The possessive investment in honorary whiteness?: how Asian and Asian Americans reify a transnational racial order through language

Abstract

ABSTRACT Considering the call for a global approach to analysing race, this study develops a theoretical framework of how racial ideology becomes structured at a global, transnational level. Drawing from approximately 500 hours of ethnographic participant observation at a predominantly white university located in the Southern United States, this study illustrates how Koreans and Korean Americans reproduce a transnational racial hierarchy at a predominantly white university. My findings show how Korean and Korean Americans normalize the imperial U.S.-Korea relations through a racially affective economy of language use in social interactions. The imperial standpoint observed in Koreans and Korean Americans calls into question the role that honorary whiteness plays in the United States’ triracial order. I further discuss the implication of Asian and Asian American's possessive investment in honorary whiteness, which is central to the maintenance of a transnational triracial order with Korea as an extension of the U.S. empire.