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DOI: 10.1177/0896920509347142

2010 36: 87Crit Sociol Jared Sexton

Proprieties of Coalition: Blacks, Asians, and the Politics of Policing

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Proprieties of Coalition: Blacks, Asians,and the Politics of Policing

Jared SextonUniversity of California Irvine, California, USA

Abstract Black populations in the post-civil rights era USA face forms of racial discipline generated not only by organizations and institutions representing the white mainstream and contributing to thepreservation or restoration of white supremacy, but also increasingly by organizations and institu-tions representing non-black people of color and contributing to the deepening and rationalizationof the new black/non-black divide. This article takes a critical look at the framing of urban multira-cial coalition politics by professional intellectuals during the aftermath of the 1992 Los Angelesuprising, specifically academics in the field of Asian American Studies that attempted to explainthe nature and sources of conflict between African Americans and Asian Americans.

Keywords African Americans, Asian Americans, Los Angeles uprising, race and class, race relations

Introduction

The present argument was first adumbrated as a conference presentation on the tenthanniversary of the Los Angeles uprising and, although it has been revised for this specialissue on race and the variations of discipline, it bears the mark of that earlier occasion.1This article suggests that blacks in the post-civil rights era USA face forms of racial disciplinegenerated not only by organizations and institutions representing the white mainstreamand contributing to the preservation or restoration of white supremacy, but also increas-ingly by organizations and institutions representing non-black people of color and con-tributing to the deepening and rationalization of the new black/non-black divide (Lee2004; Yancey 2003). The latter group includes those seeking liberal or progressive politicalcoalition across racial lines. Our discussion focuses upon a particularly problematic and

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88 Critical Sociology 36(1)

largely misrecognized instance of this racial discipline: the framing of urban multiraciacoalition politics in the public discourse of professional intellectuals during the immediataftermath of the largest civil disturbance in US history. Specifically, it examines a set oacademics working broadly in the interdisciplinary field of Asian American Studies thahave attempted to explain the nature and sources of conflict between African Americanand Asian Americans as it was rendered by events on and around 29 April 1992. Carriedout on the pages of scholarly publications and the popular press, this discussion is ofinterest because the description of the problem the terms of debate and the guiding questions rhetorically delimit prescriptions for redress and shape the perceptions ofactors involved in mobilization toward that end (Benford and Snow 2000).2

More to the point, the contest of meaning inherent in the discourse of the Black-Asianconflict is also an element of the conflict itself and not only the frame of its politicaelaboration.3 Therefore, the interpretation of political relations between blacks and Asians,regarding their respective political interests and relative structural positions, bears on thstrategy of collective political action. The argument proceeds by way of an in-depthengagement with several representative texts rather than a broad literature review andaspires to neither a comprehensive treatment of this considerable body of work nor adefinitive statement on a subject in need of further investigation. Nonetheless, thecommentary offered below possesses a limited and perhaps symptomatic value insofar ait elucidates otherwise obscure discrepancies in political framing. At the least, it raisequestions for future research on the topics at hand.

In the cluster of published academic works on urban multiracial conflict and coalitionthat appeared in the wake of Americas first multiethnic riots (Chang 1994), the signacontribution to the debate was political philosopher Robert Gooding-Williams 1993edited volume, Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising .4 To date, little has beensaid about the analytic differences that characterize this interdisciplinary collection ofessays and interviews from expert commentators on racial politics in and beyond theUSA. In particular, the clash between those featured scholars who operate within a radicacritique of capitalism (Mike Davis, Robert Gooding-Williams, Melvin Oliver et al., Corne West, Rhonda Williams) and those who, at best, waver about the ethics of capital accu-mulation (Sumi Cho, Henry Louis Gates, Elaine Kim, Michael Omi and Howard Winant).These unexplored frictions reveal not only a competition of intellectual orientation, but alsoan occlusion of political antagonism and conflict of interest. The variance in class analysalso entails a divergence in racial politics and this variance has been reproduced repeatedin subsequent studies, as discussed at some length by scholars in the field of Asian American Studies since the collection was first released (Abelmann and Lie 1997; Han2005; C.J. Kim 2000; K.C. Kim 1999; Matsuda 1996; Min 1996; Palumbo-Liu 1999;Prashad 2001; Takagi 1992; Wu 2001; Yamamoto 1999; Yoon 1997). The question forstudents of the uprising and the politics of conflict and coalition it raises is whether theywill continue to rely on the sort of commentary which compromised the initial scholarlyresponse and continues to shape the discourse to date or come to find the more criticalliterature persuasive and change the terms of debate and pose different guiding questions.5

On this score, consider arguments issued at the height of an earlier generation of urbanuprising, when the issue of multiracial coalition sat at the heart of the historic transition



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Sexton: Proprieties of Coalition 89

between the Civil Rights Movement and the emergence of Black Power. In their landmark study, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, KwameTure and Charles Hamilton (in 1967)wrote about the profound limitations of the coalition doctrine, a strongly held view inthis society that the best indeed, the only way for black people to win their politicaland economic rights is by forming coalitions with sympathetic organizations and forces(Ture and Hamilton 1992: 58). While eager to debunk the caricature of Black Power as a separatist political tendency opposed on principle to multiracial alliance, the authorsattempt to clarify the pitfalls of any coalition politics that operated upon an inadequateunderstanding of the relations of power that condition them. They note the inevitability of coalition, but not without insisting that certain questions be addressed and certain mis-conceptions be rectified before the effort can be considered politically intelligent.

