Passing-as-if: Model-Minority Subjectivity and Women of Color

Identification
Shireen M. Roshanravan

Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, Volume 10, Number

1, 2009, pp. 1-31 (Article)

Published by Indiana University Press

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mer/summary/v010/10.1.roshanravan.html

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Shireen M. Roshanravan

Passing-as-if:
Model-Minority Subjectivity
and Women of Color Identification

Abstract
Ethnic Studies and Asian American feminist scholars have investigated how the model-minori-
ty racial discourse functions to prevent cross-racial coalition and to cast doubt on Asian
American women in their claims to Women of Color political identity. However, none of these
analyses provides an account of how, for some Asian American women, the model-minority
racial project has so significantly impacted their subjects formation that the transition to
Women of Color politics becomes a desired yet delicate and anxiety-producing task. In this
paper, I introduce the concept “passing-as-if” to elucidate the historical, ontological, and
epistemological processes at play when those non-white women without collectively revalo-
rized racial identities turn to identify politically as Women of Color. I define passing-as-if as
the assumption of racial identities reviled by the mainstream yet collectively revalorized
through historical processes of community-based struggle. In a horizontal move toward
resistant sociality, I argue that passing-as-if functions as a maneuver for political company by
those who are racialized as non-white yet who do not belong to groups that have collectively
resisted racial oppression in the United States. Contextualizing the logics of passing-as-if
within colonial and racial histories of middleman subject-formation, I focus on how this
dynamic poses danger for Women of Color coalitions when it manifests—however unwitting-
ly—in one’s efforts to forge cross-racial and cross-cultural feminist solidarity.

[Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 2010, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 1–31]
© 2010 by Smith College. All rights reserved.

1
 Incident #1: “It’s because you look Mexican.”

Shortly after 9/11, I had to fly into the St. Louis airport. After arriving in St.
Louis, I walked toward baggage claim thinking that I was home-free of all
security checkpoints. Then I heard, from across the hall, a man shouting at
me: “Are you from India? Pakistan? Iran?” I was then stopped and checked
yet again. When I recounted, in anger and frustration, this humiliating
experience to my mother, she responded, with sincerity and conviction,
that the reason I was being harassed so much is because I look Mexican.

Incident #2: “It’s complicated for Asian women.”

At a national Women of Color1 organizing meeting on law enforcement

violence, the facilitator began with an icebreaker. She asked each of us to
say our name and give one experience we each have had with law enforce-
ment violence. I panicked as not one incident came to mind. A woman of
East Asian descent went first. She explained that “issues of law enforce-
ment violence are complicated for Asian women” and then went on to tell a
story of police harassment that she experienced while driving with her
African American partner. I was next. I struggled for an anecdote and was
relieved when I remembered the incident at the St. Louis airport.

In this piece I aim to answer, but more importantly to weigh and consider,
the following set of questions: What does it mean to identify politically as
a Woman of Color? How does the model-minority racial project affect our
desires to identify as Women of Color? How does it affect our subject-for-
mation? Why do some of us both want to become Women of Color and fear
our legitimacy in that becoming? The anecdotes above exemplify the focus
of this piece. Why does my mother deny that “we” are racialized? That is,
why does she deny that we are thought to be inferior people? Why do I have
such an urgency to say, “Yes, yes we are racialized, and I can prove it!” and,
at the same time, feel that I cannot really prove it, that my own example is
flimsy? More importantly, what is the connection between my mother’s
denial of our being racialized and my own affirmation of it? Does the
relation between the racialization of Asian Americans and model-minority
identity provide the connection?

2 meridians 10:1
 Let’s begin by considering some of the uses and influence of the model-
minority racial project. According to Michael Omi and Howard Winant,
“racial projects” function as the “link” between cultural representations
and the institutionalized racial practices they seek to justify (Omi and
Winant 1994, 55–56). As such, the model-minority racial project affects
how people see one another as deserving or undeserving of the unequal
distribution of state resources. The goal of this racial project is the
fragmentation of cross-racial coalitional movement against white capital-
ist institutions. This is accomplished by portraying some people of color,
namely Asians, as “models” who then justify the poverty of so-called “bad”
or “real” racial minorities. African Americans serve as the hegemonic
representative of this “bad”/“real” minority in large part because they
figure prominently as a racial group that has demanded redress from the
U.S. government for systematic state abuse and denial of resources to their
communities. According to the model-minority narrative, “bad” cultural
values substitute for state-sponsored racism as the cause of poverty among
non-white peoples. Specifically, the model-minority racial project attri-
butes the economic success of certain Asian immigrant communities to
“superior” cultural values of hard work, discipline, and obedience to
authorities. The equation of economic success and “superior” cultural
values erases differing colonial and imperial histories. This includes the
forgetting of U.S., state-manipulated immigration patterns that funneled
some populations into middle-class professions while systematically
denying others a chance to move beyond survival (Prashad 2000).
Seduced by the contradictory praise of being members of a minority
group that is better than others, some Asian communities have negotiated
U.S. racism by taking up the logic of model-minority identity and the
historical amnesia on which it relies (Bhattacharjee 1998; Prashad 2000;
Purkayastha 2005; Dhingra 2007). This communal take-up of model-mi-
nority identity reinforces public perceptions of Asian peoples as unlikely
victims of racism or as suspicious comrades in coalitional struggle against
racial injustice. Leslie Bow (1995), Jid Lee (2002), and Mitsuye Yamada
(2002), among other Asian American feminist scholars, have addressed
how the model-minority discourse cultivates popular perceptions of Asian
American women as the least political among Women of Color and
provokes questions about the authority of Asian American women to speak
as Women of Color.

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 Notice that though the uses of model-minority identity help us under-
stand how Asian Americans can presuppose racism as they deny its
structuring of society, the “model minority” is a racialized identity. Such
uses also help us understand that others can perceive Asian American
women as not taking up the politics of race because of their interiorization
of model-minority identity. But, though relevant, none of the above
analyses aids in an understanding of the connection between my mother’s
denial of our racialization as “real” or “bad” minorities by the racial state
and my own urgency to illustrate ownership of that very racialization
within the Women of Color coalition. The reason for this, in my mind, lies
in answers to the earlier questions. Accordingly, this paper elaborates the
processes of (dis)association central to negotiating the tension between
model-minority racialization and political identification as a Woman of
Color. Specifically, I introduce the concept “passing-as-if” to describe the
desirous and anxiety-ridden adoption of counter-mainstream, revalorized,
racial identities among those people of color who must navigate ambigu-
ous racial inscriptions like “model minority.”

