Chao, David Chi‐Ya. “Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism by JonathanTran (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), Xxvii + 368 Pp.” Modern Theology, vol. 39, no. 3, 17 Apr. 2023, pp. 557–560, https://doi.org/10.1111/moth.12866.
Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism by Jonathan Tran (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), xxvii + 368 pp.
In the last few years, we have seen an increase in the representation of Asians and Asian Americans in popular culture with movies such as Crazy Rich Asians, Parasite, and Everything Everywhere All at Once, the rise of the StopAAPIHate antiracist movement, as well as the greater inclusion of Asian American studies in K-12 educational curricula. It is a good time to be an Asian American—or is it? During the height of the pandemic, I would remark to my students in the Asian American theology course that I taught, “We are seeing a significant increase in Asian representation on the silver screen but anti-Asian hate continues unabated in US society.” Such is the precarity of Asian American life. It is this precarity that Jonathan Tran so ably addresses in Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism by telling two extended stories about Asian American Christians. Tran upholds the faith and practice of ordinary Asian American Christians to probe our understanding of race in the US and asks difficult and sometimes uncomfortable questions about our antiracist efforts—efforts that often marginalize those already marginalized by racism. A major thrust of the book is that Asian Americans do not fit the White-Black racial binary in the US and, rather than expanding our racial categories to include Asian Americans, we ought to reconsider these very racial categories in light of the political economy that generated their justificatory function in the first place.
Tran’s Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism is a work in constructive Christian theology that presents two competing scripts on race for life on this planet. The first is characterized by racial capitalism, where the dynamics of use, identity, and justification facilitate the domination and exploitation of the “have-nots” by the “haves.” Tran uses the Christian doctrine of sin to characterize this kind of political economy as the privation of God’s deep political economy in creation and salvation (16, 275). The alternative vision to the fallen political economy of racial capitalism is the dynamics of participation, revelation, and reparation in and through God’s deep economy. Methodologically, Tran advances claims about both complicity with racial capitalism’s dominative exploitation as well as liberation from it, and he does this through careful ethnographic and oral historical work (see the “Note on Method,” xviii–xxi). Over the course of the book, Tran brings social scientific methods to bear on theological ends by centering the faith and practice of two ordinary Asian American Christian communities.
The book is composed of two extended case study analyses. Part One (23–150) of the book focuses on the Delta Chinese during the mid-twentieth century to show, among other things, one Chinese community’s complicated complicity in the aftermarket effects of racial capitalism’s racial stratification in the “most Southern place on earth” (4). Part Two (151–292) offers an alternative account through description of the people, ministries, and institutions associated with Redeemer Community Church during the early twenty-first century. Redeemer is a mostly Asian American church in Bayview Hunters Point whose Christian discipleship leads this ecclesial community to resist the aftermarket effects of racial capitalism’s social stratification within the San Francisco ecosystem. In Part One, Tran draws upon Black Marxist analysis of racial capitalism’s commodifying effects, and in Part Two he articulates resistance to racial capitalism through a liberative appropriation of Christianity’s doctrines, moral psychology, and social formation.
While showcasing a broad and nuanced grasp of the leading works on race in Asian American studies, Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism is not narrowly or simply a book in Asian American studies. The book employs Asian American religious life to make an intervention in antiracism discourse and practice. Tran uses two case studies of Asian American Christians to illuminate the shortcomings of what he calls “identarian antiracism” (see Introduction). For Tran, identarian antiracism reigns as the orthodox view in public and academic discourses on race (4). Identarian antiracism takes racial concepts and categories as “self-interpreting” (6n17), imagines racial identity to the exclusion of the political economy that produced it (7, 10), and naturalizes racial identity that is created by racial capitalism (116), thus masking the material systems and processes that produced racial identity. For Tran, any number of pernicious effects follow from identarian antiracism, race ranking being one of them and the continuation of racist systems among the others. If these material structures create and endow racial categories with their meaning and power, then using racial categories and focusing primarily on racist beliefs (7, 78) without due attention to this material history allows the structures and systems to escape scrutiny and resistance (10). By focusing on racial identity at the expense of political economy, Tran argues, we cannot effectively overcome racism (13).
Tran is not post-racial (10) but contrasts two alternative modes of analysis: identarian and political-economic. The latter plays the conceptual hero in the book’s narrative arc and is inspired by the Black Marxist tradition (see 8n21). One of the signal semantic and conceptual contributions of the work is that Tran foregrounds how racial concepts gain explanatory purchase through political-economic structures and theologizes an antiracist pathway forward. That pathway in this work, however, must go through a critical assessment of Asian American life.
In Part One about the Delta Chinese, capitalism and racism are internally related, with the latter providing justification for the former. In the founding moment of chattel slavery in the US and its aftermarket effects, capitalist exploitation of workers produced racial distinctions to justify the exploitation (69–70). Tran names this dynamic as use-identity-justification: racialized bodies are bodies commodified for use, and capitalism commodifies in order to extract maximum profit for those who own capital. The racialized commodification justifies its exploitative use (74). Tran is not interested simply in better racial representation and inclusion, because these forms of antiracism often leave unaddressed (and thus inadvertently repeat) the race ranking produced by racial capitalism. Rather than focus on how Asian Americans suffer microaggressions or from systemic Whiteness, Tran trains our attention on political-economic histories (51–59).
