The Real Reasons the U.S. Became Less Racist Toward Asian Americans

The Real Reasons the U.S. Became Less Racist Toward Asian Americans

Between 1940 and 1970, something remarkable happened to Asian Americans. Not only did they surpass African Americans in average household earnings, but they also closed the wage gap with whites.

Many people credit this upward mobility to investments in education. But according to a recent study by Brown University economist Nathaniel Hilger, schooling rates among Asian Americans didn’t change all that significantly during those three decades. Instead, Hilger’s research suggests that Asian Americans started to earn more because their fellow Americans became less racist toward them.

How did that happen? About the same time that Asian Americans were climbing the socioeconomic ladder, they also experienced a major shift in their public image. At the outset of the 20th century, Asian Americans had often been portrayed as threatening, exotic and degenerate. But by the 1950s and 1960s, the idea of the model minority had begun to take root. Newspapers often glorified Asian Americans as industrious, law-abiding citizens who kept their heads down and never complained.

Some people think that racism toward Asians diminished because Asians “proved themselves” through their actions. But that is only a sliver of the truth. Then, as now, the stories of successful Asians were elevated, while the stories of less successful Asians were diminished. As historian Ellen Wu explains in her book, “The Color of Success,” the model minority stereotype has a fascinating origin story, one that’s tangled up in geopolitics, the Cold War and the civil rights movement.

To combat racism, minorities in the United States have often attempted to portray themselves as upstanding citizens capable of assimilating into mainstream culture. Asian Americans were no different, Wu writes. Some, like the Chinese, sought respectability by promoting stories about their obedient children and their traditional family values. The Japanese pointed to their wartime service as proof of their shared Americanness.

African Americans in the 1940s made very similar appeals. But in the postwar moment, Wu argues, it was only convenient for political leaders to hear the Asian voices.

The model minority narrative may have started with Asian Americans, but it was quickly co-opted by white politicians who saw it as a tool to win allies in the Cold War.

Discrimination was not a good look on the international stage. Embracing Asian Americans “provided a powerful means for the United States to proclaim itself a racial democracy and thereby credentialed to assume the leadership of the free world,” Wu writes. Stories about Asian American success were turned into propaganda.

By the 1960s, anxieties about the civil right movement caused white Americans to further invest in positive portrayals of Asian Americans. The image of the hard-working Asian became an extremely convenient way to deny the demands of African Americans. As Wu describes in her book, both liberal and conservative politicians pumped up the image of Asian Americans as a way to shift the blame for black poverty. If Asians could find success within the system, politicians asked, why couldn’t African Americans?

“The insinuation was that hard work along with unwavering faith in the government and liberal democracy as opposed to political protest were the keys to overcoming racial barriers as well as achieving full citizenship,” she writes.

Recently, Wu and I chatted on the phone about her book and the model minority stereotype — how it was equal parts truth, propaganda and self-enforcing prophecy.

Can you tell us a little bit about the question that got you started on this book?

WU: America in general has had very limited ways of thinking about Asian Americans. There are very few ways in which we exist in the popular imagination. In the mid- to late-19th century, all the way through the late 1940s and 1950s, Asians were thought of as “brown hordes” or as the “yellow peril.” There was the sinister, weird, “Fu Manchu” stereotype.

Yet, by the middle of the 1960s, Asian Americans had undergone this really arresting racial makeover. Political leaders, journalists, social scientists — all these people in the public eye — seemed to suddenly be praising Asian Americans as so-called model minorities.

I thought that might be a very interesting question to try to unravel.

How did these earliest stereotypes — these very negative, nasty images — take root?

Asian Americans first started coming in significant numbers during the California Gold Rush. Chinese immigrants came to do mining, then they ended up working on the Transcontinental Railroad, and agriculture. When those jobs died down, a lot of them moved to the cities where they started working in manufacturing.

At that time, in the 1870s, the economy wasn’t doing that well in California. White American workers were very anxious about keeping their jobs. They looked around and they saw these newcomers who seemed very different from them.

There already had been a long tradition in the Western world of portraying the “Orient” as unknowable and mysterious. American workers started attaching these ideas to the Chinese newcomers, who were an easy target for white American anxieties about the growth of industrial capitalism and the undermining of workers’ autonomy and freedom.

