Fancy Asians Ruthlessly Exploit Other Asians - So You KNOW They Hate Black Folks....,

fearlessj1111  |  Sociologist Tamara K. Nopper argued against depicting these Black-Asian conflicts as “mutual misunderstanding” in a 2015 article. “The use of ‘mutual’ misunderstanding suggests shared status or power, with each group contributing to each other’s vulnerability and suffering,” Nopper wrote. “The employment of the mutual misunderstanding framework suggests Asian store owners desire identification with and from Black customers across class and race lines. Yet many studies of Asian immigrant storeowners show they hold racist views of Black people and associate them with negative qualities purportedy absent among Asians.”

Asian Americans must admit and rectify the ways we uphold white supremacy, namely our anti-Blackness. Much like the U.S., Asian countries suffer from colorism and caste systems within their own societies. “Anti-Blackness is foundational to the creation of America,” said Diane Wong, an assistant professor and faculty fellow at NYU Gallatin, whose research has focused on the gentrification of Chinatowns and Afro-Asian solidarities. “It’s no secret then that anti-Blackness is reflected in Asian immigrant families, businesses, institutions and interpersonal relationships on a frequent basis.”

As a society, we have “progressed” from lynchings to viral videos of violence against Black people, from police killings and brutality to baseless accusations of criminality. In retail spaces, Black people continue to experience racism and antagonization. When Asians internalize and perpetuate anti-Black racism and violence, we are reifying our complicity and driving a deeper wedge between the minority groups.

It’s important to note that two groups are not equally positioned in larger structures of power, especially when one racial group is profiting off the other, which is oftentimes the case in these violent clashes between Black people and Asians.

“Race is certainly a factor, but it is not the only factor,” Kang, an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, said in an interview. Kang’s research has focused on Asian-owned nail salons and their racially diverse customers. “Many nail salon workers are under pressure to work quickly and keep costs down, which does not create the best environment for building customer relations.

The potential for tensions is heightened by the intimacy of the service, which involves direct physical contact, and the fact that many of the workers and owners are immigrants who do not speak the language or understand the culture of their customers.” In these scenarios, the tension is stoked by economic stress: the salon workers who often work for low wages under poor conditions, and the mostly working class clientele who cannot afford to waste money on subpar service.

Kang stressed the importance of putting these largely publicized conflicts in context. “I have observed hundreds of interactions in salons in this neighborhood that were very cordial and where workers and customers were very respectful and appreciative of each other,” she said.

Our perspectives are largely shaped by the way Black-Asian conflict is covered in media. “There is a lot of misinformation when it comes to reporting on salient issues that affect both Black and Asian communities,” Wong said. However, when videos of Asian business owners and workers inflicting violence on Black customers go viral, when Asian American activists protest in support for Peter Liang, an NYPD officer who shot an unarmed Black man in a stairwell, the message received by the public is that Asians do not care about Black lives.

These acts of violence are only a microcosm of the conflict between the minority groups, moments when the tension bubbles up to the surface and pops. There have been many ways statistics about Asian American achievement and the “model minority” myth have been used as a wedge between Asians and other minority groups, most notably through Ed Blum’s anti-affirmative action lawsuit against Harvard.

Many Asian Americans have thrown their support behind ending affirmative action and in support of standardized testing in school admission, placing their own concerns ahead of the communities marginalized by these systems, namely Black, Brown, and indigenous peoples.