Mr. Zhou had his own run-ins with the police, but he did not feel like the problems of delivery workers had anything to do with what had happened to George Floyd. He did find the protests inspiring, mostly because he admired the way Black people would show up and protest injustice against their people, but he felt like that had nothing to do with him.
Their fight was not his fight and broad Democratic messages around the police and antiracism were mostly lost on him, not only because he never came across them on Chinese-language media, but also because he did not feel any kinship as a fellow minority or person of color or whatever other category might consolidate Chinese and Black interests.
The answer may lie in doing away with “Asian-American” and “Latino” altogether and replacing them with “immigrant.” In the past, antiracist messages relied on categorizations like Asian-American, Latino and the umbrella of “people of color.” All three are abstractions that have little grounding in the everyday lives of immigrants.
The joke,” the political strategist David Shor said in a recent interview, “is that the G.O.P. is really assembling the multiracial working-class coalition that the left has always dreamed of.” As someone who has spent years reporting in immigrant neighborhoods, I share Mr. Shor’s concerns. The Republican Party’s message of hard work, capitalism and freedom makes sense to large portions of the immigrant population — in fact, it’s why many of them, including my uncle and many of his fellow kitchen workers, chose to plant roots in the country.
www.nytimes.com/2020/11/20/opinion/sunday/immigrants-vote-election-politics.html

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