American Son Summary

Kamaljot Gill
Dr. Park
ASAM 202
Race and Economics in American Son
American Son, by Brian Ascalon Roley written in 2001, is a tale of two mixed race brothers who are half Filipino and half German American. The novel explores the brother’s experiences with race as they utilize their mixed heritage to help them navigate different social groups within California. Tomas, the older brother, chooses to present himself as Latino to largely help him sell expensive attack dogs to white Americans. While Gabe, the younger brother, chooses to present himself as white to capitalize on the social implication being white has in the US, but Tomas is more successful with the creation of his image. In Amada Page’s Passing for Chicano, Passing for White, she …show more content…
She looks at how the brothers buy into a materialistic culture and develop around it. Within her reading of the text, race must be acknowledged when regarding economics, especially when looking at disparities and injustices between groups. Racial passing “is a deception that enables a person to adopt certain roles or identities from which he would be barred by prevailing social standards in the absence of his misleading conduct. The classic racial passer in the United States has been the “white Negro”: the individual whose physical appearance allows him to present himself as “white” but whose “black” lineage (typically only a very partial black lineage) makes him a Negro according to dominant racial rules” (Kennedy 2001). Passing is a tool used by the brothers in American Son to follow American materialism culture to gain financial capital. Within this reading, we can observe how race plays an economic role in lives of these …show more content…
Amanda Page states within the context of the US, “historically, under the one‑drop rule, a black‑white biracial person would usually be understood as black even if he didn’t “look” black and even if he didn’t identify as black. This is not necessarily the case for the Asian‑white biracial person, who might more easily claim whiteness if she “looks” white.” (Page 184) She points to a key difference between Asian American passing and Black passing and that is flexibility when Black Americans can be defined by the “one-drop rule”, Asian Americans cannot be. In fact, Asian Americans, who only have one grandparent who is Asian might even be denied the title of Asian American if “they do not look Asian”. Within the first few pages of the novel, we learn that Tomas presents himself as Mexican when “He is really half-white, half-Filipino but dresses like a Mexican” (Roley 15). This example of passing is more complex than the traditional passing of a black-white biracial person passing as white since it involves a biracial Asian-white person passing as Latino. This passing pulls at the history and barriers of race. Page mentions that the Philippines has shared a history of Spanish colonization with Latin America, but the nation resides as part of Asia (Page 182). Because of this history, “what is Filipino” and “what is Latino” are not clearly defined. Perhaps the best example in the text is the case of

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