The Old Model Minority Bullcrap Again

Snarki, child of Loki

Native Americans. Differently awful experience.

But “slavery” and “genocide” are both Crimes against Humanity, so there’s that.

DrDick

My immediate thought, as well.
CP

Yes, my thought too. They’re pretty much the only people in America who can make a legitimate claim to have had it “as bad as,” even “worse than,” black people.

Not coincidentally, they’re also one group that’s never brought up as a “model minority” by conservatives and centrists.
tsam

I was going to say–the first nations really got hammered.
witlesschum

Both of which were are also crimes committed against Native Americans. Charleston shipped out a fair number of slaves and most of the losers of King Phillip’s War who surrendered were enslaved and sold out of Boston.

History is an endless buffet of terrible things.

Shalimar

Shorter Duke guy: “Tens of millions of individuals who I don’t even want to understand, living in a culture my forefathers intentionally isolated from mine, all look exactly alike to me. What’s wrong with those people?”

MAJeff

The cranky old race hustler also has this gem, where he encourages everyone to be like Mike (no, not that one):
http://www.dukechronicle.com/articles/2001/04/11/letter-initial-reaction-reparations-ad-lacks-political-tact#.VVnsmZMprmv

Lee Rudolph

Now, see, even though I have already read several blogposts elsewhere about this case and commented on one my very own self, I still read “model minority bullcrap” and thought “Senate Democrats, don’t rock the Bipartisanship Boat!!!”

JMP

Now, be fair – if you speak glowingly of “model minorities”, it is also fair for me to assume that you are a giant racist.

DrDick

Always. That phrase refers to those who know their proper place in the social universe and emulate middle class white people.

Rob in CT

I actually had a Jewish acqaintance of mine argue vehemently that Jews had it harder in America (not the world, in America) than African Americans as part of a longer “what’s wrong with them?” discussion.

This was, of course, in 2008, and started off with him attacking Obama as someone who was going to “give all the money to the blacks.”

At least in that case, there was a lot of beer involved.

Another Jewish friend who also leans right (somehow, I think I know 2 of the 3 existing New England Jewish Republicans), upon hearing my recount of this, was flabbergasted and could only say “he’s an idiot.” But then he teaches US History, so what does he know?.

Warren Terra

(somehow, I think I know 2 of the 3 existing New England Jewish Republicans

Spend more time among the more expressively Orthodox Jews in New England, you’ll revise your estimate quite a bit.
- Rob in CT
  
  No doubt, no doubt.
CP

That guy (the first one) is an absolute fucking idiot.
matt w

At least in that case, there was a lot of beer involved.

I hope some of it wound up on his head.
NewishLawyer

Jewish-Americans are largely Democratic and continue to be so. This sends Republican Jews into fits of absolute hysterics and hyperbole. You should see comment threads on Jewish magazines like Tablet!!

Generation X and the Millennials seem to be a diving line. Jewish-Americans like my grandparents remember the Great Depression and WWII and stayed loyal New Dealers. Boomer Jewish-Americans might have faced the last remains of the quota system and acceptable anti-Semitism. I’ve met Boomer Jews who can talk about losing jobs or being fired for being Jewish.

Generation X Jews and Millennial Jews who grew up in the U.S. tend to know less anti-Semitism and tended to grow up with a lot of economic comfort. This causes more of them to lean R. Not by much, just a small but stuff like Triangle Fire is an abstraction to third and fourth generation Jewish-Americans. So are the tenaments of the Lower East Side.
- JL
  
  Jewish-Americans are largely Democratic and continue to be so. This sends Republican Jews into fits of absolute hysterics and hyperbole. You should see comment threads on Jewish magazines like Tablet!!
  
  Yes and it’s hilarious. Also, the pile of pieces every election season about how this time, unlike every other time they said this, is finally going to be the time when Jews go Republican en masse.
  
  Generation X Jews and Millennial Jews who grew up in the U.S. tend to know less anti-Semitism and tended to grow up with a lot of economic comfort. This causes more of them to lean R.
  
