ilovemybrowngirl-archive:

The answer to this question depends on where you live and a whole host of other factors! This is why being “Asian” as a racial concept is so nebulous – Asia is the largest continent in the world and it spans numerous countries, languages, indigenous groups vs. settler groups, social and economic classes, religions, cultures, and ethnic groups, so it’s really difficult to answer this question simply or universally. 

In terms of living in the US and Western diaspora Asian groups more generally, of course there is no hierarchy among Asians, as in x group of Asians is higher than y group of Asians. I definitely don’t think East Asians have “East Asian” privilege in the US or other western/white-majority countries. 

Hierarchy has to be analyzed through class and through other lenses, such as ethnic hegemony, religious hegemony, casteism, shadeism/colorism, and nationality. So Asian-Americans obtain material privilege based on those things. But again that’s something that affects all Asians, including diaspora Asians, and it’s by no means limited to diaspora East Asians. 

In the actual continent of Asia this question obviously becomes murkier. Obviously again there are local systems of ethnic/religious/class/caste supremacy and hegemony – such as Hindutva in India and caste throughout South Asia, or Han Chauvinism in China and Japanese nationalism in Japan, or reactionary Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka and Myanmar (as well as reactionary Zen Buddhist nationalism in Japan). 

But there are also hierarchies generated by nationalist sentiment between regions of Asia. In the oil-rich Gulf Arab nations (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, etc), you’ll notice that Arab supremacy exists. And those countries oppress and brutalize Southeast Asian, South Asian, and African migrant workers. There was a controversy recently surrounding this Qatari female celebrity who said that Filipino domestic workers don’t deserve higher pay or something like that, which is just one of the many examples of Arab supremacy. So you can see that as a sort of “Asian hierarchy” – within the wealthiest Arab nations there exists that “Sunni Arabs are at the top” system. 

East Asian countries do systemically discriminate against Southeast Asian people. This is well documented and ongoing. I think perhaps the best example of this is Japanese imperialism. It didn’t just affect China or Korea – it affected multiple Southeast Asian countries as well. And as I pointed out with the discourse regarding Crazy Rich Asians, Singapore might be located in Southeast Asia but the dominant ethnic group there are Han Chinese people who do have privilege over and oppress the indigenous Malay population as well as Tamil immigrants. And so that is an example of “East Asian” privilege over South and Southeast Asians. 

Within South Asia there is of course a hierarchy as well. There were concentration camps where Chinese immigrants were placed, in like Rajasthan for example, stemming from India’s historical rivalry with China. There are many Indians who have an anti-Sino bias and who refuse to identify as Asian because they want to distance themselves from Chinese people. 

And even between South and Southeast Asians there are tensions – Myanmar is currently enacting genocide against its minority Rohingya Muslim population, but something that people are forgetting is that a lot of what drives this genocide is ethnic, and not just religious tension. Like a lot of Burmese Buddhists claim that the Rohingya are “illegal Bengalis” who should be sent back to Bangladesh. So clearly that anti-Bangladeshi sentiment exists and it’s part and parcel to the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims in Burma/Myanmar. 

Plus within Asia you have various countries supporting local ethnic cleansing/genocide. There are numerous examples of these diplomatic relationships that aid and enable genocide/ethnic cleansing. I won’t get into them here but I’m sure you can research them on your own time!

The thing is though that within the United States, at least, what we have here is the discursive construction of “Asian-American” identity still being dominated by East Asian identities, issues, and cultures. And East Asians themselves do contribute to this. 

I feel like any time a South or Southeast Asian person attempts to point this out, East Asians shout us down. No, we aren’t claiming that East Asians are White Lite ™ or that all of them are pale/light-skinned (but the fact is that pale/light-skinned East Asians themselves deliberately erase the existence of brown/dark-skinned East Asians and South/Southeast Asians didn’t invent that problem). No, we aren’t erasing or downplaying the violent oppression East Asians have faced and continue to face at the hands of white supremacy. No we aren’t saying that East Asians have “East Asian privilege” and that they have the power white people do over us. No, we aren’t forgetting about the problems with colorism and imperialism and other things within our own cultures. 

But it is interesting to me that East Asians have this reaction every time we even bring this up. They sound like indignant upper caste Indians who say “but racism!!” every time someone points out that they have caste privilege. 

And the thing is that this does actually harm South/Southeast Asians. Like I said, there is still a lack of linguistic-specific and cultural-specific resources for South/Southeast Asians because so many people still think that we “aren’t actually Asian” (or in the case of Southeast Asians, that they’re actually just the “browner” versions of East Asians). It does harm us when East Asians universalize Asian-American identity as solely being located within East Asian categories. 

People don’t approach this topic with the nuance it deserves and it frustrates me. I’ve done a lot of research on my own time about this because it’s one of my main interests within my political science major so I’m obviously not expecting people to know all of this information, but at the very least people should have the common sense to understand that this issue is complicated.