They believed that the Chinese threatened American independence and threatened American freedom.

These ideas were particularly popular among the white working class at the time. The momentum started to build in the American West. There was the Workingmen’s Party in California — one of their platforms was “The Chinese must go.” That’s how they rallied people. And they were very successful at it.

By 1882, Congress passed the first of a series of Chinese Exclusion Acts, which was the first time a race- and class-based group — Chinese workers — were singled out by American immigration law. The Chinese Exclusion Acts restricted their entry into the United States and said they couldn’t become naturalized citizens.

What’s really striking is that in the 1890s, the federal government even mandated a Chinese registry. That sounds a lot like this issue of the Muslim registry today, right?

A lot of what you’re describing sounds familiar today — the economic anxiety bleeding into racial anxiety, the targeting of outsiders …

Absolutely. There are a lot of resonances. What’s happening today didn’t spring out of nowhere — it has a very long history in the United States.

Can you describe some of these old stereotypes? I think that most people have some idea from old Hollywood movies, but it’s just such a contrast to how Asians Americans are portrayed today.

The ways in which Americans thought about these “Orientals” hinged a lot on moral differences and on issues of gender, sexuality and family.

Many great historians and scholars have done work on this. The major groups that came before World War II were the Chinese, Japanese, South Asians, Koreans and Filipinos.

There were both similarities and differences in how the groups were viewed, but generally they were thought to be threatening — significantly different in a negative sense.

For the most part, a lot of Asian immigrants weren’t Christian, so that was suspect. American Chinatowns had a thriving vice economy, so gambling, prostitution and drugs became popularly associated with Asians. (Of course, some of the same white Americans who were criticizing Asians were also the ones participating in these activities.)

There was this idea of moral depravity. At the time, the Chinese and Filipinos and South Asians in America were mostly single, able-bodied young men, so that also raised a lot of eyebrows. It looked like they were sexually wayward.

If you look at old stereotypical imagery of Asians in political cartoons, the way they tend to be depicted is that they are not aligned with white, middle-class notions of respectable masculinity. There’s the long hair, the flowing clothing that didn’t quite look masculine yet didn’t quite look feminine — or maybe it was something in-between, as some scholars have argued.

The women were also thought of as morally suspect — as prostitutes, sexually promiscuous, that kind of thing.

An important argument in your book is that Asians were complicit in the creation of the model minority myth. The way we talk about this issue today, it’s as if the white majority imposed this stereotype on Asian communities — but your research shows that’s not the case. How did it really get started?

Absolutely. That is a critical point to understand. The model minority myth as we see it today was mainly an unintended outcome of earlier attempts by Asians Americans to be accepted and recognized as human beings. They wanted to be seen as American people who were worthy of respect and dignity.

At lot was at stake. At the time, Asians were living life under an exclusion regime that had many similarities to Jim Crow — not the same as Jim Crow, but certainly a cousin of Jim Crow. There was a whole matrix of laws and discriminatory practices.

By 1924, all immigration from Asia had been completely banned. Asians were considered under the law “aliens ineligible for citizenship.” There were all these racial restrictions to citizenship under the law — and the last of these didn’t fall until 1952.

Asian Americans tended to be restricted to segregated neighborhoods, segregated schools. They often did not have the kind of job prospects that white people had. They would be barred from certain kinds of employment either by law or by custom.

In 1937, a young U.S.-born Japanese-American man lamented that even if you went to college, you could only end up being a “professional carrot-washer.” That was really true for a lot of people. They had very limited options for social mobility. And of course there was also violence — lynchings.

So for Asian Americans, one survival strategy was to portray themselves as “good Americans.”

As you argue in your book, it became increasingly expedient for mainstream Americans to acknowledge, and even amplify, Asian attempts to gain respectability. What changed?

Those claims really start to stick in the 1940s, when the nation was gearing up for global war. American leaders started to worry about the consequences of their domestic racial discrimination policies. They were concerned it would get in the way of forging alliances with other people abroad. That really motivated American leaders and the American people to work on race relations.

