The most important books to focus on race relations in the past few years have all presented the United States through a long-standing white/black binary. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (2015), Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (2010), and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen (2014) explore how violence and invisibility shape contemporary black subjectivity. However, even as John Hope Franklin proclaimed in “One America in the 21st Century,” President Clinton’s 1997 race initiative, “This country cut its eye teeth on racism in the black/white sphere,” we must still bear in mind Korean American spokeswoman Angela Oh’s hope for a “new language” that will allow discussion “beyond the black-white paradigm.” As she further explained in the well-publicized dispute, “We need to go beyond that because the world is about much more than that, and this is sort of the next horizon” (quoted in Frank H. Wu, Yellow: Race in America beyond...

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