AFTER 1989: Are Asians Black? March 21, 2012

LA RIOTS, MODEL MINORITIES, AND AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

Featuring: LISA ARRASTIA (principal at United Nations International School), PAUL BEATTY (White Boy Shuffle, Tuff), ANNE CHENG (African American Studies, Princeton University), EDDIE HUANG (Cooking Channel), NICHOLAS LEMANN (The Big Test), WESLEY YANG (New York Magazine)

Exhibits: "L.A. Riots," "Those Asian American Whiz Kids,"

$5 Admission

We all think we know the answer to this question-Asians are not black, right? But in the nineteenth century, one California court actually determined that Chinese Americans were black-since they were not, after all, white. This panel-titled after Janine Young Kim's seminal essay, itself a '90s product-discusses how Asians and Blacks have been positioned as not just different, but set against each other, whether in the L.A. Riots or college admissions. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the LA Riots/LA Uprising/Sa-i-gu, but what's often unremarked upon is how quickly a Black-White conflict (the LAPD vs King) transformed into a multiracial one, enfolding Latino residents and Korean shop owners. Novelist and poet Paul Beatty (White Boy Shuffle) and others reads passages about the Riots, as we show video footage from Visual Communications. Blacks and Asians were also pitted against each other during the '90s debates over college admissions, consisting of attacks on affirmative action (Prop. 209) and right-wing tracts (The Bell Curve and The End of Racism) that set blacks against an Asian American model minority stereotype. These will be discussed by educator Lisa Arrastia(author of Starting Up: Critical Lessons from 10 New Schools), Columbia Journalism school dean Nicholas Lemann (The Big Test: The Secret History of American Meritocracy) andWesley Yang (New York Magazine). Special talks by Anne Cheng (Second Skin) and ChefEddie Huang (Baohaus, Cheap Bites).

This is the fourth event in the five-part series AFTER 1989: Race After Multiculturalism, presented by The Asian American Writers' Workshop.

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AFTER 1989: Race After Multiculturalism

The '90s are back! Although they're being resurrected in youth culture as the age of Cosby sweaters, animated gifs and 16-bit Nintendo soundtracks, the 1990s were at once the age of multiculturalism, premised on the idea that we could all just get along, as well as a decade divided with tense, often surreal, racial spectacle. Think O.J. Simpson, the rise of Hip Hop and grunge, The Joy Luck Club, the canon wars, the death of Selena, Rodney King, and affirmative action. The Asian American Writers' Workshop presents an alternative racial history of the 1990s through a feisty five-part event series that's part symposium, part late night talk show, part Youtube nostalgia-fest. What can the era of multiculturalism--a decade of awkward rehearsals on how to talk about race--offer our own post-multicultural but not post-racial age?
See aaww.org/after1989 for more details.