Mytholigising The Model Minority Myth.

Why We Need To Think Twice.....

In my previous post I discussed a Times article written by Jack Linshi in which he made the point that questions, discussions, and considerations of diversity almost always exclude Asian-Americans. A pompous rebuttal piece in the Toast criticized Linshi's article for focusing too much on Asian-Americans in an article about Asian-Americans - go figure. One particular criticism was that Linshi failed to point out how the model minority stereotype is used as a "weapon against both black and brown people" which is also a criticism echoed in a critique of Linshi's article by Julianne Hing at Colorlines which rants.......

People who shape the dominant political narrative in this country—politicians, pundits, media—have little use for substantive conversation about any group of non-white people unless it’s to uphold, in stark terms, notions of black inferiority and white supremacy. To that end, Asians have actually been the subject of quite a lot of public fascination, mainly as props used to denigrate blacks and Latinos and programs designed to support them and other people of color—including segments of the Asian-American population. All too often, Asians are willing to play along.

My first reaction to this is that I fail to see why the possibility that white racists might use Asians and the model minority narrative to "denigrate" people of color should in any way preclude Asians from writing articles that specify the Asian racial experience and focus a little attention on it. Surely, writing about the Asian experience of white supremacist structures is itself a critique of that system and, hence, in no way "plays along" with it? This idea and self-righteous proclamation that "all too often, Asians are willing to play along" is troubling in itself, simply because it sometimes seems to be merely a rhetorical tool utilized by Asian-American advocates to point out how different they are from all the other Asians who just don't get it as opposed to a means of shedding a nuanced light on the attitudes and socio-political stances of Asian-Americans.

Actually, we rarely know just what Asian-Americans are thinking or believing about politics or social issues, largely because we are excluded from the enquiry into diversity, race, and many other aspects of American life. But it always helps one's advocacy cred to make vague and unsupported claims that there must be some Asians out there who are bastards and you're not like them. Of course, the irony here is that in order to make such a sweeping statement about Asians and to have it stick with any kind of rhetorical power, one must be implicitly participating in a process that marginalizes Asian's opportunities to speak for themselves and, thus, take advantage of the racist structures that accomplish the very invisibility that enables the media to engineer an identity for an entire minority. I find it hard to take anyone seriously who so unconsciously appropriates the trappings and benefits of white supremacy whilst believing themselves to be speaking out against it.

A subsequent Times article by Linshi actually seems to heed - or it may be mere coincidence - these criticisms and addresses the issue of the apparent role that the model minority stereotype plays in America's racial discourse. Writing about the significance of Ferguson to Asian-Americans he says this about the model minority stereotype........

One possible answer could be found in the model minority myth. The myth, a decades-old stereotype, casts Asian-Americans as universally successful, and discourages others — even Asian-Americans themselves — from believing in the validity of their struggles. But as protests over Ferguson continue, it’s increasingly important to remember the purpose of the model minority narrative’s construction. The doctored portrayal, which dates to 1966, was intended to shame African-American activists whose demands for equal civil rights threatened a centuries-old white society. (The original story in the New York Times thrust forward an image of Japanese-Americans quietly rising to economic successes despite the racial prejudice responsible for their unjust internment during World War II.)

So, Linshi (as is the case with many other Asian-American commentators) is suggesting that the model minority stereotype owes its existence to the exigency of white supremacist structures to somehow affect the civil rights struggle by shaming, denigrating, or embarrassing African-American activists. Although seemingly an axiom amongst Asian-Americans in general and a fundamental ontological pillar of Asian-American reactivism in particular, I think that it is an overly simplistic conception of the stereotype. Furthermore, this conception of the stereotype itself betrays the danger and immense damage that this custom of relegating the Asian experience to a mere side-note of anti-blackness can present.

It is generally accepted that the term "model-minority" first appeared in a 1966 article in the New York Times Magazine written by sociologist, William Petersen, (a subsequent article that same year in the conservative-leaning U.S News and World Report described the self-sufficiency of New York's Chinese-Americans) in which he described the phenomenon of how Japanese-Americans had overcome extreme racial prejudice and incarceration in internment camps to become a successful demographic. He termed this community the "model-minority". Upon reading the piece, it is difficult to reconcile the charge that the model-minority stereotype was specifically designed to shame and hinder black civil rights activism with the content of the article itself.

Certainly, the NYT piece makes references to the black experience - minor allusions consisting of a bare few sentences - but to my reading, it more significantly provides a wealth of information about the unique history of anti-Asian racism and exclusion with very little indication that blacks are being targeted in any way. In fact, there are just as many, perhaps more, references to how Japanese-Americans outperform whites, yet, no-one has suggested that the piece tries to denigrate or shame whites. It requires an extremely sensitive reading of the piece to even remotely conclude that it is anything other than an expose - extremely unusual for its time, and hardly typical now, five decades later - that focuses on Asian-Americans. In short, the piece does the one thing that Asian-American reactivists seem to hate more than anything; it focused specifically on Asians and anti-Asian racism as significant subjects in and of themselves.

If one steps back from the subject to assess the claim objectively it seems somewhat absurd to believe that this 1966 article served as some kind of anti-civil rights effort. Bear in mind that the FBI was actively gathering intelligence on individuals associated with the civil rights movement through a campaign of surveillance and infiltration, such that they most probably were aware of any facts that could incriminate and discredit the movement and its leaders. Thus, I am being asked to believe that even though there was probably a wealth of intelligence gathered information on the civil rights leadership that could have been, at least, manipulated to make it look unsavory in order to shackle them, the tactic of writing passive-aggressive articles with sometimes vague or passing mention of blacks was utilized to stymie the movement. I hope that sounds as far-fetched to you as it does to me. Quite frankly, it sounds absurd.

What is being said is that the people and culture that inflicted injustices on black people came up with a passive-aggressive ploy - that amounts to name-calling - that they presumed would work on a community who had endured and survived some of the worst treatment ever inflicted on an oppressed people all in order to maintain the unequal social order. Name-calling as a means to undermine the emotional well-being of, and a movement driven by, a group of people who had endured extremes of abuse and not been broken by it? The only shock here is why such an inane idea has flowered and endured amongst Asian-Americans. But, if the piece was not written to denigrate blacks, why was it written?

To answer this question we have to understand that in the mid-nineteen-sixties there was little love lost for Asian people in America. It was only twenty years after a brutal and savage war with Japan in which western prisoners of war had been subject to severe maltreatment, and the war itself had been conducted on the home front with an explicitly racist tone by utilizing existing stereotypes of Asians that had developed since the first Asian immigrants arrived on the West Coast to galvanize the will and antipathy of the American public. A mere few years after the Pacific War, America again was at war in Asia in the Korean peninsula, and once again, the war on the home front was conducted with an explicit tone of racist xenophobia as Chinese-Americans were placed under surveillance by America's intelligence communities.

During this period, the US considered using nuclear weapons against both the Chinese and North Koreans, but also apparently considered a French plan to nuke the anti-colonial insurgents in Vietnam during the nineteen-fifties. Plus, from the mid-nineteen-fifties onwards, the US began to slowly increase its involvement in the Vietnam war - an involvement that utilized strategies of mass-destruction like Agent Orange and carpet bombing, but was also characterized by personal animosity resulting in countless and commonplace atrocities against the local population. In short, Asians were largely viewed as enemies devoted to destroying America's way of life that few Americans would have preferred over blacks. The reason that there were so few Asians in the US was that Asians were simply not liked, and it was the passing of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act - that would allow unimpeded migration from Asia - that brought Asians closer to the forefront of America's race dialogue.

