Asian Americans and multiracial politics: the contribution and limits of racial triangulation theory

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article places Claire Jean Kim’s racial triangulation theory in the context of Kim’s other writings from the late 1990s and early 2000s. I analyze Kim’s theory not as an analytical framework of relational racialization, but as a guide to thinking through the basis of multiracial solidarity. I contend that the power of racial triangulation theory lay in the way it demonstrated how long-term alignments of interest among racial groups could emerge from differentiated racial positions. However, I also argue that Kim’s theory was limited in assuming that racialization was the most important determinant of group interest. Through a re-examination of the 1994 lawsuit filed by Chinese American parents against the San Francisco Unified School District, Ho v. SFUSD, I suggest that comparative race scholars ought to account for class and other power relations within racial and ethnic groups, relations that produce divergent sets of interests unaccounted for by the framework of racial politics understood in terms of racialization and rearticulation.