  Not true according to the Pew Forum. It’s true that 30-49 year-old Jews were slightly less Dem and slightly less liberal as of 2013 (though still very liberal), but 18-29 year-old Jews were the most liberal subset – the most likely to be or lean Dem, the most likely to call themselves liberal, and the least likely to call themselves conservative. The real predictor of conservatism among Jews is Orthodox affiliation.
  
  The really notable thing, though, is how liberal Jewish old people are compared to what a control group of old Americans who were 80-95% white would look like. In the Pew survey, this is true in general, on the issue of homosexuality, and on the issue of the proper size/role of government. Young Jews are very liberal, old Jews are also very liberal.
  
  Anecdotally, Jews are wildly overrepresented in left-activist circles, as has been true for many decades.
- CP
  
  Jewish-Americans are largely Democratic and continue to be so. This sends Republican Jews into fits of absolute hysterics and hyperbole.
  
  If you think Republican Jews are pissed off about it, you should see how incensed it makes my Republican Christozionist relatives. They just. Don’t. Get it! It doesn’t compute. I mean, gosh darn it, how many Arabs do they have to bomb before Teh J00z start liking them?
wjts

I actually had a Jewish acqaintance of mine argue vehemently that Jews had it harder in America (not the world, in America) than African Americans as part of a longer “what’s wrong with them?” discussion.

A guy I knew in college once told me with a straight face that there was more prejudice directed against Catholics than any other group in America.
- NewishLawyer
  
  This could depend on where you grow up. A lot of evangelical protestants still have a “Damn Papists…” attitude if you push the right buttons. So if he grew up in deep Evangelical country, he could have experienced a lot of suspicion.
  
  Catholics can be just as a conservative as anyone but I suspect the reason New York and New Jersey never went too far to the right is that the Megachurch Protestantism never really took off in suburban NYC and NJ. Most Christians in the area are Catholic or mainline Protestant. The most evangelical churches tend to be African-American and/or Latino Pentecostal and very store front.
  - so-in-so
    
    True, and there were even anti-Catholic riots with churches burned at one point in the U.S.
    
    But really, no, nothing like the treatment of black people.
    
    Not without, what, 200 years of slavery and 150 of systemic and often deadly discrimination.
    - CP
      
      But really, no, nothing like the treatment of black people.
      
      Catholics could vote.
      
      And there were enough of them that doing so did in fact give them a place in the system, albeit a shitty place which it took a lot of work to claw their way upwards from.
      
      it was bad, but on a scale with what happened to black people, no. Not even close.
  - wjts
    
    I’m pretty sure he grew up in Baltimore (which is kind of funny, I guess). And I’m not arguing that there’s no such thing as anti-Catholic prejudice in the U.S., just that claiming the title of Number One Most Persecuted Minority for Catholicism is frankly ridiculous.
  - The Dark Avenger
    
    The anti-Catholic prejudice went down after the JFK election. When my parents eloped in 1956, my Texan grandparents were more concerned that Mom was Catholic than by the fact that she had Chinese ancestry. Apparently my grandfather, who was a Baptist deacon before then was known to talk about the vast amount of property and influence the church had in this country. If you look back to the 1928 Presidential campaign, the Republicans didn’t scruple to use anti-Catholicism as a tool in their campaign against Al Smith.
    
    The response to this belief was public and private, during a campaign that lasted only two months, from September to November. Yet feelings were so strong that they swirled into a hurricane of abuse, a crescendo of fear and hate blasting through eight weeks. The school board of Daytona Beach, Fla., sent a note home with every student. It read simply: “We must prevent the election of Alfred E. Smith to the Presidency. If he is elected President, you will not be allowed to have or read a Bible.” Fliers informed voters that if Smith took the White House, all Protestant marriages would be annulled, their offspring rendered illegitimate on the spot.
    
