the politics of definition

To define race, to define arbitrary categories of difference, whether by physicality or anthropology: it seems so easy to say "this is white," "that is black," as if race lay simply in the ability of the body to produce melanin. Even the Oxford English Dictionary holds this as fact: "each of the major divisions of humankind, having distinct physical characteristics." But this popular, superficial understanding ignores the historical struggles of race, and especially the contradictory and convenient definitions of race that have both informed and been informed by American politics; the ways in which white and non-white people have been imagined and categorized by white Americans, and how these imaginations have become manifest realities.

Following Stephen Jay Gould, Claire Jean Kim imagines race as a geometric plane, a field in which relationships between different points can move in two directions: "civic ostracism" along one axis, "relative valorization" along the other; i.e. a scale of inclusion and exclusion, and a hierarchy of superiority; challenging more traditional notions of race as a singular grayscale, which posits white and black at opposing poles, with Asians, Latinos, native Americans, and so on, at various points within the middle. With this model, we can understand race not as a "bipolar" construction, but rather a complex field of nuances in which, for example, Asian Americans can be characterized (in the popular imagination) as somewhere relatively in the middle between whites and blacks in terms of superiority, but far lower than both in terms of assimilability.

But how have Asians been racialized in these terms, as "model" and "foreign"? The long history of Asian exclusion and immigration quotas in America, as detailed by Mae Ngai, both was influenced by and further perpetuated concepts of Asian foreignness: "...the 'colored races,'" she writes, "were imagined as having no country of origin. They lay outside the concept of nationality and, therefore, citizenship. They were not even bona fide immigrants." (27) If we understand non-white immigrants in this manner (though the definition of "white" as we understand it now conflicts with legal definitions of "white" in the 1920s, during the era of quotas, complicated by the conquest of Mexican lands and, in turn, the status of Mexican immigrants as legally "white" in order to account for their new and unwitting presence in America), then they become "specters" (Ngai's word), not just non-citizens, but non-people, subjects who paradoxically belong to two nations and to no nation at all.

Indeed, non-white immigrants, as well as, admittedly quite broadly, all non-black minorities (and especially Asians and Latinos), can be defined by a system of paradoxes, the disparities between belonging and not belonging, inferiority and superiority, non-black and non-white. They inhabit a liminal space, a middle space, a boundary: they cannot be placed into the narrow, tidy categories of white and black.

That is not to say, of course, that non-black minorities have no relation to the bipolar American construction of racial politics, though they may lie outside that strict binary; rather, the ways in which they have become racialized depends on that established division. I am drawn especially to Kim's discussion of the "model minority," and its historic predecessors, which cast Asian Americans in a positive light vis-a-vis African Americans and Latino Americans, especially knowing the stereotype persists to this day. I become frustrated when people tell me about "how smart Asians are," because they do not understand the political history of the "model minority," and the intricate racist undertones it suggests. Is that what we as a nation have decided all Asians have in common, their (whether imagined or real) intelligence, perseverance, and cooperativeness? Furthermore, is that what we as a nation have decided all blacks lack?

Another definition of race, offered by the OED: "a group or set of people or things with a common feature or features," as if all members of a single "race" embody a monolithic, easily articulated identity.