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Boba liberal

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Boba liberal is a term mostly used within the Asian diaspora communities in the West, especially in the United States. It describes someone of East or Southeast Asian descent living in the West who has a shallow, surface-level liberal outlook. It is also occasionally used to describe conservatives who weaponize their East or Southeast Asian identity. The neologism emerged among the Asian American leftist community on Twitter who accused "boba liberals" of only holding their liberal beliefs to appear more White adjacent, by engaging in progressive social movements or viewpoints, while at the same time disregarding and trivializing issues concerning Asians.[1][2][3][4]

Mary Chao, writing for The North Jersey Record, said that "Asians call peers boba liberals when they aspire to liberal whiteness."[5] An article in The Yale Herald described it as a term "used to describe the ethnocentric politics of Asian Americans, usually of East Asian descent, who exclusively advocate for issues that benefit themselves, without acknowledging problematic dimensions of their own history and working to support other people of color."[6] The feminist magazine Fem said that "the faces of boba liberalism are Asian Americans that are part of the middle and upper economic class. As a result, boba liberals disregard the negative effects of capitalism because they profit from it. For instance, boba liberals tend to focus on advocating for Asian representation in white spaces, or discussing whether or not wearing chopsticks in one's hair is culture appropriation. These topics are popular within boba liberal circles, all while dialogue regarding inequality, globalization, and racial injustice are purposely neglected."[4]

Unherd notes that conservative Asian Americans have used the term not to critique capitalism, but to "aim at a small but influential group of progressive Asian-American activists who are supposedly selling out other Asians, especially working-class Asians, in order to win brownie points from elite, generally white liberals."[7]

The Asian identity of boba liberals has often been accused of being shallow and superficial. Boba liberals are accused of using surface-level stereotypical Asian traits such as liking boba tea to bolster their Asian credentials.[5][8]

Plan A Magazine, an Asian diaspora magazine, described the film Crazy Rich Asians and the sitcom Fresh Off the Boat as "boba liberal media", calling them the result of "a specific kind of atomized identity politics".[9] Other media outlets have connected the Crazy Rich Asians film to boba liberalism.[1][5][7]

Controversy

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The term "boba liberal" was coined in 2019 by Vietnamese American Twitter user Redmond (@diaspora_is_red) to analyze a form of Asian American liberalism through a Marxist lens.[4][6][10] Redmond has criticized the misappropriation of their neologism by stripping away the Marxist framework by failing to discuss "socialism, communism, the capitalist system, imperialism, and the diaspora bourgeoisie" and conflating "boba liberalism" with the flawed concept of "East Asian privilege".[10] In 2024, Redmond criticized misuse of the term by conservatives and liberals, and said "The term boba liberalism can go away for all I care. It's corny and stale".[11]

United States

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One commentator described boba liberals as supporting policies that primarily benefit upper-income Asian-Americans, and not necessarily the Asian-American community as a whole.[4] Therefore, while the word "liberal" is used in the term, it is not mutually exclusive to one specific ideology, as it may also extend to conservative-aligned Asians in some areas, as they would often take advantage of the "model minority" label by defending such measures.[12][13]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ a b Frias, Lauren (6 May 2021). "Boba liberalism: How the emergence of superficial activism could cause more harm than good to the AAPI community". Business Insider. Archived from the original on 11 September 2024. Retrieved 8 January 2025.
  2. ^ Rosen, Laura (18 February 2021). "The Quad: Bursting the bubble of boba liberalism amid the COVID-19 pandemic". Daily Bruin. Retrieved 13 February 2022.
  3. ^ Yukiko, Sarah (24 December 2021). "Boba liberals: The meaning of the term used to describe the Asian Americans everyone loves to hate". NextShark. Retrieved 13 February 2022.
  4. ^ a b c d Quach, Cindy (27 February 2021). "What is Boba Liberalism?". Fem. Retrieved 13 February 2022.
  5. ^ a b c Chao, Mary (22 November 2022). "How did trendy boba tea become a symbol for liberal, upper-class Asians?". The North Jersey Record. New Jersey: Gannett Company. Retrieved 8 January 2025.
  6. ^ a b Zhao, Yingying (4 February 2021). "Bubble Tea, Boba Liberalism, and Capitalism's Effects on East Asian Diasporic Identity". The Yale Herald. Retrieved 8 January 2025. It is used to describe the ethnocentric politics of Asian Americans, usually of East Asian descent, who exclusively advocate for issues that benefit themselves, without acknowledging problematic dimensions of their own history and working to support other people of color. Boba liberalists think that they are the solution to the systemic problems of racism and discrimination that we face today, when in fact, boba liberalism is an offshoot of these issues.
  7. ^ a b Peng, Sheluyang (14 July 2023). "The Asian-American class war". Unherd. Retrieved 8 January 2025.
  8. ^ Aich, Ron; Constable, Emma (21 April 2021). "The rise and fall of "boba liberalism"". The Epic. Lynbrook High School. Retrieved 8 January 2025.
  9. ^ Shibuya, Karen (2020). "COVID-19 and the End of Boba Liberal Media". Plan A Magazine. Retrieved 8 January 2025.
  10. ^ a b "Socialist With SE Asian Diaspora Characteristics". X. Jul 28, 2020.
  11. ^ Redmond (29 May 2024). "We're all Boba Liberals Now (Don't Laugh!)". Substack. Retrieved 8 January 2025. The term boba liberalism can go away for all I care. It's corny and stale, and it's infested with the worst yellow-faced flies. The fact of the matter is that Asian American liberalism and its reactionary twin are part of the same American phenomenon that we must uproot and toss to the wind.
  12. ^ Zhang, Jenny G. (5 November 2019). "How Bubble Tea Became a Complicated Symbol of Asian-American Identity". Eater. Retrieved 13 February 2022. While bubble tea itself is neither inherently political nor bad, per se, some Asian Americans are critical of the dominant strain of Asian-American politics, called "boba liberalism," that the drink has come to represent in certain circles. Boba liberalism — is the "substanceless trend-chasing spectacle" that is mainstream Asian-American liberalism, derided as shallow, consumerist-capitalist, and robbed of meaning.
  13. ^ Vo, Mai (19 October 2021). "How did we get from bubble tea to boba liberalism?". Trinitonian. Retrieved 13 February 2022. "Boba liberalism" obscures the diversity present in the community. It effaces the stories of working-class families, stories of undocumented immigrants, and stories of people who are fundamentally vulnerable in the community. Another issue with "boba liberalism" is rooted in its prevalence among middle- to upper-middle-class East and Southeast Asian communities and how they maintain the dominant voice within the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) sphere.

Further reading

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