[What if anti-Asian violence is not reducible to “hate,” and
is in fact a persistent, unexceptional presence in the long
historical, Civilizational terror-making machine that is the United
States? ] [[link removed]]

THE “ASIAN EXCEPTION” AND THE SCRAMBLE FOR LEGIBILITY: TOWARD AN
ABOLITIONIST APPROACH TO ANTI-ASIAN VIOLENCE  
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Dylan Rodriguez
April 8, 2021
Society and Space
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_ What if anti-Asian violence is not reducible to “hate,” and is
in fact a persistent, unexceptional presence in the long historical,
Civilizational terror-making machine that is the United States? _

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Atrocity and Legibility

Atrocities targeting people and bodies we identify as _our own_ tend
to incite powerful feelings of exception.  A shared sense of singular
vulnerability and violation circulates virally, and the epidemiology
of toxic intimacy with violence is simultaneously social and personal.
The sheer quantity of casualties matters less than the bare fact of
unexpected cruelty. Singularity and exception yield to righteous
outrage, communal mobilization, and militant demand on surrounding
authorities. _Something must be done now._ A famous few may issue
bounties
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for individual culprits, with no regard for the collateral
consequences of such grandstanding. A larger narrative quickly forms,
condensing in precious keywords:  hate, hate crime, justice,
ignorance, safety, policing, prosecution, inclusion, education,
criminal.

“Asian” positionality in the dense fabric of U.S. racial,
colonial, and antiblack violence is generally illegible as such,
despite the long histories
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of genocidal and proto-genocidal U.S. militarization against multiple
peoples of the Pacific: colonial occupations and ecological attacks
against Indigenous people of the Pacific Islands (Camacho 2011;
Kauanui 2018), the decade-long genocidal conquest of the Philippines
(Rodríguez 2009), atomic bombings in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and
protracted war against civilian populations in Vietnam, among numerous
other cases. While devastating obliterations of Asian and Pacific
Islander land/life/being are virtually taken-for-granted as part of
the global_ _dimensions of U.S. nation-building, they also seem to be
narratively and politically isolated from Asian/American encounters
with a militarized white supremacist _domestic front._ 

(Here i will use “Asian/American” to refer to people who identify
as “Asian American” as well as those who are racialized as
“Asian” and reside in the U.S., but do not identify as
“American” and often navigate migrant, undocumented, non-citizen,
refugee, and/or criminalized positions. I do not conflate
“Asian/American” with Pacific Islander peoples.)

The current moment thus reflects an Asian/American _scramble for
legibility_ that runs the risk of reproducing simplistic,
compartmentalized narratives and explanations for the alarming
increase in gendered racist anti-Asian violence
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since early 2020.  Many Asian/American nonprofit community-based
organizations, celebrities, (aspiring) elected officials, media
pundits, cultural workers, progressive activists, and academics seem
to be caught up in
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in some cases resisting
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liberalism that frames anti-Asian violence within commonly legible
narratives of exceptional victimization at the hands of individual
perpetrators
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Such framings have induced a stream of militant Asian/American demands
for “justice” that call on the state to increase police
surveillance
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validate the specificity of Asian victimization (via “hate crime”
statutes
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and criminally punish individuals
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who are demonstrably responsible for reprehensible acts of
interpersonal exploitation, brutality, suffering, and fatality.

Yet, this dependence on state recognition (Coulthard 2014) and
police/criminal justice responsiveness reproduces the very relations
of power that have created the conditions for accelerated anti-Asian
violence in the first place.  On the one hand, this mis-defined call
for justice seeks the state’s (and broader institutional) validation
of Asian/American suffering by amplifying the protocols of
_legitimated _antiblack, colonial, class, and gendered state
violence—criminalization, policing, prosecution, incarceration,
civil expulsion, state punishment.  On the other hand, the 
presumption that the police, criminal justice, and
electoral/legislative apparatuses
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are remotely capable of resolving and repairing the crisis of
“anti-Asian hate” posits an “Asian exception” to the otherwise
densely _normalized _forms of racial, colonial, and antiblack state
violence that define the United States as a global and national
project. 

What if anti-Asian violence is not reducible to hate
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and is in fact a persistent, unexceptional presence in the long
historical, Civilizational terror-making machine that is the United
States? 

The Problem with “Hate”

The misframing of anti-Asian violence has significant consequences,
perhaps largely unintended but no less harmful.  Not only does the
exceptionalist/“hate” approach tend to funnel Asian/American
activism, consciousness raising, and mobilization into militant calls
for “better” and intensified police action
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(hate crime) prosecutions, and surveillance, but its naming of such
violence as a problem of hate reduces the complexity of anti-Asian
violence to a compilation of incidents
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in which culpability can be affixed to specific _individual acts_.

