Celeste Ng And Trumping The System

Asian Women's Get Out Of Jail Free Card.....

In the years following the end of the Second World War, thousands of Japanese War Brides were admitted to the United States as the spouses of American GIs returning from the Pacific War. Most of these women were married to Caucasian GIs - a phenomenon which spawned an unusual racial dynamic that saw many of these Japanese War Brides slot into a unique ethnic category that set them apart from other racial minorities but also from other Asian-Americans.

A dissertation by Masura Nakamura of the University of Minnesota explores how these women integrated into their new husbands' lives, society and culture, and reveals some intriguing insights into our present-day, Asian-American gendered racial experiences. Most significantly for this post, is the relationship between these War Bride newcomers to America and the existing Japanese-American community.

For the most part, this relationship was a fraught one - either largely non-existent due to War Brides being geographically isolated from other Japanese-Americans, or due to simple lack of commonality between the experiences of the two demographics if, or when they were living in proximity. According to Nakamura's dissertation, Japanese War Brides lived unique "de-racialized" lives when married to white GIs which saw them idealized as "proto-model minorities" for their acquiescence to unquestioning integration into white society. So thorough was this process, that many even adopted racist attitudes towards African-Americans and the Japanese women married to black GIs, often having nothing to do with them because of the race of their partner.

Prominent amongst these War Brides was an attitude of disdain for Japanese-Americans, whom they derided for not being more "Americanized".....

Some war brides, such as Mrs. F-19, criticized the Japanese Americans in Hawaii for more than their use of Japanese over English and generally condemned them for not being more American. She was in favor of Americanization, and like Mrs. F-17 thought Japanese Americans were backwards for not Americanizing more fully. (p.229)......As Mrs. F-19 succinctly stated, “I am married to an American and I want to become Americanized. When Iwas married to my husband, I made up my mind that I was going to be an American. I am willing to give up my Japanese background.” 

The severe racial discrimination experienced by earlier waves of Japanese immigrants that saw them racially segregated, blocked from integrating into mainstream American society, and marginalized them as second class citizens seems to have gone unnoticed by some of these War Brides. Even the internment of thousands of Japanese-Americans seems not to have given pause to consider the possibility that Japanese-Americans were not more Americanized due to America's efforts to keep them in a state of separateness. In short, Japanese-Americans, unlike "Mrs. F-19" were not given the opportunity to choose to achieve "Americanization" through their personal partnering with whiteness. 

This "privilege" of being able to choose American whiteness was only available to Asian women married to white men. Nakamura calls this process "racial coverture" - a reference to old English Common Law in which the rights and identity of a wife are subsumed by those of the husband. In this case, the Asiatic race of Japanese War Brides was subsumed by the whiteness of their white spouse, granting them rights and opportunities not available to any other racial minority group.

Thus, at a time when racial minorities were still criminalized under draconian Jim Crow era anti-miscegenation laws, thousands of Asian women were enjoying the privilege of full integration by "choosing Americanization" due to their marriages to white men. Even prior to this post-war mass migration of Asian War Brides, Asian women enjoyed privileges if they partnered white men.

Celeste Ng's recent article in "The Cut" echoed this same privilege induced tone deafness. While I share Ng's condemnation of the harassment she has experienced, her miscomprehension of a racial minority's experience other than her own - in this case Asian men - comes through loud and clear. Unlike other minority demographics, Asian women have historically had the option to "overcome" racial disadvantages through partnering with white men, so it seems natural that some Asian women may struggle to truly understand the nature of the "no-win" situation that some Asian men might feel. This would be especially true when it might directly challenge the implicit privileges their choices in life and love may offer them.

When Ng writes....

Asian men face long-standing stereotypes that they’re socially awkward, unmasculine, or sexually unattractive, and these perceptions often put them at a disadvantage, from academics to work to dating apps. From their posts, it’s clear that Asian men like those on AZNidentity believe they’re fighting a constant battle against a culture that’s out to get them.

