Part Two: “Ostracism/Initiation,” examines twentieth-century Japanese immigrants and their descendants in relation to structural anti-Blackness and its instantiation in a nationwide system of racial segregation and anti-Black violence. Entering the U.S. in the wake of Chinese exclusion, the Japanese inherited the mantle of the Asiatic/Mongolian, much to their dismay. Despite the pointed burdens associated this label, they discovered that the constitutive not-Blackness of the Asiatic/Mongolian also enabled their qualified and uneven advancement and mobility in an anti-Black order. This remained true even during the turbulent, traumatic events of the Second World War. The wartime internment of Japanese Americans constituted not only the extreme limit of their ostracism, but also, as others have noted, their symbolic initiation into the nation. As the Cold War unfolded, accounts of Japanese Americans as an ascendant “model minority” were just one symptom of how they came to be weaponized against the Black freedom struggle and in defense of the U.S. state and racial capitalism. Like the Chinese before them, Japanese Americans deployed their not-Blackness to their advantage in their efforts to achieve residential mobility, educational success, occupational advancement, and social assimilation in the postwar era.

Part Three: “Solidarity/Disavowal,” looks at how Asian Americans developed a distinct political subjectivity during the Asian American movement, against the backdrop of emergent Black Power and the nation’s imminent turn toward mass incarceration. Asian American activists and thinkers denounced white supremacy and expressed solidarity with Black people under the Third World rubric, but they did not theorize structural anti-Blackness or recognize their own not-Blackness. Reproducing the fallacy of minority equivalence, their half-finished critique has hampered Asian Americans’ ability to understand and respond to numerous Asian–Black conflicts that have unfolded in the post-movement era—including the Los Angeles rebellion of 1992, the controversy around NYPD Officer Peter Liang’s killing of Akai Gurley in New York City in 2014, and protracted tensions over race-conscious admissions in secondary and higher education, culminating in the anti-affirmative action lawsuit Students For Fair Admissions v. Harvard. With the dramatic rise of a right-wing Chinese immigrant politics that seeks to dismantle affirmative action once and for all, the ethical–political crisis that has always faced Asian Americans—namely, what they should do about being participant–beneficiaries in an anti-Black order—has become more urgent than ever.

This introductory chapter presages the central arguments of the book and lays out a brief chapter outline.

Part One: “Exclusion/Belonging,” traces the construction of the nineteenth-century Chinese immigrant laborer as the original Asiatic/Mongolian, a figure who was not-white but above all not-Black, a wage worker who was degraded but nonetheless categorically superior to the slave. If we consider the Chinese immigrant laborer in relation to the white worker, Chinese foreignness was a site of dispossession, persecution, and exclusion. But if we consider the Chinese immigrant laborer in relation to the slave, we discover that Chinese foreignness was also, paradoxically, a site of plenitude, standing, and belonging. The exclusion movement expelled the Chinese immigrant from the nation, but not from the Family of Man. The U.S. state developed its pattern of weaponizing the Asiatic against the Black struggle during this period, as explained here in a new interpretation of Yick Wo v. Hopkins and Plessy v. Ferguson. For their part, Chinese immigrants grasped the value of their not-Blackness and developed strategies to take advantage of it, from displacing freed people on plantations during Reconstruction to refusing to allow their children to attend “colored” schools in the Mississippi Delta in the interwar years.