This is a welcome effort to extend the study of race to American political institutions. A major contribution is the exploration of the way that Asian American political prospects vary across institutions. Thomas Kim argues that the party system serves Asian Americans poorly but that their prospects are better in Congress. Given the systemic barriers in party politics, Asian Americans would be better served by building their own political base and agenda, but that goal is undermined by the misguided efforts of Asian American political elites, he believes.

Kim follows the path blazed by Paul Frymer's Uneasy Alliances (1999), which argued that African American political interests were undermined when they were “captured” by one of the major parties. Like Frymer, Kim criticizes the argument that that competition drives parties to seek the support of uncommitted voters. In the case of Asian Americans, however, their downfall has come not from being captured but rather from being perceived as fundamentally alien, greatly diminishing the incentive of any party to make them a visible part of a partisan coalition. “Rather than help integrate them, two-party competition works to maintain the positioning of Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners” (p. 6), fueling public hostility toward them, Kim argues.

The book draws heavily on work done primarily in Asian American and related cultural studies: in particular, the influential ideas of Michael Om and Howard Winant (Racial Formation, 1994) and Lisa Lowe (Immigrant Acts, 1996). Following Omi and Winant, Kim describes Asian Americans as a racial formation that has been defined as inherently foreign. The American polity is a liberal one, Kim assumes, and so Asian Americans have been depicted as illiberal, making them easy and tempting targets for parties seeking to appeal to mainstream voters.

Like many students of Asian American politics, Kim devotes considerable attention to the campaign finance scandal of 1996, widely considered by activists to be a major setback for Asian American political fortunes. The fear of public backlash led the national Democratic Party to view all Asian Americans with suspicion, while the Republican Party pressed its presumed advantage by warning of the dire consequences of this latest yellow peril.

While the institutional logic of two-party competition works against Asian American interests, congressional “countermajoritarian norms” have been beneficial, Kim argues. To put it simply, well-placed members of Congress (MCs) can wield disproportionate power, and a small number of well-placed Asian American MCs did just that to advance Asian American interests in such policies as census categories and reparations for Japanese Americans interned during World War II.

Kim's concluding argument is that Asian American interests are best served by community organizing that builds a grassroots political agenda. He believes that Asian American “political elites” have failed to do this, however, and claims that they have allowed themselves to be “pushed by major party elites to focus on developing relationships with powerful politicians rather than on building community-based political power” (p. 116).

The author's interpretation offers a valuable cautionary tale for those who believe that two-party competition is the solution to political inequities, but his analysis has a number of shortcomings. While he makes a convincing argument that Asian Americans continue to face deeply rooted political disadvantages, his claims need much more qualification.

First, he may overstate the disadvantages facing Asian Americans. There is little doubt that they continue to be seen as foreigners, but it is less certain whether this perception is as deeply rooted and disadvantageous as Kim (and many in Asian American studies) assert. Most significantly, high intermarriage rates among third- and later-generation Asian Americans suggests that the barriers are dramatically lower than they once were, and much lower than those facing African Americans. Asian Americans still are routinely seen as alien, but their marginalization in American society may be less rigid and more nuanced than Kim suggests.

Second, his criticisms of “Asian American political elites” lacks supporting evidence. He claims that they are disconnected from their communities, calling that disconnection “the contemporary nadir of Asian American political development” (p. 125). However, the media reports that supply much of his data provide no support for this claim, and most community mobilization efforts are unable to attract the media gaze. However, Janelle Wong's extensive research on immigrant communities (Democracy's Promise, 2006) documents a wealth of grassroots organizing and mobilization, and finds that it was traditional party mobilization efforts that withered and failed to incorporate new Americans.

Third, some of Kim's theoretical foundation is questionable. He frames two-party competition within a liberal consensus, without considering the shortcomings of this interpretation, which has been severely challenged by scholars over the last four decades. Rogers Smith, for example, has argued that an inegalitarian tradition is deeply rooted in the U.S., alongside the liberal and republican ones (Civic Ideals, 1997). Kim's argument that Asian Americans are viewed as “illiberal” seems to require a level of sophistication that may be widespread among the citizenry. Smith's notion of an inegalitarian tradition offers a more parsimonious and plausible explanation for the political vulnerability of Asian Americans. When the media portray them in an unfavorable light, it becomes easy for political opportunists to draw on a tradition that portrays some groups as inherently inferior and undesirable.

Finally, Kim's analysis of congressional dynamics is likely to leave Congress specialists unsatisfied. His description seems to draw on an older model of powerful committees and extensive decentralization and does not reflect the substantial increase in leadership power in recent decades. The full story of Asian American legislative successes is somewhat more complicated.

Despite these shortcomings, The Racial Logic of Politics deserves attention. It both supports and expands Paul Frymer's argument that race continues to exert a powerful influence on political party dynamics. We know far too little about the interaction of race and political institutions, and Kim has made a valuable contribution toward addressing this substantial shortcoming.