7 February 2008
I don’t think it will be news to anyone who knows me that I found this latest op-ed piece by Joan Walsh at Salon in which she tries to make sense of “Asian” support for Hillary Rodham Clinton more than somewhat frustrating.
Ms. Walsh has shown an annoying tendency to jump immediately to simplistic notions of race, class and/or gender in order to bring some sort of taxanomic order to what is actually a relatively complex array of factors used by voters to select the candidate of their choice.
Her discussion of “Asians” is a case in point. As with the rest of the punditocracy (interestingly, Walsh does not seem to believe she is a part of this group), Walsh engages in lazy generalizations which I believe end up obscuring more than they illuminate. As someone who has studied Asian diaspora cultures professionally for almost two decades, I’d like to make a number of points.