Anti-Asian Racism: Myths, Stereotypes, and Catholic Social Teachings - Softcover

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Joseph Cheah is professor and chair of the department of philosophy, theology, and religious studies at the University of Saint Joseph, West Hartford, CT. His previous books include Race and Religion in American Buddhism and Theological Reflections on “Gangnam Style”: A Racial, Sexual, and Cultural Critique, with Grace Ji-Sun Kim.

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RELIGION / Christianity / Catholic

RELIGION / Christian Living / Social Issues

RELIGION / Christian Theology / Ethics

US$26.00

Joseph Cheah

ANTI-ASIAN RACISM

Myths, Stereotypes, and Catholic Social Teaching

Cover design: Regina Gelfer

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ISBN: 978-1-62698-479-0

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

In an effort to address the evil of racism and its harmful effects, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) issued a pastoral letter, Open Wide Our Hearts: The Enduring Call to Love—A Pastoral Letter Against Racism, in its November 2018 General Assembly. This was a long overdue pastoral statement on racism, released four decades after the 1979 pastoral letter Brothers and Sisters to Us: A Pastoral Letter on Racism in Our Day, and sixty years after the 1958 statement on Discrimination and Christian Conscience. In Open Wide Our Hearts, the bishops continued not only the theme of the sinful nature of racism and its violation of the fundamental dignity of the human person, discussed in their previous pastoral letter on racism, but also recognized the Church’s failure to reckon with racial injustice over centuries in the Americas.

Open Wide Our Hearts is an improvement over previous pastoral statements in its acknowledgment of the Church’s complicity in the evil of racism. However, as a pastoral letter against racism, it has rendered the struggles and racialized experiences of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) completely invisible. This in part has to do with how the Catholic Church in the United States reflects the larger American society in the ways in which the AAPI are relegated as foreigners or outsiders in their own country and, consequently, their experiences become either subordinated or have been consistently excluded in the mainstream American history, pastoral letters, and political discourses. This has contributed to the invisibility of AAPI experiences of pain and suffering, xenophobia, and racism in racial discourses in academia, the entertainment industry, and in the Church. Not too many Americans know about the horrific violence and racism suffered by Asian immigrants in the past, and few nonAAPI Americans would take seriously racism and discrimination experienced by AAPI prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Despite the spike in violence in the Asian American community during this pandemic, a recent survey conducted by LAAUNCH (Leading Asian Americans to Unite for Change) reveals that 37 percent of White Americans are not aware of a surge in anti-Asian hate violence and 24 percent of White Americans do not believe that Asian Americans suffer from racism.

In 2018, the USCCB promulgated not only Open Wide Our Hearts but also a pastoral response about AAPI or Asian and Pacific Islanders, Encountering Christ in Harmony: A Pastoral Response to Our Asian and Pacific Island Brothers and Sisters. The latter presents AAPI in terms of their identity, generations, leadership, cultural encounter, and dialogue in faith. In addition, Encountering Christ in Harmony attempts to respond to racism experienced by AAPI in stating that racism based on language and physical appearance “can sometimes be negative due to racism” and that AAPI are “sometimes portrayed” as “model minorities.” The use of such conditional phrasings trivializes racism experienced by AAPI as if it is not widespread or systemic. While the drafter correctly brought up the idea that the model minority myth has made AAPI invisible in the politics of US racial discourses, a discussion of such a complicated myth like the model minority, in passing, without mentioning the ideology of White supremacy that made the model minority trope possible, is entirely inadequate.

In a fifty-eight–page booklet, it spent a seemingly obligatory amount of time—slightly over a page—addressing racism experienced by Asians and Pacific Islanders in the United States, plus four sidebars about racism from the 1979 pastoral letter. The largest of these sidebars provides a definition of racism from the previous pastoral letter and a quote from the late Cardinal Francis George on racism. The other three sidebars are synopses of the previous pastoral letter’s response to racism from personal, Christian, and parish levels. No reference was made to any of the works done by Asian American scholars and theologians on race/racism, Asian American history, experience, and theology

The document recognizes the role of social structures in reinforcing racism by identifying two disconcerting events in US history. However, it does so in passing or essentializing Asian American history into the worst form of tokenism: mentioning the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II within the same sentence while providing neither context nor sufficient explanation. The sentence reads, “While the experience of racism is not unique to any one ethnic group, two important examples in Asian American history include the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 and the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War.”5 What is troubling about this is that not only is the group that had the power to enact the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the incarceration of Japanese Americans made nameless, but the conditional phrasing of the sentence trivializes these two horrific events in the history of Asian Americans as a consequence of ordinary racism. Furthermore, the entire section on racism was written in passive voice, except for when the drafter writes about interethnic discriminations between Asian and Pacific Islanders and how they contribute to the racial discourse in the United States. Instead of focusing on the virulent form of racism that resulted in the Chinese Exclusion Act and the incarceration of Japanese Americans, the drafter diverts the attention to interethnic tensions that can be found in almost all groups, especially in a very broad umbrella group like the AAPI.

The big elephant in the room remains: the ideology of Whiteness and White supremacy, which are completely omitted in the document. It is obvious that Encountering Christ in Harmony is a compensative product of a committee that attempts to engage in the topic of racism because the racialized experience of AAPI was excluded in Open Wide Our Hearts.

This book thus fills a large lacuna in the Catholic Church’s understanding and treatment of the racialized experiences of AAPIs. It focuses on the central issue that the bishops’ documents do not address, namely, reckoning with the invisibility of AAPI in the church. As a vital part of the ongoing conversation on racial reckoning in the church and country, this volume approaches racism and xenophobia experienced by Asian Americans systematically by examining three destructive and pervasive stereotypes that have negatively shaped the lives of AAPI in general and Asian Americans in particular: yellow peril, the model minority, and the perpetual foreigner. I examine these three damaging stereotypes from the perspectives of history, Asian American Studies, Asian American marginal theology, biblical studies, and Catholic Social Teaching (CST). In addition, I periodically employ the bishops’ pastoral letter, pastoral response, and papal encyclicals in my discussion. As such, this book supplements the discussion of race/racism in Open Wide Our Hearts and Encountering Christ in Harmony by offering a response to issues of racial injustice confronted by AAPI communities. Before describing the organization of this book, some introduction to terms and concepts is in order.

Race, Racism, and the Pastoral Letter

Race, racism, and White supremacy are some of the central concepts running through this volume. Race is not a biological reality, but rather a social construction with real socioracial effect. Race is a set of beliefs and practices that gives meaning to the perception of phenotypic differences as essential, and how those perceived essential differences become markers of social and cultural inequality. In other words, race speaks the language of phenotype, but it is really about the social power exercised by...