Asian and Latinx Anti-Blackness in Schools and Communities: Complicated Stories of Complicity and Resistance interrogates one of the most pressing issues shaping ongoing realities around race in the United States and across the globe. The U.S. 2020 Census reminds us that as the United States is becoming increasingly racially and ethnically diverse, it is more urgent than ever to understand what the economy, U.S. policies, and humanity are fundamentally built and reliant on: "scientific" construction of racial difference, racialization, hierarchy, Blackness, and fearmongering around miscegenation (racial mixing) that condemns proximity to Blackness (Hrabovsky, 2013). Although Asian and Latinx communities have long experienced racism, racialization, and exclusion, they also occupy complex and shifting positions within a racial hierarchy that often grants proximity to whiteness while simultaneously reinforcing anti-Blackness. Asian and Latinx Anti-Blackness in Schools and Communities: Complicated Stories of Complicity and Resistance examines these tensions and offers a unique interdisciplinary opportunity to place Asian and Latinx anti-Blackness in direct conversation within schools and community contexts. Racial hierarchy positions non-white and non-Black communities as 'honorary whites,' employing anti-human tactics to complicate solidarity and coalition. Our globalized society ignores centuries of racial divisions and hierarchies and actively extinguishes healing around race by perpetual systems of anti-Blackness. Kim (2023) illuminates the positioning of Asian Americans as insider-outsider, triangulated between white people and Black people. Similarly, due to the history of Latinx being seen as a "racial group" in the U.S., despite the privileges granted to those who are light-skinned (European origin) Latinx people, they are still likely to experience identity-related oppressions in the U.S. (Casey, 2020; Go?mez, 2018). Authors Brittany Aronson and Hannah Stohry draw on their research and experience to examine in depth how racial marginalization and complicity within anti-Black systems can coexist. Within Asian and Latinx Anti-Blackness in Schools and Communities: Complicated Stories of Complicity and Resistance, the authors examine how anti-Blackness positions Black and endarkened bodies as disposable within racial hierarchies, while simultaneously recognizing and affirming the humanity of all people of color, including multiracial individuals. Rejecting an either/or framework, the text instead embraces a both/and perspective that acknowledges the realities of racism experienced by Asian and Latinx communities while critically examining how privilege, proximity to whiteness, and anti-Blackness operate within these same communities. Throughout the book, white supremacy is understood as the overarching enemy that produces and sustains these dynamics, while the authors recognize how privilege exists within their Asian and Latinx communities. This interdisciplinary work seeks to elicit scholars from fields of education, social work, ethnic studies, psychology, sociology, cultural studies, women and gender students, and more to share empirical research, narratives, autoethnographies, stories, illustrating anti-Blackness. In Asian and Latinx Anti-Blackness in Schools and Communities: Complicated Stories of Complicity and Resistance, the authors introduce anti-Blackness as a theoretical concept and elucidate this alongside the positionings of the Latinx and Asian communities, along with their communities' historical and contemporary connections to anti-Blackness. Asian and Latinx Anti-Blackness in Schools and Communities: Complicated Stories of Complicity and Resistance emphasizes implications for solidarity among the Latinx and Asian communities (and all people of color) in such a concerted effort to assert existence, transformation, healing, and responsibility to address oppressive, unjust anti-Black systems.