The “Model-Minority Subject”

Given the heterogeneity of “Asian American” identity and the homogeniz-

ing imperative of the model-minority myth, I want to clarify my use of the
term “model-minority subjects.” By “model-minority subjects” I mean an
ideological construction that enables us to explain some of the behavior of
flesh-and-blood people but that does not in itself describe flesh-and-blood
people. It references the idealized subject of the model-minority racial
project. Because the model-minority racial project is an ideological
construction, its idealized subject pushes and pulls flesh-and-blood people
in a racialized context. Specifically, it can pull Asian peoples to dwell in
their “ambiguous non-white” positions in the mainstream U.S. racial
hierarchy rather than clarify their stance as people of color in a white-
supremacist society (Kibria 1998, 70). This pull can result in a push within
Asian immigrant communities to uphold images that correspond to the
idealized model-minority subject. Such efforts can include erasing their
own historical ground of political struggle against colonialism and
racism, emphasizing upward socioeconomic mobility as a “cultural” value,

4 meridians 10:1
and insisting on the irrelevance of race as a significant barrier to integra-
tion in the mainstream organization of U.S. life.
The “push and pull” of the model-minority subject will differ in its
impact on the heterogeneous flesh-and-blood Asian peoples of different
immigration histories and classed locations in the United States. Those
Asian communities of the post-1965 immigration wave of middle-class
medical and technical professionals scattered across white suburbia will
negotiate the model-minority racial project differently from those residing
in working- or middle-class ethnic enclaves. In the latter case, one may
grow up surrounded by neighbors, stores, restaurants, markets, theaters,
and community organizations that center the concerns, languages, foods,
music, and other cultural productions of one’s ethnic background. This
can facilitate the development of a proud, non-dominant sense of one’s
racial-ethnic identity as distinct from majority white/Anglo culture. For
those with middle- or upper-middle-class socioeconomic standing
scattered across white suburbia, the economic capacity to invest in
model-minority racial ideology may lead some to see themselves as
non-minorities and thus as having more in common with educated,
middle-class, white/Anglos than with other racial-ethnic peoples (Kim
1999, 122; Dhingra 2007, 96). Under these circumstances, Asian Americans
may navigate racism without cultivating a strong oppositional racial
consciousness or a positive and robust ethno-national, communal, or
pan-ethnic identity.

Revalorized Racial Identities and the Politics of Women of Color

The cultivation of revalorized racial-ethnic identities in the United States is

a historical process of which the racial minority movements of the 1960s
are paramount. During this time, communities of color claimed new
collective racial identities signifying commitment to political struggle
against racial, colonial, and capitalist oppressions. The shift from “Mexi-
can American” to “Chicano” identity, the reclamation of black identity as
signifying “power” and “beauty,” and the internationalist, anti-racist, and
anti-imperialist adoption of the coalitional term “Asian American” are
prime examples of these new, revalorized, collective racial identities
otherwise reviled by mainstream America. Instead of state-sponsored, top-
down, abstract racial categories, the grassroots, organic cultivation of

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 “Chicano,” “Black,” and “Asian American” sought to “redefine and
recapture the specificity of their cultures” (Omi and Winant 1994, 105–09).
Specifically, these revalorized racial identities accompanied the develop-
ment of “resistant cultures” keen on articulating traditions, worldviews,
and definitions of economic justice and self-determination that countered
the dominant logic naturalizing their subordination in the mainstream.
Like the terms “Chicano/a” and “Asian American,” the historical
formation of the identity “Woman of Color” is not institutional; “Woman
of Color” is not a legal, racial, and gender census-category produced by the
state. Rather, the identity emerged through grassroots political movement.
Angela Davis traces this political movement back to the civil rights era
when Black, Latina, Asian, and Native women who were active in their
communities’ struggles for racial and economic justice also launched
internal critiques against masculinist leadership (Lowe 1997, 310). Their
challenges and critiques against the sexism within racial minority move-
ments paved the way toward the formation of Women of Color coalitional
politics (Women of Color Resource Center 2008, 8). The refusal to separate
sexual and gender liberation from the goal of racial and economic justice
defined these women’s political projects and, over time, became the
political commitment on which the identity “Woman of Color” is based.
Challenging claims that one can isolate gender violence from its
racialized context or racial violence from its gendered context, Women of
Color coalitional politics emphasizes the simultaneity and interdepen-
dence of multiple oppressions. With this shared understanding of the
workings of power, Women of Color politics rejects monolithic, abstract,
or homogeneous notions of identity politics that require erasure of
difference to prove solidarity. Instead, it posits the social, cultural, and
historical specificity of one’s location and embodied knowledge as crucial
in developing and mobilizing effective strategies to end violence against
women and their communities.
Those non-white women who belong to communities that have not been
part of the kind of historical revalorization processes described above may
lack counter-mainstream understandings of their racial-ethnic identities.
This predicament is not peculiar to those targeted by the model-minority
racial project, though they constitute the primary focus of this paper. In
terms of racialization, many women who are racialized as non-white do
not belong to groups that have collectively resisted racial oppression in the

6 meridians 10:1
United States or to any group with any sort of cohesiveness around racial
matters in the United States. These groups include South American
mestizos and U.S. Arabs before 9/11.2 Without any recognized group
resistance to oppressive racial identities in the United States, such peoples
frequently lack a sociality of resistance to institutional racism.3 For those
of us who do not want to climb the racial ladder, this lack of resistant
sociality induces existential and ontological anxieties. Without social
circles where one can be seen and validated as more than a racist construc-
tion, one may feel consumed by the “distorted image of white humanity”
imposed by the racist gaze (Lugones 2003, 160). Recognizing the depth of
assimilation to white/Anglo ways can thus leave one with a sense of self
that has been reduced to an image without substance or independence.
Exceeding this emptied sense of self cannot be an individual effort. Its
undoing requires being seen and recognized in one’s resistant construc-
tion by those deeply grounded in their own (Lugones 2003, 161). Accord-
ingly, it requires forging company with those who are fluent in community-
based strategies of non-dominant meaning-making.
Women of Color coalition lives in this creative impulse to share and
multiply resistant strategies against gendered dimensions of colonial,
racial, and global capitalist oppressions. Consequently, at the moment of
politicization, those of us lacking in this peopled sense of resistance may
consider identifying as Women of Color to be both an enticing and
anxiety-ridden possibility: enticing because it offers the possibility of
cultivating a non-dominant interiority and (inter)subjectivity in resistant
company, anxiety-ridden because one experiences a lack of credentials in
the absence of a revalorized racial-ethnic identity from which to forge
solidarity through and across difference. Because Women of Color
political formations reject an exclusionary logic of solidarity that empha-
sizes unity through sameness, one cannot identify as a Woman of Color
merely because one is not white. Yet for those Asian American women who
learned to navigate racism by inhabiting model-minority identity, their
ambiguous self-conception as “not-real” minorities may be the extent to
which they possess any semblance of a valorized racial-ethnic self.
Dependent on racial disaffiliation with other people of color, this “valo-
rized” sense of self is incompatible with Women of Color politics. Conse-
quently, for these Asian American women, the anxiety-ridden desire to
identify politically as Women of Color may emerge precisely from the

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 inability to articulate little more than an ambiguous and vacuous sense of
being not white. Navigating this conundrum becomes a delicate task with
significant consequences for cross-racial, feminist, coalition-building. It is
to this task that I now turn.

