Are Asians Black?: The Asian-American Civil Rights Agenda and the Contemporary Significance of the Black/White Paradigm

The phrase rights evokes the powerful words and images of the mass movement by Black Americans in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s. In recent years, however, Asian Americans have increasingly laid claim to a place in the history of the struggle for civil rights. Just as Derrick Bell harkens back to Dred Scott v. Sanford' as the first of the leading in civil rights,2 Hyung-Chan Kim's anthology of Asian-American civil rights cases and essays recalls cases such as Yick Wo v. Hopkins3 as proof of Asian Americans' longstanding participation in the development of civil rights law in the United States.4 When tensions within American multicultural, multiracial society exploded in Los Angeles in 1992, not only history but immediate reality itself seemed to insist on the inclusion of Asian Americans within the larger discourse on civil rights. Because what began as an arguably Black (Rodney King)-White (LAPD officers) conflict transformed into multiracial strife involving not only Black and White Americans but also Latinos and Asian Americans, the riots brought into sharp relief the complex racial interrelationships within Los Angeles. As a result, two race scholars announced that the riots marked the beginning of a new period of U.S. racial politics, 5 one that must decisively break with the bipolar model of