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Defining Race

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Seemingly "positive" racism can still have a negative impact

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A piece from New York Magazine's Andrew Sullivan over the weekend ended with an old, well-worn trope: Asian-Americans, with their "solid two-parent family structures," are a shining example of how to overcome discrimination. An essay that began by imagining why Democrats feel sorry for Hillary Clinton - and then detoured to President Trump's policies - drifted to this troubling ending:

"Today, Asian-Americans are among the most prosperous, well-educated, and successful ethnic groups in America. What gives? It couldn't possibly be that they maintained solid two-parent family structures, had social networks that looked after one another, placed enormous emphasis on education and hard work, and thereby turned false, negative stereotypes into true, positive ones, could it? It couldn't be that all whites are not racists or that the American dream still lives?"

Sullivan's piece, rife with generalizations about a group as vastly diverse as Asian-Americans, rightfully raised hackles. Not only inaccurate, his piece spreads the idea that Asian-Americans as a group are monolithic, even though parsing data by ethnicity reveals a host of disparities; for example, Bhutanese-Americans have far higher rates of poverty than other Asian populations, like Japanese-Americans. And at the root of Sullivan's pernicious argument is the idea that black failure and Asian success cannot be explained by inequities and racism, and that they are one and the same; this allows a segment of white America to avoid any responsibility for addressing racism or the damage it continues to inflict.

"Sullivan's comments showcase a classic and tenacious conservative strategy," Janelle Wong, the director of Asian American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, said in an email. This strategy, she said, involves "1) ignoring the role that selective recruitment of highly educated Asian immigrants has played in Asian American success followed by 2) making a flawed comparison between Asian Americans and other groups, particularly Black Americans, to argue that racism, including more than two centuries of black enslavement, can be overcome by hard work and strong family values."

"It's like the Energizer Bunny," said Ellen D. Wu, an Asian-American studies professor at Indiana University and the author of The Color of Success. Much of Wu's work focuses on dispelling the "model minority" myth, and she's been tasked repeatedly with publicly refuting arguments like Sullivan's, which, she said, are incessant. "The thing about the Sullivan piece is that it's such an old-fashioned rendering. It's very retro in the kinds of points he made."

Since the end of World War II, many white people have used Asian-Americans and their perceived collective success as a racial wedge. The effect? Minimizing the role racism plays in the persistent struggles of other racial/ethnic minority groups - especially black Americans.

On Twitter, people took Sullivan's "old-fashioned rendering" to task.

Andrew Sullivan may want to start by studying immigration policy to see just *which* Asians are allowed into this country in the 1 place.
- Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) April 15, 2017

4. Importantly: Elevating Asian Americans as "deserving" and "hardworking" was a tactic to denigrate African Americans
- Jeff Guo (@_jeffguo) April 15, 2017

"During World War II, the media created the idea that the Japanese were rising up out of the ashes [after being held in incarceration camps] and proving that they had the right cultural stuff," said Claire Jean Kim, a professor at the University of California, Irvine. "And it was immediately a reflection on black people: Now why weren't black people making it, but Asians were?"

These arguments falsely conflate anti-Asian racism with anti-black racism, according to Kim. "Racism that Asian-Americans have experienced is not what black people have experienced," Kim said. "Sullivan is right that Asians have faced various forms of discrimination, but never the systematic dehumanization that black people have faced during slavery and continue to face today." Asians have been barred from entering the U.S. and gaining citizenship and have been sent to incarceration camps, Kim pointed out, but all that is different than the segregation, police brutality and discrimination that African-Americans have endured.

Many scholars have argued that some Asians only started to "make it" when the discrimination against them lessened - and only when it was politically convenient. Amid worries that the Chinese exclusion laws from the late 1800s would hurt an allyship with China in the war against imperial Japan, the Magnuson Act was signed in 1943, allowing 105 Chinese immigrants into the U.S. each year. As Wu wrote in 2014 in the Los Angeles Times, the Citizens Committee to Repeal Chinese Exclusion "strategically recast Chinese in its promotional materials as 'law-abiding, peace-loving, courteous people living quietly among us'" instead of the "'yellow peril' coolie hordes." In 1965, the National Immigration Act replaced the national-origins quota system with one that gave preference to immigrants with U.S. family relationships and certain skills.

