Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism

Abstract

Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism contrasts two approaches to antiracist theory and practice. The first emphasizes racial identity to the exclusion of political economy. This approach’s prevalence, in the academy and beyond, now rises to the level of established doctrine. The second approach views racial identity as the function of a particular political economy—what is called racial capitalism—and therefore analytically subordinates racial identity to political economy. The book develops arguments in favor of the second approach. It does so by employing case studies of two Asian American communities: a Chinese migrant settlement in the Mississippi Delta (1868–1969) and a religious base community in the Bayview/Hunters Point section of San Francisco (1969–present). While focused on groups and persons (i.e., the Delta Chinese and Redeemer Community Church) the book more broadly examines racial capitalism’s processes and commitments (i.e., the Delta Chinese business model and Redeemer’s “deep economy”) at the sites of their structural and systemic unfolding. Constructively, the book proposes reframing antiracism in terms of a theologically salient account of political economy. In pursuing a research agenda that pushes beyond the narrow confines of racial identity, the book reaches back to trusted modes of analysis that have been obscured by the prevailing antiracist orthodoxy. Approaching race through political economy will not get at everything that racism is, and does, but it gets at what can be managed, and in the last resort lived. Accordingly, the book invites readers into a different life with race and racism, reimagining what they are and are doing.