by J.A.O.
On the 11th day of Black History Month, Harvard Professor Laura Huang tweeted: “I want to see how passionately people (incl other POC) will stand up for Asians. Those of you who were so vocal w BLM, where are you on the 1900% increase in Asian-directed hate crimes? The violence that has taken many lives (yet we rarely see those stories covered in the media).”
Anti-blackness, predictably, got in the way of something that had the potential to be a commentary on the politics of visibility under racial capitalism.
After receiving feedback from colleagues, organizers, and others impacted by how she chose to raise awareness of the drastic increase in violence against Asian American communities, Professor Huang issued an apology. She doubled down and tweeted: “You really can’t win when ppl don’t want to show grace. Not even after the 10+yrs of work and research I’ve done on bias, after all the fighting I’ve done against racism and sexism and disparities.. there’s so little benefit of the doubt.” The Professor then announced that the tweets would remain up and that she would be stepping away from Twitter for the time being.
No movement should envy the experience of visibility that the Black Freedom Movement garners. The visibility of Black Liberation movements has not improved the material conditions in which Black people live. Its visibility is not something Black people are leveraging over nonBlack people of color because Black Liberation’s visibility is not consensual nor is it the bestowment of political or economic power. The visibility of our movements makes Black people uniquely vulnerable to violence.
Throughout the history of Black Resistance in the United States we observe the visibility of the Black Freedom Movement being responded to with retaliation by the State.
One historical example is “Bloody Sunday”, coined for the amount of blood spilled in Selma, Alabama by state troopers who attacked the civil rights marchers who attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
Today, since the COVID-19 pandemic began, Black managers of mutual aid projects, Black political and popular educators, and other Black radicals engaged in this struggle have reported state surveillance and other state violence due to their activities.
There is also, of course, the long pattern of retaliation to Black visibility from non-state, white supremacist formations. Historically, this retaliation has been klansmen in sheets riding horseback, but on January 6th it was a group of white supremacists stormed The Capitol. Government officials decided torespond by expanding our police state and its counterterrorism programs which are designed to harm Black people and other people of color, especially those who are also Muslim and/or immigrated from Muslim-majority nations.
When I think about how visible Black Liberation was during the summer of 2020, I am forced to think about how foolish I was to believe that we were on the precipice of freedom. To be clear, I do not regret anything I participated in that summer, but I wish I had not been so full of hope.
Teachings of Abolitionist Feminisms and Black Queer and Trans Feminisms made their way into every conversation I had, even those with people in my more professional-based networks. For anyone who had not seen or directly experienced the conditions we were living under before, a political uprising and the COVID-19 pandemic became a recipe for radicalization. Sure, it was isolating to be in the company of people who were only now becoming critical of policing, but I believed that once the callousness of the State were right in front of them, there was no going back. I believed we were imagining together and now,I have no idea how we are at the mercy of a Biden-Harris Administration. I have no idea how they have gone back.
Far enough removed from the uprisings to engage in genuine self-criticism and reflection, I realize much of this time was consumed by raising white consciousness and how, if at all, prolonged civil unrest could impact the 2020 election.
Black organizers and Black Liberation, despite being the topics of conversation, did not dictate the terms of that conversation nor set the agenda for it. We built our own spaces for dialogue and aid. (Many of these spaces have survived despite it all, thankfully.) Hypervisibility did not however translate to a meaningful, favorable shift in power.
Instead, Black liberals were trotted out like show horses to soothe anxieties about social and political fractures. Black liberal politicians, such as President Barack Obama, countered the radical, abolitionist demands of Black organizers with messages of unity and patriotism. Black pundits, such as Van Jones, gave a voice to white liberal anxieties about the world burning around them, reassuring CNN viewers that “Defund the Police” did not mean no police.
But there’s rarely this type of analysis from nonblack people of color. We are often met with some variation of “Black people get more attention than us. Why won’t they share? Why don’t they want us ALL to win?” These pleas misunderstand the role of visibility, which is not something in the Black Freedom toolkit. I do not know a single organizer, myself included, who wants to become more visible. In actuality, one of the most widely circulated pieces of advice during the uprisings of the last few months has been not to photograph the faces or identifiable attributes of organizers and protesters so that we are less visible.
The desire to be faceless protects us from policing which supports us in meeting the needs of our communities without the risks we assume by doing so, whether that be eviction, losing our job(s), or becoming a political prisoner.