In 1966, William Petersen, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, helped popularize comparisons between Japanese-Americans and African-Americans. His New York Times story, headlined, "Success Story, Japanese-American Style," is regarded as one of the most influential pieces written about Asian-Americans. It solidified a prevailing stereotype of Asians as industrious and rule-abiding that would stand in direct contrast to African-Americans, who were still struggling against bigotry, poverty and a history rooted in slavery. In the opening paragraphs, Petersen quickly puts African-Americans and Japanese-Americans at odds:

"Asked which of the country's ethnic minorities has been subjected to the most discrimination and the worst injustices, very few persons would even think of answering: 'The Japanese Americans,' ... Yet, if the question refers to persons alive today, that may well be the correct reply. Like the Negroes, the Japanese have been the object of color prejudice .... When new opportunities, even equal opportunities, are opened up, the minority's reaction to them is likely to be negative - either self-defeating apathy or a hatred so all-consuming as to be self-destructive. For the well-meaning programs and countless scholarly studies now focused on the Negro, we barely know how to repair the damage that the slave traders started. The history of Japanese Americans, however, challenges every such generalization about ethnic minorities."

But as history shows, Asian-Americans were afforded better jobs not simply because of educational attainment, but in part because they were treated better.

"More education will help close racial wage gaps somewhat, but it will not resolve problems of denied opportunity," reporter Jeff Guo wrote last fall in the Washington Post. "Asian Americans - some of them at least - have made tremendous progress in the United States. But the greatest thing that ever happened to them wasn't that they studied hard, or that they benefited from tiger moms or Confucian values. It's that other Americans started treating them with a little more respect."

At the heart of arguments of racial advancement is the concept of "racial resentment," which is different than "racism," Slate's Jamelle Bouie recently wrote in his analysis of the Sullivan article. "Racial resentment" refers to a "moral feeling that blacks violate such traditional American values as individualism and self reliance," as defined by political scientists Donald Kinder and David Sears.

And, Bouie points out, "racial resentment" is simply a tool that people use to absolve themselves from dealing with the complexities of racism:

"In fact, racial resentment reflects a tension between the egalitarian self-image of most white Americans and that anti-black affect. The 'racist,' after all, is a figure of stigma. Few people want to be one, even as they're inclined to believe the measurable disadvantages blacks face are caused by something other than structural racism. Framing blacks as deficient and pathological rather than inferior offers a path out for those caught in that mental maze."

Petersen's, and now Sullivan's, arguments have resurfaced regularly throughout the last century. And they'll likely keep resurfacing, as long as people keep seeking ways to forgo responsibility for racism - and to escape that "mental maze." As the writer Frank Chin said of Asian-Americans in 1974: "Whites love us because we're not black."

Sometimes it's instructive to look at past rebuttals to tired arguments - after all, they hold up much better in the light of history.

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'Model Minority' Myth Again Used As A Racial Wedge Between Asians And Blacks

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A piece from New York Magazine's Andrew Sullivan over the weekend ended with an old, well-worn trope: Asian-Americans, with their "solid two-parent family structures," are a shining example of how to overcome discrimination.

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Psychological Impact

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Physiological and Psychological Impact of Racism and Discrimination for African-Americans

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The Ethnicity and Health in America Series is raising awareness about the physiological and psychological impact of racism and discrimination as it relates to stress during Black History Month.

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RACE - The Power of an Illusion . Background Readings | PBS

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by George M. Fredrickson Racism exists when one ethnic group or historical collectivity dominates, excludes, or seeks to eliminate another on the basis of differences that it believes are hereditary and unalterable. An ideological basis for explicit racism came to a unique fruition in the West during the modern period.