During World War II, lawmakers thought that Chinese exclusion made for bad diplomacy. So Congress decided to overturn Chinese exclusion as a goodwill gesture to China, who was America’s Pacific ally.

With the beginning of the Cold War, American policymakers became really attentive to putting their best image out into the world. They were very interested in winning hearts and minds in Asia.

Japan is a very good example. Japan lost the war and the United States took charge of reconstructing Japan in its own image as a rising democratic, capitalist country. And because Japan became such an important ally, that was the moment when Japanese exclusion laws could finally be overturned, which happened in 1952.

Again, people in Congress worried that if we left these laws on the books, it would endanger a billion hearts and minds in the Far East.

It wasn’t just a geopolitical thing right? It seems that by the 1960s, there were other reasons for investing in this image of Asians as upstanding citizens, reasons that were closer to home.

Oh, absolutely. There were definitely domestic reasons for why the idea was appealing that Asians could be considered good American citizens capable of assimilating into American life.

In the 1950s, there were general concerns about maintaining the right kind of home life. There’s this image of the perfect American family — a suburban household with a mom, a dad, two to three kids, a white picket fence. That was the ideal, but it wasn’t always realized. There was a juvenile delinquency panic in the 1950s, a big scare over how the nation’s youth were getting themselves into trouble.

The Chinatown leaders were really smart. They started to peddle stories about Chinese traditional family values and Confucian ethics. They claimed that Chinese children always listened to their elders, were unquestioningly obedient and never got into trouble because after school they would just go to Chinese school.

When I started digging, I found that this idea of this model Chinese family, with the perfect children who always just loved to study and who don’t have time to get into trouble or date — started to circulate quite prominently in the 1950s. That speaks to America’s anxieties about juvenile delinquency.

Also, since these stories were taking place in Chinatowns, it allowed Americans to claim that America had these remaining repositories of traditional Chinese values at a time when the Communist Chinese had completely dismantled them. So there’s this other level where these stories are also anti-Communist — they are doing this other ideological work.

How true were these stories though? How much of this was racial propaganda, and how much of it was rooted in reality?

These are obviously very strategic stories. In 1956, the federal government started to crack down on illegal Chinese immigration, which was in part motivated by the Cold War. So partly, the conservative Chinatown leaders thought this model Chinese family story would do a lot to protect them. They thought this PR campaign would reorient the conversation away from “Communists are sneaking into our country” to “Hey, look at these squeaky-clean, well-behaved children.”

From reading community newspapers in these Chinatowns, we know they also had a lot of concerns about juvenile delinquency. In fact, behind closed doors there were heated disagreements about what to do. One woman in particular — Rose Hum Lee, a sociologist with a PhD from the University of Chicago — wrote lots of books and papers about the problems in Chinatown, and accused leaders of sweeping these problems under the rug.

There were Asian Americans then, as today, at the end of the socioeconomic spectrum. And that segment of the population tends to go unnoticed in these kinds of narratives.

It’s interesting to compare the efforts of the Chinatown leaders to the parallel efforts of leaders in the African American civil rights movement, who also emphasized respectability — who wore their Sunday best on these marches where they were hosed down and attacked by dogs. What’s stunning to me is the contrast. One group’s story is amplified, and the other’s is, well, almost denied.

I think the Japanese American experience also highlights some of this contrast. At the same time in the 1950s, you hear these stories about how the Japanese Americans dramatically recovered from the internment camps, how they accepted their fate. “After internment, many families were scattered across the country, but they took it as an opportunity to assimilate,” that sort of thing.

Japanese Americans aren’t perceived to be doing any kind of direct action, they weren’t perceived to be protesting. A bad thing happened to them, and they moved on, and they were doing okay.

These stories were ideologically useful. They became a model for political cooperation. The ideas solidify in the 1950s. Americans had recast Asians into these citizens capable of assimilating — even if they still saw Asians as somewhat different from whites. And by the 1960s, what becomes important is that these socially mobile, assimilating, politically nonthreatening people were also decidedly not black.

That’s really the key to all this. The work of the African American freedom movements had made white liberals and white conservatives very uncomfortable. Liberals were questioning whether integration could solve some the deeper problems of economic inequality. And by the late 1960s, conservatives were calling for increased law and order.

