Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism Quotes

“Antiracism entails two fundamental tasks: first, diminishing racialization’s ability to facilitate domination, which involves deflating identarian (racist and antiracist) modes of analysis, and, second, displacing exploitation as the basis of political economy, which involves highlighting alternative idioms by which political economy is imagined.”
― Jonathan Tran, Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism

“Marxism, like Christianity, calls for collective revolutionary action but, given its ambivalence about ethical life, too often lacks the determinate forms of life necessary to get revolution off the ground.”
― Jonathan Tran, Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism

“For Christianity, a genuinely political economy—where individual desire and communal flourishing serve one another—shares patterns of common life built into the divine economy. It only requires the ecclesia to make good on what the 'called out ones' already claim as true.”
― Jonathan Tran, Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism

“The horror comes in the fact that slavers knew full well that slaves were human (for those with eyes to see, nothing could be clearer) and yet enslaved them. This reminds us that the various rationales given for chattel slavery had little to do with the ontological status of enslaved persons, and everything to do with the inhumanity of enslavers.”
― Jonathan Tran, Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism

“Christian theology . . . envisions creaturely existence in terms of depth, ever-deepening—involving, revolving, evolving—participation in the divine life as the consummation of creaturely longing.”
― Jonathan Tran, Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism

“Racism and racial capitalism—epitomized but not exhausted by white supremacist Christian religion—are distortions of God’s kingdom and economy, rejections of divine rule and divine desire.”
― Jonathan Tran, Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism

“Whatever else it might be in its various forms, religion names a structure of valuation predicated on the absolute value of God and the relative value of creatures, an infinite relationship of exchange between the one and the many.”
― Jonathan Tran, Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism

“Identarianism’s individualizing approach will not do. If we hope to succeed, we will need others.”
― Jonathan Tran, Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism

“Just as race narrows what counts as suffering, so it narrows pathways for shared forms of life. When identity precedes liberative politics, it too often precludes it.”
― Jonathan Tran, Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism

“In my approach, each racialized person counts the same, as racialized and therefore commodified. There is not in this approach some conceptually privileged racialized group (some uncommodified racial group), either on account of access to power or proximity to suffering. To be racialized just is to be commodified.”
― Jonathan Tran, Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism

“Relying, as identarianism increasingly does, on vague concepts like “whiteness” (i.e., that which determines history without answering to it) might be rhetorically useful, but it will not in the end get us very far.”
― Jonathan Tran, Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism

“Deracialization, not postracialism, should be the goal.”
― Jonathan Tran, Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism

“Decades of serious thinking about race teach us two things. First, we have every reason to question the view of race as a natural kind, the case for which has shown itself to be fatally flawed. Second, we have little reason to question the racializing effects of racial capitalism, the evidence for which is all those structures and systems racially categorizing people in order to facilitate dominative exploitation.”
― Jonathan Tran, Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism

“Instead of an approach to racism that emphasizes racial identity front to back, my approach foregrounds the political economy by which racial identity came to matter at all.”
― Jonathan Tran, Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism

“Identarian antiracism is an approach to racism that begins and ends with racial identity, prioritizing (white) racial identity as racism’s starting point and championing (non-white) racial identity as antiracism’s end game. In the academy and beyond, identarian antiracism is the dominant approach to race and racism. Its dominance rises to the level of established doctrine.”
― Jonathan Tran, Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism

“Approaching race through political economy will not get at everything that racism is, and does, but it gets at what can be managed, and in the last resort lived.”
― Jonathan Tran, Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism

“Over time, however, it became harder to ignore suspicions that the way we talk about race and racism, where so much is given to racial identity, is problematic, that there is something off about the idea that who I am reduces to what I am racially.”
― Jonathan Tran, Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism

“Structural and systemic inequalities make it clear that African Americans live, and have continuously lived, in perpetual pandemic conditions, an obviously monstrous reality save for the fact that in America black lives are given to mattering less.”
― Jonathan Tran, Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism