Overcoming our Asian Privilege

 

"We swim in a sea of whiteness, it's the norm," Ellen O'Neill, one of the campaign  organizers, said. 
"If we're white we don't have to think about it, we don't see it. 

So the first step is getting white people to see it."

Headlines you may have seen recently:

• 'Duluth's "unfair" campaign tackles white privilege'  

• 'No Longer Colorblind:  Portland teachers must rank themselves by their self-assessed "White Privilege" score'

• 'What James Holmes and the Colorado Movie Massacre Tell Us About White (Male) Privilege'

Let us step into another mental world: that of the Blank-slatist.

In his universe,  all human beings are interchangeable, their differences only skin-deep.  If the U.S. population is 64% white, 16% Hispanic, 13% black, and 5% Asian, these same break-downs must apply in every area of human endeavor: Standardized testing, educational accomplishment, politics, the arts, the sciences, the military, criminal justice, sports, etc.  Anywhere a group is under-represented (or in the case of prison, over-represented), this reflects an attack on them by...

...well, by whom?

'Institutional racism,' some have said, and have spilled much ink over it since the late 1960s (h/t Audacious Epigone) :

But as we have seen, in a country where de facto quotas routinely push out qualified Euros in favor of less qualified Afros and Hispanics in both the public and private sectors, this argument has become a tough sell.

So the Blank-slatist has settled on a new culprit: 'white privilege.'

'What is it?,' we ask him.

     'It is systematic, institutional exclusion of non-Whites,' he says.

'But we have looked at the facts and figures, and found the opposite is true--today institutional racism favors Blacks and Hispanics,' we reply.

     'We swim in a sea of whiteness.  White is the "default setting." Minority groups suffer simply from being the minority.'

'But Whites are the minority in many places--Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta, Houston; even entire states like California or New Mexico, or countries like South Africa--and yet still show superior life outcomes to Blacks and Hispanics.'

     'None of that matters. The very fact of being white gives them an unfair advantage. Check your privilege.'


Taking him at his word, that this nebulous White Privilege beams out its rays twenty-four hours a day and forces Afros, Hispanics, and Asians to under-perform their Euro subjugators, let's fire up our privilege radar and see if his argument holds up.

1) EDUCATION


We begin in the schools, where the effects of Privilege so often rear their ugly head. The 2011 NAEP report shows 8th-graders' math proficiency over the last twenty years:

The white children's privilege does not seem to have been much help against the Asians, the latter significantly out-scoring the former at Proficient + Advanced levels for every year measured. 



Our look at high school graduation rates is strangely similar:





And what of school discipline rates? The U.S. Office for Civil Rights has kindly compiled this data at the national level:

Averaging rates for all punishments (in-school suspensions, out-of-school suspensions single/multiple, and expulsions), we again face the troubling paradox that despite the decades of oppression and exclusion they labored under, Asians are 1/3 less likely than Whites to be disciplined at school.


The OCR breaks down only out-of-school suspension rates:

To be clear, these numbers are as a percentage of the total of each group.  That is, in 2009-2010, twenty percent of all black schoolboys in the country received an out-of-school suspension.

In a privilege-free world, of course, all these bars would be at the same level as that of the Whites. (7% for boys, 3% for girls).  In the case of Asians, though, this would mean them misbehaving more-- once again,  the power of White Privilege mysteriously confounded.


Our final OCR graph shows the fail rate for American schoolchildren in 2009-2010:



Again, we are forced to puzzle over the fact that Asian children are held back 1/3 less than their more privileged white schoolmates.



