Hip-Hop Gangsta or Most Deserving of Victims? Transnational Migrant Identities and the Paradox of Tibetan Racialization in the USA

Abstract

This ethnographic paper examines the complex cultural politics of Tibetan transnational migration by examining racialized everyday practices in Tibetan communities in the San Francisco Bay Area and Boulder, Colorado. After providing an overview of Tibetan migration to the USA, we discuss migrants' contradictory insertion into American racial bipolarism. On the one hand, Tibetans' racialized class positions place them at the lower end of a spectrum of moral deserving and worth. On the other hand, the discursive practices of the transnational Tibet Movement and the traveling of Tibetan Buddhist institutions to the USA ‘whitens’ Tibetans by making them seem particularly worthy and deserving of sponsorship. After exploring the production of Tibetan migrant subjectivities through white sponsorship, we examine how the successful articulation of Tibetan identities for a transnational political struggle is a double-edged sword which has unintended, and sometimes violent consequences. These play out in various ways, including intergenerational struggles over hip-hop and internalized racism.