Passing-as-if

The Asian American lacking an articulate understanding of her racialized

experience may come to feminist consciousness without an interrogation
of her own racial-ethnic identity. The anthology Colonize This! Young Women
of Color on Today’s Feminism provides first-person accounts of young Women
of Color who struggle with the puzzle of their multiple identities in
relation to cross-racial, feminist, coalition-building. Take, for example,
Bhavana Mody’s reflection on her journey to political consciousness:

Although I was understanding more and more about gender and oppres-
sion regarding women’s issues, I still hadn’t come to terms with the
racism I experienced and my Indian-American identity. And because there
was no one to have shared experience with, I threw it on a back burner and
poked at it from time to time. (Mody 2002, 273; emphasis added)

Although Mody suggests that a lack of company contributes to this post-

politicization impulse to leave her racial-ethnic identity behind, an inability
to conceive of one’s racial-ethnic identity outside of its traitorous inscription
as “model minority” can also trigger this impulse. In the latter situation, the
very possibility of political company may impel the desire to jump out of
one’s skin and assume4 a revalorized racial-ethnic identity. I call this
desirous and anxiety-ridden move among people of color “passing-as-if.”
While “passing” is a vertical move that involves feigning an identity valo-
rized in the very construction of the social and social perception, “passing-
as-if” assumes an identity that is reviled by the mainstream but has gone
through a counter-mainstream revalorization process. Because passing
requires duping others into believing that one possesses an identity hege-
monic in its construction as “normal” (for example, white, middle-class,
heterosexual, Christian, and so on), the goal of passing is to be seen as
unmarked in one’s racial, class, sexual, or religious identity (Sánchez and
Schlossberg 2001, 5). To the contrary, “passing-as-if” relies less on hiding
identity markers stigmatized by the mainstream and more on adopting,

8 meridians 10:1
mimicking, and/or associating with those who inhabit them as revalorized
sources of oppositional consciousness and political credibility.
Passing-as-if emerges from the disorienting experience of being
racialized as inferior through ambiguous social inscriptions like “honor-
ary white,” all the while lacking a community that is invested in forging a
collective, non-dominant construction of one’s self. Accordingly, it is a
maneuver specific to people of color who lack a resistant sociality in the
face of U.S. racism. White/Anglos cannot pass-as-if, even when they want
to affiliate with racialized non-white groups. The experience of being
racialized as inferior without recourse to a collective revalorized identity is
a core aspect that motivates and guides this horizontal move. It cannot
translate to white/Anglo experience.
As an orientation toward the supportive political company of people of
color, passing-as-if does not demand sameness as much as a yielding
affiliation with those non-dominant others backed by resistant sociality.
The affiliation is “yielding” because she who passes-as-if remains ghostly
in the relations forged—embracing and trying on the ways of others
without engaging the dissonances experienced in the identification
process. She morphs from a distorted image of white humanity into a
distorted image of the non-dominant other with whom she desires
resistant company. Non-specific and ungrounded in her presence, she
adopts, mimics, and/or otherwise takes up the ways of others, often with
little self-critique or question. Otherwise stated, the pretense in passing-
as-if is not that there are no differences between oneself and those with
whom one seeks identification, but rather that these differences do not
matter for the purpose of making and sustaining resistant company. Given
the centrality of engaging difference in Women of Color politics, we can
begin to glimpse problems that passing-as-if can pose for building Women
of Color coalition. Before turning to these problems, however, let’s dwell
more on the motivations and processes involved in this maneuver.
Passing-as-if involves both a leaving-behind of one’s own racial-ethnic
identity and an emptying of the revalorized identity assumed. By “emptied”
and “emptying” I mean an erasure of complex historical, social, and
cultural specificities that contextualize and give meaning to these identi-
ties. Sunaina Maira discusses, for example, the ways that Indian American
youth in New York City take up oppositional black identity by temporarily
adopting characteristics of hip-hop style without engaging the specific

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 community struggles and politics from which hip-hop emerged. The
superficial take-up is both possible and evident because of the “emptying”
of the revalorized blackness given expression through hip-hop. Maira
explains, “These second-generation youth occupy a very different class and
racial location from most Black and Latino youth in New York City, but in
fashioning their own second-generation style they have adopted elements
of hip-hop, particularly the use of clothing, dialect, and musical bricolage”
(Maira 2002, 41). Yet these adoptions of hip-hop style do not correlate to a
critique of the systemic racial violence that grounds the revalorized
blackness expressed through hip-hop culture. Maira goes on to state that
many of these Indian American youth “seemed to accept, or perhaps
passively not to reject, the racial status quo” (66). They put on hip-hop style
to articulate a resistant, non-white, Indian American racial identity but do
not engage hip-hop as a way of living in critique of the racial status quo.
Revalorized black identity is thus emptied of its historical, cultural, and
social complexities by the Indian American youth who mimic its style in a
performance of “ethnic ‘cool’” (41).
As I mentioned above, the Indian American youth in Maira’s study use
this emulation of hip-hop style to create a distinct, second-generation,
racial, Indian American identity. A revalorized black identity is thus
emptied of its interiority to enable the revalorized “filling” of another
group’s racial-ethnic identity. Because a desire to jump out of one’s skin
motivates passing-as-if, the “emptying-to-fill” formulation does not follow
in the emulations and associations enacted by “passing-as-if.” That is, the
assumption of emptied, revalorized identities in passing-as-if is not
accompanied by the formation of a new, collective, hybrid identity.
Passing-as-if cannot be a collective performance. The individual who
enacts the strategy often distances herself from her racial-ethnic commu-
nity-of-place. If the Indian American youth in Maira’s study were passing-as-
if black, their orientation toward hip-hop style would have accompanied a
turn away from their Indian American identities. Indian Americanness—
resigned to model-minority inscriptions—would be left behind as one
“jumps” into a blackness divested of interiority. The jump leaves one with
little ground for creative self-transformations since it erases the possibili-
ties of becoming more than a distorted copy—neither Indian American nor
black. Passing-as-if thus entails the ghostly inhabitation of emptied,
revalorized identities, which is to say, both identities (one’s own and the

10 meridians 10:1
one adopted) are shorn of social, historical, and cultural complexities.
Now that we have a sense of how passing-as-if functions in response to
desires for a revalorized racial-ethnic identity, let’s turn to its enactment as
a tool for navigating political company in Women of Color coalition.

Passing-as-if a Woman of Color

Because “Woman of Color” names a commitment to coalitional politics, it

is a misguided object of passing-as-if. Recognizing a “Woman of Color” is
impossible since one can never presume a person’s political commitment
on sight. It is with this understanding that Chandra Mohanty and M.
Jacqui Alexander state, “We were not born women of color. We became
women of color” (Alexander and Mohanty 1997, xiv). For Alexander and
Mohanty, the “becoming woman of color” is a resistant becoming against
the oppressive social-institutional and cultural-communal scripts that
erase, dehumanize, or otherwise subordinate those classified as both
“non-white” and “woman.” Becoming a Woman of Color in this sense is
neither oppressive (for example, through internalization of oppression)
nor depoliticized (for example, as a mere description of one’s social
location). In other words, one cannot claim Woman of Color identity
merely on the basis of being legally categorized as “non-white” and
“woman” or on the basis of suffering the oppressions such categorization
enacts. Instead, Mohanty and Alexander use this formulation to suggest
that identification as a Woman of Color is inseparable from one’s political
commitment to a process of constant becoming against the many and complex
manifestations of dominant power.
Nevertheless, Woman of Color identity may be especially appealing for
the politicized woman who is racialized as inferior and who lacks resistant
sociality. Why? The affirmation of difference and multiplicity within the
coalitional identity complicates the formation of criteria for authenticity
and legitimacy tests among group members. Emphasizing political
commitment over a particular racial-ethnic presentation, Women of Color
coalition can seem an especially promising place for someone who
politically desires resistant company and orients toward self-transforma-
tion, yet who remains illegible and inarticulate in her resistant, racial-
ethnic self. Consider, for example, the following statements by Women of
Color meditating on their attraction to cross-racial feminist coalition:

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 Coming together under broad identities like ‘people of color’ or
‘queergirlofcolor’ brought together folks who’d been at war with each
other for centuries and didn’t necessarily want to just stop. We thought
everything would be all chill and problem-free, because we’d all been on
the edges of the same meetings bitching about the same dumb white
folks and SWGs (silly white girls). (Piepzna-Samarasinha 2002, 10–12)

I call myself a woman of color before I call myself an Asian American. It

reflects how I have come to see myself and how I understand my own
identity. The term ‘woman of color’ seems broadly inviting and inclusive
while ‘Asian American’ feels rigid and exclusive. (Hurdis 2002, 285)

As the words of the Women of Color quoted above suggest, the attraction to
identities like “women of color” can be based on the false scripting of
“Women of Color” as an emptied identity, inclusive yet inattentive to the
relations among the heterogeneous gendered, raced, classed, sexed, sexual,
cultural, historical, and national localities occupied by those involved. What
may seem ideal is the perceived ability to participate in coalition while
evading the difficult work of self-transformation through questioning and
critique of one’s ambiguous racial-ethnic locus in relation to others.
The assumption of identity that occurs in passing-as-if a woman of color
can take several different routes. These can include adopting the language,
etiquette, fashion, gestures, and perspectives of the non-dominant others
with whom one seeks company, mimicking some of these characteristics
in efforts to get close to and/or seek the approval of these non-dominant
others, or doing neither yet still affiliating with the group as someone who
does not have her own community-of-place. I have traveled one or more of
these routes in my attempts to become a Woman of Color. Along the way, I
have recognized other women in positions similar to mine—unsure in
their identities of color yet desiring resistant sociality. I have felt a connec-
tion to them that would have to remain unexplored in my attempts to
pass-as-if a Woman of Color. The need to secure solid ground as one who
belongs often resulted in committing acts of betrayal to those also on the
margins. These acts of betrayal would be manifested in an avoidance of
their company in the presence of “core” folks5 and a dismissal or suspicion
of their political perspectives in the coalition. I participated in placing a
question mark on their own belonging within the coalition even as I
remained susceptible to such questioning and judgments of inadequacy.

12 meridians 10:1
Furthermore, my fear of jeopardizing the company of those I perceived as
“core” Women of Color resulted in uncritical support of them, even when
the critiques of them by “non-core” members were politically just, gener-
ous, and important to the work we were doing together.
True to Women of Color politics, my political companions generously
called me to account for these betrayals. In the painful process of becom-
ing a Woman of Color, I began to think about and discuss this maneuver,
often with the company of those I had hurt. The following fictionalized
vignettes are informed by these collective reflections and experiences. I
present them to better illustrate the motivations, logic, and consequences
of passing-as-if a woman of color.

Passing-as-if Route 1: Careful Adoption

Alice, a nineteen-year-old Korean American woman, adopted and raised by a white,

middle-class couple in Iowa, grew up with little sense of her Korean heritage or the
term “Asian American.” After taking women’s and ethnic studies courses at a
university in California, she became politicized about issues of racism, U.S. imperial-
ism, and gender violence, igniting a desire to become more solid in her identity as a
non-white woman. She attended Korean Student Association meetings only to feel
disappointed by the lack of political focus and alienated in her lack of cultural
knowledge and Korean language skills. Consequently, Alice migrated to the company
of non-Asian women of color—most of whom were Chicanas from Los Angeles. They
invited her to join a new Women of Color political group on campus. Excited by the
invitation to identify, yet unsettled by her newness to “Woman of Color” identity,”
Alice clung to her Chicana friends. She found herself deeply attracted to their
non-Anglo, non-middle-class style of dressing and speaking, their ability to code-
switch, speaking English inflected with Spanish phrases, each language shaped by the
cadence and rhythms of the other. The weightiness of their collective pride in being
Chicana and the possibilities of identifying as a Woman of Color evoked a yearning in
Alice to undo her fluency in white/Anglo ways. As she spent time with her friends, she
practiced their ways of speaking, learned to use slang appropriately, adjusted her
wardrobe and mannerisms in ways that resembled her Chicana compañeras, often
with their guidance. She took classes on Chicana/o literature and history, spent
vacation time with her friends, and became well-acquainted with their communities.
Her studied adoption of their ways of being and speaking led to a few cases of
“mistaken identity” as strangers assumed she was of some Latin descent—Chino

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 Cubano? Such incidents pleased Alice immensely, and she often hesitated to correct the
assumption. In the Women of Color coalition she began to feel assured in her
proximity to her Chicana friends and was careful to distance herself from other Asian
Americans and liminal members in the group. Although vocal on many organiza-
tional issues, Alice became less involved in tasks that required speaking from her own
racial-ethnic experience.

Passing-as-if Route 2: Mimicry

Naomi is a middle-class Indian American who grew up in a white suburb of Dallas.

Her parents often proudly narrated the myth that South Asians are the true Aryans
and instilled in her a strong sense that she was “American” just like her white/Anglo
neighbors and schoolmates. Successful in school and economically capable of fitting in
with her peers, Naomi nevertheless developed a distaste for her white/Anglo neighbors
and classmates who treated brown-skinned people with disdain while reassuring
Naomi that they didn’t really consider her a minority. Her growing desire to
dissociate from white/Anglo folks and develop a positive sense of her non-whiteness
found expression in college when she read This Bridge Called My Back and learned
of the political identification “Woman of Color.” The term seemed to articulate her
ambiguous sense of gendered and racial-ethnic non-whiteness and to justify her felt
affinity with the black and Latina women on campus in spite of their different social
and class locations. She started a Women of Color group on campus with a Latina
friend. Incapable of reconciling the home-grown narratives of her South Asianness
with her Woman of Color political sensibilities, Naomi evaded any attempts to reread
and reconsider her particular classed South Asianness in relation to the other women
with whom she worked in coalition. Instead, she mimicked some of the ways of her
black and Latina companions in an effort to embody a legible, collective, resistant
style. She learned to greet with fist bumps, incorporated certain curse words as terms
of endearment, tried to adjust her language so that “sister” becomes “sistah,” and
worked hard to hang out with those most solid in these performances of what she
considered to be “fly diva” resistance. Naomi, however, remained conscious of her own
performance as bordering on ridiculous, awkward, sometimes exaggerated, and
always tentative in her efforts to feel “inside” the Women of Color group. This caused
Naomi to invest a lot in being seen with those she considered “core” to Women of Color
identity while dismissing members of the group who, like her, lacked a more solid
sense of their identities of color.

14 meridians 10:1
Passing-as-if Route 3: Absent Participation

Nikki is half white and half Thai, from a middle-class, suburban community in
upstate New York. As she learned about issues of social injustice in college, she
struggled to understand how to position herself in relation to the term “people of
color.” Clear that she did not grow up with the racial violence that other racialized
people have endured, in part because of her light skin and her class status, Nikki
decided that it’s better to think of herself as an “ally” rather than a person of color. Yet
when she was invited to join a political Women of Color organization, she agreed to
attend—curious and hopeful about the possibility of identifying. As she developed
investment in the group and its politics, Nikki became one of the most responsible and
committed members. She was significantly involved in events—often taking notes,
facilitating discussion, and taking care of logistics. Nevertheless, Nikki rarely
contributed to discussions from her perspective and was often the one silent person in
heated discussions or the volunteer when there was not enough time to get to everyone
during a self-reflexive exercise. She was reluctant to share much of her life with the
collective in fear that they would have judged her “too white,” “too heterosexual,” “too
middle-class.”