One of the most incisive challenges posed by Ture and Hamiltons historic interventionis determining whether potential allies of black political initiatives have as their centralgoal the necessarily total revamping of the society (Ture and Hamilton 1992: 60). Inconsidering the legacy of Black Power for present purposes, the question we face is thefollowing: is the political desire of non-blacks for coalition with blacks undermined tothe extent that the former groups accept the American system and want only if at all to make peripheral, marginal reforms in it (1992: 60), a social formation for which theexclusion of the category of racial blackness is a sine qua non? In this light, the analysisof this ultimately conservative allegiance and the proprieties of coalition it demands arematters of importance for a critical intellectual and political practice that does not con-done the pieties of the new black/non-black division: congratulating the will to US class-power as unmediated resistance (Spivak 1999: xii) and promoting the orthodoxy that a hostile posture toward resident blacks must be struck at the Americanizing door beforeit will open (Morrison 1993: 57).6

Beyond and Between / Black and White

In the post-civil rights era USA, the demand for paradigm shift with respect to racial theory is a defining characteristic of political culture.7 We are told in a variety of tones that racematters are no longer, if ever they were, simply black and white. At best, the focus of a black-white dualistic analysis is deemed inadequate to apprehending the complexity of racial formation in the wake of post-1965 immigration and the rise in rates of interracialdating and marriage since the landmark Supreme Court ruling in the case of Loving v.Virginia (1967). At worst, the Procrustean tendency is deemed politically stunting insofaras it precludes a discussion of the colors in the middle, now inexorable parts of theBlack/white spectrum (Cho 1993: 205). There is already a considerable literature in thesocial sciences and humanities which details those vexed positions that are neither black nor white (Sollors 1997), encompassing not only the articulation of emergent multiracialor mixed race identity claims (Daniel 2002; J.M. Spencer 1997; R. Spencer 1999), butalso critique and political mobilization among Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders,Chicano/as, Latino/as, and American Indians (Aguilar-San Juan 1994; Gracia and DeGreiff 2000; Jaimes 1991).8



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However, the notion of an endemic black-white model of racial thought is somethingof a social fiction one might say a misreading that depends upon a reduction of thesophistication of the paradigm in question. Once that reduction is performed, the fictioncan be deployed for a range of political and intellectual purposes (Kim 2006). In addressinthe call to displace the black-white paradigm, we may recognize that its purported institutionalization indicates more about the enduring force of anti-blackness (Gordon 1995,1998) than the insistence of black scholars, activists or communities more generally.9 When broaching the explanatory difficulty (Omi and Winant 1993: 111) of present-day racial politics, then, one wonders exactly who and what is addressed by the demand togo beyond black and white. One finds a litany of complicating factors and neglectedsubjects, but it is accompanied by a failure to account cogently for the implications of thisnewfound complexity. The recently appointed Dean of the Wayne State University Law School, Frank Wu, has written: beyond black and white is an oppositional slogan it names itself ironically against the prevailing tradition It is easy enough to argue thasociety needs a new paradigm, but it is much harder to explain how such an approachwould work in actual practice. (Wu 2006: xi) It is harder still to explain why such anapproach should be adopted. In fact, the implementation of the new paradigm of racialtheory seems unfeasible because it does not and perhaps cannot develop a coherentethical justification as an attempt to analyze and contest racism. Taken together, theseambiguities beg a key question: what economy of enunciation, what rhetorical distributionof sanctioned speaking positions and claims to legitimacy are produced by the injunctionto end biracial theorizing (Omi and Winant 1994: 154)?

In pursuing this question, consider the following provocation by another noted legalscholar, Mari Matsuda (2002), offered at a 1997 symposium on critical race theory at the Yale Law School:

When we say we need to move beyond Black and white, this is what a whole lot of peoplesay or feel or think: Thank goodness we can get off that paradigm, because those Black people made me feel so uncomfortable. I know all about Blacks, but I really dont know anything about Asians, and while were deconstructing that Black-white paradigm, wealso need to reconsider the category of race altogether, since race, as you know, is a constructed category, and thank god I dont have to take those angry black peopleseriously anymore (Matsuda 2002: 395).

It is important to note that this contention, like those of Ture and Hamilton and Wuabove, is not issued against progressive political coalition, but rather is drawn from a sym-pathetic meditation on the need for more adequate models of racial analysis and strategieof multiracial alliance-building in and beyond the US context. What Matsuda polemicallyidentifies are dangers attendant to the unexamined desire for new analyses and the anxiousdrive for alliance, namely, the tendency to gloss over discrepant histories, minimizeinequalities born of divergent structural positions, and disavow the historical centralityand uniqueness of anti-blackness for the operations of global white supremacy (Mills 1998



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Matsuda urges the refusal of what historian David Hollinger (2003) has coined the one-haterule or the presumption of the monolithic character of white racism. By calling to questionthe motive force of a nominally critical intervention on the black-white paradigm,Matsuda traces a fault line in the field formation of Asian American Studies that marksan opening for the present inquiry. It seems that the question of anti-black racism troublescontemporary efforts at mediation among the non-white between black and non-black communities of color and interpolates Asian American panethnicity (Espiritu 1992)in ways that exceed even the immanent critique of that conceptual touchstone and principleof organization (Lowe 1996; Ono 1995).

If one of the benefits of a reconstructed racial theory addressing the increasing complexity of racial politics and racial identity today (Omi and Winant 1994: 152) is its capacity tograsp antagonisms and alliances among racially defined minority groups (1994: 154), thatpolitical-intellectual enterprise is not without hazard.10 As we will see below, this fraughtdynamic is especially (though by no means exclusively) evident in the academic literatureof black-Asian conflict in the urban USA. The public commentary dates back to at leastthe 1980s, but it reached a new level of production in the 1990s following the highly pub-licized black-led boycott of Korean grocers in Flatbush, New York in 1990 (Kim 2000)and, more sensationally, the Los Angeles uprising of 1992 (Okihiro 1994, 2001, 2006; Yamamoto 1999). In the second edition of their widely noted Racial Formation in the United States , sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant state, for instance: The les-sons of the Los Angeles riot are instructive as a starting point to criticize bipolar concep-tions of race (Omi and Winant 1994: 152, emphasis added). Yet, rather than serving as a critical starting point, the 1992 multiracial conflagration has, for the most part, sowed a good deal of confusion regarding the aptness of inherited frameworks of racial theory forthe production of knowledge and the ongoing challenges of political organizing andactivism on the Left. On both counts, the flashpoint between African Americans and Asian Americans in general and the Black-Korean conflict in particular have been acute.11In this sense, the following critical engagement is not simply a response to the observa-tions of a select few scholars or even a rejoinder to academic trends. Rather, it is an invi-tation to radical rethinking that should be considered germane to those interested inforging a more ethical relation to black strivings in a twilight civilization (West 1996)and, more pointedly, to those that still feel the need to take those angry black people seri-ously (Matsuda 2002: 395). It is perhaps unnecessary to add that this reckoning wouldbe a prerequisite to thinking more properly about social justice on a global scale.