    Opponents blanketed the country with photos of the recently completed Holland Tunnel, the caption stating that this was the secret passage being built between Rome and Washington, to transport the pope to his new abode. Countless copies of a small cartoon appeared on lampposts and mailboxes everywhere. Titled “Cabinet Meeting — If Al Were President,” it showed the cabinet room, with the pope seated at the head of the table, surrounded by priests and bishops. Over in the corner was Al Smith, dressed in a bellboy’s uniform, carrying a serving platter, on top of which was a jug of whiskey. Summing up, the minister of the largest Baptist congregation in Oklahoma City announced, “If you vote for Al Smith you’re voting against Christ and you’ll all be damned.”
  - CP
    
    Catholics can be just as a conservative as anyone but I suspect the reason New York and New Jersey never went too far to the right is that the Megachurch Protestantism never really took off in suburban NYC and NJ.
    
    I’d agree with this.
    
    Catholics are a split vote. About equal parts Democrats and Republicans. The hierarchy may be all-Republican-all-the-time, but not the congregations. It’s fundamentalists who are the real “all in the tank for the GOP” factor.
    
    ETA: having been raised Catholic and dabbled with the religious groups on campus in undergrad, I can confirm that Catholics are absolutely held in deep contempt by the entire WASP/fundie/heartlander subsection of the Republican base. However, this really doesn’t translate into my life being in any way harder just because I’m Catholic. Maybe it would if I were in a deep deep red state, but as it is, they’re basically just crazy people yelling from soapboxes on street corners. They hate us, but they don’t affect us.
  - Barry_D
    
    “This could depend on where you grow up. A lot of evangelical protestants still have a “Damn Papists…” attitude if you push the right buttons. So if he grew up in deep Evangelical country, he could have experienced a lot of suspicion.”
    
    Probably, but that deep in, anybody who was Jewish would face more, and anybody black would face far, far more.
TribalistMeathead

Mrs. Meathead had a work friend in DC who got up in front of a predominantly black and Latino classroom to give a training seminar and announced that she knew what it was like to be a minority in America because she’s Jewish.

No, really. Stop laughing.

J. Otto Pohl

I never liked Jerry Hough. He shilled for the USSR throughout the 70s and 80s and was one of the few US academics to openly support the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states. So it does not surprise me that the dean of left-wing political science who was married to the dean of pro-Soviet revisionist history Sheila Fitzpatrick is a racist. Fitzpatrick made a career in training scholars who deny that racism ever existed in the USSR under Stalin with the exception of anti-semitism. How the deportation of all ethnic Koreans in the Soviet Far East and the expulsion of almost all Chinese in 1937 was not racist has never been adequately explained to me.

On the other hand I think terms like Black and especially Asian are far more complex and varied than this post implies. There is a lot of diversity in both groups and they are getting more diverse. The experience of Ghanaian and Nigerian immigrants does have a lot in common with Korean and Chinese immigrants. On the other hand Hmong and Cambodian refugees have had distinctly different expereinces from immigrants from Taiwan or Hong Kong. I don’t think it is at all far fetched to compare the experience of some Blacks, most notably voluntary immigrants from Africa and the Carribean to some Asians. It is only a problem when dealing with the descendents of involuntary immigrants brought to the US as slaves.

Murc

Fitzpatrick made a career in training scholars who deny that racism ever existed in the USSR under Stalin with the exception of anti-semitism. How the deportation of all ethnic Koreans in the Soviet Far East and the expulsion of almost all Chinese in 1937 was not racist has never been adequately explained to me.

… he actually made that claim with a straight face?

You don’t even need to bring up the stuff happening over in the far east. The soviet union was shockingly racist towards anyone who wasn’t a Russian. It was so racist that the Ukrainians initially welcomed the Wehrmacht during WWII; that’s how bad Ukrainians were treated, to say nothing of other ethnic minorities in the USSR such as Kazakhs or Cossacks.
- J. Otto Pohl
  
  Francine Hirsch who was one of Fitzpatrick’s students and is currently tenured at University of Wisconsin has vehmently denied the existence of racism in the USSR under Stalin. I have a detailed refutation of her argument at the url below.
  
  http://jpohl.blogspot.com/2012/10/george-fredrickson-and-why-francine.html
- cpinva
  
  “… he actually made that claim with a straight face?”
  
