Asian Americans are those Americans whose families came mainly from Asia within the past 300 years (not counting Siberians, Jews, Armenians, Georgians and Lebanese Christians). They account for 4% of all Americans – more people than in Ohio.
By metropolitan area:
- more than a million: Los Angeles (1.88m), New York (1.88m), San Francisco (1.01m)
- more than 20%: Honolulu (44%), San Jose (31%), San Francisco (23%)
The four main kinds:
- Brain-drain: like those from India, South Korea and the Philippines, particularly doctors, nurses, engineers and university students who stay on, filling a vacuum created by America’s terrible public schools (23rd worldwide in mathematics, 31st in science). They do well since they are voluntary immigrants and have better educations than most whites. They still experience racism, like glass ceilings, university admission quotas, stereotyping and higher rates of unemployment. Their families mainly came since the 1960s. Their children gave rise to the model minority stereotype.
- Refugee: like those from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia who fled American wars. Their families mainly came in the 1970s and 1980s. Many are stuck in poverty. Among these are Vietnamese Amerasians, the largely disowned children of American soldiers.
- “Muslim”: quote-unquote because some are Sikhs or Christians who “look Muslim” to those brainwashed by American television. Despite many being “Caucasian” they have been racialized, particularly since 9/11, suffering hate crimes and civil rights abuses. They are stereotyped as dangerous and violent.
- Old-school: Those whose families came before the 1960s, mostly in the 1800s from Japan and China. They were shut out of many fields. White American culture stereotyped them mercilessly: Charlie Chan, Dragon Ladies, China Dolls, the Yellow Peril, etc. Before the Asian brain drain whites saw them not as intelligent but as “inscrutable”.
There are others who are none of the above, like Korean adoptees and hapas (mixed-race).
On the White American Real Person Scale, most are, as of 2012, Almost Real, with “Muslims” seen as Despised Others.
The civil rights of all are at the mercy of white authorities, especially when said authorities feel threatened by a foreign Asian power. You saw that with the Japanese American internment in the 1940s and you see it now with civil rights abuses against “Muslims”. It is a good example of the perpetual foreigner stereotype – where Asian Americans only become “American” when they win the Nobel Prize or an Olympic medal.
The model minority stereotype: Whites love to point to the success of brain-drain Asians to bash blacks, Latinos and Native Americans and to prove how wonderfully unracist America is. But if you take into account things like parents’s education, most Asian Americans are not a particularly good example of the Bootstrap Myth. Or even studiousness.
“Asian American” as a term came out of activist circles in the 1970s, becoming common by the 1980s. Before then most saw themselves in ethnic terms (Japanese American, etc). The murder of Vincent Chin in 1982 was a wake-up call: it showed that they were all in the same boat, that “playing by the rules” was not enough.
See also:
- Frank Wu: “Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White” (2002) – Excellent! The single best book on Asian Americans that I know of.
- Ronald Takaki: “Different Mirror” (1993) – great on Asian American history and American history in general
- Real Person Scale
- Vincent Chin
- Japanese American internment
- The perpetual foreigner stereotype
- The model minority stereotype
- bootstrap myth
- Jehanzeb: The Hate I Will Never Forget: A Decade After 9/11 – post by a Muslim American
- Three Bears Effect
- growing up Asian American
- Gene Yang: American Born Chinese
- Tips on writing about Asian America
- Stereotypes about East Asian women
- David Carradine – a good example of yellowface
- “Too Asian”
- Korean adoptees
- Vietnamese Amerasians
- Asian double eyelid surgery
- Half white, half Asian
- “How can it be racist if Asians do better?”
- The intelligence of Asians: a brief history: 1840-2010
- “Asian Americans have a higher median family income”
- Asian American IQ and income
- Asian fetish
- Black men, Asian women
- Adrian Tomine: Shortcomings
Great post.
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America’s public schools are not terrible–stop promoting this stereotype.
