Original Research Articles Black-Asian Solidarities and the Impasses of “How-To” Anti-racisms By Elizabeth Hanna Rubio Abstract During the 2020 summer of global uprisings in defense of Black life, widely circulated anti-racist reading lists created heightened demand for books that promised to teach readers how to examine their internalized racism. Situated in U.S. racial liberalism’s extensive literary genealogy, anti-racist “how-to” literature has historically swooped in during moments of heightened racialized confusion to restore narratives of American exceptionalism. This literature sustains the tenuous promise that racism is something that one can challenge in interpersonal relationships and by following specifc steps toward individualized behavior correction. Building on a broader body of work that has critiqued liberal anti-racisms for detracting from abolitionst struggles against racialized injustice, this article specifcally frames the limitations that “how-to anti-racisms” place on transgressive multiracial coalition building. Through ethnographic analysis of discourses and practices that move through various sites of contemporary Black-Asian American activist encounters, I build on Black and radical women of color feminist theorizations of solidarity to show how “how-tos” destabilize coalition building by overdetermining resolutions to confict. I argue that in “settling” anti-racism into a repertoire of predetermined steps, how-to-ism constrains the contradiction, anger, and uncertainty that is fundamental to forging the radical accountability central to abolitionist work. Keywords: anti-blackness, anti-racism, Asian Americans, coalition Despite its immersion in a global pandemic, the world (as I write in summer 2020) is also in the midst of a global uprising in defense of Black life. The murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, George Floyd, and Elijah McClain 1 appear to have mobilized some form of public reckoning with the fact that it is policing itself—and not a few bad apples resorting to an “excessive” use of force—that is the problem. “Excess” is not excessive at all, and that is precisely the point. Judging by the outpouring of corporate statements “in solidarity with the Black community,” it seems as though the opinion that Black lives do indeed matter is an increasingly popular (or at least proftable) one to have. Still, there appears to be in this moment a heightened sense of confusion about how to be a prop- erly anti-racist non-Black person in a world where Black lives do matter. This confusion has led to in- tense popular debate about the following sorts of questions: Should I say Black, or Black and brown, or people of color? What should I be reading? Am I supposed to like Hamilton or not? Am I being anti- Black right now? What about now? These are important questions, but I’m not sure they are the ones that most urgently need asking. After all, as bell hooks writes, “a woman who attends an unlearning racism workshop and learns to acknowledge that she is racist is no less a threat than one who does not” (1984, 54). This piece interrogates the relationship between “how-to anti-racisms” and multiracial solidarity building, particularly at various sites of Black-Asian American racial justice work. By “how-to anti- 1 I write this list of names of Black people murdered by the state in 2020 knowing that it is incomplete and that, tragically, it will likely grow by the time anyone reads this. Journal for the Anthropology of North America 0.0, pp.1–16, ISSN 2475-5389. Copyright © 2021 American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.. DOI: 10.1002/nad.12139 1