The Innocence of (Asian/American) Capital12

In Ethnic Peace in the American City , Edward Chang and Jeannette Diaz-Veizades (1999)write that no consensus has emerged regarding the causes and meaning of the violencethat erupted on April 29, 1992 (Chang and Diaz-Veizades 1999: 4). However, in thefollowing chapter they gloss the context of the encounter in uncontested terms:



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The seeds of tension between Korean Americans and African Americans were sown andnourished during the 1970s and 1980s. While the African American community wasstagnating economically, the Korean American community was thriving. And while the African American community watched capital flow out of the central city, the Korean American community put to work its internally generated capital Korean immigrantentrepreneurs found business opportunities in black neighborhoods as early as the late1960s and early 1970s [They] assumed that they could make a healthy profit fromonly a small investment of capital, and they did not intend to stay in African Americanneighborhoods for a long time. (1999: 31).

We will consider these passages in more detail momentarily, but what stands outimmediately is the fact that this reference to the urban political economy elicits no criticadiscussion and is instead framed as an objective account of the material conditions ofconflict. Even if we were to accept the terms of description, there is no explanation ofwhy or by what means the African American community was stagnating economicallyand the Korean American community was thriving. Piecemeal speculation is offeredbut it is put forth in lieu of rigorous examination. In fact, this marked inability or refusalto pursue a class analysis in the interpretation of racialized antagonism a failure disperseacross the literature suggests a blind spot that produces interference and distortionwithin the conceptual framework. However, before that discussion can be broached, we musask what this ineffectual political economic commentary enables as a framing device. It donot help us to understand the situation any better, but it does illuminate the workings of the argument.13

After noting uncritically various dimensions of the material context, Chang and Diaz-Veizades (1999) state that with the proliferation of Korean-owned businesses in southcentral Los Angeles, several of the stores have become the target of resentment, hostilitbigotry, boycotts, and sometimes violence by AfricanAmericans (Chang and Diaz-Veizade1999: 33). The targeting of Korean-owned businesses is thus naturalized as a tragic anundeserved side-effect of otherwise euphemized processes of economic expansion foKorean American entrepreneurs: the penetration of internally generated capital and therealization of value. The authors thereby cover over the question of analysis with biological metaphors of proliferation and natural cycles. Yet, whereas black peoples resentmenhostility, bigotry, boycotts, and violence are said to be the inevitable outgrowth of a natural process the seeds were sown the reader is not invited to make peace with theproverbial harvest. In order to avoid a causal explanation that might suggest apology forioting and looting, the root causes of this societal discontent and conflict are displacedonto aggravating subsidiary factors framed as cultural difference.14

Both legal scholar Sumi Cho (1993) and cultural critic Elaine Kim (1993), to cite twoadditional examples, repeat this theoretical maneuver in their respective work on theuprising. Cho (1993) affirms that the ostensible root causes of the rioting were the Kinverdict and the racist police violence it exemplifies, combined with the failure of the Ueconomy toprovide jobsand a decent standardof livingfor all of its people (Cho1993: 197).In another section, she notes that, because the ability [of Korean Americans] to open store



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[in black neighborhoods] largely depends upon a class variable (1993: 200),15 many of the tensions [between these groups] may be class-, rather than racially, based, actually reflecting differences between the store-owning Korean immigrants and the African- American customers (1993: 206). Further, these class-based differences narrow thecontact zone between blacks and Korean Americans such that the interaction betweenthe two racial groups is structured strictly by market relationships: one is the consumer,the other is the owner (1993: 198).

However, these claims regarding the import of class are attenuated in two ways. First,although it is noted that these particular Korean-owned businesses accumulate value(however great or small is beside the point) at the expense of these particular black communities as an effect of the essentially exploitative market relations between store-owners and consumers under capitalism, it is argued that, like the King verdict, the failureof the US economy ... [one of] the ostensible root causes of the rioting, [was] not the fault of Korean shop owners (1993: 197, emphasis added). This is true in a limited sense,given that political economy is not reducible to simple judgments of culpability. Yet, thepoint not to be missed is that the moral extraction of small merchants despite theirmobilizing in excess of half a billion dollars in the riot zone alone from analysis of thelocal reproduction of capitalist relations is a precondition for the image of Korean Americans as victims of the uprising per se.16

Second, although an essentially exploitative class relation is established, the mentionof this class-based relation is intended to mitigate the resentment and hostility supposedly born of cultural differences and racial animosities. In addition to the above cited passage,Cho also writes: The ability to open stores largely depends upon a class variable, as opposed to a racial one. (1993: 200, emphasis added). Establishing a rivalry between raceand class variables and situating them as opposing terms undermines the attempt to theorizetheir mutual implication. However, even if we accepted the counter-posing of race andclass, nagging questions would remain. For instance, how are class-based tensions andconflicts any less violent, politically untenable or ethically liable than race-based tensionsand conflicts from the point of view of the exploited and oppressed? Are we to think thatclass oppression is somehow easier to accept than racial oppression and that it is, for thatreason, somehow less volatile or less explosive? Is not class difference, pace Marx, itself a euphemism for a permanent state of aggression, the fundamental systemic violence of capitalism (iek 1996: 566)?

As indicated in the opening section, subordinating the significance of race while pacifying the notion of class rubs against the grain of a number of other scholars in the field of Asian American Studies. Here we see that it also contradicts Chos (1993) earlier insistence thatthe Black/white framing of race issues must give way to a fuller, more differentiatedunderstanding of a multiracial, multiethnic society divided along the lines of race, class,gender, and other axes in order to explicate effectively the Los Angeles explosion (Cho1993: 196). Indeed, what seems to give way is the explanatory power of racial antagonismaltogether, rather than the Black/white framing. This is more than an unattendedconceptual slip and I am arguing that a link exists between the demand to move beyondthe uncritical acceptance of the dichotomous Black/white character of US race relations



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(1993: 206) and the inability to think race in a sustained way once such an uncriticalacceptance is refused. I want to suggest that this shifting of the terms of debate aboutthe black-Korean conflict (and US black-Asian relations more generally) from race toclass (as opposed to race) is symptomatic of an affective difficulty shaping the engage-ment of Asian American intellectuals with the intersection of racial hierarchy and thehierarchy of class society. It registers the exertion required for genuinely taking on thinvolvement of Asian Americans, however varied and complex that involvementundoubtedly is, with the structures of anti-blackness and the advance of financialization(Foster 2007) on a global scale not only as victims of organized, state-sanctioned violence, but also as agents or, at the very least, as accomplices.

