Hello! We’re very excited to have Pulitzer Prize winner and Macarthur Genius Grant recipient Viet Thanh Nguyen on the show. There was a lot to discuss and a lengthy conversation that I (Jay) found absolutely fascinating about the role of academia, especially during a time of national protests. A lot of history in this one as well — if you didn’t know about AAPA and Third World Liberation Front, there’s a short primer at the beginning of the episode.
I disagree with Sandy's comment here. I've encountered the language of decoloniality in organizing spaces and the academy as a means to throw any class analysis to the wayside and foreground hyper-individualistic interpretations of reality that only pay lip service to "structures" as long as they don't have to locate them concretely and confront them collectively. There's a narrative that ES changes lives, and it may do so individually, but in my experience at the university level as a teaching assistant, it demobilizes people from engaging with reality as is in favor of virtue signaling and representational politics. I think this is just another way of forming a consensus about "acceptable" minoritized identities that then ask for a racialized student-center, or something similar. Under this kind of organizing people love to talk about white supremacy and coloniality but the moment you want to act collectively people then use their racialized, minoritized identity to talk themselves out of doing anything. I don't think this convo is out of touch-- it tackles the problems with ES head-on and honestly. Yes, of course we have to fight for liberation but this kind of framing remains abstract and when we pinpoint where power actually lies the more people just don't wanna do anything about it because cynicism gets in the way, etc.. or they're surprised that confronting power is not a pleasant activity you get awards and recognition for.
I was disappointed to hear how out of touch this conversation was with what is happening on the ground among Asian American activists and organizers. Check out orgs like Ktown For All, Freedom Inc, Hana Center Chicago, NAKASEC, 18 Million Rising, People’s Collective for Justice and Liberation, Vigilant Love, Asian American Feminist Collective, Asian American Justice + Innovation Lab (my org), and probably a bunch of other ones I’m forgetting right now. Coalitional, cross-racial organizing is happening on all fronts- not just on the labor and immigrant rights front, but also on the cultural, digital, healing, educational fronts (and more). We have to fight for liberation on all these scales because the reach of systemic white supremacy is deep, from coloniality on the level of the global military industrial complex to coloniality on the level of the mind and body. We have to decolonize our very senses of being and knowing in order to be truly coalitional. The conversation about ethnic studies was also so limited to elite institutions- as an adjunct professor at Cal State LA, I can tell you that race and ethnic studies and Pan-African studies literally change the lives and help empower our BIPOC students. One of the co-founders of BLM LA, Dr. Melina Abdullah, is a long time professor in (and former chair) of PAS at Cal State LA. There’s a huge people’s struggle right now to get the white supremacist administration to appoint her as the inaugural Dean of the new College of Ethnic Studies, second in the nation after the historic founding of SFSU’s CoES. They recently decided to appoint an Asian man without training in ethnic studies to be the interim dean, instead of appointing the people’s choice— the tired white supremacist tactic of using Asians as a racial wedge. There is so much more I could say, but I’ll stop there.
I disagree with Sandy's comment here. I've encountered the language of decoloniality in organizing spaces and the academy as a means to throw any class analysis to the wayside and foreground hyper-individualistic interpretations of reality that only pay lip service to "structures" as long as they don't have to locate them concretely and confront them collectively. There's a narrative that ES changes lives, and it may do so individually, but in my experience at the university level as a teaching assistant, it demobilizes people from engaging with reality as is in favor of virtue signaling and representational politics. I think this is just another way of forming a consensus about "acceptable" minoritized identities that then ask for a racialized student-center, or something similar. Under this kind of organizing people love to talk about white supremacy and coloniality but the moment you want to act collectively people then use their racialized, minoritized identity to talk themselves out of doing anything. I don't think this convo is out of touch-- it tackles the problems with ES head-on and honestly. Yes, of course we have to fight for liberation but this kind of framing remains abstract and when we pinpoint where power actually lies the more people just don't wanna do anything about it because cynicism gets in the way, etc.. or they're surprised that confronting power is not a pleasant activity you get awards and recognition for.
I was disappointed to hear how out of touch this conversation was with what is happening on the ground among Asian American activists and organizers. Check out orgs like Ktown For All, Freedom Inc, Hana Center Chicago, NAKASEC, 18 Million Rising, People’s Collective for Justice and Liberation, Vigilant Love, Asian American Feminist Collective, Asian American Justice + Innovation Lab (my org), and probably a bunch of other ones I’m forgetting right now. Coalitional, cross-racial organizing is happening on all fronts- not just on the labor and immigrant rights front, but also on the cultural, digital, healing, educational fronts (and more). We have to fight for liberation on all these scales because the reach of systemic white supremacy is deep, from coloniality on the level of the global military industrial complex to coloniality on the level of the mind and body. We have to decolonize our very senses of being and knowing in order to be truly coalitional. The conversation about ethnic studies was also so limited to elite institutions- as an adjunct professor at Cal State LA, I can tell you that race and ethnic studies and Pan-African studies literally change the lives and help empower our BIPOC students. One of the co-founders of BLM LA, Dr. Melina Abdullah, is a long time professor in (and former chair) of PAS at Cal State LA. There’s a huge people’s struggle right now to get the white supremacist administration to appoint her as the inaugural Dean of the new College of Ethnic Studies, second in the nation after the historic founding of SFSU’s CoES. They recently decided to appoint an Asian man without training in ethnic studies to be the interim dean, instead of appointing the people’s choice— the tired white supremacist tactic of using Asians as a racial wedge. There is so much more I could say, but I’ll stop there.