential
rights for various minority groups. In my view, there is no question that
African Americans together with American Indians have a moral claim on
this country larger than any group, and that the redress made thus far is
completely inadequate toward repairing the present inequities that persist
as a legacy of past state-organized mass atrocities. Some may believe that
a kind of nativist argument would provide further justification for these
legitimate claims to redress, on the grounds that these groups’ forbears
were here longer and/or their labor and ingenuity contributed a great deal
to the wealth of this country. More recent immigrants, it may be thought,
“deserve” less by way of protected opportunities or government assist-
ance. The issue of nativism is thus important to address in relation to
the differences and potential conflicts among communities of color, since
many Asian Americans and Latino/as are post-1965 immigrants (when the
restrictions on immigration based on geography were lifted). One might
well ask, what is wrong with nativist arguments, and is the critique of
nativism based ultimately on group self-interest?
There are both consequentialist and non-consequentialist arguments
one can make against nativism. The principle consequentialist argument
against using nativism to justify differential rights is that it will produce (or
in reality, merely maintain) a hierarchy of first and second class citizens.
This is both undemocratic and undesirable as the kind of community many
would want to live in. Nativist rhetoric has already justified state orches-
trated murders and other horrors at the U.S.–Mexican border, a border that
the current U.S. President announced he would arm even further (using
the Texas Rangers, who were disarmed in the 1920s after it came to light
that they had lynched hundreds and perhaps thousands of Mexican Amer-
icans without trial).32 Nativist arguments might well tend to encourage
people to turn a blind eye to what happens at the border. And moreover,
such enforced hierarchies of status within a society must surely share
responsibility for creating the problems of crime and social insecurity that
adversely affect everyone.

32 Acuña, Occupied America; Leslie Marmon Silko, “Fences against Freedom,” Hungry
Mind Review 31 (1994), pp. 9, 20, 58–59.
24 LINDA MARTÍN ALCOFF

These provide consequentialist arguments against nativism based on

its subsequent effects on the U.S., but one might also make non-
consequentialist arguments against nativism. The logic of nativism is
based on the idea that those native to this country “deserve” more, not
just because they have been here longer (in which case all land claims
by Native American groups would have to be immediately settled in
their favor), but because they or their relatives contributed the labor and
ingenuity that made the U.S. wealthy. There are several arguments one
could make against this view. One might first want to point out that there
are numerous groups within the U.S. that contributed labor and ingenuity
toward the country’s wealth and that have not received any approximation
of fair compensation. But one could also argue that the wealth of the U.S.
has been the product in no small part of neo-colonial and imperial global
relations that ensured the extraction of natural resources at a price U.S.
companies determined, as well as super-exploitation of labor (i.e., a much
larger extraction of surplus value) that produced the capital brought back
here. The building of the Panama Canal gives just one small but clear
example. The U.S. contributed capital and some of the engineers for the
project, helped to plan a coup to separate the country off from Colombia,
who would have been a much more powerful negotiating adversary, and
manufactured a treaty which no Panamanian signed that guaranteed that
the entire profits from the canal would go to the U.S. “in perpetuity.”
Not only did the treaty guarantee capital flight, it gave the U.S. complete
political autonomy over the canal zone, cutting right through the heart of
Panama and thus splitting it in half. The U.S. was also given the right
to intervene with military force whenever it unilaterally determined that
canal security was at stake, a proviso that had major negative effects on the
political developments in the country and in particular in the development
of social justice movements. The people who actually labored to build the
canal, enticed from the West Indies and Asia as well as local people, were
paid 10 cents a day and died from yellow fever in tens of thousands.33
Nonetheless, anti-treaty rhetoric in the U.S. persist in calling it “our canal.”
Such facts as these contest the true referent of the term “nativist.”
Peoples in foreign lands have been native if that means contributing the
labor and ingenuity that made the U.S. wealthy. The descendents of those
who built the Panama Canal mostly live in Panama today but some have
immigrated to the U.S. And the so-called “illegals” working in the U.S.
today make a substantial economic contribution, doing work no one else

33 See Michael L. Coniff, Black Labor on a White Canal (Pittsburgh: University of

Pittsburgh Press, 1985); Walter LeFeber, The Panama Canal: The Crisis in Historical
Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
 LATINO/AS, ASIAN AMERICANS, AND THE BLACK–WHITE BINARY 25