When looking at educational outcomes later in life, we see a strangely similar pattern with SAT scores:

Image source

College enrollment, heavily affected by soft quotas, is hard to pin down. However, in 1996 California voters passed Proposition 209, strictly prohibiting quotas in college admissions.  Ten years later, enrollment numbers look like this:

Image source

And finally, the total number of Americans with a college degree:

Image source

2) CRIME

The 2005 Color of Crime report gives a breakdown of incarceration rates by race/ethnicity.  Their explanation of the charts that follow:

'Figures 9 and 10 show how many times more likely than whites various groups were to be in state and federal prison in 2001. The white incarceration rate is set at one for every crime. For every other race, a bar at two means people of that race are twice as likely as whites to be imprisoned for that crime; three means three times more likely, etc.'

Again we see the same pattern: It turns out that Asians are incarcerated at only 1/5 the rate of Whites.



3) LIFE OUTCOMES


When we delve into other evidence of privilege, such as median household income, we find:

 Image source

 And on the West Coast, where Asians are most present?

Image source 

Teenaged birth rates follow a similar pattern:

 Image source

As do unemployment rates:

Image source

*       *       *

Arnold and Caroline Rose remind us of what the Chinese in particular faced earlier in U.S. history:

While the Chinese at first had an overwhelming concentration on the Pacific coast, when they lost their jobs as miners, farm hands, and railroad workers, they spread also to Eastern cities. The feeling against them was so strong throughout the country that by 1882 the United States passed its first law restricting immigration on grounds of race [the Chinese Exclusion Act], directed specifically against the Chinese.

Feeling the pressure, and not having a powerful foreign government to back them, the Chinese gradually accepted a subordinate position and a voluntary segregation--but not until they had conducted a vigorous but dignified defense before the courts with little success.

[...] Propaganda against the Chinese became so "normal" and expected that it gradually was engaged in unconsciously. Chinese became the villains of the cheap magazines, the movies, and the comic strips. The "good" Chinese characters were loyal but somewhat silly servants. The crooked streets, the underground passageways in Chinese neighborhoods left from an earlier time when whites used them, the tong wars that carried over from a still feudal homeland, all gave support to the stereotypes of the Chinese as a man of mystery and sin. (1)

As for the Japanese, who first came to America in the 1880s, the imperialist actions of their home country led to harsh treatment in the U.S.:

Anti-Japanese feeling was so strong in California by 1907 that the federal government restricted Japanese immigration from Hawaii in that year, and from Japan in the following year (by the famous Gentlemen's Agreement). In California political campaigns used anti-Japanese slogans, the white public was urged not to trade with the Japanese, and in 1913 a law was passed that prohibited aliens ineligible to citizenship from purchasing real estate.

[... In 1942,] all sorts of rumors flew about, and were practically universally believed by the whites, that Japanese Americans were giving information to the enemy, were sabotaging our factories, were storing up arms, and so on. Fear and hatred of the Japanese Americans were so strong that the Army evacuated all of them, whether American citizens or not, from the West coast and placed them in inland camps. (1)

*        *       *

White privilege is tough to pin down.  Does it mean that Euro-Americans, by virtue of their race, enjoy advantages allowing them superior life outcomes, and that by noblesse oblige they should share their spoils with the less-white?  If such is the case, then whatever this unnameable quality is, Asian-Americans seem to have even more of it than Euros do.  This despite past exclusion which, while nowhere near that suffered by Afros, was on a par with (and often worse than) that suffered by Hispanics.

How to explain this paradox?  Are Asians creeping in at night and siphoning off the privilege from Whites' privilege-tanks?  Are they endowed with a force-field that resists the Euros' privilege-rays, ricocheting them back in a blinding flash that then cripples white performance relative to their own?

Whatever this quality may be, our White Privilege Experts would do well to study its source so that they can show Hispanics and Afros how they too can take advantage of it.  After all, we don't want our great-great-grandchildren's policy-makers to still be puzzling over these mysteries one hundred years in the future.

 Previously:

Hunting the Yeti: Institutional Racism in the 21st Century,
Who's Afraid of Affirmative Action?,
Is Natural Selection Racist?

  REFERENCES:
(1) Rose, Arnold M. and Rose, Caroline B., America Divided:Minority Group Relations in the United States. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1948.