America, by the mid-nineteen sixties, was a global power that, through a series of alliances, was striving to stem the advance of communism by pushing its own ideology of freedom, democracy, and equality. The problem was that the whole world could see what nonsense that was. Jim Crow (4th section, "Engaging with Africa") and racist immigration policies undermined America's credibility in the very countries of Asia (page 10) and Africa where the fight against communism was taking place. Thus, doing away with racist immigration policy was essential to maintain America's standing with its allies in Asia. The only obstacle was that Americans were largely against immigration reform that would permit unhindered migration of Asians into the country.

Thus, Asian-America's focus on America's social anxieties at the passing of civil rights legislation ignores the - perhaps equally - anxiety-inducing legislation that dramatically altered America's immigration policies. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 removed all of the barriers that up until that point had severely restricted immigration from Asian countries. Given that for decades Americans had been comfortable with immigration and social policies that excluded Asian people, it is not hard to see why the new legislation that would permit a group of people who were largely viewed as enemies to migrate en-masse might have been received with no small degree of trepidation. A Harris Poll of the time found that almost two-thirds of Americans opposed the act, and another 18% were undecided. America just was not happy with the idea of Asian immigration.

In light of this anti-Asian racism of the time, as well as the overwhelming opposition to the 1965 Immigration act, it seems even more far-fetched to suggest that Asians could possibly have been used as foil in some way to undermine black rights in the American mind. What is more likely is that the New York Times piece was merely an attempt by a liberal-leaning news publication to assuage anxieties about, and shape public opinion in favour of, a very unpopular , but politically necessary, piece of immigration legislation by painting Asian immigrants as a non-threatening and industrious group who make positive contributions to society. That's all it was. Even the US News piece seems to make no attempt to denigrate blacks and even quotes a social worker who explicitly states that the Chinese would exhibit very similar problems to blacks if they were placed under the same circumstances.

To fully understand the scope of American society's opposition to Asian immigration it is worth noting that more than a decade after the 1965 Immigration act, Americans were still voicing misgivings and hostility towards the prospect of Asian immigrants. As these two Harris Poll records show that Americans were in favor of closing the door to Vietnamese refugees, feared that they would take jobs from Americans, and widely believed that they would not be able to integrate. That hardly sounds like a resounding belief in the idea of Asians as a model minority that other minorities should emulate. Even today, some in white America are still smarting about the 1965 Immigration act. Articles like these show clearly that there are some Americans who continue to feel cheated out of their demographic privilege by the 1965 legislation.

By belaboring the dubious assertion that there was, and is, some kind of conspiracy of passive-aggression to embarrass blacks into submission - when several centuries of brutal slavery and decades of Jim Crow failed to do just that - Asian-Americans are not only obscuring history, they are contributing to Asian-American invisibility by deflecting attention away from the Asian-specific racial experiences described above and in so doing deny Asians a deserved autonomous racial perspective.

But, what of the idea that the model minority stereotype continues to be used to "browbeat" other minorities and justify discrimination against those groups? Most recently, public figures like Adam Carolla and Bill O'Reilly utilized the stereotype and its most trendy incarnation, Asian Privilege, to deny that racism is the inhibiting force that minorities say it is. I will discuss the Carolla and O'Reilly use of "Asian privilege" rhetoric in my next post, but for now, I ask the question; is there evidence that those who believe the model minority stereotype also exhibit racist attitudes towards blacks that are justified by, and derived from, it? Unfortunately, the answer is not as straight-forward as the examples of Carolla and O'Reilly would make it seem to be.

A study by the Northwestern University of Law found a tenuous correlation between those whites who adhere to the model minority stereotype and a corresponding adherence to anti-black attitudes. Even where a correlation was present, there was no reason to believe that the model minority stereotype was a causative factor in forming anti-black attitudes, merely that there was a pattern or correlation. Do Asian-Americans really believe that white racism requires an Asian intercessory justification to legitimize its existence in the minds of those who adhere to it? From the study....

..generally non- Hispanic whites who believe that Asian Americans work harder than whites are not less sympathetic to blacks’ need for greater government assistance (see Table 1). Put slightly differently, the belief that some Asian Americans have “pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps” does not necessarily accompany the view that all groups should do the same.

More significantly, the study found a strong correlation between the belief that Asians are hard-working and successful and a belief that Asians experience no discrimination. In other words, the model minority stereotypes  hurts Asians, by obscuring the fact of anti-Asian racism, more than it informs negative attitudes towards other minority groups.

The Model Minority Hypothesis would predict that those who consider Asians smart, hard working, or wealthy tend to think that Asian Americans are not discriminated against..........Among non-Hispanic whites, the belief in most of the five positive model minority stereotypes correlated very strongly with the perception that Asian Americans faced little or no discrimination in the job market or government assistance for other minority groups.......Similarly, those non-Hispanic white respondents who believe that Asian Americans are wealthier or harder working than other minorities also tend to be more likely to believe that Asian Americans face little or no housing discrimination.

The study's conclusions?

Overall, there is no relationship between positive views of Asian Americans and negative views of African Americans. Where significant relationships exist, they usually tend to undercut the Model Minority Hypothesis, rather than support it. ....On balance, we found no significant support for the concern that those who espouse model-minority-like beliefs are more likely to oppose affirmative action for African Americans in employment or college aid, to believe that blacks have too much government influence, or to believe that we spend too much money on schools in black neighborhoods (see Tables 1 and 2).

In other words, it is particularly those who hold the stereotype of Asian Americans as hard working compared to whites who show intermittent favoritism for immigration, immigrants, Asian Americans, African Americans, and government programs to help them—no “Yellow Peril” here.

The data showed no general pattern of correlations between beliefs that Asian Americans are smarter, harder working, or richer than other minorities and hostility to immigrants, Asian Americans, or African Americans.

Ouch. There is no reason to believe that whites who hold to the model minority stereotype also exhibit a corresponding antipathy to other minorities. In fact, those who view Asians as model minorities also view other minorities sympathetically. This suggests that despite conservative pundits' use of the model minority stereotype to race-troll, average Americans aren't buying it.

Although it is almost certainly true that politicians and media pundits make rhetorical plays on the stereotype, there is little reason to believe that there is widespread adoption of these attitudes in the general population. There is also reason to believe that the idea that Asians receive favorite status or some kind of special treatment from whites - the "Asian Privilege" theory - is little more than a concocted fantasy. After all, few believe that Asians experience discrimination such that it would warrant special treatment. Believing that Asians are more hard-working than other groups simply does not correlate with any notion that blacks and immigrants should be denied assistance, nor is there reason to believe that the model minority stereotype confers political or social benefits on Asians. I wonder if the entirely Asian-American created notion of Asian privilege has done more to generate resentment from other minority groups than the model minority stereotype.

What all of this suggests is that one of the foundational concepts in Asian-American thought is in dire need of revision. Primarily because focusing on how the model minority stereotype affects other groups - which seems to be not at all - we are implicitly obscuring the patterns of racism that have affected Asians for decades and further handicapping our credibility as deserving participants in the race dialogue.

Conservative politicians and pundits are able to use Asians as battering rams against other minorities precisely because Asians have little opportunity in the mainstream to present their own point of view. Asian-American commentators aid this marginalization by criticizing Asian-focused narratives for being Asian-focused.

The First Rule Of Asian-American Advocacy Is.....

.....You Don't Talk About Asian -American Advocacy.

Back in October of 2014, a guy by the name of Jack Linshi wrote what I thought was a refreshing article in Time magazine in which he discussed the place of Asian-Americans in society's dialogue on racial diversity. His thesis was simple; society's conceptualization and media-driven perceptions of Asian-Americans has resulted in their not being considered in the diversity equation. Significantly, he points out the damaging effect that the model minority stereotype has had on marginalizing the Asian-American voice, and hence, its consideration, from America's race dialogue. What Linshi did not know was that he had committed one of the cardinal sins of Asian-American politics.