Kims (1993) reflections are similarly telling. She writes that Korean shop owners inSouth Central and Koreatown were affluent compared with the impoverished residentswhom they often exploited as laborers or looked down upon as fools with an aversion tohard work (Kim 1993: 218). Beyond recognizing a structure of material inequality andits accompanying condescension, she represents Korean shop owners as subscribed to bourgeois immigrant ideology insofar as they regarded themselves as having arrived inmeritocratic land of opportunity where a persons chances for success are limited onlby individual lack of ability or diligence (1993: 219). But rather than pursue this line oinvestigation in order to understand the racialized class conflict it suggests, the authorevades its implications in a footnoted admission: I am not grappling directly with sociaclass issues here, because, although I am cognizant of their crucial importance, I am simplnot qualified to address them at the present time (1993: 233, fn. 14). This disclaimer isoffered despite the earlier claim that class factors have been more important than racefactors in shaping Korean American immigrants attitudes toward African American andLatino populations (1993: 233, fn. 14). By this account, the article fails to discuss whais most important about the issue it sets out to address.17

Kim (1993) does finally offer some comment on class, however. In the same footnoteshe writes: Because they are merchants, the class interests of Korean American shop ownin Los Angeles differ clearly from the interests of poor African Americans and Latincustomers (1993: 233, fn. 14). Much like Cho (1993), Kim (1993) concedes that thereare identifiable conflicts of interest grounded in a structural relation of exploitation,whether in the form of wages for labor or prices for commodities. Still, the otherwisewelcome political struggle against inequality that this identifiable class conflict mighwarrant is obviated in this context. According to Kim (1993), working with simpledyads is impossible, since Korean American shop owners are also of color and mostlimmigrants from a country colonized by the United States (1993: 233, fn. 14). However,it is unclear what about this qualification renders the simple dyad of class conflicimpossible, even if it is conditioned by the fact that Korean American shop owners arpostcolonial people of color.18

In claiming that Korean American shop owners in this context are both victims andvictimizers (Omi and Winant 1994: 153), scholars misunderstand the central insight of the middleman minority thesis to which they allude, namely, that middleman minority merchants are both victims of the more powerful dominant host population (in this case,



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whites of the political elite and economic ruling class) and victimizers of their less powerful laborers and clientele (in this case, the black poor and working class) (Bonacich 1973:58990). In this way, they tend to conflate the structures of white supremacy and USimperialism (which can and do oppress Koreans and Korean Americans) with the violenceor property destruction of the urban uprising of the un-propertied black poor (whichcannot and do not oppress Koreans and Korean Americans). Rather than adding textureto a fuller, more differentiated understanding of the Los Angeles explosion, the post-colonial immigrant caveat appears instead as a non sequitur.19 The incessant displace-ment of race onto class and the subsequent abdication of class analysis together representan aversion to considerations of the material conditions of hierarchy and exploitation intheoretical work. As noted, there are references to capital, relations of production, themarket, relative affluence, economic stagnation, etc. But none of this is elaboratedas the circumstances structuring antagonism between blacks and Asians in the throes of globalization. More to the point, it is not understood as a local and immediate relationof institutionalized violence.20

This waffling about the material stakes of class conflict is duplicated at the level of ideology. In Kims (1993) account, Korean Americans are at once associated with andexcused from ideologies of political conservatism, class hatred, and anti-black racism.21On the one hand, many Koreans exhibit intensely negative attitudes toward the poorand indeed desperately fear being associated with them. And, further, in the USA whereblackness and brownness have historically been almost tantamount to a condemnationto poverty, prejudice against the poor brought from Korea is combined with home-grownUS racism, and the results have been explosive (Kim 1993: 2334, fn. 14). On the otherhand, she explains away these class and racial hatreds as the ignorance and naivety of postcolonial subjects paradoxically overexposed to American popular culture and history.22

[Korean shop owners] hadnt heard that there is no equal justice in the U.S. They had tolearn about American racial hierarchies. They did not realize that, as immigrants of color,they would never attain political voice or visibility but would instead be used to upholdthe inequality and the racial hierarchy they had no part in creating Thanks toEurocentric American cultural practices, they knew little or nothing good about African Americans or Latinos Most Korean immigrants did not even know that they wereamong the many direct beneficiaries of the African American-led civil rights movementwhich helped pave the way for the 1965 immigration reforms that made theirimmigration possible They were unaware of the shameful history of oppression of nonwhite immigrants and other people of color in the U.S. (1993: 21819)

And so forth. Whereas the conventional framing of black-Korean conflict (whether by the coverage of white media outlets or the pronouncements of black nationalist commu-nity activists) supposedly centers race in simplistic ways to the detriment of a fuller, moredifferentiated understanding of a multiracial, multiethnic society divided along the linesof race, class, gender, and other axes (Cho 1993: 196), this new understanding gener-ated beyond the black/white paradigm, as it were, actually displaces race with class, rather



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than enlarging it. When class is raised as an excluded variable of analysis, its salience undercut by naturalizing capitalist exploitation or confounding, rather than specifying,the location of Korean Americans, merchant or otherwise, in the hierarchical class structurof US society and the circuits of global capital (1993: 234, fn. 17). The mystification ofclass is made possible, in circular fashion, by returning to the question of race as a matterof the racial oppression of Korean (and other Asian) Americans under white supremacyand US imperialism or the sublimation of race as cultural difference. In the process, raceand class are disconnected and used against one another. What remains constant is theinability or refusal to identify race and/or class power on the side of Korean Americans

International Racial Hierarchy

When the issue of race is admitted within the critical frame, its explosive results are containedby discussion of racism between blacks and Korean Americans figured as an equal exchange:quid pro quo. Cho (1993) indicates above that the conflict between Korean Americansand African Americans contains definite cultural differences and racial animosities (Ch1993: 206); however, the nature of the differences and the vectors of the animositiesremain vague. Cultural difference is invoked to explain the reputed misunderstanding between blacks and Korean Americans regarding retail etiquette,23 even if Cho, like hercounterparts, notes the limitations of this account. Although Koreans wanted very badlyto believe in this reductionism, one making an honest assessment must conclude that fartoo many Korean shop owners had accepted widespread stereotypes about African Americans as lazy, complaining criminals (Cho 1993: 199). Yet, this acceptance idescribed more accurately as a capitulation delivered by force: The dominant U.S. raciahierarchy and its concomitant stereotypes are transferred worldwide to every country thathe USA has occupied militarily (1993: 199), a global imperial effect later referred to athe international racial hierarchy (Cho 1993: 209).