In all three cases, “Women of Color” became a means of reconciling the

ambiguity of one’s racialized experience and the desire for a revalorized,
racial-ethnic, gendered self. The reconciliation, however, relied too much
on an evacuation of one’s locus,6 and consequently, an evacuation of the
complex relationality on which Women of Color political solidarity and
action is based. Alice, Naomi, and Nikki avoided opportunities to interro-
gate their own location in relation to the Women of Color with whom they
sought resistant sociality. As a result, their middle-class, Asian identities
were surrendered to their model-minority inscriptions as “foreign,”
“apolitical,” and “honorary white.” The impetus to disappear in the
borrowing of revalorized identity markers erased the historical, conten-
tious, and ongoing process of the revalorization, thereby presuming these
identities as fixed in their status as always-already politically transgressive
against oppressive logics.
Alice’s pleasure in the mistaken assumption that she must be part
Latina, for example, is evidence of this orientation to dwell in an emptied
racial-ethnic self. Her identification with Chicanas was loving and ground-
ed in an intimate knowing of their histories and ways of being. However,

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 to the extent that she participated in Women of Color coalition or Chicana
community struggles as an ambiguous interloper, she betrayed the
complexities that form the ground of her own path to political conscious-
ness and those of her compañeras. What are the historical and political
trajectories of white/Anglo U.S. adoption of Korean babies? How do they
relate to U.S. imperialism and militarism? Are there connections between
these revelations of systemic domination and those experienced by Alice’s
Chicana friends? How did Alice’s distinct racialized, gendered experience
facilitate a proclivity for cross-racial feminist solidarity that could benefit
the larger people-of-color coalitional movement? Such questions remain
unasked and unanswered when one seeks to pass-as-if. In other words, it is
not the cross-racial identification or inhabitation of other revalorized
identities that is in itself problematic; rather, the danger lies in the resigna-
tion and reduction of these identities to racist inscriptions as “fake,” “real,”
“model-minority,” or “apolitical.”
Naomi’s mimicry is distinct from Alice’s careful adoption of revalorized
racial-ethnic identity markers. It is not informed by insertion within the
specific communities from which the oppositional style emerges and gains
meaning. Surface-level assumptions and perceptions of who and what
counts as real Women of Color guide the performance. The “real” in such
instances remains filtered through hegemonic social perception and thus
is defined primarily through one’s distance from dominant white/Anglo
cultural scripts. This imagining of real people of color empties them of
their interiority and turns them into stereotypes. Hence the exaggerated
and awkward inhabitation of the characteristics adopted. Her mimicry
bordered on caricatured adaptation—informed by mainstream commodi-
fication—of the motility, clothing, attitude, language cadence, slang, and
street knowledge that have come to signify collective empowerment and
resistance among those racialized as real or bad minorities. Naomi’s
mimicry, like Alice’s careful adoption of Chicana ways, communicated a
desire to identify and be identified with those she imitated. In this regard,
the mimicry did not aim to ridicule those mimicked as much as it caused
the mimic herself to feel ridiculous in her attempts to belong. Naomi
mitigated this risk of ridicule by seeking the attention, approval, and
company of those she mimicked while keeping careful distance from those
who, like her, were less sure in their identities of color.

16 meridians 10:1
 Finally, the route of “absent participation” does not involve adoption or
mimicry of revalorized identity markers. In many ways, Nikki’s perfor-
mance of passing-as-if may seem the least problematic. Her avoidance of
speaking from her own locus or of interrogating her relation to the other
women in the group could be understood as an admirable de-centering of
the self in coalitional work. She was, after all, a committed and responsible
member advancing the work in the coalition. Yet Nikki remained ghostly
in her presence, avoiding opportunities to redefine her lived experiences in
the advancement of coalitional politics, careful to guard her self from
exposure. The fear of judgment led to the evasion of opportunities to
explore her initial decision to identify more as an ally of people of color
rather than to claim the identity herself. Did she maintain this sense of
being a “helper” to the “less fortunate” in her participation within the
coalition? She may have been attentive to others—associating with them,
spending time with them, responding and responsible to them—but was
never really “with” them in the sense that she remained absent in her
specificity. She rarely asked questions, she never voiced critiques, and she
presented no political traction for the ideas of her companions. Woman of
Color identity thus became an empty identity into which she disappeared
even as she coveted the resistant sociality it provided.
I consider these strategic routes of passing-as-if woman of color with an
understanding of the pressure exerted by the model-minority racial project
to prevent solidarity across multiple categories of difference. The existen-
tial and ontological anxieties that induce this phenomenon are conse-
quences of living realities permeated by racist and colonialist logics. In the
United States, people of color and immigrants of color must navigate these
logics to survive and to maintain an affirming sense of self against
constant degradation. These navigations can lead to collective movement
against injustice, but they can also lead to an investment in the myths that
one’s people are indeed culturally and racially superior to other subordi-
nated groups. Regardless of the direction, the navigation is most success-
ful when one has social backup.
“Women of Color” names a coalitional politics that directly addresses
this need for collective movement against oppression. The collective
politics it names refuses any homogenizing standards or criteria. Because
of its expansive attention to complexity, Women of Color coalition can be
both an appealing and demanding political commitment. The imperative

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 to address a wide range of issues and particular struggles is inviting in its
inclusiveness. Yet the invitation of Women of Color politics does not stop at
inclusion of disparate peoples and issues. Rather, it demands the contextu-
alization of local struggles within larger frameworks that highlight
relations of complicity with, and transgression against, the structural and
interpersonal oppression of others. Becoming a Woman of Color, there-
fore, must include confronting the myths internalized about one’s self in
relation to others and vice versa (Alexander 2005, 269). How, for example,
has the model-minority myth trained Asian Americans to see other people
of color as deserving of their violent circumstances? How has it shaped
Latina and Black women’s perceptions of Asian Americans as always
middle-class, apolitical foreigners?
Such confrontations open new possibilities for strategizing against
divide-and-conquer logics, but they may also make visible the painful ways
in which one has been complicit in the oppressions of others. Conscious-
ness of these modes of complicity becomes a mobilizing force toward
more effective strategies for liberation when they are understood as
historically and structurally produced and thus capable of transformation.
The aim is never to dwell in guilt or shame, but rather to make conscious
and to articulate that which has paralyzed our radical imaginations and
thwarted coalitional efforts to live violence-free lives. Because passing-as-
if a woman of color resigns one’s racial-ethnic identity to “model-minori-
ty,” “whitewashed,” or otherwise traitorous inscriptions, it contributes to
this paralysis of imagination. Exposing the historical production of
maneuvers that structure passing-as-if can help clarify its entanglement
with dominant logics and dismantle the assumptions on which the
strategy depends.