As I lamented in this post - here - Asian-American activists and social commentators for some bizarre and inexplicable reason seem to have developed a negative knee-jerk reaction to any commentary written by Asian-Americans that have a specific focus on Asian-Americans. There is a bizarre tendency to be critical of Asian-American commentaries that don't also bring the issues of other demographics to the table. According to these folks, if you focus on Asian men, then your piece is flawed because you have not mentioned Asian women (although, the reverse scenario seems to be acceptable), if you talk about anti-Asian racism, then your piece is flawed because you didn't mention anti-black racism, if you focus on the detrimental effects of the Model Minority stereotype has on Asian-Americans, then your piece is flawed because it doesn't mention global warming (that one was jesty, but you get my point). In short, Asian-Americans are unreasonably critical of any commentaries on the community that are in any way presented as independently significant in their own right.

So, naturally, I was not surprised when a "response" to Linshi's piece was published in an online mag called "The Toast" that pretty much stayed true to the custom of diminishing the credibility of an autonomous Asian-focused racial experience. The Linshi piece shines a nuanced light on how the model minority stereotype has fundamentally worked to render Asians socially and politically invisible such that indications of discrimination against Asians in promotion in the tech industry - as well as the rich history of anti-Asian racism - are largely ignored as insignificant by the white majority, minority diversity advocates, and even Asian-Americans. By contrast, the Toast piece seems to want to constrict our conception of the Asian-American experience such that the notion itself has no meaning.

As Linshi points out....

Asians and Asian-Americans are smart and successful, so hiring or promoting them does not count as encouraging diversity. It says: there is no such thing as underrepresentation of Asians and Asian-Americans. The problem with this belief, historians and advocates assert, is that it not only obscures the sheer range of experiences within Asian and Asian-American populations, but also excludes them from conversations about diversity and inclusion in leadership and non-tech sectors..........Not that this exclusion is a new phenomenon. Historians agree that diversity has turned a blind eye to Asians and Asian Americans ever since the 1965 Immigration Act.

Overall, Linshi's piece sheds lights on the most destructive aspect of the model minority stereotype; that it excludes Asians from the dialogue on their own experiences. Because they are marginalized and rendered invisible, they have almost no part in setting, or even contributing to, the agenda on diversity and race - in part because Asian-Americans reactivists themselves seem to conceive of Asian issues as merely a parasitic addendum to other minorities' problems with little, or no, autonomous significance in their own right. I on the other hand, maintain that anti-Asian racism is both fundamental to, and is the very basis of, white supremacist philosophy. Although Linshi does not say it, the unspoken (and perhaps, unintended) implication is that marginalization of Asian-Americans via the model minority stereotype benefits both the white mainstream whose anti-Asian xenophobia means that it doesn't particularly want to see a politically and socially influential Asian minority, but also non-Asian minorities who seem to increasingly view Asians as a stumbling block to their own advancement as well as to diversity itself.

Another piece written in the Daily Beast by Tim Mak expands on  this notion. Mak is more direct about it though....

Paradoxically, Asian Americans are considered minorities when white activists seek to challenge affirmative action but not considered minorities or contributors to diversity when other activists seek to promote it. We’re objects used to prove a political point about other ethnic groups rather than a group whose successes and failures are judged on our own.

Unsurprisingly, this refreshingly straight-forward piece that hints at the uncomfortable possibility that Asians are used as both a foil by the white mainstream to obscure their own racism but are also viewed as the unwanted red-headed stepchildren of the diversity demagogues, has not been embraced -  or even discussed - by the online Asian-American reactivist network. This may also be partly because the piece implies that maintaining  the marginalization of Asian-Americans provides a useful tool for both white supremacy as well as its black/Latino nemesis.

The Toast rebuttal-esque piece epitomizes the kind of pompous and self-important, yet devoid of substance, content that seems to accompany any attempt to bring an autonomous Asian-American voice to the table. The piece is based on an e-mail exchange between two - I presume - Asian-American journalists, Sarah Jeong and Nicole Callahan. Although the whole piece reads like a manifesto of self-importance, these two points, in particular, stood out for me......

Sometimes we are “left out” because we don’t face the same racism. I think it’s rather disingenuous to claim to be “left out” of the black/white framing, and then conveniently ignore or not talk about the ways Asian Americans benefit from not being seen as black.

And.....

But it also doesn’t make much sense to talk about race or the model minority myth at all without acknowledging white supremacy and the anti-blackness at its root........Yes, talking about racism and discrimination against Asian Americans is extremely weird without broaching how the model minority myth has been used as a weapon against both black and brown people.

Quite frankly, I don't see how you can motivate Asians to want to fight white supremacy by telling them that their own racial experiences are irrelevant and that they have nothing unique to contribute to the process. Somehow, Asian-American social justice commentators seem to hold to the principle that Asian advocacy is about stifling an autonomous Asian voice and co-opting the black one, like parasites. Some inspiration.

Even worse, though, this self-disqualifying of Asians from having a voice in America's race dialogue is attained by misunderstanding Linshi's point.  By my reading, the gist of the Linshi piece is not to claim that Asians are left out of the black/white framing, but to suggest that the black/framing is a hopelessly inadequate framework to effectively describe America's diverse racial experience. Even if you accept with full uncritical faith - as many seem to do - the axiom that anti-Asian racism is rooted in anti-blackness (in fact, history suggests the opposite is true - that the racial thinking that made anti-blackness possible and legitimate is predated by, and rooted in, anti-Asianism), you will find yourself unable to adequately describe America's diverse racial experiences. All roads do not lead to anti-blackness and the insistence that they do contributes nothing meaningful to America's race dialogue, particularly where it concerns Asian-Americans.

Asians are left out of the race dialogue for one reason and one reason alone; we are marginalized and offered few opportunities to actually present our experiences in our own words and on our own terms. That is the real damage of the model minority stereotype; it diminishes the credibility of Asian-American claims to negative racial experiences and casts doubt on anti-Asian racism as a significant issue. Ironically, the Toast piece does pretty much the same thing.

Linshi writes.....

Yet the movement to push Asians and Asian-Americans into conversations of diversity and inclusion has fizzled out in recent years. Asian-American activism, historians believe, was at its peak following a national outcry after two white men escaped prosecution for their 1982 racially-charged murder of Chinese-American Vincent Chin. Nascent groups like American Citizens for Justice and the Coalition Against Anti-Asian Violence demanded equal treatment of Asian-Americans both under the law and in society. The fight for Asian-American equality may be less fierce today, but it is still there.

My take is that one possible reason why the "movement to push Asians and Asian-Americans into conversations of diversity and inclusion" might have fizzled out is that Asian-Americans - as the Toast piece illustrates - are stifling it. Asian-American "advocates" have created a hostile environment where those who want to actually focus their advocacy on Asians are deemed to be, or denounced as, anti-black, wicked model-minority embracers, or just not "down". In short, those historical efforts to  give Asians a voice in the diversity dialogue have been subverted by a new generation who seem to have run out of original things to say, so they co-opt anti-anti-blackness movement rhetoric and try to squeeze every possible scenario into some unfeasible manifestation of the black/white dichotomy.

One such scenario is the model minority stereotype, which - according to many Asian-Americans in the know - was created, and exists, solely as a means to embarrass other minorities, discredit welfare programs, and roll back civil rights gains achieved in the nineteen-sixties. I will expand on this conception of the stereotype in my next post, but for now it will suffice to say that there are plenty of reasons to think that the model minority stereotype is, and was, far more complex than simply a conspiracy to pit minorities against one another.

In summary, as long as Asian-Americans continue to diminish and stifle efforts to give our community its own voice and perspectives in the diversity conversation, we will continue to be marginalized, or worse still, not taken seriously. Borrowing the terminologies and rages of black activism - though ostensibly noble - just makes us parrots of someone else's experiences. In some ways there seems to be an element of abdication of responsibility in the sense that it is easier (but not braver) to appropriate the ready-made activist agenda of black advocacy than it is to create an Asian-American ontology from the rich history of anti-Asianism.

