Mixing anecdotes, legal cases, and journalistic reporting, a leading voice in America's Asian community tackles what it means to be Asian American in contemporary America.
Writing in the tradition of W. E. B. Du Bois, Cornel West, and others who confronted the color line of the twentieth century, journalist, scholar, and activist Frank H. Wu offers a unique perspective on how changing ideas of racial identity will affect race relations in the twenty-first century. Wu examines affirmative action, globalization, immigration, and other controversial contemporary issues through the lens of the Asian-American experience. Mixing personal anecdotes, legal cases, and journalistic reporting, Wu confronts damaging Asian-American stereotypes such as the model minority and the perpetual foreigner. By offering new ways of thinking about race in American society, Wu's work dares us to make good on our great democratic experiment.