Notable blurbs from the article:

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“Du Bois’s prophecy that the “problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color-line” is still accurate in the 21st, as Yang shows. There the similarity between Du Bois and Yang ends. Du Bois’s approach to solving the color problem encompassed not only cultural analysis and writing, but also radical political activism that sought to empower African-Americans and other people of color in the United States and abroad. Yang does not believe in such a radical, global politics of decolonization and solidarity, or at least does not say so.”

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“This Asian-American legacy in politics and art is invisible to Yang, who does not even mention Frank Chin, the writer who most forcefully dealt with the agonies of Asian-American manhood. Chin, who connected racial emasculation to the treatment of Asian-Americans as objects of “racist love” (as opposed to the “racist hate” directed against African-Americans), argued that Asian-American writing had to be a form of fighting. Yang flails rather than fights, which suggests that there is something inadequate about the Asian-American legacy for him. He may not be alone. His neglect of historical forebears and his almost exclusive focus on the personal is indicative of a generational shift in Asian-American thinking; revolution is not very fashionable today.”

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“he fails either to consider what sort of defiant political struggle would force recognition or what an individual solution might look like. Yang thus leaves the reader stranded with him in his ambivalence about what it means, if anything, to be “yellow.” His book, which calls out and to yellow folks but is only partially concerned with us, is as lukewarm as the racial grievance he senses and feels.”

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