Minor Feelings: a Reckoning on Race and the Asian Condition

A white man who has attended a racial awareness seminar feeds Hong a line that is dominant in the American popular imagination when he tells her that “Asians are next in line to be white” (18). The man assumes that these so-called “model immigrants,” many of whom seem to embody the American Dream and achieve economic success on a par with the white people who hoard most of the country’s wealth, are becoming so like them that soon the racial distinction between the two groups will be irrelevant (14). For this man, whiteness, the privileged position in the racial hierarchy has less to do with the color of skin and more with economic and social advantages over other races. Hong cannot agree with him. While she acknowledges that some Asians have amassed similar levels of wealth to white people and that the predicament of low self-esteem amongst Asians “is on the way out with my generation,” other factors such as Asians’ relative invisibility in the American media and the microaggressions they face on a daily basis mean that their lived experience does not resemble that of white people (10).

Hong has experienced the contradiction of being privileged enough to enter the same spaces as white people, while not enjoying the same advantages in her career as a poet.