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@Rhaegar Targaryen some of them are as good as private schools and a lot are average. but there are way too many especially in poor areas with a lot of people of color the schools are under funded, failing, and many of the teachers are inexperienced or just don’t care. that’s not a stereotype; it’s truth. maybe not for middle class white americans, but it’s a reality for far too many students.
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Erica-American public schools can be bad or good, but the reasoning Abagond gave for this is that the American schools are terrible. Not true. Enough good students graduate from American schools to fill hundreds of medical schools. The truth is no American wants to practice in Bumblefart, Arkansas, and foreign doctors will move in to fill that void.
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Great post Abagond, I had to put some people in check about referring to Asian people as oriental. orinental is a damn rug. The idiots shot back and said they were tired of being politically correct. We ought to be able to call people what we want to. This was a white woman. I was starting to get annoyed. “Why don’t I just call you an idiot.” I can’t stand ignorance and intolerance..
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From my understanding, most Americans don’t consider “Muslims” as Asian. What criteria made you put them in this group?
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Nvm.. you must be speaking of Pakistanis, Afghans, etc. When I read “Muslim” I thought of Arabs
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@ Abagond
What I got from this besides being informative, is that all peoples of Colour must belong to a “group” of some kind in order to continue the defamation and subjugation of said group.
The name calling is just another tool used to dehumanize them.
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@Jay from Philly
Soooo…what are you trying to say?
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@ Jay
I now delete comments with Mock Ebonics. See the comment policy. You will have to somehow express your opinion without it.
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Being 23rd in mathematics and 31st in science education is terrible for a country like America. It is extremely bad news. If it continues America has no long-term future as an advanced nation.
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I was born and raised in the USA but now live overseas in Asia.
I agree that the vast majority of primary and secondary schools in the USA are simply terrible. I really think most Americans are fooling themselves into thinking that they have good schools (at least from an academic perspective). 23rd in Mathematics and 31st in science seems better than I would have rated them myself. I don’t think Abagond is exaggerating one bit by saying that the schools in the USA are TERRIBLE.
The USA doesn’t produce enough skilled people in the Maths, Science and Engineering disciplines. If it were not for foreign students (those who may later form “brain drain” immigrants), I think the USA would be up shit creek. It would not surprise me if most of the “local” achievers were children of brain drain immigrants. Either the USA start educating their students, or expand brain drain immigrant pool or they will eventually sink to the very bottom.
I won the top math award for my county school system in high school, which at that time was the 10 largest school system in the country (with over 10,000 graduating seniors) and went on to compete in the East Coast Mathematics Olympiad. The majority of the participants seem to have Asian or Jewish ethnic backgrounds – saw relatively few Anglo, Hispanic or Black participants.
Still, these super math achievers in the USA would simply just be “normal” students in many overseas countries.
@abagond, I recognize some of this content. I have tons of fodder for other posts and have drafted some already. I guess I need to share the ones that are 90% done with you.
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Abagond,
You told Jay, “I now delete comments with Mock Ebonics. See the comment policy. You will have to somehow express your opinion without it.”
The key word is ‘somehow’.
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At the university I attended (in Massachusetts), I learned about the origin of the Asian Students Club. That term only began usage in 1975-1976. Prior to that, they had separate clubs based on ethnic background (eg, Chinese Students Club). Still, around mid 70s- 1982, “Asian” was a term used mostly by Student activist organizations and not used widely across US society.
But after Vincent Chin, “Asian” as a group in the USA was formed and developed a national consciousness.
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@mary burrell
While most Asian-Americans do not accept the use of “Oriental”, there is not necessarily anything horrible per se about that word any more than there is something evil about “Colored”.