  why not? that was standard soviet propaganda up until the fall of the USSR. decent folk weren’t supposed to point out that it was factually false. if you were in the soviet union, pointing it out could well be fatal. another standard claim by the soviet union: there is no unemployment in the USSR. this I know from first-hand experience, from visiting the Russian pavilion at Expo 67, in Montreal, where a very big deal was made about it, as compared to capitalist countries, where you could be gainfully employed and living the life one day, unemployed and out on the streets the next. as my (Russian jewish) mom pointed out to then 12 year old me: “employed” in Russia probably meant sweeping the streets or, if you were really up the scale, sweeping red square. the funny part of the whole thing was that the picture used to demonstrate that “full employment” thing was of an old babushka sweeping a street.
Lee Rudolph

On the other hand Hmong and Cambodian refugees have had distinctly different expereinces from immigrants from Taiwan or Hong Kong.

Indeed, in the Providence/Fall River area (I don’t know about Lowell) young Hmong/Cambodian men account for non-negligible numbers of (always, or almost always, intergroup) shootings—counter to what Dan Surber (who he?) is quoted saying (in a defense of Hough) over at alicublog:

Part of the reason is Asian males are not shooting one another up like inner city black males are.
- J. Otto Pohl
  
  Just as there have been European gangs in the past and present there have also been Asian gangs. This has been true even among Asian ethnicities that have in general been economically successful in the US. I remember growing up in Nor Cal in the 70s and my mother not wanting to go to SF because of Chinese gang violence. Then of course in parts of OC where I later lived there was Vietnamese gang violence. A lot of immigrant groups have had some elements of their youth involved in such activities at one time or another.
  - sparks
    
    In the early ’80s, I used to tour the SF spots where the Chinese gang killings were with a Chinese-American friend. He knew every single store where someone (or more) got blasted. It was fun and enlightening. He knew all the good restaurants as well.
    - The Dark Avenger
      
      My grandfather knew members of he Green Dragon Tong in Shanghai before WWII, according to an informant of mine, Green Dragon Tong members wear green-colored baseball caps as a way of displaying their colors without it becoming known outside the Chinese community in this country.
      
      Until now.
  - cpinva
    
    ” A lot of immigrant groups have had some elements of their youth involved in such activities at one time or another.”
    
    this has been the case ever since the first mass migrations to the US began. I’m thinking with the irish potato famine, but it could be earlier.
kayden

Actually, if African Americans didn’t fight for civil rights, Blacks from other countries (the Caribbean and Africa) could not come to this country and do relatively well. That’s something that Black immigrants should not forget (and I’m saying this as someone of Jamaican descent).

I don’t think it’s fair to compare Black immigrants to African Americans at all. This is just another cute way for White racists to play Black ethnic groups against each other while always putting down African Americans and totally ignoring the role that racism has played in the problems facing that community today.
PhoenixRising

African immigrants are definitely not African-Americans.

SE Asians are not the model minority.

The story of one Khmer-American community in this video is powerful. By the numbers…Cambodian immigrants are pretty bad off. And you still can’t compare them, demographically, to African-Americans in the same ZIP code.

Vance Maverick

When you write that the experiences can’t be compared, it’s of course not literally true, but I think I know what you mean. Specifically, arguments of the form “Group X is like African-Americans in this way, but different in that way, therefore …” fall down at the starting gate, because the supposed similarity, typically of starting conditions, collapses as soon as you try to articulate it.

c u n d gulag

This, ladies and gentleman, has been the latest chapter in “bspencer’s Pet Peeves and Bugaboos that Make Her Want to Slam Her Head Against a Wall Until it Explodes.”

Why not slam Dex’s head instead?
He won’t miss it!

We’d miss yours, though! :-)

cpinva

“Why not slam Dex’s head instead?”

that’s kind of what I thought too. and trust me ms. spencer, it really doesn’t feel that much better when you stop. I tell you this from personal experience.

JL

Also, “model minority” stereotypes are bad for the groups that are subjected to them, like Asians and Jews. They erase the different experiences of different subgroups (e.g. Southeast Asians, Sephardi-Mizrahi and Ethiopian Jews, refugees, first-gen immigrants). They erase Jewish poverty, Asian poverty. They lead to “model minority” kids’ learning disabilities and other school problems not being diagnosed or addressed because people can’t wrap their heads around them. They lead to Asians getting discriminated against for promotion in fields like tech where they’re well-represented. And to dominant culture not even noticing.

