On the Black-White Binary Paradigm and Misclassification

2024-2 Feminist Ethics

 

On the Black-White Binary Paradigm and Misclassification

 

This reading response consists of questions and a brief sketch of thoughts rather than a critique of Alcoff’s paper. I believe that her analysis of the black-white binary paradigm enables us to comprehend the problem of the narrow scope through which Latinos and Asian Americans in the United States have been misclassified as either black or white, depending on the circumstances, in ways that have maximized the benefits of white supremacy (Alcoff 2006: 251). The repercussions of the black-white binary scope are extensive and profound; Latinos and Asian Americans are doubly bound in the sense that not only―as the Hernandez case indicates―their oppression is interpreted in distorted ways, but also―as the April 29 “riots” show―they have often become victims of the “model minority myth” (Alcoff 2006: 254; Kim 2021: 9-10).

From this consideration, Alcoff concludes that racial oppression works on multiple axes such as (1) the color axis, (2) the physical‐characteristics‐other‐than‐color axis, (3) the cultural‐origin axis, and (4) nativism (Alcoff 2006: 259). In other words, it is an oversimplification to analyze racial oppression within a single framework. While espousing her claim, I would like to raise two questions worth investigating. First, as Crenshaw famously argues, the notion of intersectionality is useful to identify a relatively more marginalized group by comparing them to those who are privileged “but for x” (Crenshaw 1989: 152). This, however, can become an extremely difficult task when those four axes are intertwined. Second, I think even this complex analysis may require a further fine-grained classification depending on circumstances. Asian Americans, for instance, may experience various forms of nativism depending on their nationality. For Chinese Americans, discrimination might be related to ideological matters; for Koreans, it could be partially scrutinized in terms of colonialism and imperialism.

 

References

Alcoff, Linda Martín (2006). Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. New York, US: Oxford University Press.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé (1989). Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. The University of Chicago Legal Forum 140:139-167

Kim, David H, (2021). Asian American Philosophy and Feminism, in Kim Q. Hall and Ásta Sveinsdóttir, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.