Yes, and that’s the point. They are a racial minority, “America is a white supremacist society”, Asians have been (and are now being) discriminated against, so they “should” need extra support as other minorities do.
But they don’t need that support. They are out-performing, not only other racial and ethnic minorities, but whites who are supposedly benefiting from privilege. It’s not supposed to work that way, in the narrative of “whiteness”.
Wouldn’t this logically apply to hispanics as well? Yet, other than the Florida Cuban community, they seem to have more in common, demographically, with the African-American community than with communities of Asian immigrants and their immediate descendants.
So let me get this straight - Chinese nationalists go online and fling around a term of derision about strawman western white liberals, because reasons? Am I following so far?
Or more simply - foreigners go online to foment divisiveness of Americans. Hm, where have I heard THAT before?
Well, the targets aren’t strawmen or strawpeople. The targets are real. Ask yourself why would a rising nation, one that should be the #1 economy anytime now, be derisive about a particular faction of the west? I believe it comes from the astonishment that a nation that had such an impressive lead in practically every metric of power is inhabited by a significant fraction willing to actively hamstring itself.
I’m guessing the same people are staunchly opposed to protesters in Hong Kong who don’t want to have their rights trampled, so I’m inclined to think that the main issue here isn’t nationality or race, but one’s views on human rights and liberty.
I think it’s about the nature of power. Look at how far China has come and how quickly. It’s impressive. The island creations, that new Silk Road project, the spread of Chinese power outside of Asia, internal infrastructure improvements, etc. are the results of a people who have a confident and ambitious mindset. Why wouldn’t they be amazed that the current #1 which they will probably surpass is willing to abdicate that spot. Contrary to what some would wish to believe we are a world of competing nation-states.
You want rights and liberty? You better not give up the mechanisms which enable one to protect those rights.
The forums I am seeing this is on forums are frequently the liberal reaction to the anti-asian discrimination by some competitive colleges. The forum I first encountered this on was discussing the push to eliminate the SHSAT as the sole criteria for admissions to NYC’s specialized high schools. This conversation may have adopted a term that started in mainland China but the forum I am reading is filled with Koreans, Indians and other groups. Frankly, the common factor seems to be recent immigration rather than ethnicity.
I would say that there is a significant population of asian americans who think the left is dismissive towards asians when there is a conflict between what is good for asians and what is good for any other minority. Many on the left have a racial pecking order (and we see it expressed here), and asians are the junior partners in the push for racial justice.
I believe the primary reason asians went from being overwhelmingly republican in the 1980s to overwhelmingly democrat is because so many republicans are racist, and asians started to identify republicans as the party of the reacists. Republicans no longer have a monopoly on racism in the eyes of many in the asian american community.
How would one go about “pandering” to Asian-Americans? Another way to ask this question: What policy issues are of specific concern to Asian-Americans that are being ignored by progressives?
What does conservatism offer Asian-Americans who desire “equality of opportunity”? Conservatives support systems that favor affluent whites over others, and they’ve showed no sign of stopping this. As much as Affirmative Action comes up in discussions about Asian-Americans, you would think at some point their ire would be focused more on the wealthy who buy their way into university and less on black and Latino students. But sadly, if your posting history is a representative view within your ethnicity, their ire stays on the wrong target.
Do you have any specific examples? I want to fight any “racial pecking order” or other sorts of nonsense on the left that might drive away Asian voters.
The Baizuo premise is that success is supposed to be impossible for anyone that is not white in America’s white supremacist culture. They are uncomfortable with asian success.
And that means that it’s OK to discriminate against asians? Should “social justice” for hispanics come at the cost of social injustice for the vietnamese? We all show up in this country with whatever baggage we have. It is not our job to equalize everyone at the border, is it?
That’s not the point. I think most asians americans feel that blacks in america get a raw deal but a lot of that is due to the prejudice of individuals. A type of prejudice that existed for asians at one point. Asians worked pretty hard to get out from under that prejudice and now it feels like we are being punished for our success by baizuo who are uncomfortable with our success…
So you haven’t seen liberals trying to explain away asian success with theories about “white adjacency” “white proximity” “spill-over white privilege”? These are all devices that baizuo use to try to explain away the inconvenient truth that while america is a white supremacist country, success is still possible for minorities that make the extraordinary sacrifices to overcome that white supremacy and racism. And now we have to overcome that racism from the left as well as the right.
And that’s what makes the baizuo so uncomfortable. Minorities are not supposed to succeed in a white supremacist society, its supposed to be possible only for rare individuals.
This is the source of much of the asian american concern. The liberal left has jumped to the defense of what seems to be pretty discriminatory stuff because they like the results. It really makes it clear that asians are a junior partner in the fight for racial justice. That racial justice for groups that have historically been oppressed by a bunch of white people should come at the expense of poor asian kids. Meanwhile we preserve legacy admission for the children of mostly white people. We preserve athletic preferences for the children of mostly white people.
There is still a ton of racism, we should try to fix it. Racism wears on you. Some people can stoically grind it out but not everyone can. Suicide rates for minority children are much higher than suicide rates for white kids. I suspect racism has something to do with it rather than psychological fragility of minorities.
What we shouldn’t do is let it become an excuse to visit injustice on others.
By and large, affirmative action. Many (although certainly not all) Asian-Americans oppose affirmative action, because they see it as a way to suppress Asian admissions (although Asians are overrepresented at many universities at a macro level, when it comes to the individual level, there is often a clear double standard whereby Asians have to score significantly higher on the SAT than other race groups in order to have the same chance of admission.)