{"id":37217,"date":"2014-08-30T20:50:50","date_gmt":"2014-08-30T20:50:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=37217"},"modified":"2014-08-30T20:50:50","modified_gmt":"2014-08-30T20:50:50","slug":"the-complicity-cost-of-racial-inclusion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=37217","title":{"rendered":"The complicity cost of racial inclusion"},"content":{"rendered":"

The complicity cost of racial inclusion<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Al Jazeera America<\/a>
\n2014-08-24<\/p>\n

Julia Carrie Wong<\/strong><\/a>
\nOakland, California<\/em><\/p>\n

When Brook Soso<\/a>, a new Asian-American character in the second season of \u201cOrange Is the New Black<\/a>,\u201d arrives at the federal prison in Litchfield, New York<\/a>, a fellow inmate named Lorna Morello provides her with a toothbrush and bar of soap. Morello, who is white, is an enforcer of the strict racial divisions (black, Latina, white and other) that define the show\u2019s social landscape \u2014 \u201cit\u2019s tribal, not racist,\u201d she explained in the first season \u2014 but here she makes an exception. \u201cI don\u2019t normally bend the rules like this,\u201d she says, \u201cbut you don\u2019t look full \u2026 Asian.\u201d<\/p>\n

Morello turns out to be right \u2014 Soso is half Scottish \u2014 but Soso\u2019s arms-length adoption by white prisoners such as Morello is in many ways still evocative of the shifting position Asian-Americans hold in the United States today. Being Asian and being white are becoming less and less mutually exclusive and the boundary between them (particularly in arenas such as work and education) increasingly porous. But the induction of Asian-Americans into whiteness doesn\u2019t alter the meaning of whiteness; rather, it\u2019s a reminder that whiteness has never been defined by a person\u2019s country of origin or genetic makeup. It\u2019s simply a tool, one that can continue to operate even with the inclusion of certain minority groups…<\/p>\n

…It may be disconcerting for some people to recognize that the boundaries of whiteness can shift. The ubiquitous boxes we check on applications and census materials might lead us to believe that race is determinate. But race is a social construct, not a scientific fact: American whiteness was an ideological creation to rationalize the enslavement of Africans and the extermination of native peoples.<\/strong> As David Roediger<\/a> argued in \u201cThe Wages of Whiteness<\/a>,\u201d racial antagonisms helped solidify 19th century American class structure. In subsequent generations, whiteness was expanded to meet the needs of our changing population and the U.S.\u2019s imperial interests abroad. Throughout our country\u2019s history, special privileges (such as voting and land ownership) have been reserved for those who were considered white…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The complicity cost of racial inclusion Al Jazeera America 2014-08-24 Julia Carrie Wong Oakland, California When Brook Soso, a new Asian-American character in the second season of \u201cOrange Is the New Black,\u201d arrives at the federal prison in Litchfield, New York, a fellow inmate named Lorna Morello provides her with a toothbrush and bar of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,16,33,8,394,20],"tags":[15078,17824,1786,17823,17825],"class_list":["post-37217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-asia","category-census","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-al-jazeera-america","tag-cara-wong","tag-david-roediger","tag-eugene-volokh","tag-julia-carrie-wong"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37217"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37217\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}