Yellow Peril, Black Power

Abstract

Through a study of African American and Chinese American populations in New York City, Yellow Peril, Black Power argues that crime can be a form of mutual aid—a set of practices around which people collaborate to secure resources, protection, social mobility, and political power. Relations between Asian American and African American populations are often caricatured as being merely hostile, a model minority versus a historically exploited group, respectively. Meanwhile, Black and Asian solidarity has also become a popular rallying cry since the murder of George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin and increased incidents of anti-Asian violence in response to the Covid-19 pandemic sparked Black Lives Matter and Stop Asian Hate protests in 2020. In discussions of policing, mass incarceration, petty crimes, property destruction, and hate crimes, the categories of “crime” and “criminal” and the affects they inspire have become central to how people understand the barriers to and possibilities of Black and Asian solidarity. This dissertation explores how the designation of certain practices as criminal has created tensions among these populations, particularly around different experiences of race and gender and different relationships to law and policing. However, it also shows how Black and Chinese populations have worked together to develop practices of mutual aid to mitigate these tensions and help to build lasting solidarities in the absence of or in opposition to the state and its resources and protection. There are many other places one could look to try to understand African American and Asian American solidarities, but I argue that the lens of crime helps to bring certain dynamics into focus. First, the kind of improvisation that criminal activity often requires can help to foster pragmatic, everyday collaborations between groups that might generally hold strong prejudices against each other in the service of a shared goal. Second, particularly for Black and Chinese populations that have historically been stereotyped as criminal in the US, exploring criminality can also help to make collaborations legible in media, like hip hop and film. This study also focuses on forms of crime that are more widely accepted or tolerated by broader populations. The suppression of crime is normatively understood as synonymous with public safety, yet the commonsense approaches that populations targeted for violence or neglected by the state develop to defend their communities are often criminalized. Crime is often associated with the desperation of the lower class or the greed of the upper class, which marks crime as “deviant” behavior. Yet, as I explore in this dissertation, people from a variety of class backgrounds undertake criminal acts of mutual aid, protest, defense, and resource acquisition in service of a range of political projects. In other words, my research reveals that people are always committing crimes and that, contrary to the norms of mainstream sociology and normative theories of criminology, crime is not an exceptional even or a rare breach in the social fabric.