The historical case of the Delta Chinese illuminates this reality through their grocery market stores that service primarily Black customers in a White-controlled political economy (68). The Delta Chinese cannot escape the aftermarket effects of chattel slavery in the racial capitalism of the US South (86–87). In the moral and political analysis of Part One, the Delta Chinese exploited their African American customers (145). (Notably, this kind of moral and political description cannot be achieved through identarian explanation.) Aftermarkets do not ignore systemic inequalities but take advantage of them (81), and Christianity played an important role in the complicity of the Delta Chinese with racial capitalism. When Christianity and its theology are silent on race and political economy, Christianity ends up supporting racial capitalism (97–99). Christianity that is abstract will let racial capitalism have its way (154–55).
Part Two features Redeemer Community Church in Bayview Hunters Point, a historically marginalized and underserved part of San Francisco. With the second case study of the book centered upon Redeemer Community Church, Asian American Christians perform a counter script and imagine something different from complicity in dominative exploitation (157). Redeemer is a church composed in part by InterVarsity Asian American alumni from neighboring Stanford and Cal who move to Bayview Hunters Point with the conviction that Christian discipleship should take political economy seriously (158–72).
Throughout Part Two, Christianity plays an essential role in antiracism. God’s deep economy is an alternative idiom to racial capitalism (193). “Against racial capitalism’s use-identity-justification dynamic, deep economy catalyzes a more fundamental dynamic, participation-revelation-reparation” (211). Tran’s antiracist vision, depicted by Redeemer Community Church, is driven by the biblically narrated, triune economy of God’s saving grace in Christ (207–11). God allows creatures meaningful participation in this divine economy through the Holy Spirit. Tran narrates this sanctification and Christian discipleship through the ecclesial practices of Redeemer Community Church and its programs, ministries, and relationships. Participation in God’s economy is the alternative to commodifying use for dominative exploitation.
For example, Dayspring is a technology company that does website design, brand design, software development, and nonprofit consulting and was initially funded by the same people who started Redeemer Community Church. Dayspring’s faith-based practices include “radical economic sharing and redistribution, divested wealth, just labor practices, and personal liberation” (211). Through the witness of Redeemer Community Church and its affiliates (such as Dayspring), Christianity provides the moral formation and “forms of life” that Marxism does not (19, 293). Redeemer was part of God’s deep economy in Bayview Hunters Point that was “developing Asian American Christians for social justice” (233). The call of Christian discipleship beckons dispossession of the racial capitalist dynamic of use, identity, and justification for the costly and joyful dynamic of participation, revelation, and reparation of God’s creation (238–39).
In a book on race, antiracism, and Asian Americans, there is a perplexing ambiguity on the central issue of racial identity. Does Tran rehabilitate racial identity or argue for its abolition? The book imagines both. On the one hand, Tran can be taken as arguing for the abolition of racial identity because of the racial capitalist use-identity-justification scheme that created racial identities and perpetuates their meaning and power in aftermarket opportunities of dominative exploitation. See, for example, statements such as these: “Embracing racial identities that come downstream from racialization amounts to an intimate embrace of the political economy that produced them” (10), or when Tran says that “racial identity remains wedded to racial capitalism” (11), or that race cannot be separated from the “zero-sum political economy that produced it” (28). In other words, in these cases, using concepts like racial identity recapitulates the racial capitalist processes that created the concepts in the first place. Embracing talk of racial identity is tantamount to endorsing the racial capitalism that produced them; therefore, we should not use race concepts.
On the other hand, Tran can be taken as offering a deflationary account of racial identity, one that denudes the racial concepts of their naturalized, self-explanatory excesses and rehabilitates them for liberative use. Tran, for example, talks about calling time on racial capitalism through participation in deep economy that reorients these racial concepts for alternative ends (see 19, 211). On this deflationary account, we can retain the use of racial identity if we simply understand the meaning and power of these concepts in terms of political economy (13). Racial categories can be rehabilitated for an alternative political-economic vision—a vision of justice and mercy through participation, revelation, and reparation via God’s deep economy. Redeemer Community Church is an extended illustration of how this rehabilitated use might work.
What I take to be the root of this tension running throughout the book is whether the conceptual content of racial identity is fixed by its natal moments in racial capitalism (and its aftermarket effects) or whether that conceptual content can be determined by other circumstances and ends of use. One could frame this tension as that between the Marxist and Christian theological frameworks found in Parts One and Two of the book respectively. Tran can be taken to argue for the abolition of racial identity because racial identity is indelibly determined in its content by the originating moment of chattel slavery and its aftermarket effects (the Marxist hermeneutic). Tran can be taken to argue for a deflationary account and rehabilitated use of racial identity if certain racialized Christians imagine and do otherwise according to divine deep economy (the Christian hermeneutic). Those who want to retain a deflationary account of racial identity will think that the material histories overdetermine Tran’s account of racial identity (against his pragmatic insights about concept use). Those who are pessimistic about Christianity’s ability to reshape racialized creatures for lives of dispossession and liberative ends will think that the material histories underdetermine his account of liberation.
Another way to frame this tension about racial identity is by asking the theological question: Will humans be racialized in the eschaton? Are our resurrected bodies racial bodies? Indeed, what would it mean to answer these questions? Perhaps it is helpful that Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism does not resolve this eschatological tension for us. It puts the burden back on its readers to continue the conversation about the utility and ends of talking about racial identity.
For the rigor of argumentation, innovative use of empirical methods for theological ends, incisive moral assessment of the complexities of Asian American life, and theological vision for antiracist Christian discipleship, I consider Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism to be a field-defining contribution to works on race and Christian theology as well as the study of Asian American religion and theology.