will do. Nativism thus obscures more than it clarifies various groups’
relationships to the history and prosperity of the U.S. Many Asian Amer-
ican and Latino/a sub-groups have been in the U.S. for multiple centuries
as well, in various forms of indentured servitude (especially Mexicans,
Chinese and Japanese). But the more recent immigrants, from places like
El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam and Cambodia, can also be
directly tied to U.S. policies that made their countries literally unlivable for
them. Surely these immigrants therefore have a moral claim on the wealth
of the U.S. which has no relation to their number of years here.
Thus my last argument has been that the color axis is only one of the
axes that need to be understood as pivotal in racist ideologies, that racism
can and has operated in ways in which color is not central but other phys-
ical features, cultural characteristics and origins, and status as “native” or
“non-native” operate to the same effect. It is important to note that these
other axes are forms of racism that produce other ways to classify and
delimit subsets of people and then justify discrimination against them. All
immigrant groups are not racialized in the sense of universalizing negative
value across a group that is demarcated on the basis of visible features, and
essentializing their cultural characteristics as static. Russian and Eastern
European immigrants, though often living in horribly poor conditions with
little community help of any kind, are not singled out for the same treat-
ment as recent southeast Asian and Central American immigrants, as the
targets of group based violence and scapegoating. European immigrants
are not tagged as cultural inferiors nor is their difference racialized in the
way that Latino/as and Asian Americans experience. Their category as
“foreign” is marked on their body, as Wen Ho Lee was forcibly reminded
when he was put in solitary confinement with chained legs for nine months
as a result of being “racially profiled” and suspected of a loyalty to China
unrelated to his citizenship or his political commitments.
My basic thesis, then, is simply that we need an expanded analysis of
racism and an attentiveness to the specificities of various forms it can take
in regard to different groups, rather than continuing to accept the idea
that it operates in basically one way, with one axis, that is differentially
distributed among various groups. Whether my own analysis of some of
these specificities is right in all respects, it may still be the case that this
basic thesis is correct.
I want to end with an example that links the false homogenization of
people of color with the recent demise of affirmative action programs in
U.S. higher education, and that will show how much is at stake in our
need to recognize the complexity of our differences. Dana Takagi argues
persuasively that the recent disenabling of affirmative action policies “grew
26 LINDA MARTÍN ALCOFF

out of fluid discourse(s) on racial minorities in higher education in which

the main issues were pivotally constructed in, and encapsulated by, the
debate over Asian admissions” and specifically the debate over claims that
Asian Americans were “over represented” in U.S. universities.34 In other
words, the alleged “over-representations” of Asian Americans in colleges
and universities was used to argue that the problem of minority under-
representation in higher education is not caused by race, and therefore an
affirmative action based on race is neither helpful nor justifiable.
What I would argue here is that the black/white binary is operating
in this case to obscure the real problems. Conservatives argued that Asian
Americans are nonwhite so that their case can be used to dismantle affirma-
tive action for all: if they can get in, we all can get in. But this would
only follow if the category “nonwhite” is undifferentiated in terms of how
racism operates. Others wanted to argue that Asian Americans are being
treated here as white, and thus have no interest in an anti-racist coalition.
It is certainly true that it is a white power structure that privileges such
things as test scores. But Asian Americans were still not actually being
treated as whites. Takagi points out that the claims of “over representa-
tion” conveniently ignored the large disparity between Asian American
admission rates and white admission rates (the percentage of admissions
in relation to the pool of applicants), a disparity that cannot be accounted
for by SAT scores or grades. That is, holding scores and grades constant,
white individuals were more likely to be admitted than Asian Americans,
even if in real numbers on some campuses Asian American acceptances
outnumbered whites (To give one example of this, the Asian American
Student Association at Brown University discovered that between 1979
and 1987 there was a 750% increase in Asian applications, even while
there was a steadily declining admission rate – from 44% in 1979 to 14%
in 1987).35 So there has been a covert quota system operating against Asian
American applicants in many university systems, which is covered over by
the high admission rates, and which is no doubt motivated by the same
fears of “yellow peril” that was used to justify discrimination in the 1800s
as well as the treatment of Wen Ho Lee. Asian Americans are not seen as
white despite the fact that they have so-called “white” attributes because
they are seen as unassimilable, retaining loyalty to Asian countries, and
thus a threat to “the nation.” The concern about “over representation” was
oddly applied to Asians when it had not been applied to any other group,
except Jews in the past which was clearly a case of anti-semitism. It is

34 Takagi, The Retreat from Race, p. 7.

35 Takagi, The Retreat from Race, p. 28.
 LATINO/AS, ASIAN AMERICANS, AND THE BLACK–WHITE BINARY 27

certainly not applied to the poor, who are under represented, or to the
children of alumni or to athletes, both of whom are over represented.
Takagi traces the empirical studies, public discourse and policy changes
prompted by this concern about over representation to the argument that
affirmative action should ignore race and address only class, even though
the claim that racism can be addressed in this way can be easily empir-
ically disproved given the disparity of SAT scores within classes across
racial difference. Just to give one example, there is an 80 point difference
between blacks and whites in mean SAT scores, even when both come
from families making $70,000 or more, and similar cases apply to Puerto
Ricans and other groups.
What this case demonstrates is not that all nonwhites should be grouped
together in all cases of attempts to redress social inequities, but precisely
that they should not be lumped together. The problems of discrimination
in higher education in the U.S. faced by Asian Americans has had to do
with overt policies that apply quotas based on the specific forms of racism
directed against them. The problem of discrimination in higher education
faced by African Americans and Latino/as has not worked through quotas
to guard against “over representation” but through the use of SAT scores
and vastly unequal public education. Racism is the culprit in each case,
but the means and ideology vary, and thus the effective redress will have
to vary.
Takagi recounts that some Asian American activists who wanted to
end the unfair quotas on their admission rates called for a meritocracy of
admissions based on SAT scores and grades. But this would only block one
form of racism, leaving others not only intact but ideologically reenforced.
Meritocracy is still an illusion highly disadvantageous to African Amer-
icans and Latino/as. Thus, strategies that seek to eliminate discrimination,
including argumentative strategies used to defend affirmative action, must
either be made specific to certain historically disadvantaged groups, or,
if they are general, they must consider their possibly converse effects on
other groups. Only a rich knowledge of the specific and variable forms of
racism in the U.S. will make such considerations possible.

Syracuse University/SUNY Stony Brook

Department of Philosophy
SUNY Stony Brook
Stony Brook NY 11794
USA
E-mail: [email protected]