Chapter 6
Jonathan Tran, Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism (Preface, Note on Method, Introduction, Postscript: Beyond Marxism)
Tran’s work begins with the question of race and the COVID-19 pandemic.
That particular moment alongside the rest of Tran’s life experiences as an Asian American have made him deeply suspicious of the idea of racial identity as a basis for common life and for cross-racial solidarity. He argues that the work of anti-racism has taken on too much of the baggage of race.
Tran instead searches for something “beyond the Scylla of postracialism and the Charybdis of doubling down on racial identity” (xvii). For this, he turns to the political economy.
With deft interdisciplinarity, Tran submits a case study of Asian Americans as a racial category to highlight the limits of the concept of race. He argues that this category conceptually marginalized Asian Americans in a Black-White binary and that the category itself explains very little about Asian Americans. Instead, our politics must attend to historical and material contexts that can better explain what racism is, how it works, and what liberation entails.
Racism and racial capitalism are distortions of God’s kingdom and economy.
Thus, Tran argues that theology can show us how race creates a justifying discourse, such that the exploiter can think well of his own actions.
Tran’s theological work can help us imagine a world otherwise. The second half of his book explores a case study in which this new economy of Christ may be effectively exemplified. But is it tenable? Can it be enacted elsewhere?
In other words, is there really something within the Christian tradition that is capable of overturning the brokenness of this world and reshaping our relationships with one another? If revolution is the church simply being the church, what should the church be?