The thing is that . . . “Oriental” is associated with the historical inscrutable, cunning and sneaky stereotypes (Charlie Chan, Fu Man Chu, dragon lady) or the exotic stereotypes (eg, China Doll) that predate the model minority stereotype. The term was discarded mainly as a way to discard those stereotypes. It is similar to how “colored” hails back to the days of Jim Crow, and are a very poignant reminder of the racial segregation era. When segregation ended, so did the use of “colored”.
But no sooner did the use of Asian get popular than did white America decide to coin the term “Model Minority” and apply that to Asians. When America decides to dump the model minority stereotype, maybe a new term will come to replace “Asian”.
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@Jefe: Thanks for the teaching moments. I think it was the woman’s attitude that set me on edge. Since I know this woman has made racist comments before about others.
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Is there a good study about the chinese workers in 1800’s? Does any one know how many thousands of them died by killings, disease etc, other than somekind of estimates?
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Abagond:
This statement seems like it employs a stereotype to critique a stereotype, and in doing so, obscures lessons on the attainability of middle-class success in America.
In California, asian people are 14% of the population but 40% of the UC student body. You appear to suggest that this is the result of demographic inevitability (e.g. high parental education levels, though I guess we shouldn’t ask how the parents got so educated) and not due to replicable factors such as a prioritization of education.
I think I understand the subtext here. This appears to be a blame avoidance exercise. At the core is a sacrosanct premise which must be tenderly cultivated and guarded against critique: “It’s not black people’s fault for their education, income, and crime levels.”
So important is that axiom that it must be defended from attack even when no one’s attacking. Here we see a necessary condition of this assertion: if you want to believe that Group A cannot be accountable for its difficulties, you must demonstrate the Group B cannot be accountable for its successes.
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@ Randy
It is based on studies of social mobility and school success of Asian Americans. If you control for parents’s education the apparent differences in those things go away. There is nothing surprising going on.
For example, Asian Americans as a whole do do more homework than whites. But if you compare, say, the children of engineers, the marked difference by race goes away.
If you are only going to let in Asians with good educations then of course their children are going to flood the UC system and other non-racist universities. Duh.
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Abagond:
How do you suppose those parents became engineers in the first place? And how do you suppose their children became so strong academically?
The answer to both questions resolves to a prioritization of education. It’s a repeatable formula, particularly since many of these people came from impoverished backgrounds themselves. I would hope that such examples would serve to inspire others from poor backgrounds.
Abagond:
Given the amount of hard work and sacrifice required to attain that level of success, I don’t see anything “duh” about it.
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[…] Asian Americans […]
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@Randy
Did you notice the caption underneath the picture of this post?
“In the fourth quarter of 2009, 7.2 percent Asian Americans with bachelor’s degrees were unemployed, while only 4.7 percent of whites with the same education level were without work”
Why do you think this is so?
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Actually in some countries (e.g. UK) Asian usually refers to South Asians (folks from India, Pakistan), while Oriental refers to Chinese, Japanese types or at least used to be a different term used.
As far as American school being bad, how about American don’t respect “Education” as much. It’s not just teachers who have to teach, students have to be respectful and willing to learn as well, which is something that is never mentioned.
Put those same Asian kids in the so call bad school and I bet it will be a different scenario.
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To The Cynic:
Did you notice the caption underneath the picture of this post?
“In the fourth quarter of 2009, 7.2 percent Asian Americans with bachelor’s degrees were unemployed, while only 4.7 percent of whites with the same education level were without work”
Why do you think this is so?
I wondered about that also. Note that the data is now almost 3 years old and covers one quarter at basically the highest point of unemployment during the recession. If you look below you’ll see over the past decade Asians had lower unemployment than Whites except during time near the 2002 recession which hit the Tech industry hardest.
http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2011/ted_20111005.htm
I suspect something similar was happening during the last quarter of 2009 cited by Abagond.
Currently Asian unemployment (Asian 6.2% vs White 7.6%) is lower than Whites and their labor participation rates (the number of people working versus those not working..) is higher.
http://www.deptofnumbers.com/unemployment/demographics/
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t02.htm
Unemployment figures for one quarter from 3 years ago do not necessarily reflect a trend.