This is, of course, in addition to the ways in which Asian or Jewish American experiences are not like the Black American experience. The latter is a history of, among other things, deliberate wealth prevention and destruction and creation of ghettos through public policy.

CP

Here’s another interesting thing about “model minorities.” If they weren’t so small a demographic for conservatives/centrists to even notice, you know who would’ve fit this trope to a tee for most of history? American Muslims.

Let’s go down all the stereotypes; a large proportion of them are middle class businessmen or even highly educated professions like doctors. They haven’t spawned any particular culture of gang or organized crime, the kind that’s constantly brought up when we discuss black people, Latinos, East Europeans (or, once upon a time, the Irish and Italians). There was a big streak of social conservatism and anti-communism in their civil society. And heck, before the post-9/11 backlash, most of them even voted Republican.

But, then the post-9/11 backlash came. And none of that mattered.

That’s something else that needs to be pointed out in all this “model minority” crap: it doesn’t matter even if you are a “model minority.” Even if your demographic comfortably fits every one of the stereotypes that Republicans love to wave at black people and say “why can’t you be more like them?” – you’re still not “part of the club.” And the very nanosecond that they see any profit in throwing you under the bus, they will, your low crimes rates, conservative social values, strong work ethic and everything else be damned.

(ETA: I wonder if this ever occurs to Republican-voting Cubans).
- xq
  
  There is a version of the “model minority” argument comparing US Muslims favorably to European Muslims.
  - J. Otto Pohl
    
    Actually I think it is that US acceptance and assimilation of Muslim immigrants has been more successful than in Europe. Not that the US has a better quality of Muslim immigrant. But, rather that American is supposed to be merely a legal rather than an ethno-racial category. In most of Europe citizenship is much more closely tied to ideas of blood and soil nationalism than it is in the US. In France people still speak of immigrants of the third generation.
    - TribalistMeathead
      
      In France people still speak of immigrants of the third generation.
      
      They also do that in Augusta, GA.
      - njorl
        
        And they’re referring to immigrants from Pennsylvania.
    - CP
      
      I think it also helps that the Muslim demographic was so small, and initially without any of the red flags that conservative attach to other minorities (e.g. blacks) that there wasn’t much to motivate a backlash there.
      
      9/11 altered that by really putting them in the crosshairs.
- brugroffil
  
  Someone wrote about this a few years back:
  
  http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/essay-how-the-republican-party-alienated-the-once-reliable-muslim-voting-bloc/2012/11/15/23e2af70-2da5-11e2-9ac2-1c61452669c3_story.html
  
  By 2000, the Muslim community in America was several decades old, and had started to mature as a political entity. Muslim organizations almost unanimously endorsed George W. Bush. I voted for Bush that year. I would have voted for Bob Dole in 1996 if I weren’t so busy with medical school that I forgot to vote; I would have voted for Bush Sr. in 1992 if I weren’t still 17-years-old.
  
  In the 2000 election, approximately 70 percent of Muslims in America voted for Bush; among non-African-American Muslims, the ratio was over 80 percent.
  
  Four years later, Bush’s share of the vote among Muslims was 4 percent.
  
  What happened? Well, a lot.
  - CP
    
    Thanks, that was a great read.
    
    I can’t say I didn’t cringe a little at the initial characterization of how warmly and enthusiastically people like his dad hopped on board the Republican bandwagon (Reagan era) and stayed there. But hey, they learned eventually. We all do.
    
    All the things detailed in the second half of the article – especially “after Bush left office” – are despicable; I remember some, but not all, and am still sickened even by the things I already knew.
NewishLawyer

There was a posted I saw in SF about defying stereotypes. The poster featured an Asian kid holding up a math test with an F on it.

Not sure if this was effective as an image or not.
- Orbis_Terrarum
  
  Maybe thinking of this?