Nonblack people of color must challenge themselves to understand visibility – both what it means and who it serves. Even nonblack people of color who can see Black hypervisibility, as Professor Huang does, still fetishize it and believe it is something Black people are wielding like a knife.
Instead of responding like Professor Huang, it’s necessary that nonblack people of color begin to interrogate the regularity in which videos of us being violated, killed and arrested are circulated. I have yet to see nonblack people of color or white people depicted in the same way.
To ask these questions is to learn that violence against nonblack people of color, specifically against East Asian people, is hidden in service of anti Blackness. Their invisibility and our hypervisibility is about antiblackness and not a reflection of the validity or invalidity of struggle.
Invisibility and hypervisibility are tools of social control that manage racial hierarchy. The hypervisibility of Black people speaks to our purported inability to successfully assimilate and to participate in a post-racial society because we continue to fixate on race and refuse to rise above our race. By contrast, the invisibility of Asian people, primarily East Asian people, speaks to their purported ability to assimilate, excelling academically and embracing an entrepreneurial spirit. Any lull in Black hypervisibility would raise eyebrows. Where has the race problem gone? When light is shined on Asian-directed violence, people are also confused. Is the race problem worsening? Has Black Lives Matter rubbed off on other groups?
I try not to take these things personally. That doesn’t make it any less frustrating for me as a Black person though.
How can we all agree that the model minority myth/narrative requires invisibilizing racism against nonblack Asian people, but we conveniently ignore that the model minority myth also relies on Black hypervisibility? The model minority myth makes nonwhite, nonBlackness valuable in racial hierarchy.
“Asians have managed to assimilate” and “Asians are educated and well-off. Why can’t Blacks do that for themselves?”
This visibility fetish exists in the context of immigrant rights and immigrant justice as well. I remember reading tweets from nonblack Latine organizers about how they never see the turnout Black Lives Matter marches have for “kids in cages”. The response of many Black organizers, Latine and non-Latine, was to name the invisibility of Black immigrant communities and the erasure of Black mothers and caretakers in the movement for immigrant justice.
Unsurprisingly, there is silence from those who invoke the language of “kids in cages” around the mass deportations of Haitian immigrants under the Biden-Harris Administration. Only Haitian organizers have amplified the story of a two-month-old Haitian infant and dozens of other children being among those deported. More evidence of how visibility is not something Black people have control over and how visibility only serves the interests of white supremacy.
People are always so much louder about how angry they are about Black visibility that I cannot usually tell whether the racism they experience is even a problem for them.
The way nonblack people of color fetishize visibility is one of many reasons why I do not believe it to be possible to unify under a vision of “POC solidarity”, which is used to describe a relationship founded on our political muleship rather than on solidarity anyway. Rather than understanding visibility as white supremacist violence that reinforces racial hierarchy, nonblack people of color believe that we are in competition with them to be seen. It is as insulting as it is dangerous for nonblack people of color to bond over their visibility fetish, but we as Black people do not have time to waste fighting with them about it any longer; we are dying and they know that.
I also believe that they know, and actively disregard, the long-standing history of Black and Asian solidarities against the U.S. Empire, which includes the Black-Japanese coalitions born from the struggle against Japanese Internment and those being born today in the wake of several incidents of Asian-directed violence. I could wag my finger and say in a stern voice, “Ignoring the ways that our communities have shown up for each other is harms us both”, but in light of Professor Huang’s comments, I do not have the energy and I do not believe Asian-Americans who share those sentiments are the biggest losers in these intercommunity disputes, which is precisely why Black people are still explaining the consequences of their antiblackness and their visibility fetish.
Suggested Readings:
- Black and Asian Feminist Solidarity Letter by Black Women Radicals and Asian American Feminist Collective
- Colonized Loyalty: Asian American Anti-Blackness and Complicity by Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt
Using the Plight of Black People to Combat the Oppression of Non-Black POC Always Perpetuates Anti-Blackness by Jamilah Bellinger
J.A.O. is a New York City based full-time law student, essayist, and organizer. Since March of 2020, J.A.O. has managed the Fill the Gap Project, which provides free menstrual products and emergency contraception to persons living in the United States. J.A.O. has contributed to Black Youth Project, RaceBaitr, and Wear Your Voice Magazine.