Cho (1993: 199) raises the issue of Korean American anti-black racism only to tempersuch observations with references to a titular black anti-Asian racism. And just as Korea Americans are, in a sense, absolved of racism as an effect of their ideological submissibefore an imperial US mass media, so too are blacks, thanks to Eurocentric Americancultural practices, inculcated for similar reasons with distorted ideas about Korean Americans (Kim 1993: 218). In this vein, Chang and Diaz-Veizades (1999) also arguethat the mainstream media did indeed have a major role in creating the Korean-African American conflict constructing racial stereotypes, images, and perceptions to pitKorean merchants against African American residents (Chang and Diaz-Veizades 199967). Thus, blacks and Korean Americans find themselves in thrall to the respectiveimage of the other constructed by a white racist cultural apparatus and, pitted against oneanother, they remaincollectively divided andconquered.24 Yet, the quidpro quo equivalencedrawn between these various forms of racism and the anti-racist prescriptions they solicit where two subordinate groups, imagined on a horizontal plane, simply mistake one anotherfor their true racial and class enemy quickly discloses a pretense. Racial hierarchy



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which historically positions Asians over blacks, much as class exploitation positions own-ers over customers and employers over workers, is strangely inverted in this instance.

The respective racisms between blacks and Korean Americans are rendered politically equivalent once they are reduced to stereotype and disconnected from racial hierarchy. Ina further conceptual maneuver, even this dubious equivalence is undone by the reassertionof a new and different hierarchy representing a reversal of power relations that, incon-gruously, privileges the black poor and working class over and against Korean Americanentrepreneurs. Though it is widely known that the historic disenfranchisement of theblack population proceeds apace in the post-civil rights era 25 and that, in any case, politicalpower in the USA grossly favors the rich because it stems largely from economic power(Palast 2002), poor and working class blacks are nonetheless represented here as relatively empowered vis-a-vis Korean Americans in the political realm.26 Black political power issaid to be both effectively constituted and determinately wielded over the latters collectivefate and fortune. No clear criteria is offered for measuring relative political power savepassing references to black elected officials, regardless of their actual influence27 and thesupposed political power of blacks is generally conflated with the visibility of spokespersonsin the mass media (again, regardless of actual influence or lines of accountability). How any of this properly constitutes political power and how the activities of either electedofficials or media spokespeople benefit black people in general or the black poor andworking class in particular is never demonstrated; it is simply asserted in lieu of argument.

In contrast, blacks are understood to be economically less powerful relative to Korean Americans, both in the aggregate (the political economy of blacks or Korean Americansas groups) and in the more immediate context (the political economy of merchant-customer relations). However, this asymmetry is hushed in its bearing on the discourseand the discrepancy of economic power is minimized or explained away as relative success.Class struggle is de-politicized and the scholars under review instead arrogate for Korean American merchants a dubious right to capitalist enterprise that is ethically rationalized inthe rather misstated language of survival. To follow this account of events is to acceptthat the paramount political problem highlighted by the 1992 uprising is not the pastand present of accumulation as evisceration (Williams 1993), but rather the fact that theUS power elite, by way of their police forces, did not secure a more favorable businessenvironment for entrepreneurial capital. On this score, I am offering a condensed summary of and lodging a profound disagreement with Jeff Changs (1993) early concept of differential disempowerment, a notion that continues to inform the discourse to date.28The differential is said to manifest in various ways, including the exclusion of Korean Americans from official forums of public debate about racial conflict in the city in contrastto a supposed black media access.29 But the misconception of black political power ismade most apparent in the ominous imagery of angry mobs bent upon destruction andviolence descending on Koreatown (Cho 1993: 201). The ratio of black politicalpower does not reside in the ability, or even in the attempt, to shape the policy environ-ment or to affect or exploit political economic conditions to the detriment of Korean Americans. In fact, the power differential cannot be established as an institutional orstructural reality. Instead, power is confused for brute force as it takes the form of black



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destruction and violence, the very same rioting that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famouslydescribed on numerous occasions as the language of the unheard, the desperate recoursof the politically powerless .

The rhetoric of foreshadowed onslaught links together black peoples resentment,hostility, bigotry, boycotts, and violence as a chain of equivalence, a teleology leadininexorably from resentment to burning and looting. Thus, Chang and Diaz-Veizades(1999) can read the seeds of conflict in the mood of the black poor and Cho (1993) canascribe to black people in their view from below a politics of resentment wherein thscene was set for disaster and required simply a spark to ignite a highly flammable situatio(Cho 1993: 201). What King once called blacks legitimate discontent is recoded somewhere between jealousy and envy, reduced to sour grapes or refined into a petroleumproduct hazardous material in any case. As an effect, this discontent is interpreted asthe sign of an impending disaster for Korean Americans and not as the sign of a concrete disaster for blacks (Spillers 2003), an already oppressive state of affairs for which no businowners insurance policy or municipal redevelopment plan is readily available. Howevethe standard picture of unevenness between blacks and Korean Americans can be imaginedand its attendant emotional drama can become compelling, if and only if the preceding structures of power the evolving market relationship between Korean American ownerand black consumers, linked as it is to transnational capital flows, Korean national development projects, the leveraging functions of the racial state and its immigration policymachinations, the dynamics of international racial hierarchy remain bracketed out ormystified.30 So long as we approach the black-Korean conflict through the matrix of the April 1992 Los Angeles uprising, taking property destruction and the reification of privatholdings as our points of departure the opening scene we can only ever understandthis political relation as a question of reparations for the latter and palliative or prison forthe former.31

A more critical perspective would have to acknowledge the suffering endured byKorean American merchants in the wake of the Los Angeles uprising as a relatively privilegedexperience. The collective experience of loss, both materially and psychically, involves tmourning of conservative ideological commitments and the divestment of ill-gottenvalue (ill-gotten insofar as the realization of value under capitalism is premised onexploitation). It is, moreover, the resentment of frustrated bourgeois aspirations by therelative loss of status and working proximity to not membership in the most despisedclasses of the most despised racial group in the USA. It represents, finally, the interruptioof a collective dream for those who disavow that Eurocentric economic migration (andeventually even political exile) persists in the hope of justice under capitalism (Spivak 1999: 395, emphasis added); those who, working against the tide of US capitalism atthe mercy of banks, wholesalers, and retail outfits who [work] in concert with eachother, nonetheless desire and often enough attain the quick fix of the AmericanDream to send children to the finest colleges, to own a house, to drive a car (Prashad2001: 101, emphasis added).

