There's Asians on Campus?! Whitey's Work Is Done!

Is there anything -- the racist presumptions, the backslapping of whites on "progress", etc. in the thousand or so words of the Times story this week about Asians on campus that isn't already conveyed by the old Newsweek seen at right?

Let me be blunt: as an Asian-American who isn't afraid to take on the identity while smashing the windows and burning down the whole edifice at times, I'm not among those who thinks that the model minority myth is either a) our patented Secret Weapon against white supremacy, or b) something that is as much an affront to us as, say, slavery was to the black nation (or for that matter, as bad as the old days).

The Asian model minority myth is like most myths, with a tragic and comic aspect -- see Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle.That said, however, the persistence of the Asian-American model-minority myth is fucking annoying and should be annoying to any Asian-American who strives to be fully human. Not only because it places impossible-to-reach expectations upon us, but because it is part and parcel of an attempt to keep us stranded from the struggles of black and Latino people and to strand black and Latino people from "polite" society in general.

With that in mind, let's pick apart the model minority myth for what it is -- a myth -- and let's look at how it is grossly inaccurate.

• The mantra of the social sciences: correlation =! causation. The correlation of Asian identity to college education does not mean any particular conclusions can be made, other than that there's an awful lot of Asians in college.
• What we can say is that post 1960s immigration policy was explicitly designed to have a strong correlation between legal immigration status and pre-immigration educational achievement. That means the Green Card lottery is skewed toward those families that already have a member of the family (often the patriarch) who has a Masters, and in an area where the U.S. is lacking in (i.e., those who have a Masters in Computer Science are distinguished even further in the process).
  
• The full story for Asian-Americans is beyond the regulated inflow of top-of-their-immigration-cohort Green Card candidates. It also goes into those who lack educational background who get lucky and get a Green Card according to the lottery. It goes into those who win refugee status. It goes into those Asian nations (Philippines, Cambodia, Vietnam) that had post-war agreements with the U.S. to send refugees -- as well as the families whose immigration they sponsored. And it is in this precise category that you see negative instances against the model-minority myth: families that do not have high educational achievement here in the U.S. because it is was not there in the motherland, that do not have the requisite wealth to send children to college.
• Part and parcel of the model minority myth is the idea that affirmative action has harmed Asian-American enrollment. While it is true, if you make a monolith of Asians and Asian-Americans that you have a smaller pecentage, when investigating further you find that those that are shafted by the dismantling of affirmative action in higher education are those that need higher education the most -- i.e., working class Asians. That is to say, while the pool of "Asians" in higher education at Berkeley and so on is greater now, examining further you'll find that the U.C. system as a whole has lost a great deal of its working class component with the end of affirmative action: big decreases in Hawaiian native, Pacific Islander (Samoan, Tongan, etc.) and Filipino populations. I would speculate that there are now a greater number of affluent East Asians -- "uptown Chinese" in the words of Prof. Peter Kwong -- who are winning a sort of "honorary white" status.

In the end, the Times makes the quintessential flaw of the bourgeois liberal multiculturalist approach to race: defining the problem as a lack of "diversity" in the institution, rather than a lack of power in and over the institution for a given population.

Furthermore, I would note that this bourgeois liberal multiculturalism has a particular nasty side: it takes any number of ideological aspects of the "Oriental" Other, and beatifies them only to knock them back down, e.g., Confucianism (and to a lesser extent, Hinduism) is chic for whites to "tolerate" (moreso than, say, Islam) because it conforms (or has been bent to conform) to the bourgeoisie's ideas of "work ethic", the patriarchal family, etc.

These ideological systems are oppressive back in the homeland -- and any white person who thinks it's simply chic should be condemned to live as a dalit in the countryside, or a woman in a Saipan sweatshop. The ultimate tragedy is that the entry of the colonialist United States into the equation, immigration becomes no escape: immigrants leave the motherland because of the sheer badness of how feudal thinking pervades into modern life, think they're going to leave for the U.S. to live a more cosmopolitan life, and end up getting sucker punched by some middle manager who takes advantage of the remnants of Confucian and Hindu belief.

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