On a final note, another thing to consider is whether diversity and the credibility of one's input to the conversation on it must be - as the Toast piece seems to imply - correlated with the degree or severity of the experience of racism. It seems like even more abdication of responsibility to suggest that one has to experience harsher racism to earn the necessary credibility to deserve to give input to the diversity dialogue. Do I really need to have been severely beaten by skinheads, harassed by the police, or racially mocked on national broadcast television to be able to put forward a meaningful and legitimate contribution to the conversation? It seems silly and unhelpful to dismiss an entire community's input because of simplistic notions of who suffers more and harsher prejudice.

Donald Sterling And Racism In America....

.....And Why Asians Have Nothing To Answer For.

There is an article in Slate that has been making the rounds written by a couple of Asian-Americans on the recent furore over Clippers' owner Donald Sterling's racist remarks about African-Americans. The piece parses the bigger picture of Sterling's racist attitudes and does a good job of contextualizing his supposed "love" of Koreans as merely another way of expressing a racialized and racist way of thinking.

As one might expect, the article goes to great pains to highlight the idea of the Model Minority myth as a cause of this way of thinking, noting that racism is not always - in fact is never - only about hatred, but can be expressed even as one expresses love and admiration.

While it’s not quite on par with degrading other minorities as lazy or filthy, Sterling’s praise for his hardworking Korean tenants and the “Asian way” reveals how racism can be a collection of contradictory impulses. Love and hate, praise and condescension—they are all engines of exploitation.

Oddly enough, this notion of racism being expressed through love is not new, and was most eloquently described by none other than Frank Chin - the largely marginalized and under-appreciated Chinese-American writer - whose brutal directness and unwillingness to compromise on historical and cultural truths has made him an anathema to the far more prominent historical revisionists within Asian-America. Personally, I like the guy. Way back in 1972, Chin wrote a piece called "Racist Love" that encapsulates with great eloquence and directness this idea that racism does not necessarily thrive on hatred alone, but is just as equally upheld by "love". Read it and weep.

Of course, the Slate piece should be read as a refutation of the idea that the "model minority" is a positive thing, and in that regard I wholeheartedly agree. What I find problematic about the piece - and about Asian-American commentary on the model minority stereotype as a whole - is that we always fail to point out the most uncomfortable truth about it. When Asian-Americans talk about the model minority the usual trope is that the stereotype upholds the idea that racism can be overcome through hard work as proven by Asian "success", whilst simultaneously faulting other minorities - black and Hispanic - for not doing the same. The story goes that since Asians - supposedly - don't complain about racism and just put their heads down and "get on with it" that this is a good model of behaviour for all minorities to follow - hence Asians are the "model minority". In other words, the stereotype implicitly and explicitly justifies racist attitudes towards blacks and Hispanics by blaming them and not racism for their inability to succeed.

The typical Asian response - naturally, perhaps - is to decry the stereotype for its racist love and for its detrimental effects on other minorities, criticize Asians who "embrace" the stereotype, and most significantly of all, to criticize Asians who might embrace the stereotype or simply fail to speak out against it. The reasoning goes that Asians who embrace or are silent about the stereotype are implicitly upholding white racism and in return are given "privileged" status or simply given just "privilege". I have written about this notion of Asian model minority privilege elsewhere, but the story goes that by participating in white supremacy - that is, by accepting privileges (often unspecified by critics) that enable Asians to "prosper" - and not challenging the structures that uphold it (presumably by quitting college or jobs, perhaps?), Asians are being complicit in anti-black/anti-Hispanic white supremacist racism. As the article notes....

The housing case brought against Sterling in 2003 includes black, Latino, and white plaintiffs but no Korean-Americans. We have not been able to find prominent public complaints against Sterling by any Asian-American individuals or groups. There are also troubling stories of Sterling at one point replacing his security team with “Korean-born guards who were hostile to non-Koreans.”

Although there is no explicit criticism of Asian-Americans in the piece for not speaking out against Sterling's long list of racially demeaning statements and activities, pointing out that Asians have not made any substantial complaints about him is, to me, an implicit observation on supposed Asian "passivity" when it comes to speaking out about racism directed at both Asians and non-Asians alike. As other prominent bloggers have suggested, because Asian privilege is - supposedly - unique in that we are afforded opportunities to prosper not given to other minorities, then we are uniquely required to be more vocal about racism.

This way of thinking leaves us with a substantial elephant in the room. As I pointed out in  my other model minority post, if it is true that to succeed requires complicity with white supremacy, then it must also be true that for any minority to succeed, they have to also be complicit with white supremacy and, in fact, many non-Asian minorities do succeed. In fact the Sterling case is an awkward illustration of this notion in action. Although Sterling has a long history of expressing racist opinions and enacting racist policies in his work, and although lawsuits have been brought against him by aggrieved parties, the fact is that for at least the two plus decades that Sterling has been expressing racially charged opinions and discriminating against blacks and Hispanics, there has been - as far as I know - almost no complaints or activism from black or Hispanic employees within his Clippers organization about his prejudices.

That is, aside from the most recent on-court, pre-game, "protest" by Clippers players against Sterling's most recent transgression, the black players, coaches, and whatever black support staff he employs, have been largely silent in challenging Sterling's prejudices which have been out in the open for years. In other words, they have been guilty of "model minority" behaviour - accepting the status quo in exchange for "privileges" and the opportunity to prosper. I am not criticizing the apparent passivity of black employees of the Clippers organization here, but merely pointing out that speaking out against structural racism is far more complex and difficult to do than merely following a set of college-learned ideals and imposing that set of ideals on real people in the real world (with families to support and children to feed) and finding imperfection in those people because they have to make real-world choices.

Clearly, Asians are not alone when it comes to keeping quiet and keeping their heads down instead of confronting racism head-on, the only difference is that  whereas blacks and Hispanics have a strong cultural and social voice, Asians have a weak cultural, social, and political, presence and it is, thus, easy to label us and make it stick. As I have shown, no-one is faulting black Clippers employees for their years of apparent silence over Sterling's racism.

But even the idea that Asians don't speak out about racism is clearly false. Blogs like my own, and even other Asian bloggers whose focus is not the racial experience include commentary and speak out about racism. Often, in the aftermath of yet another racist media slight, Asian journalists or writers will post articles in mainstream publications speaking out about racism. So why we have this idea that Asian don't speak out about racism I don't know because clearly, we do. But this perception itself illustrates just how excluded Asians are from the processes by which perceptions of us are formed. Despite the fact that Asians regularly speak out about racism, the wider perception is that we don't, which is probably because the images and statements that are  given the most gravity are made or created by non-Asians, often relying on formulaic and derogatory conceptions of Asian people, and who have the full power of the media apparatus at their disposal. All of this means that to buy  into the idea that Asians don't speak out about racism is to in some ways hold Asians responsible for their own exclusion and invisibility in mainstream culture. Even worse, to suggest that Asians are uniquely and specifically more disinclined to challenge racism's structures is merely more stereotyping.

Asians have very little to no control over America's race dialogue on Asians - this is a simple fact. That is why it is important that we refrain from an intra-community dialogue that over-simplifies our race experience and our responses to it. As the Sterling case has shown, any and all minorities once integrated economically into the system will overlook racial indignities and transgressions committed by the white power structures - Asians are not alone in that.

But the ultimate beneficiaries of this racial typecasting are the people who invoke the model as a bludgeon against others. Sterling’s admiration for his Korean tenants is actually a kind of scorn. After all, he still subjected Korean tenants to the same degrading treatment as everyone else—the only difference is that the Koreans seemed willing to take it.