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Impact on Health

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Public health improves quality of life, extends life expectancy, reduces human suffering and saves resources over the long term.

Donate today and help APHA promote and protect the health of all people by creating the healthiest nation in one generation.

APHA is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.

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Public health improves quality of life, extends life expectancy, reduces human suffering and saves resources over the long term. Donate today and help APHA promote and protect the health of all people by creating the healthiest nation in one generation. APHA is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.

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Decoded - The Surprisingly Racist History of "Caucasian" | MTV

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Why do we call White People Caucasian? It's an interesting question considering that outside America, Caucasian simply refers to the people from the region around Caucasus Mountains. Not only that, but there's actually a pretty messed up history to what seems like a pretty innocuous word. What is that history?

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chimamanda ngozi adichie new yorker festival

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on Facing Racism in America

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The writer talks with David Remnick about the black experience in America, and how the left often cannibalizes itself.

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Hispanics, African-Americans come together to fight racism

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If white supremacists and neo-Nazis thought their antics in Charlottesville, Virginia, would further divide Americans, they were wrong. Two groups that have sometimes been pitted against one another ...

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Division of people only leads to destruction, all we need is love and unity.

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Reducing the impact of racism on students

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Allowing students to fully understand the impact of racism.

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Watch full-length episodes of PBS documentary series FRONTLINE for free. A Class Divided - The day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, a teacher in a small town in Iowa tried a daring classroom experiment in discrimination.

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In light of a Donald Trump supporter's recent suggestion that imprisoning Japanese-Americans during World War II set a " precedent " for creating a Muslim registry, one viral video's message is particularly poignant.

A clip from AJ+ features Japanese-Americans sharing what happened to them and their families when the U.S. government forced 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry to leave their homes and live behind barbed wire over 70 years ago.

The video came out in February, but the survivors' words are still relevant ― especially after retired Navy SEAL Carl Higbie's interview on Fox News last week. Discussing a proposed registry of immigrants from Muslim countries, Higbie said, "We've done it with Iran ... we did it during World War II with Japanese, which, call it what you will, maybe it was wrong ... Look, the president needs to protect America first."

After facing major backlash for those comments, Higbie admitted that the government's imprisonment of Japanese-Americans, many of whom were U.S. citizens, was a "huge black mark on our society and we would never want to do it again."

Japanese-Americans have long drawn parallels between their wartime experiences and the mounting Islamophobia that Muslims have faced in recent years. "What's happening to the Muslims right now is really close to the hearts of the Japanese-Americans because it happened to us," said Gloria Imagire, a former prisoner, in the AJ+ clip.

In the video, some survivors spoke about being relocated to detention facilities and the lives they left behind. One man, Hiroshi Kashiwagi, recalled the guard towers in the camps, where sentries were stationed with firearms. Survivor Tadashi Yoshi explained how his brother served in the U.S. military even though his family was imprisoned.

"My brother was in the Army," Yoshi said. "He was fighting over there in Italy, in southern France, and his mother and father and his younger son is in a camp."

After they were released, Japanese-Americans continued to feel the effects of imprisonment. Though not everyone in the video agreed, a few people said that they made an extra effort to prove their "Americanness."

"When the Korean War started in 1950, I enlisted in the U.S. Army and served my three years to prove my loyalty," Ben Takeshita said in the video.

Ultimately, it's clear these survivors hope the injustices they suffered never afflict another group of people.
The Huffington Post is documenting the rising wave of anti-Muslim bigotry and violence in America. Take a stand against hate.

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Japanese-Americans Share Their Tragic Experiences In Prison Camps

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In light of a Donald Trump supporter's recent suggestion that imprisoning Japanese-Americans during World War II set a " precedent " for creating a Muslim registry, one viral video's message is particularly poignant. A clip from AJ+ features Japanese-Americans sharing what happened to them and their families when the U.S.