Across the political spectrum, people looked to Asian Americans — in this case, Japanese and Chinese Americans — as an example of a solution, as a template for other minority groups to follow: “Look how they ended up! They’re doing just fine. And they did it all without political protests.”

That isn’t really true, by the way. Asian Americans did get political, but sometimes their efforts didn’t get seen or recognized.

These stereotypes about Asian Americans being patriotic, having an orderly family, not having delinquency or crime — they became seen as the opposite of what “blackness” represented to many Americans at the time.

I would say it also costs the majority less to allow Asian Americans, who were still a very small part of the population, to let them play out this saga of upward mobility, rather than recognizing the rights and claims of African Americans during that same time.

I’m not saying somebody sat down and did a cost-benefit analysis. But in some ways, there seemed to be a big payoff for little risk. Even with the overturning of the exclusion laws, it’s not like large numbers of Asians were coming into the United States at the time. Asian Americans at that time were still a pretty marginal part of the population.

As harmful as Asian exclusion was, I would agree that those structures were not as deep or pervasive as anti-black racism. It wouldn’t do as much to change the overall social picture by allowing these small numbers of Asian Americans to move forward. It was easier to do, in some ways, because those exclusion structures were not as pervasive, and the consequences had not been as long-lasting as they had been for African Americans.

A really fascinating part of your book describes how these new Asian stereotypes shaped the Moynihan Report, which infamously blamed the plight of African Americans on “ghetto culture.” I think that is a great example of how this model minority stereotype started to get used against others in the 1960s.

Daniel Moynihan, the author of that report, was a liberal trying to figure out how to solve this huge problem — the status of African Americans in American life.

If you look in the report, there’s not really any mention of Asian Americans. But just a few months before the Moynihan Report came out in the summer of 1965, Moynihan was at a gathering with all these intellectuals and policymakers. They're talking about how Japanese and Chinese Americans were “rather astonishing” because they had thrown off this racial stigma. Moynihan points out that 25 years ago, Asians had been “colored.” Then Moynihan says, “Am I wrong that they have ceased to be colored?”

That was a very striking and powerful moment to me.

I think a lot of people believe that the model minority stereotype came out of the huge surge of highly educated Asians who started coming to the United States after 1965. But as your book shows, I think, the causality actually runs the other way.

It’s mutually reinforcing. At the time that the United States did this major immigration law overhaul in 1965, policymakers decided that the nation should select its immigrants based on how they could contribute to the economy (and also to reunify families). So what we start to see is people coming to the United States with these credentials and backgrounds and training, and they seem to confirm some of the ideas that are already there — that Asian Americans are model minorities.

My book stops in the late 1960s, but what I think has happened since then is that the model minority stereotype story has really shifted away from the original ideas of patriotism and anti-communism. We now fixate more on education. There’s the image of the tiger mom focused on getting her kid into Harvard. That emphasis also speaks to a shift in the American economy, how upward mobility really depends on having a certain kind of educational training.

And the anxieties about Asians have never really gone away. Now they’re portrayed as our global competitors. So underlying the praise there’s also this fear.

Sometimes in America, it feels like there are only so many racial buckets that people can fall into. With increased immigration from South Asia and Southeast Asia, for instance, it seemed like lot of the newcomers were swept up into this model minority narrative.

What happened in 1965 is that we opened up the gates to large-scale immigration from places like Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia. From Asia, you get large numbers of people coming from South Asia, the Philippines, Korea. Then by the 1970s, the United States is fighting a war in Southeast Asia, so you get this refugee migrant stream. And you’re right, they’re stepping into this predetermined racial landscape, these preconceived notions about how Asians are.

But as a historian, as someone who thinks about race in American life for a living, I also think that the “model minority” category has only a limited usefulness now in terms of our analysis. We talk about it as a common stereotype, but it doesn’t explain the whole scope of Asian American life today — especially since 9/11, when you have communities of South Asians who are Muslims or Sikhs now being racially targeted or labeled as terrorists. So that has become another stereotype of Asians these days.

I think that underscores maybe the meta-narrative of your book — how we in America have always viewed ethnic and racial minorities through the lens of politics and geopolitics, right? In terms of international relations, in terms of what kind of image we want to project to the world, and in terms of what our national anxieties about other countries are.