Passing-as-if: Colonial and Racial Legacies

Although passing-as-if is a horizontal move toward resistant sociality, the

colonial and racialized contexts in which it emerges as a viable strategy
impacts the logic on which the maneuver relies. Given this, one must ask
how the phenomenon of “emptied identities” functions to secure colonial
white-supremacist and global-capitalist power structures? How is the
phenomenon itself induced by the institutionalized logics of colonial
mimicry and model-minority racial projects, among other middleman

18 meridians 10:1
ideologies? A brief exploration of these questions will help map the
connection between model-minority subject-formation and the impetus to
pass-as-if woman of color.
Upward racial affiliation in white-supremacist colonial/racial contexts
necessitates the mimicry of white/Anglo cultural norms. The institutional-
ization of whiteness as an unspoken criterion for socioeconomic mobility
seduces people of color toward this vertical move, making it neither
voluntary nor inescapable (Koshy 2001, 156). This seduction masks and
protects white power structures through the production of middleman
minorities. Denied the self-determining power of whiteness yet able to
access some of its privileges, these racial groups buffer the white-suprem-
acist power structure from mass protest by enabling the facade that racial
barriers are not as rigid or real as they may seem.
The racial production of middleman subjects has a long history of
serving colonial projects that extend beyond the geopolitical borders of the
United States. Accordingly, I situate Homi Bhabha’s “mimic man” as a
historical relative of the U.S. “model minority” to remember the processes
and conditions that prepare the ground for immigrant negotiations with
U.S. racial projects. Bhabha’s citation of British colonial Thomas Macaulay
is particularly useful in clarifying what the mimic man was to be in the
colonial imagination: “a class of interpreters between us and the millions
whom we govern—a class of persons Indian in blood and colour [sic], but
English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect” (Bhabha 1994,
87). As intermediary racial groups, “mimic men” and “model minorities”
are defined in terms of self-negation. The “mimic man” is a non-Indian
Indian—“almost the same, but not white”—while the “model minority” is
often represented as “proxy White” or the “minority that does not act like
one” (Bhabha 1994, 89; Kim 1999, 120–22). Bhabha’s theorization of
“colonial mimicry” opens avenues for conceiving the endurance of colonial
legacies in shaping transnational migrations and racial negotiations in
new geopolitical “home” places. It thus provides greater tools with which
to dismantle racist notions that Asians are biologically or culturally
disposed to be the “model minority.” If we consider colonial mimicry as
one of many colonial legacies that prepared certain U.S. Asian immigrants
to take up the model-minority myth, we are in a better position to inter-
vene in the institutionalized forgetting that enables the persistent take-up
of damaging racial projects within immigrant communities of color as

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 well as the assumptions on which passing-as-if relies. More specifically, we
can locate the historical production of emptied identities in the vertical
move of assimilation to the horizontal move of passing-as-if.

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As mentioned earlier, passing-as-if relies on the pretense that differences
do not matter in the forging and sustaining of resistant company. This
pretense is equally important in the vertical process of colonial mimicry.
What is actually produced through colonial mimicry is not sameness as
much as what Bhabha calls “authorized versions of otherness” (Bhabha
1994, 88). These “authorized versions of otherness” are produced and sanc-
tioned by the colonizer according to his desires and needs. The colonized
Indian who becomes a “mimic man” remains “Indian in blood and colour
but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect” (Bhabha
1994, 87). Racially, then, the colonized could never be rid of their subordi-
nate difference, yet they could approximate the colonizer’s “superior”
ways. Colonial mimics thus live in a state of ambivalence and ambiguity,
seduced into being like that which they can never actually become and to
devalue that which they are consigned to be. In other words, the mimic
man is seduced into being a self-negating Indian—a non-Indian Indian
whose non-Indianness is produced through mimicry of the white/Anglo
colonizer and whose Indianness, consequently, becomes an “authorized
version of otherness” precisely because it is produced as non-Indian.
Tanya Luhrmann writes of this seduction into colonial mimicry as she
considers those positioned to become mimic men in British India:

The great promise of the white man’s curtained power was that it
seemed to have a threshold over which the educated, the well-born, and
the successful could pass. And because of this implied advantage, those
who saw themselves as the most eligible were perhaps less likely to see
the invisible barriers of racial difference, less likely to feel outrage on
the part of fellow natives, more prone to dream of the just achievement
of their desires to be “as-if” Englishmen, for it is not unnatural to see
the world in the way that seems to suit you best. (Luhrmann 1996, 4)

The Parsis of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Bombay articulated this

desire to be as-if Englishmen largely through their claim to racial distinc-
tion: their non-Indian Persian origins. Parsis escaped an Islamic Persia in

20 meridians 10:1
the tenth century C.E. and adopted Gujarat, a western state of India, as
their new home. Popular folklore has it that the king of Gujarat granted the
Parsis stay in his kingdom on the promise that they keep to themselves and
not attempt to convert others to their religion (Rogers 1993, 290). This
promise—to keep to themselves—became a key strategy for Parsi advance-
ment. Open to adaptation and committed to a self-preserving indifference
in relation to their fellow Indians, Parsis were primed to serve British
interests “as a kind of bridge between the other Indians and the Europe-
ans” (Luhrmann 1994, 339). Parsi approximation to the British colonizer
was inextricably tied to “the assertion of distance from non-Parsi Indian
communities.” These non-Parsi Indian communities were understood to
be the exact opposite of the Parsi: “barbaric, uncivilized, non-rational,
dark-skinned, and essentially different in their constitution” (Luhrmann
1994, 339). The non-Indianness of the non-Indian Indian (Parsi) thus
gained meaning not only through the upward racial affiliation with the
British but also through the downward racial disaffiliation with fellow
colonized Indians.
In this regard, one can surmise that the emptied selves of middleman
subjects facilitated a divide-and-conquer colonial strategy. Confined to
exist within the terms of “authorized versions of otherness,” the mimic
man struggles to see himself outside the colonizing gaze and becomes
adept at becoming what others (want to) see in him. If the mimic man
cannot see himself or others outside the colonial imagination, then
conceiving of positive change through affiliation with those racialized as
inferior becomes unlikely. As such, the mimic man is incapable of deep,
horizontal relations of solidarity.
Bhabha exposes this as an intended consequence of colonial mimicry by
referencing Charles Grant’s “Observations on the State of Society among
the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain,” an influential, nineteenth-century
text on Indian manners and morals. In it, Bhabha tells us, Grant insisted
on the importance of devising a strategic form of colonial subject-forma-
tion that involved a partial reform of Indian manners along Christian lines
but only insofar as this reform facilitated breaks in solidarity along caste
lines and did not lead Indians to believe themselves entitled to rebel
against English authority. “Grant suggests a ‘partial reform’ [that] will
produce an empty form of the ‘imitation [my emphasis] of English man-
ners’” (Bhabha 1994, 87). Empty imitation implies a zombified subject

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 whose movements and beliefs are scripted by and for those in power.
Present through what he disavows, the mimic man is perpetually banned
from full identification with the colonized and the colonizer. The “empti-
ness” of this imitation is what leads Bhabha to claim that “[m]imicry
conceals no presence or identity behind its mask” (Bhabha 1994, 88). In
other words, there is no hidden Indian self behind the imitation of English
manners; rather, the Indian identity itself is constituted through its empty
imitation of English manners.