That final sentence seems to be trying too hard and does not specify how Sterling's behaviour was degrading to Koreans, but it illustrates my points clearly. Nothing I have read anywhere says that Sterling degraded the Koreans, just like black players and staff at the Clipper's organization were not personally degraded (as far as I know) by him. Perhaps if there had been incidences of personal degradation the Koreans might have reacted, just like the black employees at the Clipper's organization might have reacted if they had experienced personal degradation - they certainly did not seem motivated to to speak out or protest on behalf of the victims of housing discriminatioın in Sterling's rental properties. The point is, that all minorities act the same when they become economically integrated, suggesting that expecting such economically integrated people to approach anti-racist activism like Malcolm X might not yield the desired results, or even be the desired approach.

The real damage here, though, is to suggest that there is something uniquely Asian about not speaking up against discrimination when they are not directly, or personally, affected by it. Clearly, all minorities who have achieved some degree of economic integration for one reason of another will not challenge discrimination unless they are personally affected by it - the Clipper's employees illustrate this. By implying that this is a uniquely Asian phenomenon is simply incorrect and only serves to deflect the dialogue away from any meaningful attempt to find a course of action that empowers minorities - not just the Asian ones - to embrace their economic success or integration, whilst challenging discrimination from within.

Pointing the finger at Asians only allows the very significant fact to go unnoticed that almost no minority groups who stand to lose what little piece of economic advantage they have attained will rarely jeopardize it to stand up for ati-racist ideals. This notion is too simplistic on top of being wrong - much like the kind of stereotyping we are targeted with - and in order to improve the Asian-American cultural, social and political footprint we need to offer dialogue about ourselves that is primarily accurate, and nuanced.

What Is An Asian To Do?

America's Asian Problem.

I came across an online news article in the Guardian that surprised me because it was written by an Asian-American (Jennifer Lee), on the subject of Asian-Americans - the Guardian is a British news outlet. In the article - written, somewhat, in response to the recent Amy Chua claims on how culture affects success, and based on studies conducted by Lee and Min Zhou - Lee suggests that "we" need more US Asians - US Chinese in particular - to move away from the rigid definitions of success that have typically driven their apparent economic and academic successes. The gist of the article was - as the article's title suggested - that Asians should expand their definition of success beyond the "limitations" implicit in presuming success to mean a high educational attainment leading to a successful professional career and the financial rewards that such a career brings with it and move into the arts.

I have heard this sentiment being expressed several times before elsewhere and it seems to be a common feeling in Asian-America that somehow seems to based on an assumption that succeeding in the arts is a piece of cake. Whilst I believe that real social change occurs mainly through the process of changing attitudes by means of a strong cultural voice - that is, a creative voice - I also think that we have to be aware of the prevalent culture that seems to condition a negative knee-jerk response to any Asian successes and find fault with it at any cost. Or, on the flip-side, find Asian successes problematic because Asians are simply the wrong kind of minority.

Consider this.....

But this narrow framing of success comes at a price: young people who don’t “make it” are made to feel like failures and under-achievers, often leading them to isolate themselves from their ethnic communities and reject their ethnic identities. These “under-achievers” told us that they “don’t feel really Chinese”, “aren’t like other Asians”, or have become “the black sheep” of their families because they haven’t met what they perceive to be the expected levels of achievement for Chinese Americans.

This is somewhat insulting.The implication here is that a career in the arts is somehow not measured by financial success and academic achievement is less of a necessity, or, even worse, that failure in the arts is somehow less devastating than failure to make it in the professions. This is plainly false.

In truth, in order to succeed in the arts, one has to work extremely hard just to outperform competitors, and then hope that an agent or patron of some kind can find an angle for your work and then pitch it to the right people to pitch it to the general public. In the meantime, the artist often lives a life in which financial uncertainty becomes a way of life. Of course, if you are lucky and manage to make it, then the rewards are probably worth the effort, but for every successful artist there may be dozens more who don't make it. It is that hard, even if you don't add in the ingredient of prejudice that Asians may encounter - as the article says - working in a field where rewards are often derived from the subjective whims of audiences, who may be swayed by prevailing racialized attitudes. How this describes a less stressful career choice or one that carries a "softer" failure I don't know. I would not be surprised to discover that most artists - writers, fine artists, classical musicians and the like - actually do achieve at least a master's degree or above, and that these folks even excelled in their studies.

Even popular musicians - including the self-taught - typically will spend hours in practice, and years performing in dives gaining vital experience. The point is that for every painted masterpiece there are dozens of sketches and rejected ideas, for every hit song, there are dozens of bad takes and rejected verses that never see the light of day. And even when - or if - an artist does produce a masterpiece, there is no guarantee that the world will recognize it as such until well after the artist dies. So, to suggest that a career in the arts leads to more happiness, or is in some way a better way to define success is simply nonsense. The point is that regardless of whether one chooses a professional career or a career in the arts, the application and drive to succeed are fundamentally the same, and success often follows a successful academic career. The only difference between those who choose the professions and those who choose the arts is the vehicle that people are using to get to the same end of financial security and acclaim.

Clearly, regardless of which career choice one makes, the fact is that to succeed in that field, one has to work equally hard, put in thousands of  hours of practice and apply oneself in education,the goals of which are fundamentally the same as they would be in a professional career. To imply otherwise is misleading - the arts require an extremely high degree of educational attainment so I am always somewhat puzzled when I hear Asians speaking about a career in arts as though it is a breeze to achieve.

But there is another aspect to this way of thinking that I find troubling. This what the article says....

Americans often measure success by the three M’s: money, Motorola, and Mercedes. Most Chinese immigrant parents, on the other hand, define success as getting straight A’s, graduating from an elite university, pursuing an advanced degree and becoming a doctor, lawyer, pharmacist or engineer.......Could this be why the children of Chinese immigrants are, on average, better educated and wealthier – with higher paying jobs – than the general US population?.......

Given these consequences, why do Chinese and other Asian immigrant parents frame success so narrowly?.......They do so because they come from countries where education is one of the only paths for mobility. And, as non-white immigrants in the United States, Asian immigrant parents fear that their children will experience discrimination in their careers. So parents shepherd their children into conservative, high-status professions in which they may be most shielded from potential discrimination by employers, customers and clients.......

Based on our interviews with the children of Chinese immigrants, we learned that their parents believe that careers in writing, acting, fashion and art are risky because these professions involve subjective evaluation, thereby making their children vulnerable to bias. By contrast, careers in medicine, engineering, law or pharmacy require higher credentials and advanced degrees, which protects their children from the usual types of discrimination.

What strikes me here is that the article is suggesting that because some people struggle or ultimately fail in their attempts to enter the professions with impeccable educational credentials that this is somehow a good reason to re-define the terms of success. As I explained above, success in any field is fundamentally measured by the same criteria; acclaim from peers and community and financial security so, in reality, success is not actually being re-defined. It is merely the means by which these goals are achieved that has been changed and that carries with it the same, or greater, risk of failure.

But even though the article outlines clearly that perceived and real experiences of prejudice and discrimination have already shaped Asians practices and attitudes towards careers and success - that is, Asians have already re-defined success to adapt to these experiences - Lee's piece somehow manages to avoid the elephant in the room by suggesting that Asians should reappraise of how we define success as a separate dialogue from the factors of prejudice that largely shape them. In effect, Lee is saying that Asians should put their heads down and unilaterally adapt - again - to the obstacles of racism and prejudice that shape how we may approach career choices without, presumably, addressing the issues that have limited, and caused Asians to self-limit, their career choices.

What I am getting at here is that if we know and acknowledge that stereotypes, discrimination, and prejudice, play a significant role in shaping or limiting the avenues for opportunity that Asians feel are available to them, then any reappraisal of this has to be culture and society-wide, and include a reappraisal by society of its attitudes that limit Asian participation in all aspect and areas of the culture.