Absolutely, that’s the link. The model minority stereotype and the terrorist stereotype are related, I agree, in how they speak to the geopolitical anxieties of their times.

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RustyShackleford said:

 

Slighted said:

I recently heard about something called "Asian privilege" where Asians benefit more than black/white/every other folks: make more $, get admitted to best schools, lack of crimes, etc.

Has anyone heard about this and can aware us?

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I'm not Asian, but I can share a general theory regarding labor market discrimination and how it affects different groups.

I don't like using "benefited" in the sense of discrimination but Asian American see very unique outcomes in the labor market. And sorry for talking about large groups like a monolith

So the the "Asian privilege" things people observe is actually statistical discrimination working in favor of some Asian American workers. The theory goes that since individual employer (or police, or admission officers, or who making a choice) can't fully observe or know what kind of person they are interacting with truly is; so because of that, they fall back on information that have about the groups that person belongs to, in other words, they use stereotypes.

Let's look at the dark side of it, because I think it drives home the point better:

This hurts black people a lot because even if a hiring manager is not racist, he doesn't know exactly want kind of person the black person he/she is interviewing truly is. So he/she falls back on information they know (or believe) about black people. They usually on average go to worst schools, or are mistreated at good ones, they might have gotten into college on a quota, they might not have acquired the same level of human capital as a white or Asian person with the same qualifications. Now these things may or may not be true, but the hiring manager believes it. So the assign the stereotypes of a group on that individual black person.

Now this can be powerful, because of so many socioeconomic factors and America's history, people of different races face different challenges. Because of this we see different outcomes for different races; so many of these stereotypes have some truth in it.

A simpler example: Take race and social factors out of it. Let us say you are a hiring manager and a loading dock and you need to hire workers to lift and carry things all day. Would you hire more men or more women? Well statistically men are stronger than women, so even if you're a woman yourself, you would be more inclined to hire men because you assume they will be more productive.

Back to race: Even if you're a black hiring manager, you might assume the white person will be more productive than the black because they probably went to a better school, got more resources available to them to build their human capital. You don't know if it true in this case, but you just rely on stereotypes and incomplete information drawn from social outcomes.

One way around this is having good "test" or signals of what kinda of person applying for a job actually is. That is why you get the more involved interview processes, why a college degree is so important, for jobs that really shouldn't require it( the degree sends a strong signal about competency), and why drug testing is pushed in some cases.

Another example: drug testing. Society believes black men use drugs at higher rates, which is not true, whites up and down the socioeconomic ladder use it at the same rate or slightly, slightly higher. So when you see drug testing put in place in these higher paid industries, white folk (and women in general) started to get popped more than people thought. Basically, firms got the rude awakening that everybody used drugs about the same rate. As a result white wages got driven down slightly, black people got slightly more opportunities, and the the wage gap shrunk a lil in some industries because of the testing. In short, drug testing which is assumed would hurt black people, actually helped them.

Now thing about Asians, in America, the Asian community is generally viewed very well, especially when it comes to the labor market. A hiring manager that may assume bad things about a black person because of lack knowledge and falling back on stereotypes, may assume the best about an Asian person because of stereotypes about Asians. They have good analytical minds, they worked hard in school, they will be follow orders, they are willing to put their job first in their lives. In doesn't matter if they stereotype lines up with reality or not, people just have to believe they do. And well know this is not true of all Asian groups because we see different economic outcomes among demographics of Asians.

And I know that is not universal because a dark skinned Asian person is still gonna be looked at different by the police that a light skinned one. The sad truth is that Asian American's like all other races get a break a lot because of how closely people associate them with desirable aspects of the white community.

So it is not privilege, it is incomplete information that usually cost other minority groups, helping some Asian workers. And I do mean some.