#FDPNJOH
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The self-negating mimicry of white/Anglo norms takes on a new dimension
in the post-civil-rights-era United States. Whereas the colonial context of
British India made explicit the racialized boundary between colonized
Indians and British colonizers, in the post-civil-rights-era United States, the
manifestation of what many have called the “new racism” (Omi and Winant
1994; Collins 2004) relies on a hegemonic discourse of a falsely inclusive
“America,” to which all U.S.-citizen men and women can equally belong
regardless of racial classification. The nation-state’s struggle to “find a racial
logic capable of circumventing the imperative of equality established by the
Fourteenth Amendment” shaped the historical development of this racial
discourse (Ngai 2004, 9). Crucial to this logic was a shift from biological
notions of race superiority to an emphasis on cultural differences whereby
ethnicity and race became uncoupled for Euro-Americans and conflated for
those of Mexican and Asian ancestry. The separation of whiteness from
European ethnicity exposes the empty constitution of white racial identity
that, in turn, facilitates its conflation with an all-inclusive “America.”
According to this logic, those who were of European origin possessed
ethnicities amenable to “American” (read: white) ideals, while those with
national origins racialized as non-white would forever be labeled foreign and
incapable of assimilation (Ngai 2004, 7–8). If white is a racial prerequisite
for citizenship, and one’s national origins are racialized as non-white, then
becoming “American” is an impossible task.
Hailed as a color-blind meritocracy, this white-supremacist America
nevertheless denies racial barriers to national inclusion. The popular
discourse that anyone can achieve the “American Dream” so long as they
work hard seduces immigrants of color to negate their racial-ethnic
identity as a means of becoming “American just like everybody else.” The

22 meridians 10:1
seduction is facilitated by the negative formulation of white racial identity.
After examining federal court cases filed in the early part of the twentieth
century by people hoping to legally establish their whiteness and thus their
right to naturalize as U.S. citizens, Ian Haney Lopez concludes:

[T]he courts defined ‘white’ through a process of negation, systemati-

cally identifying who was non-White. Thus, from Ah Yup to Thind, the
courts established not so much the parameters of Whiteness as the
non-Whiteness of Chinese, South Asians, and so on. . . . In this rela-
tional system, the prerequisite cases show that Whites are those not
constructed as non-White. (Lopez 1996, 27 emphasis added)

If whiteness is that which is not non-white, then immigrants racialized as

non-white, seduced by the promise of a falsely inclusive and color-blind
America, must assimilate through processes of self-negation—becoming
non-Mexican Mexicans, non-Indian Indians, non-Korean Koreans, and so
on. The illusory base of the seduction is evidenced by the fact that one
remains “Mexican,” “Korean,” “Indian,” “minority,” or “foreign” even after
the processes of negating one’s racial-ethnic self in a mimicry of white/
Anglo ways. Nevertheless, in a racial context where whiteness is coded as
the unmarked norm of society, inclusion in that society may seem less
impossible. Whereas the mimic man was never promised entry into British
identity, the “model minority” is subject to the illusion that s/he can
become “American just like white/Anglos.”
The empty identity “American” becomes a means for avoiding articula-
tion of one’s contradictory status as a non-minority minority. For example,
elders in my middle-class Indian immigrant community often insist on
defining their children’s racial-ethnic identity as “American,” advising
them to check “other,” instead of “Asian,” on school applications. Simi-
larly, my mother’s suggestion that my experience of racism was a case of
“mistaken” identity implies that we have achieved the unmarked status of
“being American just like white/Anglos.” Who “we” are in terms of
racial-ethnic identity remains unclear in my mother’s response; however,
our distance from “Mexicans” entitles us to honorary white status. The
logic of her response thus echoes the negative formulation of white racial
identity as that which is not non-white. In other words, my mother insists
that we are beyond suspicion by the police state because we are not Mexican
(not-non-white).

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 We are now in a good position to respond to the question: What is the
connection between model-minority subject-formation and passing-as-if a
woman of color? Colonial and racial legacies prepare certain Asian peoples
to negotiate racial barriers through a disavowal of their racial-ethnic
backgrounds. As a middleman ideology, the model-minority ideology
seduces an evacuation of one’s cultural and historical specificities in an
assimilation to white/Anglo ways. Because a negation of non-whiteness
(itself conflated with regions of the non-European world) defines white
racial identity, then being a “model” minority means participating in this
negation of one’s own racial-ethnic self while remaining consigned to non-
white racial categorization. The emptied racial-ethnic identity produced in
one’s negotiations with U.S. racism serves as the impetus to pass-as-if a
woman of color. That is, post-politicization, one may desire to jump out of
one’s emptied racial-ethnic identity and into one that is historically and
collectively revalorized. The practice of negating one’s racial-ethnic
identity is honed in one’s efforts to disappear in the falsely inclusive
“American” identity. The logic and skill involved in passing-as-if a woman
of color are thus prepared in one’s previous negotiations with the model-
minority racial project. Understanding this practice as seduced by colonial
and racial projects exposes its existence as a renewal mechanism of power
that can be unlearned.

Conclusion

Understanding passing-as-if as a modality of model-minority identity

exposes multiple avenues for advancing progressive feminist politics at
both the intellectual and praxical level. I have elaborated its logic with an
eye toward the specific and insidious obstacles it presents for some in their
earnest efforts at collective self-transformation in Women of Color
coalition. Articulation of and critical (self-)reflection on these obstacles
enables the production of effective strategies to work through them.
Because passing-as-if a woman of color relies on distortions of Women of
Color coalitional identity and impacts the processes of forging solidarity
with others in the coalition, strategies that address its manifestation will
impact the health of all those involved in cross-racial, feminist organizing.
Moreover, tracing the emotional struggles and political contradictions
involved in one’s move from passing-as-if to becoming a Woman of Color

24 meridians 10:1
highlights the treacherous terrain of collective self-transformation against
the dominant hierarchical binary logic of “sameness” and “difference.”
Maneuvering through this terrain requires constant attention to one’s
relations with others and a self-reflexivity that does not dwell in guilt or
shame. In this vein, I have attempted a theorization of passing-as-if a
woman of color to provide conceptual tools and vocabulary that facilitate
Women of Color political commitments to challenge those ways of
knowing and being that are problematical yet most familiar to us.
We can see how passing-as-if can be used to clarify and enhance
strategies for coalition-building by revisiting the Women of Color meeting
recounted at the beginning of this paper. Given that passing-as-if a woman
of color requires an emptying of Women of Color coalitional identity where
inclusion depends on one’s institutionally inscribed distance from white/
Anglo culture (as not-white), some models of Women of Color coalitional
organizing can play a part in fueling its manifestation. Anti-violence
feminist activist Andrea Smith, for example, warns against models of
Women of Color organizing that assume shared victimization in the face
of multiple oppressions. Instead, she advocates for a model that takes into
account distinct ways different communities of color have suffered
oppression. “This way,” she argues, “our alliances would not be based
solely on shared victimization, but where we are complicit in the victimiza-
tion of others” (Smith 2006, 69). We can understand the perils of basing
Women of Color politics solely on shared victimization by revisiting the
Women of Color meeting described earlier. When the facilitator opened
the meeting with an icebreaker intended to demonstrate shared victimiza-
tion in the face of law enforcement agents, there was an implied assump-
tion that our alliance as Women of Color at this meeting would be based on
that shared victimization.7 Consequently, the icebreaker created an
atmosphere where those who could not offer evidence of suffering this
particular kind of violence might fear being read as somehow not “real”
Women of Color in that coalitional space. This partially explains my
feelings of panic at not being able to remember any such incident of
violence and then of relief when I finally could. It also explains why the
woman of East Asian descent qualified her own account with a statement
of how issues of law enforcement violence are complicated for Asian
women. The assumption of shared victimization foreclosed any consider-
ation of this “complication.” The account she did provide thus scripted her

