The future is ours to build: Asian American abolitionist counterstories for Black liberation

Abstract

ABSTRACT Since Claire Jean Kim’s theory of racial triangulation was first published two decades ago, we have witnessed a new generation of Asian American activist formations emerge. Despite this timelapse, applications of racial triangulation have focused on intergroup conflict and on the specificities of racial positioning without imagination of alternatives. This paper examines the potential of racial resistance to triangulation, an overlooked dimension of Kim’s theory, and charts an emergent area of research that centers Asian American abolitionist counterstories for Black liberation: How have Asian Americans divested from the structures that uphold anti-Blackness – and what does divestment look like in practice? We remain at a crossroads and in need of scholarship that makes legible the political possibilities of cross-racial solidarities and refusals to triangulation. I draw inspiration from the organizing of Freedom Inc., a Black and Southeast Asian grassroots collective working with low-to-no-income communities of color in Madison, Wisconsin. Their transformative work to remove police from schools helps us to conceive of a politics that is not only reactive to existing systems of power but also as fugitive, abundant, and visionary in the sense that they are forging alternate relationalities in the unfinished project of worldmaking post-triangulation.