thisisnotjapan Originally from thisisnotjapan
Asked by Anonymous

Becuase asian people, especially east asians are sometimes viewed in better light than other POC, can this be called asian privilege?

No.

Privilege is NOT like hit points in a video game! Treating it that way just reproduces hierarchical white-dominated racial scales. It’s connected to institutional power and is culturally and historically contingent. Even white privilege is historically contingent in that it didn’t really exist before 1500 or so.

Some East Asians whose parents immigrated with a lot of social capital have advantages in life and a higher class position, others emphatically do not. This piece by Andrea Smith on the three pillars of white supremacy is a much more helpful way of framing the issue than video-game-style privilege calculation.

Someone who looks visibly East Asian in the US gets the benefit of positive stereotypes only in that racist institutions and people think, “they’re not like those other minorities”… most often, “not black”. So it’s really more of a kind of non-black privilege, if you use the framework of privilege at all. The privilege we get can be (and is) withdrawn by white people all the time. It’s nothing like white privilege.

Posted on April 15, 2014 with 165 notes
  1. kittiekami reblogged this from valentinesclown
  2. mushroominc reblogged this from bhuttu
  3. sannascomfortplace reblogged this from bhuttu
  4. magiclesbian-blog reblogged this from bhuttu
  5. jelimore reblogged this from bhuttu
  6. bhuttu reblogged this from queerqueerspawn
  7. queerqueerspawn reblogged this from whatyoucanovercome
  8. artificerdivine reblogged this from rabbityshen