Diaspora by Design: Flexible Citizenship and South Asians in U.S. Racial Formations

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Diaspora 6:1 1997 WÊ Diaspora by Design:1 Flexible Citizenship and South Asians in U.S. Racial Formations Kamala Visweswaran2 University of Texas, Austin My inclinations are strongly antiracist and sympathetic to minorities . My family endured European colonialism in India for many generations, and my great-grandfather was killed by the British army for alleged insubordination. In the United States I am no stranger to xenophobia, prejudice and discrimination. I also feel a particular debt to the civil rights movement___ Yet I am not an uncritical cheerleader for every parade that carries the minority banner___ —Dinesh D'Souza (vii) Former presidential hopeful Phil Gramm has paid warm tribute to Indian immigrants. During the recent immigration debate in the Senate, the Texas republican said Indians as an ethnic group had the highest per capita income and the highest average educationlalj level in the U.S. He said the U.S. needed more hard-working and successful immigrants like Indians.3 —India News Digest Is the warm reception given Dinesh D'Souza's writing not in part due to the place he occupies as a member of a "model minority" seen as increasingly important to political conservatives like Phil Gramm? I wonder. I have been equally struck by the fact that under the second Reagan administration, one ofthe most prominent members of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the agency charged with monitoring and investigating claims of racial discrimination, was Joy Cherian, an Indian immigrant. More recently , I have contemplated the role Pakistani-American M. Ali Raza played (in 1994) in asking California State Attorney Quentin Kopp for an opinion on the affirmative action hiring policies in the California State University system. Thus begins this essay, precariously enough in an anti-immigrant North America, with a scene of crisis between an African-American critic and a South Asian one. The risks in so doing are manifold, for this essay may invite a kind of spectatorship I do not wish to fuel, and which may be read as legitimating current anti-immigration Diaspora 6:1 1997 arguments. Yet anti-immigration sentiment, as exemplified by the passage of Proposition 187 in California, is surely linked in complicated ways to the repeal of civil rights and affirmative action legislation: thus, 1996 witnessed passage of Proposition 209, the "California Civil Rights Act," which eliminated affirmative action programs throughout the state ofCalifornia; and the Hopwood Decision of the Fifth Circuit Court, eliminating race as a criterion of admission at the University of Texas. This essay should thus be read as an attempt to explore emerging fissures among progressive coalitions, in the hopes of clearing new analytic space for those of us who also work in the academy. The black/white polarization ofrace relations in the public sphere has never been adequate for understanding the place of Asians (or Native Americans and Latinos) in U.S. racial formations. The effects of this polarization are to cast the racial identities of immigrant Asian groups as either symbolically "whitened" or "blackened" (Ong, "Cultural Citizenship"); or to place Asian groups too quickly in a mediating position between blacks and whites. Both options obscure the process of "Asianization," that is, the ways in which Asian groups become Asian as defined against, and in relation to, each other. This is not to deny that Asian groups play a mediating function economically and politically in U.S. society; it is rather to insist that the causes and consequences of mediation for different groups may vary, and that analyses which highlight the apparently ambiguous or anomalous position of (for example) South Asians in a scheme of racial classification that groups them with neither whites nor blacks (Kibria; Rajagopal) in the end rigidify a polarized model ofrace relations, at the expense ofdeeper historical analysis. Despite popular slogans that "the U.S. is a nation of immigrants" (which, of course, initiate other rhetorics of exclusion), immigration is commonly portrayed as a threat to older, more established groups, rather than as an integral part of the making of older and new racial formations alike. Immigration is also too often understood in a presentist frame, and groups like "Asian Indians" may be designated as "new immigrants," thereby obscuring older...

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