AAPI Month Reflections: On Solidarity As a Path to Liberation

As AAPI Heritage Month concluded, we reflected on the complex place of Asian Americans within our racialized society. The pan-ethnic AAPI classification is far from homogenous (as many have pointed out), spanning degrees of privilege across class, country of ethnic origin, citizenship status, and indigeneity. So, how can we, as Asian Americans with relative privilege, make sense of our social responsibilities while honoring our ancestry and our community spaces? This past May, we looked to scholars and activists who have shaped our community to answer some of these questions, and to emerge with a theory of intersectional solidarity that we can apply to our lives.

A Brief History of the “Model Minority”

As early as the 1800s, when Asian Americans began to form communities, the “model minority¹” myth was introduced as a conservative effort to discourage and deny liberation for Black, indigenous, and immigrant groups. Post-Civil Rights-era immigration policies intensified this project, monitoring the class and education status of immigration applicants to curate and shape the community into an affluent, submissive, and largely more conservative base than their predecessors. A key purpose of the model minority myth is depoliticizing Asian Americans, instead incentivizing the group to climb the financial mobility ladder while passively upholding White privilege and supremacy.

Asian Americans, as defined by Claire Jean Kim’s famous racial triangulation theory, thus become a racial tool in the white-Black hierarchy. We are racialized relative to this existing system, and face inherent barriers to self-determination outside of white supremacy: “Via the model minority myth, both Blacks and Asian Americans are kept in their place in the field of racial positions without a single overtly racial claim having been uttered,” Kim proffers. We are instrumental to the white supremacist project as we are “valorized” as examples to Black Americans of how a community can ostensibly “succeed” within the empire without threatening it. Simultaneously, we remain alien to the image of an “American,” fundamentally incapable of assimilating due to our collectivist nature and foreign customs.

Viet Thanh Nguyen refers back to racial triangulation, stating that “Asian Americans are who we are partly because of who we are not: not indigenous, not Black²” His refusal to highlight that Asian Americans are also not white decenters and destabilizes racial hierarchy. Though it does not negate that Asian Americans are alienated, persecuted, or racialized in various contexts, as immigrants, we are still settled on stolen land. Asian Americans’ racial position in the U.S is defined by our relationship to other marginalized and oppressed groups, and it’s up to us to decide whether or not we’re anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, and anti-racist.

Members and supporters of the Asian American community attend a “rally against hate” at Columbus Park in New York on March 21. Photographer: Ed Jones/AFP/Getty Images

The term “Asian American” was originally rooted in a radical, political identity in the 1960s and 70s. The term sought pan-Asian solidarity and global liberation, making a person identifying as “Asian American” automatically anti-colonial and anti-imperialist. Over time, the once-radical identity lost touch with its roots. Fast forward to contemporary times, and we’ve lost the political histories and knowledge of our ancestors. Younger generations’ understanding of the term frequently amounts to a desire for superficial cultural representation, making it ripe for co-optation by capitalist, white supremacist forces. Although visibility is a necessary step towards solidarity, we must move beyond the limits of identity-based politics and the confines of ethnic belonging. To achieve true solidarity, the AAPI community must inhabit anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, and anti-racist beliefs by refusing the trappings of privilege and instead building alongside oppressed and marginalized communities.

Diaspora and the language of belonging

To learn more about the apparent “unassimilability” of Asian Americans and our latent political potential, SB spoke to sociologist and organizer Bianca Mabute-Louie. In her book, Unassimilable, Mabute-Louie explores the dimensions of Asian identity in the U.S., the intrinsic value of ethnic enclaves (which she describes as “ethnoburbs”), and how we can preserve the benefits of tight-knit communities without falling into the trap of social sequestration.

Unassimilable by Bianca Mabute-Louie

In her research on the historical significance of ethnoburbs, Mabute-Louie uncovered much of why and how ethnic spaces provide a sense of belonging for the diaspora. In this era of social media organizing, we talk a lot about “community,” so it’s instructive to observe how our elders and ancestors created a community infrastructure within cultural and linguistic parameters that defied the normative expectation to assimilate into “American” society. Mabute-Louie cites her grandmother’s experience recovering from grief and isolation through the support structures of the “ethnoburb,” which ensured that she had meaningful relationships along with the necessities of staying alive. But what are the implications of restricting this infrastructure to an ethnic community? The lines between safety and political complicity begin to blur when we only look after those who look like us. Mabute-Louie thus locates the “limitations of ‘Asian American’ as a political identity.”

Pan-ethnic solidarity—that is, extending the umbrella of ethnic identification to include multiple sub-groups and nationalities—has been the default mode of organizing since the inception of “Asian American” identity. Still, the diaspora today is more heterogeneous than ever, and that heterogeneity is intertwined with how we view ourselves in relationship with other racialized groups. Grouping ourselves based on identity has its merits, as seen in the ethnoburb, but it is an ultimately misguided way to approach political solidarity. Because identity within the race system is not static, someone is always excluded. Rather, organizing ourselves based on shared political experiences and, further, a shared vision for the future, is far more effective while still preserving our ethnic spaces.

Instead, Mabute-Louie’s proposed replacement for “Asian American” is “Asian Diaspora.” Not only is Asian Diaspora a political identity and terminology for Asian Americans, but it also resonates with Asians who felt excluded from “Asian American” identity and spaces. Chinese international students shared with Mabute-Louie that they felt like the term worked for them. They also shared that when entering Asian American spaces, they didn't feel included. Asian Diasporic community and solidarity within the U.S. are entwined with global history, politics, and struggle. Our diasporic history and voice will always challenge the established colonial narrative, making it imperative that Asian Diaspora solidarity is an internationalist one. Much of our diaspora are refugees, migrants, asylees, indigenous, and represent the global South. The term thus reminds us of “our connections to our historical anticolonial rage and internationalist solidarity… both colonial agendas and anti-imperial resistance define our experiences of race in the US”³.

Upon reflection of my own distance from Chinese international students in college, I landed on the same conclusion as Mabute-Louie: this divergence between American-born and first-generation Asians was the effect of assimilation. Marking first-generation Asians as the “other” is a protective mechanism designed to create another hierarchy that puts Asian Americans closer to whiteness. Imperialism, exclusion, xenophobia, and assimilation are so deeply ingrained within our collective consciousness that the option of an expanded community and solidarity becomes obscured.

There is currently a lack of Asian diasporic mobilization because the politics of inclusion and representation are serving much of the diaspora, enabling many of us to amass wealth, status, and influence at the expense of less privileged members of our own community as well as other racialized groups. However, this reliance is precarious, as it leads us to forget that inclusion within an unjust system is unsteady. A state that can oppress one group can and will oppress anyone. We can always take our power back by refusing to assimilate. There’s a cost, but as a group, the Asian Diaspora can retain its “unassimilability,” allowing us to take back our otherness and push past the simplified, Western understanding of our existence and racial place. The refusal to belong embraces a complexity that avoids Western categorization altogether.

There remains much more to explore on these complex and interwoven topics, so I encourage you to read Unassimilable and follow Mabute-Louie on Instagram @beyonkz.

For further learning, here are some of the resources I mention in the piece (and some I didn’t):

• “On The Death of Asian Americans” – Viet Thanh Ngyuen’s Third Norton Lecture

• Grace Lee Boggs in Conversation with Angela Davis

• Asian Americans in an Anti-Black World by Claire Jean-Kim

1. Coined by William Petersen in The New York Times, 1966

2. Norton Lecture 3: On the Death of Asian Americans -

3. From Unassimilable – Mabute-Louie, 2025, p. 214

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