.....she has revealed her lack of familiarity with Asian men's experiences. Some of Asian-America's most successful men have written about experiencing this feeling of unremitting cultural hostility that Ng casually dismisses as the domain of "Asian men like those on AZNIdentity". Here are some examples.....

.......there were times I thoroughly believed that no one wanted anything to do with me. I told myself that it was all a lie, but the structural emasculation of Asian men in all forms of media became a self-fulfilling prophecy that produced an actual abhorrence to Asian men in the real world. (Eddie Huang.).....

We’re simply interested in finding our identity, but when we look out to the world, all we can find is the lazy portrayal of the uni-dimensional, kung-fu fighting, smart, obedient, emasculated man or hyper-sexualized woman. The Model Minority. That sucks. (Ricky Yean - CEO).... 

No, I was a “chink”: A trope of an Asian man, a character I knew little about but had internalized, like many other Americans, as an emasculated nerd. I remember sitting in the back of my dad’s car one night crying and shaking as I told him that “no girl will ever like me because I’m Chinese.”.......In a place where Asian manhood had been obliterated, what I needed was someone to look up to. Someone who could understand my struggle and set an example. And my dad was not that person.......A white man couldn’t teach an Asian man about masculinity. Nor could the media, with its tokens and stereotypes.....(Zachary Schwartz, Journalist)

Last year, I read a book by Alex Tizon called Big Little Man: In Search of My Asian Self..... In the book, Tizon laments the representation of Asian men in popular media—or really, the lack thereof. He writes of Sex and the City: “Something like 2 million Asians live in the New York metropolitan area, but Asians hardly appear in the show at all—symbolic annihilation at its best.” Symbolic annihilation: the under-representation of a group of people, usually in media. Asian men rarely show up in TV or film. And when they do, they often are at best sexless nerds, and at worst offensive stereotypes.(Kevin Nguyen, journalist)

We realized that for all of Jeremy Lin’s accomplishments, we as Asians are still different, are still seen differently than other races by the vast majority of Americans................The truth is, racism toward Asians is treated differently in America than racism toward other ethnic groups. This is a truth all Asian Americans know. While the same racist may hold back terms he sees as off-limits toward other minorities, he will often not hesitate to call an Asian person a chink, as Jeremy Lin was referred to, or talk about that Asian person as if he must know karate, or call him Bruce Lee, or consider him weak or effeminate, or so on....(Matthew Salesses, author)

There are many more such testimonies in which successful Asian men describe this sense of being under siege by a hostile and racist culture. Surely, men such as CEO, Ricky Yean and well-regarded authors, like Matthew Salesses are not "bullies" like those "Asian men on AZNIdentity"? Clearly, Celeste Ng is wrong in her insinuation that these notions of a hostile culture are the delusions of unhinged Asian men.

Despite Ng's acknowledgement of the discrimination and dehumanizing stereotypes that Asian men face, it seems like mere dismissive lip-service. She writes...

These harassers frequently brand me “self-hating” and accuse me of “hating Asian men” — because I have a white husband, and because of a tweet I posted years ago in which I acknowledged I wasn’t always attracted to Asian men......They have a valid complaint here: My tweet fed into those stereotypes that Asian men are unsexy, and when people pointed this out, I rethought my own biases. 

Ah, that tweet! The problem from my perspective is not that Ng's tweet revealed her lack of attraction to Asian men, or that she bought into stereotypes about them. The issue is the casual, off-the-cuff expression of racism. Ng finds that all Asian men look the same and that their "look" negates any curiosity about their personal qualities.

This sentiment plays into more sinister stereotypes - Asians as droll automatons, lacking any significant quality of character to differentiate any one individual from another. Ng seems unconscious of her unconscious propagation of a foundational dehumanizing stereotype that has existed in American culture as a by-product of the need in times of war to dehumanize your Asian enemy. Her lack of attraction for men like me is not a problem for me. Her clueless propagation of racist sentiment is.