Certainly it could be argued that by making the decision to strive for success in fields where Asians are not "traditionally" to be found could create a shift in attitudes, but as Jeremy Lin has shown in sports, and several Asian actors have shown in film, even if you have abilities to succeed outside the Asian norm, the deeply ingrained attitudes can and will hold you back. But in both Jeremy Lin's case and that of Asian actors not being given opportunities, it could be argued that the support of the larger Asian-American community who have attacked head-on and basically stopped the overt dehumanizing stereotyping  and characterizations of Lin has helped to smooth his path somewhat, and Asian responses to poor representations may have slightly improved opportunities for Asian actors.

The point here is that the combined efforts of  of Lin's pursuing an "outside of the box" career and the head-on confrontations of the community to the racist backlash against him may have served to highlight the societal conversation about anti-Asian racism, and softened America's cultural conceptual barriers that see or accept a very limited definition of what it means to be Asian. Lee is fundamentally describing a shift whereby Asians act like a "model minority", by changing their own behaviour without necessarily rocking the boat of mainstream racist attitudes, despite the evidence that with a combination of personal application and community will we can soften, slightly, the blows of racist presumption.

Now the irony here is that Lee's piece was written almost as a refutation of Amy Chua's supposed model-minority-celebrating-new-novel in which she cited cultural characteristics as the cause of the successes - as defined by financial and academic achievement - of various American ethnic minorities, including, naturally, the Chinese. Oddly, Lee seems to be a champion for Asians to model-minority their way out of career and choice limiting prejudice in much the same way that Chua has been accused of doing. Even more funny, is that Lee actually reaches the same conclusions that Chua reached - cultural factors are responsible for the success of some minority groups, which is exactly what Chua has asserted. It seems odd to rebut an idea by seemingly agreeing with it.

My sense, though, is that Lee's piece is but one manifestation of the widespread embarrassment amongst Asians that Amy Chua has chosen - by default, perhaps - to not be contrite about Asian success and put it out there as - again perhaps not by design - something that deserves praise in and of itself without it being framed as an implicit affront to the cause of social justice and anti-racism. I'm a little fatigued by the constant reminders that Asians should be ashamed that being successful supposedly makes other minorities look bad, or that our successes are some kind of leverage to justify racism against other groups. On the contrary, the model minority stereotype first and foremost is used to justify racism against Asians, or diminish its importance.

Some suggest that we should throw off the model-minority stereotype for these reasons, I say that by allowing the stereotype to loom large in our consciousness we are giving in to the power of stereotypes to shape our lives. The fact is that regardless of who you are, if you believe stereotypes then you have accepted and utilized racist thinking. This holds true for the white racist who justifies racism against non-Asians by citing the model-minority stereotype, but also for the non-white person who allows themselves to develop racialized resentment towards Asians because they may have been told that they should "do what the Asians do".

We are not responsible for the stereotypes that are created about us and trying to not seem to be that stereotype is to allow racism to shape your actions, when the focus should really be on developing original approaches to shaping identity, our cultural footprint, and our inclusion in more aspects of the culture. Shaming ourselves about Asian successes is to accept the principles of racial prejudice. This is because anti-Asian racism manifests as a refusal to accept Asian-American accomplishments or view them as implicitly threatening, suspicious, or as a justification for resentment which are foundational aspects of anti-Asian racism.

How odd that it is being suggested that we can strike a blow against racism by encouraging shame and suspicion about successes that are largely shaped by that very racism. This behaviour allows the virus of racism to persist because, paradoxically, the carrot of economic success through academic achievement and a career in the professions is still largely held up as the goal for every other group but Asians who, apparently, should be questioning it. This means that decrying our successes supports the racist perspective that is threatened by, and suspicious of, Asian success.

A Modulating Racism

Prosperity, Success, And The Permissiveness Of Racism.

I came across an article in the New York Times that covered the racial experiences of minority groups at the University Of Michigan. What struck me about the piece was one comment by a black admin officer that I thought had significance in the intra-Asian-American dialogue on the model minority stereotype. This is the comment...

We’re clearly not postracial,” said Tiya A. Miles, chairwoman of the department of Afro-American and African studies. “Sometimes I wonder if having a black president lets people feel like that gives them cover. It absolves people of being prejudiced.

An interesting comment that sums up in a nutshell the experience of Asian-Americans.Whereas the the above comment mentions the "success" of having a black president serving as an excuse or cover for prejudice, for Asian-Americans, it is the notion of an economically and educationally high-achieving minority that excuses anti-Asian attitudes - what do Asians have to complain about when they are so successful?

Whereas much commentary focuses on how the minority model stereotype separates us in the eyes of our co-minorities, all too often we miss the fact that the stereotype's primary function serves to render an autonomous Asian voice invisible and downplay the fact that casual anti-Asian racism and hate crimes are regularly committed through derogatory cultural representations of Asians, normalizing such attitudes and further ingraining anti-Asian hostility into the cultural zeitgeist as the normal and acceptable mode of behaviour and conceptualization of Asian people.

While we spend our time decrying how the successes we achieve are an affront to other minorities, we fail to notice that this success - paraphrased as the "model minority" - serves as an excuse to legitimize America's casual cultural racism towards Asian-Americans. Many of the incidents cited by the article of racial intolerance and insensitivity towards black students are mirrored in commonplace experiences for Asian-Americans. In fact, not only are they common, American culture itself brazenly and unapologetically propagates this intolerance flagrantly distilling "Asian" characteristics down to a series of demeaning qualities that are recycled by subsequent perpetrators and even broadcast to international audiences.

Here are some examples of the intolerance cited in the article....

fraternity hosting the party, whose members are mostly Asian and white, had invited “rappers, twerkers, gangsters” and others “back to da hood again.”.....high-profile incidents — including a number of fraternity parties nationwide that have used racist symbols, including watermelons and gang signs....a black student at the State University of New York at New Paltz, shared a photo of a “colored only” sign that had been placed on a water fountain in his freshman year.

What is being described here echoes the kinds of media depictions that Asian-Americans complain about, the difference is that the article is acknowledging that these incidents may reflect an intolerance towards blacks, whereas the media's perpetration of the same kinds of insensitivities and dehumanization of Asians causes few eyebrows to be raised, and scarce criticism save from Asians themselves. Rarely, if at all, is the possibility raised that these intermittent but consistent depictions of Asians might reflect intolerance. The question is; what is the difference between "play-acting" at being a "gangsta" in a college frat-house and play-acting dehumanizing ideas about Asians on the television or movie screen?

One difference is that Asians are a model minority whose educational and economic achievements have enabled anti-Asian racism to find an acceptable avenue of expression - prosperity alleviates the effects of racism, so the prevailing wisdom goes, and, in fact, prosperity itself may reflect a reversal of racist attitudes such that racial insensitivities can be excused because the bottom-line has become the gauge of its prevalence. The logic is flawless and convenient; prosperity is an indicator that racism has diminished, therefore racially demeaning depictions of Asians simply cannot be racist.

The reality is that what the Asian-American experience can offer us - and it is an experience that we often miss in our attempts to distance ourselves from "internalizing" the model minority stereotype - is an insight into the future of all visible minorities who attain some level of prosperity. If we accept that prosperity is the line beyond which racism is judged to have disappeared - when our experience tells us it has not - then we have not really succeeded in changing ingrained racist attitudes, we merely allow them to exist in a more subtle or snide way that enables the permissiveness of racial harassment.