The argument I have developed thus far can accommodate the diversity of the Korean American population, including the mixed fortunes of small merchants, and it does not



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rely on denial of either the genocidal history of US imperialism in Asia or the ongoing history of anti-Asian racism within the context of domestic white supremacy, including all the forms of continuing exploitation and discrimination.32 It does not, moreover,refute the participation of blacks (or Latinos or even Asian Americans) in the politics of exclusion and regulation that structure contemporary immigration in the USA. What thisargument does, rather, is take the ensemble of scholars under consideration at its collectiveword and give due attention to specificity . What it reveals is that the indisputable complexity of the Korean American position, even in this circumscribed context, in no way mitigatesthe class and racial violence that subtends it nor the conservative ideological commit-ments that articulate it. In a phrase, the structural violence of racial capitalism constitutesthe political unconscious of the present discourse on US black-Asian relations.33 To situateKorean American merchants as victims of the black poor, innocent and ignorant of a struggle that simply precedes them, that does not involve them, that is not of their making,that is beyond their comprehension, and, hence, not their fault is, quite plainly, tocircumvent ethics and to excise a population from time and space and the power relationsthey unavoidably inhabit. It is to suggest that, because they are neither white nor ruling class, they bear no responsibility toward their current context. It is to suggest, morelocally, that they bear no responsibility to resist and undermine an interaction structuredstrictly by market relations and to place first priority on the needs and well-being of the disenfranchised (Kim 1997: 206) rather than the needs and well-being of the racially privileged and upwardly mobile. Instead, the thrust of the discourse is an insistence onthe uneven, if not exclusive, responsibility borne by blacks presumed to enjoy collectively all of the privileges and powers of native-born white citizens of the USA toward Korean Americans and, by extension, toward other Asian Americans and Latinos vis-a-vis the history and politics of immigration.

A Second-Hand Emotion

The explicit impetus of the literature surveyed in this article is the promotion of multiracialcoalition politics in the urban USA. Much like Ture and Hamilton, I am far from foreclosing the question of coalition, but my concern nevertheless has been to suspend this questionwhile working to understand how the desire for coalition is rhetorically structured.In concluding on this point, I return to a passage in the penultimate section of Kims(1993) earliest essay. There she recounts the trials and tribulations that followed upon thepublication of a shorter version of the same essay in Newsweek magazine. The bulk of mail received in response was standard racist fare, replete with accusations of treason andcalls for immediate repatriation. In spite of this, Kim (1993) finds encouragement inthe many supportive and sympathetic letters arriving from both white allies and otherpeople of color.

After all is said and done, however, it is an unnamed black male prisoner (a non-violentoffender)34 who writes the most touching letter. He is describing a process of politicalenlightenment in which he moves awayfroma presumably narrowblack nationalism toward



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some broader conception of multiracial solidarity, at which point he is able to write thefollowing: Our struggle(s) are truly one in the same, your peoples struggle [is] my peoplestruggle (Kim 1993: 228). This gesture of newfound political solidarity from the undersidof civil society is not offered in service of any stated self-interest on the part of the imprioned black man and it does not appeal to a convergence of interests linked to specific andidentifiable goals. It is not communicated across two independent bases of power, butacross the distance of extreme inequality. It is predicated on a denunciation of propertydestruction and shaped by a curious appeal to shared distress. But Kims identification inot driven by her sympathy for a prisoner (much less the pain and suffering of his morethan two million imprisoned counterparts and all their relations), but the pleasure takenin receiving the sympathy of a prisoner for the (largely insured and recoverable) loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in business property for a community of small merchantsWhat happened in LA during the riot really hurt me because [there] was no way thatblacks [were] suppose[d] to do the things to your people that they did (Kim 1993:228). For Kim (1993) the rationalization proves cathartic: This is the ground I need toclaim now for Korean American resistance and recovery, so that we can become Americawithout dying of han. (1993) The censure that grounds the captive black mans statementof common cause by depicting resident blacks as already discredited outlaws appeaagain to be the compulsory knock at the Americanizing door before it will open(Morrison 1993: 57).

Like the African American man who wrote from prison, the African American manwho had been brutally beaten by white police might have felt the desire to love everybodybut he had to amend or rectify that wish. He had to speak last about loving peopleof color. The impulse to love everybody was there, but the conditions were not rightFor now, the most practical and progressive agenda may be people of color trying towork it out (Kim 1993: 228).

Here, the ground of multiracial solidarity is driven by the image of a black mans desirto love interracially, a properly trained impulse that settles for the most practical andprogressive agenda. Thus, in working out the relations between blacks and Asians, politicor otherwise, we find an interracial love borne by the interdiction of black rage, whoseeventual and eventful violence is, for all of our theorizing, ultimately without eitherexplanation or justification. To claim there was no way blacks were supposed to do ththings that they did is only to say there was no good reason. The profound damage couldhave been exacted only for the wrong reason, or, perhaps, for no reason whatsoever.

In the final analysis, our intellectual efforts founder in case after disastrous case of thoangry black people (Matsuda 2002: 395) giving vent to frustration and resentment,perennially on the verge of ignition. If we are coalition-minded, which is to say lookingfor love (in all the wrong places), we are enjoined to purge the elements of rage that makthe specter of black violence such a hulking material force: wreaking devastation, destruction, erasure and, at the extreme, extermination.35 In the imaginary of this interracialpolitical romance, black rage converts magically into black affection.36 Considering theprofessed love of two black men from their respective locations behind bars, beneaththe baton, staring down the barrel of a gun we must ask whether there is not a relation



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between the terror of state-sponsored racist violence and black peoples seeming willingnessto assure non-blacks (not least their comrades!) of their security by exorcizing the specterof their own violence and distinguishing themselves from the haunting image of their owninconsolable rage. We must ask whether blacks are not compelled to declare I love youby the proprieties of coalition that permeate the hope to come clean and continue theinteraction [between blacks and Asians], freed from theburdeningspecter of disaster (Chang 1998). Assuming we can move beyond a solidarity of fear driven by the opportunisticprotection of ones property in a riot (Prashad 2001: 125), we might ask, further: is thequest for black love so consuming that one will call on the police to secure it? Fortunately,there are some among those thinking seriouslyabout this conflicted/collaborative interactionseeking a different common ground against property and propriety.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Robert Allen, Jeff Chang, Kenyon Farrow, Sora Han, Tamara Nopper, Dylan Rodrguez, Setsu Shigematsu, Oliver Wang, Frank Wilderson III, and thestudents of the Race Riots undergraduate course in the Program in African AmericanStudies at the University of California, Irvine for their feedback at various stages of thedevelopment of this essay.