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 as “real” in that space only through her relation to her African American
partner. Divide-and-conquer racial logics that pit African Americans as
“real” minorities against Asian Americans as “fake” or “model” minorities
congealed in spite of our desires for cross-racial feminist coalition.
As Andrea Smith advocates for models of Women of Color organizing
that account for the ways we are complicit in the oppression of others, I
add that such accountability must include commitment to community
transformation, even when that community inhabits and upholds legacies
of colonial mimicry and the model-minority myth. Understanding the
histories of one’s complicity in the oppression of others and the contradic-
tions they have produced within communities of color enables the produc-
tion of alliances that account for multiple and historically specific oppres-
sions. Moreover, they provide avenues for reconceiving one’s located
racial-ethnic differences against the grain of domination. When we dwell
in, rather than dismiss, those contradictions that render us nonsensical or
inarticulate, we may be able to sense remnants of forgotten or distorted
histories that allow us to understand ourselves against the forces of social
fragmentation.
I could, for example, hear in my mother’s response to the incident of
racial profiling a desire to understand herself in positive terms without
having to devalue other people. Unearthing such desires can move us to
ask: What are the histories of struggle, of the anti-colonial warriors of
one’s community emptied from one’s sense of self in the efforts to become
American? Distancing ourselves from our specific racial-ethnic communi-
ties in efforts to forge deep coalitions denies the possibility of redefining
our differences against the authorized versions of otherness that continue
to divide us. We must therefore turn to this task of redefining ourselves,
our cultures—in non-dominant relation—if we are to realize the “potential
alliances and collaborations across divisive boundaries” so boldly imag-
ined by Women of Color and U.S. Third World feminism (Mohanty 1991, 4).

"DLOPXMFEHNFOUT
I owe a debt of gratitude to María Lugones for the innumerable and invaluable
conversations over the years that enabled this piece to come to fruition. For
reading and providing helpful comments on early drafts, I thank Michele Janette,
Ernesto Martinez, Alison Bailey, Manuel Chavez, C. Tushabe, Mariana Ortega,
Cricket Keating, and the anonymous reviewers at Meridians. Finally, thank you to

26 meridians 10:1
all the Women of Color with whom I have worked and grown personally and
politically over the years.

/PUFT
1. I capitalize the term “Women of Color” to indicate its political, organic meaning
derived by feminists of color and to distinguish it from its use as a racial and
gender descriptor (applicable to all non-white women).
2. I want to clarify that by “South American mestizos” I am referring to U.S.
immigrants of South American descent who claim some indigenous heritage.
Unlike Chicanos/as or Puerto Ricans, they do not belong to racial-ethnic groups
with revalorized, U.S. racial identities born of participation in collective political
movement against racism in the United States (Oboler 1995). Also, I do not mean
to suggest that Arab Americans did not endure racist violence or participate in
collective political resistance as Arabs prior to 9/11. However, many scholars
have noted how 9/11 marked a new collective “visibility” of Arab Americans as an
aggrieved and counter-mainstream U.S. racial-ethnic minority group (Jamal and
Naber 2008).
3. After coming to political racial and gender consciousness, an inability to
disentangle one’s racial-ethnic identity from its model-minority racialization (as
“apolitical” “honorary white,” or “not of the U.S.A.”) can thwart participation in
collective processes of articulating one’s experiences as a U.S. racial minority.
This predicament contrasts with the biracial women of African descent in
France Winddance Twine’s ethnographic study, “Brown-Skinned White Girls,”
who forge a “white cultural identity” while growing up in predominantly white,
middle-class suburbs. When they are called to identify as “black” upon entering
college, they struggle with the dissonance between their “white cultural
identity” and their “black social identity.” However, the women in Twine’s study
immediately and explicitly associate “black” identity with “fighting for equality”
and the use of terms like “sistah” to signal a collective political sociality among
black peoples (Twine 1997, 234–35). In other words, their class privilege and
social isolation from communities of color does not lead to the same kind of
political isolation that can manifest for those whose racial-ethnic group is not
widely recognized as an aggrieved (and/or politically resistant) U.S. community
of color.
4. I purposefully choose the verb “assume” to describe the actions involved in
passing-as-if as a maneuver for political company. The Oxford English Dictionary
lists the following meanings of the verb “assume:” to adopt, to use, to take into
the body, to take upon oneself, put on (a garb, aspect, or character), to invest
oneself with (an attribute), to take as being one’s own, to arrogate, pretend to,
claim, take for granted, to take to oneself in appearance only, to pretend to
possess; to simulate, to suppose. To “assume” a revalorized racial-ethnic
identity in passing-as-if is to suppose and take for granted the identity as

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 always-already possessed of an oppositional politics, to arrogate this opposi-
tional meaning to oneself for the purpose of nourishing a desire for a resistant
racial-ethnic self-construction, to simulate aspects or attributes of the identity,
thus emptying it of its historical, social, and cultural complexities, to take the
identity as being one’s own without sufficient interrogation of one’s own
historical connections to the identification assumed. The assumption can be as
minimal as not questioning one’s relations to those with whom one assumes
affiliation and as maximal as mimicking or carefully adopting their style.
5. María Lugones describes “core” people of color as inhabiting revalorized racial
identities with a surefootedness that is shored up by deep, unquestionable ties to
one’s own community (Lugones 2003, 151–64).
6. I use the term “locus” as developed by Walter Mignolo (1995). Departing from
the work of Michel Foucault, Mignolo defines “locus of enunciation” as the
institutional sites, histories of peopled interaction, affiliation, and negotiation,
and the embodied social-political inscriptions of race, gender, sexuality, class,
and colonial histories that shape how we come to know what we know and how
we come to understand and speak the present. Accordingly, the “evacuation of
one’s locus” refers to the forgetting—enforced by the model-minority racial
project—of these social, personal, historical, and institutional affiliations and
interactions that shape one’s contradictory sense of self in relation to differently
located others.
7. Law enforcement violence is a term used by Anannya Bhattacharjee to describe
“violence and the abuse of authority by the full range of law enforcement agencies”
(Bhattacharjee 2002, 2). These agencies include: “local and state police agencies,
prison systems at the local, state, and federal levels, the United States Border Patrol
and interior enforcement agents of the Immigration and Naturalization Services
(INS), and, most recently, the rapidly expanding INS detention system” (1).
Historically, these agencies have enforced structural racism in its myriad forms and
therefore have impacted the lives of all of us who identify as Women of Color. The
fact that we were all sitting in that room speaking English and not other languages
is itself an example of how law enforcement violence has impacted our lives as
Women of Color. Nevertheless, the icebreaker asked for an experience with law
enforcement violence, and it translated more like a request for discrete encounters
with law enforcement agents rather than consciousness of the violence perpetuated
by them on one’s reality. I also want to clarify that I am not dismissing the
importance of breaking the silence around violence in the lives of women of color. I
do think, however, that it is a task for which careful preparation is needed.

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