The model minority dialogue must provide more room for the exploration of this phenomenon of prosperity providing the legitimacy for the permissiveness of racial harassment. Instead of framing the Asian-American experience of achieving prosperity as primarily a story of a formerly aggrieved minority's ingratitude or indifference to other minorities who may be less successful than we, perhaps it would behoove us to explore the subtle, grudging, racisms that accompanies prosperity or even merely the appearance of prosperity, and in so doing, highlight the fact that racism does not end once a group has exhibits high college graduation or income levels. 

Wimpy Asian Guys?

Five Filipinos Take On Dozens.....



http://www.worldstarhiphop.com/videos/video.php?v=wshhLdGt96ranp5hbubZ

Don't know if those are really Filipinos, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were. LOL!

We Don't Know Much!

Asian Attitudes And The Model Minority.

The folks over at the "Racefiles" blog have posted the findings of a study that they conducted that sought to..

...better understand the racial position of Asian Americans, and how Asian American identity functions in the realm of racial politics...

To accomplish this, they did the following.....

....conducted in-depth, confidential interviews with 82 Asian American organizers, leaders, intellectuals, and artists working in the racial justice field throughout the United States. We also talked to five non-Asian American racial justice leaders doing promising work that cuts across all communities of color. 

There is some good background information provided that offers a persuasive (but, in my opinion, incomplete) interpretation  of the historical background that has shaped the social hierarchy of 21st century America.

The latter part of the findings shifts focus somewhat to the interviewees' personal visions for mobilizing Asian-Americans. But, I'll begin by focusing on the report's findings on the racial attitudes and positions of Asian-Americans as represented by the interviewees.

In answer to the question of "how Asian Americans think about race, and whether we should work to build a more unified Asian American identity", the following was concluded......

They Don’t. It is significant that about one-third of respondents said that Asian Americans do not think about race at all. Some said this was because of the weakness of Asian American racial identity especially among first-generation immigrants and refugees, but others attributed it to the racial position of Asian Americans, especially those with class privilege, which encouraged the embrace of American individualism.

Asian American Racial Superiority. Many participants critiqued the model minority myth as a strategy to denigrate Blackness and distance Asian Americans from other peoples of color, in service to white supremacy.

 And one Mid-West organizer elaborates....

“I mean, Asians are racist… I don’t think that they think very highly of African Americans. I think that they largely think what they’re told about them, which is that they’re criminals, they’re undeserving, they try and feed off the system, they don’t work hard, they’re scary, all of those different kinds of things… It’s messed up.”

The next question asked; What do Asian Americans Think of Other Peoples of Color?

In general, there was a sense that Asian Americans had internalized negative stereotypes about Blacks and Latinos in particular, and took pride in the model minority myth, even if they did not think explicitly about race in their daily lives.......More than half of the people we interviewed said that Asian Americans exhibited a significant amount of anti-Black racism.

The piece goes on to describe Asian-American attitudes towards Latinos - generally slightly warmer than attitudes towards blacks, but still somewhat negative - and Asian-American feelings towards Native Americans, which turned out to be non-existent - Asian-Americans don't think about them much. But overall, the general consensus was that Asian/black tensions were the most significant manifestation of Asian-American feelings of racial superiority.

Although these findings are presented as representative of Asian-American attitudes, I was disturbed by the fact that nowhere were these conclusions supported by studies, surveys, or polls, conducted on the community. On the contrary, these findings were simply the opinions, perceptions, and guesswork of the interviewees. Now it may be the case that these interviewees were referring to studies but no studies were cited to support their statements.

The problem with this should be obvious. It is simply misleading to represent opinions about the attitudes and worldview of a group as the actual attitudes and feelings of that group. It doesn't matter that these people are activists or advocates, their opinions are just their opinions and nothing more. I don't doubt that the intentions of the study were noble, but without a legitimate study conducted directly with members of the community that reflect a representative cross-section of the demographic then the conclusions can only be misleading.

As I have written elsewhere, marginalization of Asian-Americans (and Asians) is often driven by misrepresentation by self-proclaimed experts - whose objectivity is never questioned and the subjectivity of their assertions never recognized - who often manufacture, skew, or over-generalize, information about Asia and present them as facts. This way of doing things is popular because the input of Asians is not required, and not even wanted, allowing any claims to be made (often resulting in best-selling books) without the inconvenient question of their veracity being raised. No-one wants Asians ruining the cultural Asian-marginalizing party by actually asking Asians to express and interpret their own ideas without the filter of a white expert's subjective opinion. Thus, Asians are often excluded from dialogue about themselves. The last thing that Asian-Americans need is to have our own advocates and intellectuals doing things in a similar vein.

Even if we were to accept the unlikely scenario that a handful of activists can know Asian-Americans well enough to make the kinds of sweeping statements that were made, the way it was reported is troubling. For example, in answer to the question "how Asian Americans think about race, and whether we should work to build a more unified Asian American identity", the study "found" that "Asians don't" think about it. The problem here is that even this is misleading - even if we do accept that the activists' opinions are an accurate representation of Asian-American attitudes. Only one-third of the interviewees believed that Asians don't think about race, this leaves at least two-thirds of interviewees who may believe that Asians do, in fact, think about race. So, even by their own criteria, it is inaccurate to say that Asians don't think about race - in fact, the opposite may well be the case and at least two-thirds do.

These criticisms are significant when we look at the latter part of the study which looks to answer the questions of the direction, character, and focus, of future Asian-American "resistance". The section begins as follows.....

Is It Strategic to Organize and Resist as Asian Americans?This question revealed deep conflicts and confusion, and it demands much more debate and discussion among racial justice organizers. There was a fairly even split between those who said “yes” we should work to build a unified API identity, and those who said “no,” “maybe,” or “I don’t know.” Among those who said that we should, one-third had significant qualifiers, sometimes contradicting their initial answer. Even those working at API organizations expressed doubts. One person said, “I don’t know if I would say yes to that. I mean, I’ve spent my 20 years doing so, but I don’t know.” Another person simply said, “I don’t even know what ‘API’ means.” 

It seems evident that Asian-American justice workers really don't have a clear-cut vision of what the goals of Asian-American advocacy are, what it would take to mobilize Asians politically, how we should co-operate with other peoples of colour, or even whether Asian-American identity is a good basis for organizing. Yet, nowhere is mention made of actually asking Asian-Americans themselves what their experiences are and how they see themselves in the racial dynamics of American society. And this is a serious omission from the thinking of our activists.

The reason is that what is actually missing is a body of work that tells us, with reasonable accuracy, what are the experiences of Asian-America that could inform their activism. What this means is that at this point in time, perhaps it would be more meaningful to focus on working on an ontology of Asian-America that allows us to move beyond the guesswork and opinion. Ontology can be defined as "a specification of a conceptualization", which means to establish a criterion for what does, or does not, exist. For Asian-America, this means removing the guesswork, over-generalized labeling, opinion, and supposition, from our dialogue, and establishing the fact from the fiction. This ontology could be informed by academic study, polls, or even journalistic investigation, but it has to exist in order for a meaningful vision to be established.

My final point of interest is in the stated feelings of the interviewees towards the model-minority stereotype. In the study, much time is spent on, and much reference is made to, the model-minority label and how it affects relations between Asian-Americans and other minorities. Many (perhaps all) interviewees decry the stereotype for "elevating" Asians above other minorities and causing division between them, implying that Asians don't do enough to "fight" the stereotype. But I think that this is simplistic and dangerous because it fundamentally asks that Asians answer for a stereotype that they didn't create and I don't think that it is fair, or appropriate. Even those successful Asians who supposedly "embrace" the stereotype are not obliged to answer for it.

Here is the irony; my observation is that it is mostly Asian-Americans who actually use the term "model-minority". In mainstream America, the term is hardly ever mentioned when referring to Asians. In fact, American culture is so poisoned with negative attitudes towards Asians that, culturally, we are far from being viewed as models for anything. Sure, there are the reports of Asian successes, but often these are presented with a tone of foreboding, and rarely as a celebration. White culture doesn't celebrate our successes - it is disturbed by them.