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illmatic34 said:

 

tokes99 said:

what purpose do you think the "model minority myth" serves? and why use asians (as broads as that term is) for this purpose?

i'm always a bit perplexed that people have the idea that the media (especially entertainment media) has this type of sinister agenda...isn't the easier explanation that this country is/was built to the advantage & service of white supremacy (this is a loaded term historically- but i think of this playing out in the world today as more of a strong bias) by default, therefore white people just generally don't have to or want to, put themselves in another person's skin and consider what their experiences are, ever; and you can see this with how some were bugging out about the luke cage netflix series being "too black" and not being able to relate (even in the culture at large with the whole kaepernick thing), whereas minorities all have to, to some extent, consider/deal/wrestle with whiteness both in media & real life in ways i'm not sure would even occur to most white folk...

i have to believe it is more out of their historical position of self centeredness, this oblique kind of disinterest/ignorance still persists, and that most non white representations rarely move beyond stereotypical roles...we tend to get their understanding of our (all minorities) stories rather than the nuanced distillation that comes from having 1st person experience...

if you think about translating one language to another, meanings rarely translate exactly 1:1, there are phrases,sayings, words, that just don't have equivalents; something is almost always lost. i think of much of entertainment is an attempt to translate and make digestible for white consumption, combine this with the FACT that entertainment media always catches wreck when they get it wrong with respect to finding the balance between respecting the source & trying to introduce/make palatable slightly unfamiliar non white stories to the (white) masses (i.e. this new bruce lee film, even eddie huang's own show - he disowned, basically it claiming they were white-washing his life), it feels like this could be remedied by included more diverse voices in decision making roles though even with the best most official representers for every ethnicity, there will be times even they won't get everything totally right, and people tend criticize those folks as not being "for the cause" or sellouts...

which brings me back to asking about this idea of being a "banana," i've never heard that term before...but its meaning is pretty obvious, and i would assume it would only be used by asians; would it be considered a serious insult and how common/pervasive is its use? and is their some set behaviors that would qualify/disqualify one being "asian," maybe it is more ethnically specific to groups, chinese, hindu, thai, etc.?

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It was engineered to portray Asians as the "best" minority, giving them a false sense of entitlement. But this has some damning effects.

For one, Asians are less likely to give a damn about issues that effect other POC. I know quite a few folks who are Asian that identify as Republican and chalk up police brutality to, "Well, he/she resisted arrest" and whatnot. I'm not saying this is applicable to all, but I've definitely witnessed this first hand. You can see the solidarity between Black and Asian groups prior to the rise of the model minority myth through historical retrospectives.

Second, it creates division and self-loathing within the Asian-American community. The folks who've made it, so to speak, look down on those who don't. I think what I've found is that so many Asian immigrants truly believe in the American Dream; the thing is that so many factors contribute to one's economic status and the way the system is built, it's really hard for immigrants to ascend past their economic standing.

Going off of that, people generally assume that Asian folks have it the "easiest" out of all minority groups. Simply not the case. You can point to immigrants from China, Korea and Japan and say, "All Asians are successful" but Asia is much bigger than those three countries (Well Asia doesn't really exist, but that's not the point of this conversation). The Vietnamese, Hmong, Laotians, etc. are all scattered across the Midwest facing economic struggles but people wouldn't generally know that because of a lack of representation in the media. Aside from that, you don't have to be dirt poor to be struggling. I'm very privileged and grateful that I came from an upper middle class family but growing up as a very small minority in a town with few like us, I dealt with racism from others damn near everyday.

Perhaps the most notable harm the Model Minority myth accomplishes is the destruction of our histories of oppression and solidarity. We never learned about how the Japanese were kept in internment camps in the U.S. during WWII, and I would consider that one of the more well known events in Asian American history. And I guarantee you most folks wouldn't even know about that event either if you asked them right off the top. Very few curriculums (if any) will mention the hardships of living in America during the 19th/20th century or the solidarity between Blacks and Asians prior to the Model Minority myth. Here's a few examples:
 

• Civil Rights movements helped end racist immigration laws against South Asians.
• In the late 1960s, Asian Americans were part of the Third World Liberation Strikes in Berkeley that launched the Black Power movement and inspired the Yellow Power movement.
• Asian American activists like Grace Lee Boggs and Yuri Kochiyama worked hard to build interracial solidarity and worked closely with leaders like Malcolm X.

I drew some of this from previous knowledge and from this article. Give it a read if you can: http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/04/dismantle-model-minority-myth/

You brought up some good points though. I reckon that it is both - the media is sinister and doing its best to uphold white supremacy, even if they are completely unaware of it.