Notes

1 A shorter version of this essay was first presented as a conference paper in 2002 on the tenth anniversary of the Los Angeles uprising at Blacks and Asians: Encounters through Time and Space, BostonUniversity, under the title, The Specter of Violence in US Black-Asian Relations. It has since under-gone several revisions.

2 The academic literature on framing processes in the development or transformation of social movementsis critically reviewed by Benford and Snow (2000). It has since entered the mainstream politicalvocabulary, albeit in less precise forms, largely through the popularization of the work of GeorgeLakoff (Bai 2005).

3 I am following Spivaks (1999) reading of Foucault in my use of the term discourse: something thatis among the conditions as well as the effect of a general system of the formation and transformationof statements (Spivak 1999: 3, fn. 5).

4 Other notable examples of the literature on multiracial conflict and coalition around that timeinclude: Baldassare (1994), Hazen (1992), Los Angeles Times Staff (1992), Madhubuti (1993), Okihiro(1994), Omi and Winant (1994), Yu (1994), and volume 19, number 2 of the UCLA-based Amerasia Journal (1993).

5 The former cohort includes Changand Diaz-Veizades (1999), Kim (1997), Oh(2002), and Zia (2000).6 I want to register a partial criticism here of Kims (2000) treatment of the differentiation of blacks,

whites, and Asians in the field of racial positions in the USA. Her concept of racial triangulationrightly situates Asians above blacks and below whites along the vertical axis of relative valuation, butmistakes the respective inside/outside positioning of blacks and Asians along the horizontal axis of civic ostracism. While noting the historic racialization of civic belonging, her implicit claim that



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blacks somehow enjoy civic belonging commensurate with whites does not escape recourse to legaformalism, i.e. that the formal extension of citizenship to blacks supersedes their substantiveostracism from the political community (Wacquant 2002).

7 Racial dichotomizing focusing analysis and discussion of race solely on black-white relationshipsis endemic in the USA. As much as the politicians or mainstream media, academic analyses reproducthis distorted model of race as a largely black-white dichotomy Too often, today, as in the past,when scholars and journalists talk about race relations, they mean relations between African Americanand whites (Omi and Winant 1994: 153).

8 The post-civil rights proliferation of mixed race identity politics and the emergence of non-black peoplof color in theory, research, and political organization should not be conflated in their respectivehistorical significance. These various racial projects share a passion or preoccupation to challenge thso-called black-white binary, but they often do so in contradictory ways. For extended discussion of thepolitics of multiracialism, see DaCosta (2007), Dalmage (2004), Sexton (2008), and Williams (2006).

9 The casting of racial politics in predominantly black/white terms is largely an effect of the postwarrace relations industry as it developed around the emergence of the modern Civil Rights Movementand Black Power. The most well-known document in that vein remains the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (NACCD 1968), a.k.a. the Kerner Commission, in which wascoined the phrase, two societies, one black, one white separate and unequal. This report providesthe title for Hacker (1992), whose work serves as a frequent example of the paradigm in question.However, the black civil rights struggle dating back, at least, to 1787 has consistently understood itsein relation to the condition of oppressed peoples around the world (Birnbaum and Taylor 2000).

10 The new paradigm creates the dangers of false affinities and superficial comparisons. The prescriptivand normative consequences of this new paradigm are ambiguous. (Wu 2006: xiii)

11 Prashad (2001) writes: In our own time, and in the USA, there is the assumption that race riots occubecause of Asian (mainly Korean) grocers in black (and Latino) neighbourhoods. (Prashad 2001: 102,emphasis added).

12 This section heading is borrowed from the title of a talk delivered by Beller (2001), regarding thediscursive production of innocent victims in the aftermath of the events of 11 September 2001.

13 The failure to critically examine political economy in discussions of the Los Angeles uprising and oblack-Korean conflict generally is discussed by Abelmann and Lie (1997), Min (1996) and Yoon (1997)

14 It may be that the roots ofany societaldiscontent and conflict are the perennial issuesof resourcescarcityand allocation and, ultimately, access to power and capital. At the grassroots, neighbor-to-neighborlevel, economic and political competition is heightened by differences in cultural orientation andpractices.These range from the mostobviousdifferences in language, dress, food, and music todifferencesin household living patterns and political orientation. (Chang and Diaz-Veizades 1999: 5)

15 Of course, access to capital also depends largely upon a racial variable, both within the USA and thglobal economy. For a treatment of race and class variables in the establishment of small businesseamong Asian immigrants to the USA see, for instance, Chin et al. (1996) and Nopper (2008).

16 Despite an otherwise trenchant critique, Prashad (2001) makes a similar comment: The Koreans arepart of the equation, but not even close to being the agents of bondage (Prashad 2001: 112). It is my sense that the attempt to locate Asian Americans in the equation of racial capitalism is bungled becausit is too deeply bound up in the worried desire to mitigate the real or imagined violence of blacks.

17 Kims next major attempt to think through black-Asian relations some four years later still broaches noreal discussion of class issues and consigns to irrelevance Marx as a source of class analysis par excelle(E. Kim 1997: 211). There is also a displacement here between the notion of Asian Americans occupyinan untenable position and an indefinite one such that the indefensibility of their position as gatekeeperin the bifurcated two-class social formation is buttressed by the inability to locate it.



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18 Regarding new immigrants, Spivak writes: relatively speaking, our self-representation as marginal inthe USA might involve a disavowed dominant status with respect to our countries of national origin(Spivak 1999: 396). At the very least, it involves the disavowal of shared interest in capital that unites

the illegal alien and the aspiring academic (1999: 396).19 Cho (1993) makes a comparable point when she writes, Korean Americans do not identify with

European Americans and see themselves as very distinct. (Cho 1993: 206) Not identifying as white,however, in no way requires solidarity or common cause with blacks.