The individualization of anti-Asian violence distorts its
institutional, cultural, and systemic dimensions while ignoring its
complex historical relation
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to chattel slavery, antiblackness (Vargas and Jung 2021) colonialism
(within and beyond the U.S. proper), imperial war, heteronormativity,
white supremacist patriarchy, and racial capitalism
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(Robinson 2000). Further, mobilizations that fixate on “stopping
Asian/AAPI hate
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encourage superficially performative “solutions” that seek to
neutralize, educate, or otherwise fix (hate-inducing) ignorance,
ideological/rhetorical extremism, and toxic anti-Asian feelings.  By
way of contrast, a focus on the complexity of _violence _(rather than
hate)_ _gestures to the vibrant scholarly, artistic, activist analyses
and counter-narratives_ _that situate specific Asian/American people
and communities in complex relation to gentrification
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redlining, deportation
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and the criminalization of sex work, gangs, informal economies, and
undocumented status, among other forms of displacement, state
violence, and systemic vulnerability.

Thankfully, organizations like Red Canary Song
[[link removed]], AAPI Women Lead
[[link removed]], Butterfly
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Committee [[link removed]] are generating
critical framings and activist narrations of anti-Asian violence that
bring clarity to this historical moment.  Centering sex worker
justice, radical feminist, Black solidarity, migrant/refugee focused,
and anti-carceral approaches, these and other Asian/American
collectives demonstrate a vigorous, shared commitment to study,
discussion, and debate _as_ _primary scholarly activist practices_. 
Such work amplifies the insights and grassroots power of abolitionist
[[link removed]] approaches to justice
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(Kaba 2021) that have grown exponentially over the last twenty-five
years [[link removed]] and equip a more
rigorously radical conceptualization of recent U.S. based anti-Asian
violence. 

Contrary to the Biden White House’s portrayal of anti-Asian violence
as a _horrible though momentary deviation_
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from the normative racial script of the U.S. nation-state, an
abolitionist analysis suggests altogether different premises for
understanding the significance of such gendered racist atrocities as
what took place on March 16, 2021 in Atlanta.  These and other
“incidents” of anti-Asian violence must be aggressively,
rigorously deprovincialized, de-isolated, and recontextualized as part
of a dynamic, expanding condition of domestic white nationalist
warfare (James 2007) that has accelerated since November 2016 but is
in no way unique to the current period.

A Domestic Warfare Totality

Anti-Asian violence is the logical expression of a militarized,
persistently war-waging _white nationalist, domestic warfare totality_
(Rodríguez 2021) that increasingly solicits diverse, multiculturalist
(“nonwhite”) participation
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Regardless of the racial identity of individual perpetrators,
anti-Asian violence cannot be framed as a problem of individual animus
or hate because the white nationalist totality is a) _cold-blooded as
fuck, _and b) _doesn’t give a shit about individuals
in-and-of-themselves._

The primary, normalized (if generally undertheorized and misperceived)
mode of this totality is best understood as asymmetrical domestic
warfare:  the _modus operandi_ of the warfare totality is to
constantly (mis)identify targets, invasively occupy new and old sites,
and accumulate more layers of atrocity.  For example, while specific
incidents of “Black on Asian” violence have attracted significant
attention across media platforms and political persuasions (and play
especially well to the antiblack scripts of conservatives and far
right wingers), such antagonisms are not reducible to either
anti-Asian animus among Black people or virulent antiblackness among
Asians.  The white nationalist totality, as a historical state of
normalized, asymmetrical domestic war, _encourages as it actively
produces _the material and ideological conditions of such violence. 

For these very reasons, the current historical moment is conducive to
an abolitionist approach to anti-Asian violence that engages in
collective practices of revolt, solidarity, creativity, and mutual aid
that de-prioritize condemnation of individual perpetrators (Black,
Brown, and otherwise) and cultivate infrastructures of accountability
to _other _communities, organizations, and movements struggling for
liberation from antiblackness, colonial domination, and asymmetrical
domestic war.

What happens when anti-Asian violence is substantially, intentionally,
and publicly narrated in continuity with (rather than in exception to,
or in political competition with) white supremacist, antiblack, and
settler colonial violences in their episodic, systemic, and long
historical forms?  How do the events of January 6, 2021 (the seizure
of the U.S. Capitol), May 25, 2020 (the police street murder of George
Floyd), and March 13, 2020 (the police home invasion murder of Breonna
Taylor) create the conditions of possibility—if not likelihood—for
March 16, 2021?