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Hand2HandKing said:

i found it interesting how asians knowingly played into the divide and conquer nature of the stereotype

almost like they were comfortable with white people "giving" them status as long as they were seen as other than black

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LIONBLOOD said:

Titanium Tea said:

They actually kinda got a thing for us a lot of the time. 
I will acknowledge da privilege in this circumstance. 

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Asian women love fat white dudes, the way black men love fat white women...it's science.

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ninjahood said:

MIKE HONCHO said:

I thought the real reason was because white dudes love Asian punani

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never got da yellow fever among white dudes.

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heatpinoyboy said:

ninjahood said:

MIKE HONCHO said:

I thought the real reason was because white dudes love Asian punani

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never got da yellow fever among white dudes.

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Something that came back to the US after wartime. The fanaticism of asian women's bodies is parallel to how they were portrayed in early cinema and how asian american men were relegated to asexual/ineffective/undeserving caricatures. Think...Piccadilly, Fu Manchu, Thief of Baghdad, Romeo Must Die

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heatpinoyboy said:

ninjahood said:

MIKE HONCHO said:

I thought the real reason was because white dudes love Asian punani

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never got da yellow fever among white dudes.

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Something that came back to the US after wartime. The fanaticism of asian women's bodies is parallel to how they were portrayed in early cinema and how asian american men were relegated to asexual/ineffective/undeserving caricatures. Think...Piccadilly, Fu Manchu, Thief of Baghdad, Romeo Must Die

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NikeTalker23 said:

I've been told by white folks that asians get a pass in the white community because they don't feel threatened by them.

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sckid20 said:

Can confirm.

Usually goes like this at a party

Caucasian - "so...youre ummmm...?"

Me - "im filipino "

Caucasian - "oh ....you guys have great food"

Me - "lol...yea we do "

Caucasian - "hey were going out on my boat next weekend you should come "

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ninjahood said:

MIKE HONCHO said:

I thought the real reason was because white dudes love Asian punani

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never got da yellow fever among white dudes.

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A piece from New York Magazine's Andrew Sullivan over the weekend ended with an old, well-worn trope: Asian-Americans, with their "solid two-parent family structures," are a shining example of how to overcome discrimination. An essay that began by imagining why Democrats feel sorry for Hillary Clinton — and then detoured to President Trump's policies — drifted to this troubling ending:

"Today, Asian-Americans are among the most prosperous, well-educated, and successful ethnic groups in America. What gives? It couldn't possibly be that they maintained solid two-parent family structures, had social networks that looked after one another, placed enormous emphasis on education and hard work, and thereby turned false, negative stereotypes into true, positive ones, could it? It couldn't be that all whites are not racists or that the American dream still lives?"

Sullivan's piece, rife with generalizations about a group as vastly diverse as Asian-Americans, rightfully raised hackles. Not only inaccurate, his piece spreads the idea that Asian-Americans as a group are monolithic, even though parsing data by ethnicity reveals a host of disparities; for example, Bhutanese-Americans have far higher rates of poverty than other Asian populations, like Japanese-Americans. And at the root of Sullivan's pernicious argument is the idea that black failure and Asian success cannot be explained by inequities and racism, and that they are one and the same; this allows a segment of white America to avoid any responsibility for addressing racism or the damage it continues to inflict.

The Color of Success. Much of Wu's work focuses on dispelling the "model minority" myth, and she's been tasked repeatedly with publicly refuting arguments like Sullivan's, which, she said, are incessant. "The thing about the Sullivan piece is that it's such an old-fashioned rendering. It's very retro in the kinds of points he made."

Since the end of World War II, many white people have used Asian-Americans and their perceived collective success as a racial wedge. The effect? Minimizing the role racism plays in the persistent struggles of other racial/ethnic minority groups — especially black Americans.

On Twitter, people took Sullivan's "old-fashioned rendering" to task.





"During World War II, the media created the idea that the Japanese were rising up out of the ashes [after being held in incarceration camps] and proving that they had the right cultural stuff," said Claire Jean Kim, a professor at the University of California, Irvine. "And it was immediately a reflection on black people: Now why weren't black people making it, but Asians were?"