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For those with bachelor’s degree, Asian Americans had higher rates of unemployment than White Americans for 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011:
http://www.epi.org/publication/ib323-asian-american-unemployment/
If you compare just those who are native-born, the difference is even worse, presumably because some of the foreign-born unemployed return to their old countries.
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To Abagond:
If you compare just those who are native-born, the difference is even worse, presumably because some of the foreign-born unemployed return to their old countries.
I made the same mistake at first, the author is comparing foreign Asians to foreign born Whites, not all Whites…Native born Asians with Bachelors degrees had lower unemployment in 2009 – 2011 than foreign born Asians with 4 year degrees.
Also there has been a net inflow of Asian immigrants since the recession started. Note also that roughly half of the people that call themselves Asian American are foreign born. (often arriving with the parents, the so called generation 1.5)
There may be prejudice involved or it could be that college educated Asian Americans have tended to concentrate in professions (IT, Engineering, Accounting..) that continue to impacted by the American penchant, even during a recession, of both in-sourcing (bringing in L1, L2, H1B visas and hiring recent college grads from foreign countries..) and outsourcing.
What’s interesting is that Asians with a High School diploma or less have had consistently lower unemployment than Whites.
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That link includes Hindus, Milton.
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And Abagond’s latest link also compared native Asians and whites in table #2. It wasn’t just Foreign Born Asians vs. foreign born whites.
http://www.epi.org/files/2012/ib323-table2.png.538
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To Franklin:
That link includes Hindus, Milton.
Not sure what you mean. Most Hindus in the US are Indian (plus a smattering from Bali or Sri Lanka and a few converts..) or of Indian descent and Indians are classified as Asian by the US government so when the author is talking about Asians in the US whether native or foreign born she would be including those of Indian descent.
And Abagond’s latest link also compared native Asians and whites in table #2. It wasn’t just Foreign Born Asians vs. foreign born whites.
http://www.epi.org/files/2012/ib323-table2.png.538
Yes.. I know.. it appeared that Abagond by this statement “If you compare just those who are native-born, the difference is even worse” was implying that unemployment figures for American born Asians with 4 year degrees were worse than for foreign born Asians, which was not the case for 2009 – 2011.
Perhaps Abagond can clarify.
More interesting figures from the latest BLS data:
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t02.htm
Asian Civilian labor force July 2012:
8,346
Asian Civilian labor force July 2011
7,405
A 12.7 % increase in the Asian labor force in one year.
A stunning increase… under-counted previously, immigration, H1b, L1, etc visas..?
Compare that to Whites:
White Civilian labor force July 2012:
124,749
White Civilian labor force July 2011
125,659
A 0.8% decline in the White labor force in one year. Understandable given the aging demographics of Whites.
Even so the Asian unemployment was below the White unemployment rate in July 2012 despite a dramatic increase in the size of the Asian labor force.
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While I am not American, the last sentence of this post stood out for me. That playing by the rules is not enough. It holds true in other countries as well. It is typical to say nothing and do nothing in response to racism (especially when so subtle), yet this still communicates a message that says, `This is acceptable.’
I have read that, over the past few years, while Asian Americans have had lower unemployment than Whites, they are often unemployed for the longest time out of all racial groups in the US.
For anyone interested, I thought this might be appropriate to post here. I recently came across this series of photographs by Tim Greyhaven. He has photographed many locations of anti-Chinese violence in US history. You can also read the stories of what happened at each place:
http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/13/remnants-of-anti-chinese-violence/
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To Mimi:
Enough good students graduate from American schools to fill hundreds of medical schools. The truth is no American wants to practice in Bumblefart, Arkansas, and foreign doctors will move in to fill that void.