20 In a section entitled, The Economic Causes of Conflict (Chang and Diaz-Veizades 1999: 5052),the causes referenced show up not to be economic at all. Instead they speak of the source of [black] resentment of Korean American business success, namely, a lack of ethnic cohesiveness[based on blood and land] as the main cause of the lack of African American-owned businessesin America (though black people otherwise seem ultra-cohesive in their ability to boycott orloot); the extreme sensitivity of black people toward Korean merchants lack of respect; how the mass medias depiction of African Americans as uneducated, poor, or criminal influencesKoreans perceptions; and Korean immigrants lack of sympathy and respect for poor blacks (asa result, it seems, of their simply being unaware of the history of oppression and exploitation of minority groups by white America).

21 Again Prashad (2001) reiterates: on the one hand he claims that, when the first significant numbersof Korean immigrants arrived in LA and began to concentrate their efforts in small, family-rungrocery-liquor stores they were unaware of the political powder keg they were about to ignite(Prashad 2001: 115). Yet, later in the same essay he writes: The Koreans may have understood whatwas going on, but could not find a way to control the situation, except, as continues to happen, toleave the area (2001: 118). The very fact that merchants, despite limited economic opportunities,enjoy a relative degree of mobility in relation to the captive market of ghetto residents that serve astheir customer base is a point lost on Prashad (2001), at least in this moment.

22 Korean Americans were used to deflect attention from the racism they inherited and the economicinjustice and poverty that had been already well woven into the fabric of American life. (Kim 1993:221) But as Matsuda (1996) argues, much like Kim (1997) in other moments, there is a forfeitureof agency involved in this singular claim to manipulation by the powers that be.

23 J. Lee (2002) demonstrates that the idea of widespread friction within the retail encounter is over-stated, finding instead that, as a rule, Korean American merchants effectively construct an atmos-phere of civility with respect to their black clientele and so locating the source of black-Koreanconflict at this nexus seems less plausible. However, she does note that the negative symbolic value of non-black businesses in black neighborhoods under conditions of extreme inequality do help toexplain how interpersonal disputes can contribute to a more generalized group conflict. H.C. Lee(1999), in turn, cautions against a too easy procession from the scale of interpersonal disputes to thescale of group conflicts, suggesting that the vector of escalation is misleading.

24 Abelmann and Lie (1997) give a more cogent account of the media construction of the Los Angelesuprising and the framing of black-Korean conflict more generally without attributing the samecredulity to either blacks or Korean Americans.

25 For an excellent treatment of this process, see American Blackout (2006) directed by Ian Inaba [runtime 92 min]. See also Piven, Minnite, and Groarke (2008).

26 On this point, we can note, following Cho, that Korean Americans in and around Los Angeles oftencontributed handsomely to powerful politicians ... and local officials in attempts to garner politicalinfluence (Cho 1993: 202). What, for instance, might a comparative analysis of black and Korean American campaign contributions reveal about the lobbying power of the respective constituenciesin the metropolitan area or even state-level policymaking?



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27 For a discussion of the structural ineffectuality of (black) elected officials at various levels of goverment, see Martinot (2004) and Sexton (2007).

28 In Race, Class, Conflict and Empowerment, Chang (1993) writes: The struggle for group power,

the power to shape and influence given situations to maximal outcomes, was waged on two fronts:on the media front for social-political power and the market front for economic-political power(Chang 1993: 89). In his estimation, blacks enjoy greater access to and influence over major mediaoutlets and hence are more able to shape public opinion while Korean Americans enjoy greater accesto capital and influence over the market considerations of major industries.

29 One wonders to what extent this access is actually controlled by the invited black media commentatorindividual or collective, especially given the medias demonstrated commitment to overexposing black rage and restricting black media commentary to crisis-response (Cohen 1999).

30 The implantation of Korean immigrants, particularly those involved in small-scale private enterprisein depressed areas of the urban USA, in the foreign policy designs of the US and Korean states(including negotiations of immigration policy) has yet to enter political discourse in any significantway. Such explorations would help to clarify not only the itinerary of Korean merchants internallygenerated capital the sources of which allow for capital investment despite whatever discriminatorypractices are engaged by local banks in the USA but also the legal status afforded such immigrantin relation to others hailing from less capital rich sending countries. See Tamara K. Noppers articlein this volume or, for another example, see Yoon (1997).

31 This liberal perspective was reiterated without modification by city officials and business leaders ithe aftermath of the uprising and was translated into subsequent redevelopment plans in the Mid-City and Wilshire/Koreatown areas administered by the Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles.

32 Regarding the relation of US imperialism in Korea to Korean Americans: The postcolonial informanhas rather little to say about the oppressed minorities in the decolonized nation as such, except, atbest, as especially well-prepared investigator. Yet the aura of identification with those distant objectsof oppression clings to these informants as, again at best, they identify with the other racial and ethnicminorities in metropolitan space. (Spivak 1999: 360)

33 A strong connection, indeed a complicity, between the bourgeoisie of the Third World and migrantsin the First cannot be ignored. However important it is to acknowledge the affective sub-space inwhich migrants, especially the underclass, must endure racism, if we are talking globality, it is one othe painful imperatives of the impossible within the ethical situation that we have to admit that theinterest of the migrant, however remote, is in dominant global capital. (Spivak 1999: 382) Racialcapitalism is borrowed from Robinson (1999) and political unconscious from Jameson (1981).

34 Although our correspondent was serving time on the charge of a violent crime (armed robbery), Kimis sure to point out that it was an armed robbery during which no physical injuries occurred (Kim1993: 227). This detail is noteworthy given that the essay is addressed to the discourse of black violence and criminality.

35 Kim (1993) reaffirms the import of Korean nationalism as a means of recovery and resistance aftethe uprising, despite her criticism of its relation to anti-black racism in earlier sections (Kim 1993: 229).None of the authors criticized above takes up the question of police repression that circumscribed theuprising and intensified in its wake, including the nearly 17,000 arrests and detentions, thousands of deportations, countless injuries and dozens of deaths (many from police violence), and the increasedmilitarization of urban space (Davis 1998: 391).

36 SeeMarriotts (2003)incisivereading of thecollaboration betweendirectorStanleyKramerandactorSidneyPoitier, in which he traces the onscreen conversion of black rage to what he calls black therapeutics.



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