Like some Japanese war Brides before her, Ng can't seem to understand why there is such a fuss about interracial marriage. Nor can she seem to gauge why it is such an issue for some racial minorities. The reason, I submit, could be that interracial partnering is something that Asian women have never really had to struggle to achieve. Despite the fact that modern-day Asian women fancy themselves as martyrs for the cause of interracial love, in truth (as herstory shows), Asian women have long been afforded the privilege of crossing the racial barrier to partner white men, while other minorities (including Asian men) have been criminalized for their interracial love choices. Anti-miscegenation laws have been ignored, and immigration laws perforated and changed to enable this to happen.

Far from being the heroic struggle for interracial love against all the odds that modern-day Asian feminists would like us all to believe, Asian women partnering white men is, in fact, one of the most glaring examples of the power of white male supremacist privilege. How else can we explain the ease with which harsh laws devised to inhibit racial mixing could so easily be ignored? The answer of course is that the racist white men in power at the time decided that they could ignore their own laws to their own benefit. Such is the power of white supremacy.

Of course some Asian women can't understand the anger that some Asian men might feel about interracial out-marriage - they have never really had to fight for the right to it and have had any obstacles to it waved away by those in power. This lies at the root of Asian-American inter-gender issues when it comes to out-marriage.

We are living in a kind of residual culture, an aftermath of a period in American history of cultural and legal white racial supremacy. Asian-Americans seem not to have explored how the effects of gendered historical racism affect our community for one very good reason. As partners for white men, Asian female cultural leaders have effectively become the voice of the Asian-American narrative. From that perspective, not much has changed for Asian women. Jim Crow and immigration laws were changed and bypassed to permit Asian women to marry into whiteness. This is why "Asian narratives" are largely dominated by depictions of Asian women and white men whilst Asian men are marginalized. This is also why the "Asian narratives" often seem more sympathetic to historical white power structures than to the Asian experience.

Our present-day culture reflects this history. The naturalness of Asian women with white men is the social and cultural by-product of this history. By the same token, the normalcy of casual dehumanization, emasculation, and marginalization of Asian men derives, ultimately from the draconian anti-miscegenation legislation and sentiment strictly applied to Asian men who have always been conceived of as irredeemably foreign threats. No surprise that some Asian women are left scratching their heads trying to comprehend what it is like to be marginalized culturally, socially, and sexually. They have always been afforded an avenue out of that. Asian men still live under the shadow of residual cultural anti-miscegenation sentiment.

The existences of Ng's article is itself an expression of this privilege. Asian men are long accustomed to Asian women spouting racist sentiment towards us, yet, how often do we see a mainstream publication giving Asian male writers the opportunity to call it out?

In summary, the root of the gender conflict in Asian-America derives from the vastly disparate histories and racial experiences each has faced, particularly on the subject of miscegenation. Whilst Asian men were strictly held to account for anti-miscegenation, Asian women were exempted in tens of thousands of cases. The repeal of draconian immigration and anti-miscegenation laws merely meant business as usual for Asian women who had long been allowed to circumvent them due to their white partners. White supremacy itself has been a get out of jail free card for Asian women.

Sadly, Ng's experiences of online bullying, are a reflection of this historical chasm in experiences, and probably explains why awareness of it seems lacking in her piece. Quite simply, the "Asian narratives" of the post anti-miscegenation/exclusionary immigration period ignores this disparity of historical experience and instead focuses on the happiness of Asian women and their saviour white partners. Asian men are invisible in their own historical narratives, and the discrimination they experienced erased. This is why Asian women seemed to have been able to more easily "move on" past the history of racism that affected Asian-Americans in the past. The groundwork for this was already laid for them, thanks to the power of white supremacy to define race according to its own needs and desires.

The question is, how do Asian men "move on" from this history and its continuing cultural aftereffects without an honest acknowledgement of it?

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.