And this is where it gets uncomfortable because given that American culture demeans Asians (to the point of it becoming the cultural norm), any resentment has to derive from the apparent contradiction between these reported successes and the cultural attitude that Asians are society's losers. This goes beyond the simplistic notion of a "cause-effect" character of the model minority stereotype - it might be more likely that people resent Asians because pathetic Asian losers are not supposed to be successful.

This is problematic for those who wish to allay black resentment towards Asians caused by the stereotype by insisting that we show contrition for it, because the model-minority label doesn't really exist as the resentment-motivating entity that we seem to think it is. It is culturally normalized anti-Asian attitudes that make resentment and hostility the standard mode of interaction for mainstream America (of all colours) and its Asian minority regardless of any specific label - that is Americans are conditioned to view Asians with suspicion, hostility, and distrust, regardless of any particular stereotype.

This might be uncomfortable for some because it suggests that anti-Asian hostility from both black and white Americans derives from the same root cause of cultural conditioning and not from a specific stereotype that we have perceived to be uniquely designed for this purpose. That is why fighting the model-minority stereotype is like jousting windmills - the entire culture is set up to create a no-win and a no-way-in attitude towards Asians. People would find any excuse to resent us even if the model-minority stereotype didn't exist because the entire manner of America's cultural attitude with Asians promotes distrust and suspicion.

It is naive to react with horror (and surprise) that the white racism which produced the stereotype has induced a racist response from other minorities towards Asians. And it is self-deceiving to deny that  that is racist when people are resentful towards a group because of stereotypes, regardless of who is expressing it. It is almost always forgotten that the model-minority stereotype reflects how profoundly the Asian minority of America is culturally marginalized; an entire identity can be, and has been, created for us by media and cultural forces that excludes Asians from the whole process of its creation, yet which has been successful in defining what it means to be Asian-American in the popular consciousness. If other minorities hate us because of that, then that implies an uncompromising prejudice in a similar vein to that modeled by the white mainstream.

There are other, equally or more, pervasive representations of Asians that may have far worse consequences than the model-minority stereotype. American culture enacts and depicts racial harassment of Asian people as a normal and acceptable activity, and often engages in fantasies about committing sadistic violence towards, and mass-murder of, Asian people. Furthermore, there is resentment inducing political blaming of Asia and Asians for various economic or environmental "crimes", pervasive racial mockery in film and television, and casual assertions of Asian underhandedness and sneakiness in all their endeavours. I maintain that all of this cultural hostility has modeled resentment, hostility, anger, dislike, and uncompromising combativeness, as the normal and acceptable way of interacting with Asians.

What this means is that regardless of the specific racially inflected representation, the response is almost always going to be negative - tell people that Asians are the model-minority, then the response is resentment, tell people that Asian kids are the most bullied then the response is "its their own fault, Asians are anti-social", complain about anti-Asian racism in the black community and the response is "well Asians are racist and Koreans are channeling money out of the hood", and tell people that there is significant poverty amongst Asian-Americans and the response is indifference, or "blacks and Latinos have it worse!". The stereotypes are only the poisonous by-product of the underlying prejudices that enable Asians to be defined by people who at best are ignorant, or at worst, malicious.

This why I think that more evidence is required before we start asserting the model-minority label as the most significant cause of tensions between Asians and other minorities. If we stop reacting and look at the situation rationally, we might notice that America's culture of combative disassociation, casual racial harassment, and vindictive resentment, is more likely to shape people's reactions and interactions with Asian-Americans far more effectively than the specific model-minority label. This pervasive culture of dehumanizing and demeaning Asians - which also conditions other minorities in their behaviour and attitudes - more than outweighs any supposed positives stemming from the model-minority stereotype and probably shapes reactions to it.

My final thought on this is that I question the degree to which the model-minority stereotype actually influences federal and state policies towards other minorities. The narrative is as follows; the model minority stereotype is used as some kind of leverage by white America (usually GOP white folks) to justify cutting minority programs. But is this really true, or even reasonable to presume that the stereotype is even considered when policy changes are being discussed and put forward, or even that it influences such policy discussions? Certainly, an argument can be made that this label is bandied about (perhaps mostly by Asians who oppose it) in popular dialogue, but I see little reason to believe that the model-minority stereotype is used to justify any policy of any level of government. I think that it is somewhat grandiose to believe that this establishment actually needs model Asians to justify policies that affect other minorities, or even that the establishment uses this argument to establish a legal basis for "anti-black" policies.

So, in summary, the study highlighted the ontological gulf that exists between advocates and the community it seeks to represent. This gulf is apparently often filled with subjective opinions about the nature and character of Asian attitudes in lieu of a significant ontological basis. Furthermore, the study itself somewhat misleadingly reports these opinions as the actual attitudes and feelings of the community, which I recognize as a common phenomenon in Asian-American "culture" in which subjective thoughts and attitudes are unreasonably generalized as community or culture wide realities. Finally, the interviewees' attitudes towards the model-minority stereotype reflect what I have observed amongst many Asian-Americans; guilt for which they feel a need to show contrition, but it might also reflect an exaggerated and inflated notion of the actual influence that the stereotype may exert over the political process.

It does a disservice to Asian-Americans to downplay the fact that the model-minority stereotype reflects the degree to which the Asian voice is overpowered by the structures of racism in America - the white mainstream can shape our social identity and make it the basis upon which the Asian minority is perceived. Focusing on how the label affects other minorities' opinions of us instead of how the label reflects this damaging, profoundly embedded and overwhelming culture of hostile misrepresentation, is itself marginalizing Asians from their own experience. Communities come together when they recognize common experiences, at the root of the Asian experience is the notion that a shared humanity with Asians is impossible or unwanted - and it is unreasonable to believe that this mainstream position is rejected by other minorities. Giving weight to resentment caused by the label, as opposed to the racism that produces it is actually distancing Asians from any commonality with these other minority groups, and actually empowers the structures of racism.

Here is the link to the study..........
http://changelabinfo.com/reports/ChangeLab_Left-or-Right-of-the-Color-Line.pdf

Screw All Of You Guys....I'm Going Home

The Cartman Principle.

Life can be funny sometimes.

For various reasons many Asian-Americans will cringe when being called a "model minority". Chief amongst those reasons is the notion that supposed Asian-American academic achievement and economic success are often held up by some white commentators as the model for other minorities of colour to imitate in order to pull themselves out of poverty. Many minorities (Asians and non-Asians alike) view this as a strategy for excusing white discriminatory practices and placing responsibility firmly on the shoulders of minorities themselves for whatever backward social conditions they might face. The general principle is that if Asians can succeed, then why can't other minorities do the same? Many minority commentators point to this idea as being divisive and has set minorities groups against one another, increasing suspicion and mutual hostility.

Yet, as this article proves, white people should be careful what they wish for. Here's an excerpt............

In Silicon Valley, two high schools with outstanding academic reputations are losing white students as Asian students move in. Why?.........Whites aren't quitting the schools because the schools are failing academically. Quite the contrary: Many white parents say they're leaving because the schools are too academically driven and too narrowly invested in subjects such as math and science at the expense of liberal arts and extracurriculars like sports and other personal interests.....The white exodus clearly involves race-based presumptions, not all of which are positive. One example: Asian parents are too competitive. "My sense is that at Monta Vista you're competing against the child beside you," [parent, Ms. Doherty] says...........At Cupertino's top schools, administrators, parents and students say white students end up in the stereotyped role often applied to other minority groups: the underachievers.

As you may have read, many white people are refusing to play their own game and are leaving - taking their marbles home with them.

No doubt, the model minority stereotype will lose its appeal for white commentators and will quietly disappear from the dialogue.