Undertaking collective responses to these and similar questions can
productively reshape and redirect Asian/American activisms in dialog
with already existing movements
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self-determination, and grassroots power.  A growing accountability
to such movements [[link removed]] has led some
prominent Asian/American community organizations
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to develop platforms, strategies, and public statements that reflect
abolitionist [[link removed]] principles—such a shift
shows the potential to dislodge stubborn ideological loyalties to
dominant, narrow, and ultimately oppressive definitions of justice
that rely on police power, criminalization, and the
authority/prestige/endorsement of elected officials
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celebrities, corporate/university/philanthropic foundation
administrators, and social media influencers.

Five Working Principles

For now, i hope it will be helpful to offer some working principles
for collective work across different pedagogical, organizational,
artistic, scholarly, and other activist contexts.  Here, i am echoing
the generous insights of people, movements, and communities cited
throughout this piece, while also drawing from more than two decades
of humble, privileged participation in multiple projects shaped by
Black radical [[link removed]], anticolonial,
abolitionist [[link removed]], and radical queer,
feminist
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and trans* [[link removed]]
frameworks: 

1. Framing anti-Asian violence through the language and cultural
politics of “hate” and “stopping hate” is inadequate,
misleading, and (unintentionally) trivializing.  Fixating on hate as
the foundational, if not exclusive cause of such violence drastically
underestimates the scope of life-or-death vulnerabilities experienced
by specific Asian populations in the U.S. context.  

2. Seeking peace, respect, and justice through the criminal justice
system, increased police capacity, and enforcement of hate crimes
legislation expands and sustains anti-Asian violence rather than
slowing, repairing, or ending it.  _Anti-Asian violence is an
expression of the white nationalist domestic warfare totality, not a
momentary exception to it._

3. While anti-Asian violence partly manifests in individual acts, it
is a dire mistake to _individualize_ the conditions, causes, and
cultural contexts of anti-Asian violence. In the context of normalized
domestic war, interpersonal violence proliferates and creates
casualties within and between the very communities that are unevenly
targeted by state and state condoned violence.  Such casualties are
not reducible to despicable individual acts. To the contrary, these
acts are inseparable from conditions that actively foment
interpersonal violence, including but not limited to systemic
housing/health/food insecurity, asymmetrical (antiblack) policing and
incarceration, the culture of gendered sexual violence, militarized
white supremacy, and everyday experiences of economic precarity and
institutional exclusion.

4. Diversity, inclusion
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and multiculturalist approaches are not only inadequate to the task of
addressing the roots of anti-Asian violence, but also tend to
reproduce the cultural logics
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of U.S. nationalism, exceptionalism, and patriotism_ _that catalyze
such violence in the first instance.  Such approaches often
implicitly treat anti-Asian violence as a temporary crisis to be
addressed through piecemeal institutional responses:  public
statements
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town halls
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webinars, task forces, mental health triage
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employee and student trainings, and mandated/recommended curricula
(Asian/American texts, films, cultural events, etc.). The problem,
however, is that anti-Asian violence may be _caused, sanctioned, or
otherwise reproduced by these institutions themselves._ It is
necessary to address whether and how specific institutions—whether
university campuses, K-12 school systems, corporations, city councils,
police departments, arts organizations, nonprofits/NGOs, religious
establishments, etc.—contribute to the condition of domestic warfare
(and thus anti-Asian violence) as a matter of their normative,
everyday operation.

5. This is a crucial historical moment to create on-the-ground
solidarities across neighborhoods, organizations, and communities that
de-provincialize “Asian American/AAPI” spaces.  Mutual aid models
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and accessible way to undertake this difficult work, and collective
study of specific present tense examples reveal the long histories of
antiracist, Black liberation [[link removed]], and
anticolonial [[link removed]] movements in and beyond the
United States.  Crucially, mutual aid creates the possibility for
autonomous, accountable, self-determined approaches to addressing
interpersonal as well as intra/inter-community antagonisms that
frequently result in exploitive, opportunistic, and mutually
destructive forms of violence. Intentional, well-planned
proliferations_ _of mutual aid projects drawing from the abolitionist,
Indigenous anticolonial, migrant refugee, and Black
feminist/queer/trans radical traditions can create sustainable
infrastructures of solidarity that hold the capacity to reshape social
landscapes and relations from the scales of the interpersonal to the
regional.  _This will be among the best strategies to slow and
ultimately stop specific forms of depersonalizing anti-Asian
violence._

6. A shared, dynamic embrace of scholarly activist study can enrich,
transform, and creatively accelerate collective approaches to
resisting and abolishing anti-Asian violence.  If we acknowledge that
the condition is one of white nationalist domestic war, then it is
imperative to conceive of—and operationalize—methods of movement,
community, and sociality that attempt to do more than merely survive
it.

For references please go to the original article: References
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