Minor Feelings: a Reckoning on Race and the Asian Condition

The term Asian American was invented at UC Berkeley in 1968 to “inaugurate a new political identity” that was “radicalized by the black power movement and anti-colonial movement” (190). The term replaced how Asians were referred to as before, by the nationality of the country of their ethnic origin. While the moniker was an unapologetic term used by the students to describe who they are, Hong considers that it “is now flattened and emptied of any blazing political rhetoric” (190). Instead, it has become synonymous with notions of a model minority and complacency with the current system.

Although Hong’s subject-matter explicitly centers on the experiences of Asian Americans, she acknowledges that it is difficult to define exactly who this 5.6 percent of the American population are. Lack of unity is a key feature of being Asian American, as this demographic hails from the many countries of a huge continent and occupies all the different levels in the class system. She acknowledges that she can best speak for the Korean American experience, although she refers to examples from the lives of Asians with other ethnic backgrounds. Moreover, this demographic dislikes being around each other in large numbers because “instead of solidarity, you feel that your are less than around other Asians, the boundaries of yourself no longer distinct but congealed into a horde” (9). Resentment and hostility exist amongst Asians from different socioeconomic groups, and different people experience their race diversely. Hong, a Generation Xer, feels that she has “confidence […] impoverished from a lifelong diet of conditional love and a society who thinks I’m interchangeable as lint” (8). However, Jia Tolentino, a millennial Filipino American reviewer of Hong’s book, feels that her generation defines her more than her race.

Hong is suspicious of those affluent, urban Asians who state that race is not an issue for them, finding them a whisper away from the white people who claim that they do not see race. Race denial absolves Asians from both their troubling historic mistreatment at the hands of white people and also from the privileges they have enjoyed at the expense of those who are Black and Latinx. If Asians are conscripted into whiteness, they will contribute to raising levels of injustice in the country. Instead, Hong sets out a manifesto for recruiting Asian American into a “we” that includes “non-whites, the formerly colonized; survivors such as Native Americans” and to fight to end white supremacy in American institutions (197).