Several articles on Asian Americans have been brought to my attention. First, Stark Contrasts Found Among Asian Americans. This graphic illustrates the situation well, Asian Americans are multi-modal in income and education. Now, this should make sense, when you reflect that Asian Americans are an omnibus grouping. The San Jose Mercury news has a series titled “Asian Impact” that focuses on the Bay Area. Again, the multi-modality is emphasized, with various ethnic groups decomposed into their distinct elements, though there tends to be a positive spin on the trajectories of less affluent groups, for example, Lifting test scores in one San Jose district, spotlights the impact of Vietnamese on one particular school. Here are some charts from the series that might interest readers:
Discrimination Against Asians
Views of Marriage Outside of the Group
Social Networks
Based on a poll underwritten by The San Jose Mercury News, it shows some intertesting trends (though not surprising), for example, the Filipino openness to out-marriage (the Spanish/Chinese/indigenous mestizo background of much of the Filipino elite might explain this).
Such surveys of a minority ethnic group will offer different lessons to Left and Right. When I was in college the Asian Pacific Student American Union often emphasized the plight of the Southeast Asians to “debunk” the Model Minority Myth. The problem with this is two fold.
Even the Hmong are on an upward trajectory, and the Vietnamese most certainly are.
It does not refute the reality of relatively prosperous Indian, Japanese, Chinese and Korean Americans-who happen to form the majority in terms of numbers (one could focus on the plight of poor whites in the upland South if the least among us is going to be a standard).
I’m going to be honest when I feel that some APASU types felt an almost bizarre auto-schadenfreude about the misfortunes of Asians Americans when they came to light, as it reinforced models of how they felt white America screwed the Yellow Man (since they tended to be East Asians most of the anecdotes dealt in negative stereotypes based on chopsticks and kung-fu movies rather than curry munchers snake charming, as South Asian activists would emphasize).
The major take home lesson might be that the 1960s Civil Rights movement is not the template for a somewhat artificially constructed white-non-white dichotomy. This dichotomy is partially contingent on the overwhelming dominance of white Americans in public life, something less significant in many regions of the country, and the relatively smaller numbers of non-whites so that intra-non-white conflicts can be discarded from the equation. The chart that displays attitudes toward marriage shows that all Asian American groups tend to be coolest to partnerships with black Americans. A similar sort of tension exists between blacks and Latinos, between the various Asian groups and so forth. Aside from natural clusters within the Asian group (Vietnamese-Chinese-Japanese-Korean) I think it can be argued that many minority groups are more comfortable with, and share more with, white Americans than other minority groups.
On the Right, one lesson to note is that yes, Asian Americans of various stripes do succeed and prosper, but the difficulty of black Americans and to some extent Latinos in fully emulating a cross-community white middle class model (that is, they display cognate income distributions, rather than being skewed toward poverty, despite a large middle class) suggests that the conservative free enterprise formula has different results depending on the sort of capital that the community brings. That is, there are many complex elements that go into making a “community,” and just as the Left attempts to extract a few salient points to address injustice (in particular the relationship to white America), the Right attempts to extract a few bullet points that it believes can be easily leveraged with “enterprise zones” and what not (family values for example).
There are no simple answers, I am generally of the school that the government should not have much of a hand in inter-ethnic relations unless violence seems imminent. Nevertheless, those who do believe that inter-community amity is something that the government can deal with, or that programs can “uplift,” need to study the empirical reality and be cautious of broad models that discard genuine details of difference.
Posted by razib at 04:05 PM