KmCO

My grandmother, whom I do love dearly, has an extremely irritating habit of doing this. Well, in fairness, she’s eased off of it a little in more recent years, but when I was a kid I would hear it all the time. Any time I discussed racism against blacks as an older child and adolescent, I would hear from her about how black people don’t like to work, they’re lazy and can’t make it at school, they don’t raise their children properly and so the cycle repeats itself. White racism against blacks got completely erased in this narrative. And she would then compare how white racism didn’t affect her–she is an immigrant who was naturalized in 1999, despite the fact that she had come over in the 1950s–so it shouldn’t impact blacks. The kicker? My grandmother is a blond Swedish woman who was already married to a well-off American when she got off the boat.

TribalistMeathead

This reminds me of the time an Asian commenter at TNC’s place remarked that he didn’t know any Asian parents who didn’t encourage their kids to do well in school, and TNC responded “I don’t know any black parents who don’t encourage their kids to do well in school.”

tsam

There must be SOME parents that instruct their kids to do shitty in school.
- TribalistMeathead
  
  The Irish.
- MAJeff
  
  The Bushes
- Malaclypse
  
  The Aristocrats!
  - bspencer
    
    *snort*

Gator90

IMO, the achievements of African-Americans, considered in light of the past and present obstacles in their path, are more impressive than those of any other American racial/ethnic group.

tsam

That hits on the main difference: Black people are successful in spite of the system, rather than because of it.
kayden

Agreed. I love the fact that African Americans started their own financial and educational institutions when Whites kept them out of theirs. Shows that they were willing to do whatever it took to succeed despite obstacles. I also love the fact that within 40 years of the end of state-sanctioned segregation, the US has its first African American President. Amazing accomplishment given how badly African Americans were treated in the 60s.

I see nothing for African Americans to be ashamed of. I also don’t get the comparison to other racial minorities — especially Jews who are White and therefore fit within the White majority.
- JL
  
  especially Jews who are White and therefore fit within the White majority.
  
  Ashkenazi Jews were not always considered white in the US, and some Jews – Sephardi-Mizrahi Jews, Ethopian Jews, multiracial Jews, Jewish converts of color – are not white now.
  
  That said, Jewish and Black Americans should not be compared because even when Jews were not considered white the situations were different. TNC has written a lot about how Black American experiences are different from others because of how race is constructed in this country.
  - J. Otto Pohl
    
    The US census considers Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews to be white as well as Ashkenazi ones. Any people with origins in the Middle East or North Africa are officially white in the US.
    - JL
      
      Not the ones who ended up in Latin America following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Arguably not Spanish-origin Sephardim either. I think there was even a court case about this some years back.
      
      At any rate, yes, the census says that about people with MENA origins, but it doesn’t have much relevance to the way people are actually racialized in US society at the moment. Arabs, for instance, are not generally considered white even if the census claims they are.

dilan

This argument proves way too much. The experiences of “black people” (i.e., descendants of slaves) and “black people” (i.e., the children of voluntary immigrants of African descent) also cannot be compared. Yet we group them together.

Further, affirmative action programs routinely do group blacks together with all sorts of other minorities with different experiences, such as Hispanics, Indians, Pacific Islanders, etc. While excluding Jews and Pacific Rim Asians. In other words, when we do our race based public policy, we don’t carve out some special rule for the descendants of black slaves with their particular history. Perhaps we should, I don’t know.

Race is just really, really complicated. And there’s a lot of ways in which the various lines that are drawn really are arbitrary and don’t even attempt to accurately measure the oppression that people face. And while I’m not a fan of “model minority” rhetoric either, there’s also a tendency in reverse to simply pretend that Asian people, especially, are like white people who had all the societal advantages when in fact Asians overcame deep prejudice and structural barriers to achieve their success. When my parents were young, Asian people couldn’t even own real estate in California under the Alien Land Law. Japanese and Japanese Americans were thrown into prison camps in World War II. More recently, Asians faced a hard percentage cap on the number of them who could get into certain top universities (the same way Jews did 80 years ago).

They faced a ton of oppression, it isn’t the same as the oppression that various sub-groups of black people faced and face, and they aren’t a “model minority”. At the same time, the fact that so many Asians have succeeded in the face of oppression is not irrelevant to the discussion, either.

