ABSTRACT
In the last 50 years, Asian Americans have largely been positioned as the “model minority,” a stereotype that presumes their docile, hardworking, and quiet character as the origins of their success and ascendance to “white adjacency” in the US racial hierarchy, in direct opposition to Black Americans. However, as the Covid-19 pandemic spread around the world, the contingency of Asian American white proximity in the United States was called into question by dangerous political rhetoric scapegoating the “Chinese” (and Asian Americans as a proxy) for the virus and subsequent loss of “freedoms.” This chapter explores the importance of critical and global literacies as tools to respond to racialized rhetoric, focusing on the contexts of Asian Americans’ shifting racialized positions in 2020–21 during the global Covid-19 pandemic, the fight for Black Lives, and the rise in anti-Asian violence. The chapter argues that it is critical for Asian diasporic peoples across Western countries to challenge ideologies of racialized othering and scapegoating, in light of global and local tensions and crises. This can be done when Asian diasporic peoples author their own individual and collective identities, as people whose heritage may be important in informing their perspectives, but not in narrowly defining their national, racial, or sociopolitical identities and ideologies, and through forming coalitional solidarities with other marginalized racial groups.
