Theories of Racism, Asian American Identities, and a Materialist Critical Pedagogy

In this article, I argue that the persistence of “race” as the central unit of analysis in most U.S. scholarship on racialized populations and education has limited our systematic understanding of racism and class struggle. I discuss British sociologist Robert Miles’s notion of racialization—as a way to theorize and articulate multiple forms of racism, the specificities of oppression and lived experiences that impact historically marginalized populations in the U.S. I critique “race relations” sociology because it essentially creates and reproduces a black/white dichotomy. To provide specificity to the discussion, I examine “Asian American” identities and the ways in which they have been racialized. I discuss two key components to the social and historical construction for Asian America: a critique of the “model minority” myth and the deconstruction of pan-Asian ethnicity. This article looks at the implications for a materialist critical pedagogy.