ChrisTS

Aside from the racism, what I find most alarming about Hough’s [repeated] comments is the lumping together of “Asian-Americans.” As others have noted in this thread, it’s bad enough that he apparently thinks all blacks in the U.S. are descendants of enslaved Africans. That might be regarded as sloppy language: he’s thinking of those American blacks, not all the others. But ‘Asian-Americans’? Does this man live in a hole? Indeed, does he know any history?

Assholes like Hough make me ashamed to be an academic. Not because he’s a racist, but because he is ignorant.

Manju

Black-white dating is almost non-existent because of the ostracism by blacks of anyone who dates a white.

A majority of Black Americans have approved of interracial marriage since at least 1969 (when Gallup started measuring). They go from a low of 56% approving to a high of 96, as of the most recent (2013) poll.

In contrast, Whites don’t achieve majority-approval until 1997. In 1969, approval was at 17%. Today (or 2013) its 84%, still below that of Blacks.

http://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Production/Cms/POLL/zjvs_n5c6kkeionkwnt3ea.png

tsam

It has to be true, he JUST got done making it up.
TribalistMeathead

Oh, polls, schmolls. It’s far more accurate to do like my old biracial roommate did and judge acceptance of interracial relationships by who gave him and his white girlfriend dirty looks when they walked around the mall together.

Yankee

Don’t disagree, just want to point out that you’re treading awfully close to the “Black Culture” line … “those people are unique because of how they were raised”.

tsam

I think you’re misreading it. She says their experience is unique, not their personalities…
- Yankee
  
  OP is a counter to the snipe of “Why can’t those people just get ahead like “, right? So “It’s because … ” … what is she saying then?
  
  Really, it’s about how We are treating Them NOW, isn’t it??
  - JL
    
    Now, but also historically. White-dominated America spent decades preventing and destroying Black wealth-building and creating Black ghettoes. It’s not “how they were raised” (with the implication that the fault then lies with their parents/guardians), and it’s not “Black culture is pathological” (TNC has written a great deal about how certain behaviors assumed to be pathological by the mainstream are not pathological in the context of their home environment, an environment constructed by the public policy of a society run by white people).
bspencer

I genuinely–no snark–have no idea what you’re talking about.
- Yankee
  
  Well then pardon me but I don’t understand what you’re trying to do with the reference to “uniquely awful experience”. Saying “it’s their culture” as a way of making poverty, etc the result of their own moral failings as a group has been justly roundly trashed hereabouts lately. But can you differentiate saying “these people as a group have a common history that created their oppression” and “these people as a group have developed a reactionary culture that is rather dysfunctional with respect to the larger, less oppressed mainstream culture” … ?
  
  Or do you want to deny that Blacks have in fact developed a differentiable subculture? One that has developed a lot of crossover value?
  - bspencer
    
    Still have no idea what you’re talking about. Less babbling and more clarity of thought would be good here.
    - Manju
      
      He’s saying you’re implicitly blaming Black Couture for the dearth of Af-Ams amongst the Model Minority. He doesn’t realize you’re actually saying Anna Wintour’s choices have had a disparate impact on Black Couture.
      
      Also, Malcolm X’s reverse racism, such as “do not wear white after labor day”, hasn’t helped matters.
      
      Hope this clears things up.
  - JL
    
    If you want to understand the difference between what people here are trashing and what people here are saying, read the Great TNC vs Chait Argument of 2014 (whose last entry, with links to most of the previous ones, is here). You’re thinking that bspencer is promoting, basically, Chait’s position. But the opinions on this blog and in this comment section are much closer to TNC’s position.

RobertL

Unusually for a blog post, I feel like I can contribute something here because I actually have some knowledge – instead of just half-arsed opinions.

I attended a training day last week on Asian names. Their structure, what they tell about the person, how they are Anglicised etc. It was run by an Australian-Chinese linguist who was frighteningly passionate about this field.

One of the things she said was that Asians from those countries that have a Confucian background do not have the same sense of “self” tied up in their name. That means that they are not averse to changing their name and will do so at times in there own language and homeland.

Couple that with the fact that they are aware that foreigners will have trouble pronouncing their names properly, when they migrate to an English-speaking country they are often willing to change their name to fit in better.