These arguments falsely conflate anti-Asian racism with anti-black racism, according to Kim. "Racism that Asian-Americans have experienced is not what black people have experienced," Kim said. "Sullivan is right that Asians have faced various forms of discrimination, but never the systematic dehumanization that black people have faced during slavery and continue to face today." Asians have been barred from entering the U.S. and gaining citizenship and have been sent to incarceration camps, Kim pointed out, but all that is different than the segregation, police brutality and discrimination that African-Americans have endured.

Many scholars have argued that some Asians only started to "make it" when the discrimination against them lessened — and only when it was politically convenient. Amid worries that the Chinese exclusion laws from the late 1800s would hurt an allyship with China in the war against imperial Japan, the Magnuson Act was signed in 1943, allowing 105 Chinese immigrants into the U.S. each year. As Wu wrote in 2014 in the Los Angeles Times, the Citizens Committee to Repeal Chinese Exclusion "strategically recast Chinese in its promotional materials as 'law-abiding, peace-loving, courteous people living quietly among us'" instead of the "'yellow peril' coolie hordes." In 1965, the National Immigration Act replaced the national-origins quota system with one that gave preference to immigrants with U.S. family relationships and certain skills.

In 1966, William Petersen, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, helped popularize comparisons between Japanese-Americans and African-Americans. His New York Times story, headlined, "Success Story, Japanese-American Style," is regarded as one of the most influential pieces written about Asian-Americans. It solidified a prevailing stereotype of Asians as industrious and rule-abiding that would stand in direct contrast to African-Americans, who were still struggling against bigotry, poverty and a history rooted in slavery. In the opening paragraphs, Petersen quickly puts African-Americans and Japanese-Americans at odds:

"Asked which of the country's ethnic minorities has been subjected to the most discrimination and the worst injustices, very few persons would even think of answering: 'The Japanese Americans,' ... Yet, if the question refers to persons alive today, that may well be the correct reply. Like the Negroes, the Japanese have been the object of color prejudice .... When new opportunities, even equal opportunities, are opened up, the minority's reaction to them is likely to be negative — either self-defeating apathy or a hatred so all-consuming as to be self-destructive. For the well-meaning programs and countless scholarly studies now focused on the Negro, we barely know how to repair the damage that the slave traders started. The history of Japanese Americans, however, challenges every such generalization about ethnic minorities."

But as history shows, Asian-Americans were afforded better jobs not simply because of educational attainment, but in part because they were treated better.

"More education will help close racial wage gaps somewhat, but it will not resolve problems of denied opportunity," reporter Jeff Guo wrote last fall in the Washington Post. "Asian Americans — some of them at least — have made tremendous progress in the United States. But the greatest thing that ever happened to them wasn't that they studied hard, or that they benefited from tiger moms or Confucian values. It's that other Americans started treating them with a little more respect."

At the heart of arguments of racial advancement is the concept of "racial resentment," which is different than "racism," Slate's Jamelle Bouie recently wrote in his analysis of the Sullivan article. "Racial resentment" refers to a "moral feeling that blacks violate such traditional American values as individualism and self reliance," as defined by political scientists Donald Kinder and David Sears.

And, Bouie points out, "racial resentment" is simply a tool that people use to absolve themselves from dealing with the complexities of racism:

"In fact, racial resentment reflects a tension between the egalitarian self-image of most white Americans and that anti-black affect. The 'racist,' after all, is a figure of stigma. Few people want to be one, even as they're inclined to believe the measurable disadvantages blacks face are caused by something other than structural racism. Framing blacks as deficient and pathological rather than inferior offers a path out for those caught in that mental maze."

Petersen's, and now Sullivan's, arguments have resurfaced regularly throughout the last century. And they'll likely keep resurfacing, as long as people keep seeking ways to forgo responsibility for racism — and to escape that "mental maze." As the writer Frank Chin said of Asian-Americans in 1974: "Whites love us because we're not black."

Sometimes it's instructive to look at past rebuttals to tired arguments — after all, they hold up much better in the light of history.

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rbk93 said:

I'll read it later, but "less racist?"

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