In his memoir, hip hop artist Mega Ran writes, “I call Japan my mecca, my homeland.” Taking cue from Mega Ran, this article explores contemporary US Black people’s attraction to Japan and Japanese culture. It shows that Japan is both familiar and “other,” a combination that I show allures many contemporary US Black people. Specifically, this article argues that Japan’s reputation as a peaceful and prestigious, nonwhite, Global North nation, renowned for its sophisticated media products and noble traditions, magnetizes this community. “Mecca Japan” provides an ethnography of two interrelated groups: Black nerd (“Blerd”) convention attendees and US Black residents of Japan. These ethnographic observations are corroborated by close readings of relevant and recently published memoirs by US Black authors. Blerd convention participants’ perception of Japan, this article shows, is largely fantastical and touristic, while Black residents there negotiate a comprehensive relationship with their adopted country, which harbors its own racism. Despite challenges, these expats regard Japan as their preferred home. With Japan as their simultaneously fantastical and real refuge, these subjects deepen our understanding of interracial intimacies in the cultivation of global Blackness not determined by proximity to white people, but instead routed through a familiar yet exoticized “East.”
In a political moment increasingly defined by the visible rightward shifts of US immigrant and refugee communities, this article presents the concept of refugee conservatism as a political orientation analytically distinct from traditional white conservatism. Produced through the convergence of Cold War resettlement and multicultural neoliberalism, refugee conservatism takes shape not as a project of racial entitlement, but as a “law-and-order common sense” and a moral economy of “waiting one’s turn.” Drawing on sixty in-depth interviews and longitudinal ethnographic research (2014–2025) with Khmer, Vietnamese, Salvadoran, Guatemalan, Eritrean, Syrian, and Afghan refugees in the San Francisco East Bay, I examine how these positions emerge as survival strategies within conditions of conditional inclusion, racialized surveillance, and economic precarity. I argue that what may appear as ideological alignment with the US right is a structural residue of militarized resettlement and differential incorporation into a racial state that offers protection only on the condition of strict legal compliance. To engage the methodological challenge these perspectives pose to the field, I develop “becoming tender” as a critical feminist practice of reading and listening designed to sit with these politically uncomfortable truths. Rather than writing off refugee perspectives as simply complicit, becoming tender utilizes historical attunement and local specificity to read contradiction as structural rather than as individual moral failure. By foregrounding contradiction rather than resolving it, this essay urges Ethnic Studies to expand its ways of reading political heterogeneity within and across racialized communities, offering a method to build and sustain alliances while honoring the full, complex humanity of those navigating the contradictory demands of the US racial state.
This paper highlights the perspectives, experiences, and needs of educators for building and implementing an Asian American Studies curriculum in K–12 education. Based on data from surveys, semi-structured interviews, and participatory engagement with educators, this study reflects the current context of a group based primarily in Southern California. Examining the firsthand perspectives of K–12 educators and strategies of engaging them as co-creators of their own professional development, this paper explores how creating a teacher-centered learning community through conferences and ongoing professional development spaces may increase teacher self efficacy for Ethnic Studies.
Authors describe the building of successful relationships between the Myaamia (Miami) tribe of Oklahoma and Miami University.