In addition multiple countries who under perform the US on the PISA test have markedly higher doctor to patient ratios than the US… (Greece, Portugal, Uruguay to name a few..) you can thank the American Medical Association for that. Entry to medical schools in the US is basically the toughest in the world by design.
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@ Uncle Milton
I am saying that if you look just at Asians and whites born in America, the difference in the unemployment rate for those with bachelor degrees is worse than if you compare all Asians and all whites in America.
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To Abagond:
I am saying that if you look just at Asians and whites born in America, the difference in the unemployment rate for those with bachelor degrees is worse than if you compare all Asians and all whites in America.
I was asking about this statement: “If you compare just those who are native-born, the difference is even worse” but it doesn’t matter.
FWIW, in pre recession 2006 the difference in unemployment between Asians and Whites with 4 year degrees or better was 0.1%.
Click to access unemployment_edpays.pdf
It is clear that for the periods listed 2007 -2011 by the author, if her data is correct that Asians with college degrees tended to have higher unemployment than Whites with college degrees. Note however that being registered as unemployed means you have not given up looking for work. Asians have higher labor participation rates for their respective age groups compared to Whites. It’s a stereotype but from my anecdotal experiences and seemingly backed by the data, Whites are more likely to give up looking for work. (move home, be supported by a spouse etc..than Asians..)
As for your speculation about foreign born Asians returning to their home countries, at least for the 2010 – 2011 period there was a net increase by 1.6%:
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/forbrn.t03.htm
Asian foreign born with college degree or better in the labor force 2011:
2,936,000
Asian foreign born with college degree or better in the labor force 2010
2,889,000
I was surprised by how low these figures were
Asian native born with college degree or better in the labor force 2011
862,000
Asian native born with college degree or better in the labor force 2010:
817,000
An increase of 5.5%
This recession has hit younger college age people especially hard, the median age of Asians is 33.2 compared to the median age of non-Hispanic Whites at 42.3.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2012-05-17/minority-births-census/55029100/1
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Just saw part of the movie “7 Faces of Dr. Lao” (1964) with Tony Randall in the title role as Dr. Lao.
Talk about the pre-70s “inscrutable” stereotypes and the tendency to use “yellow-face”, east Asian characters portrayed by Caucasians.
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abagond
Being 23rd in mathematics and 31st in science education is terrible for a country like America. It is extremely bad news. If it continues America has no long-term future as an advanced nation.
**********Not too sure how to use the quote function on this board, so I’ll just make a few brief comments. 1. I can see that you haven’t studied much statistics. What is the range on your data set? If if it from 1-10 and the scores are to 2 significant figures behind the decimal point, then something like this could happen: Spot #1 could be 10.00 and spot #10 could be 9.80. Spot #20 could be 9.65 (and so on and so on). Large differences in place number but a small difference in absolute/ relative terms. I’d be interested to see the range amongst the advanced countries.
2. I can see that you don’t read economic periodicals very much. Why don’t you do some abstruse statistical research…..by, say, looking up the OECD figures and seeing how tightly test scores correlate to GDP per capita. I think you will see that the relationship is very weak.
3. Did you know? The US has a dramatic range of racial groups (and therefore IQs). At the very top are Ashkenazi Jews (115+) and “Asians” (of various origins) and the bottom are Black Americans (85ish). If you crunch the numbers (I bet you haven’t), you could find out that: a. It doesn’t take that many low IQ people to drag the average score of a country WAY down. b. You don’t need EVERYONE to be scientists. You just need a good chunk of the highest IQ people to be scientists/ engineers, and that is enough.
4. This lets me know that you didn’t pay attention in your math classes. China GDP per capita: About $7500. Growth rate 10% (over the last 30 years). That’s about $750 added per person per year. (Assume that population is constant. China’s population is aging because of the one child policy. That’s another story, though). US. GDP per capita: About $45,000. Average growth rate 3% (over the last 100 years). $1350 added per person per year. If you do the math: The US GDP per capita is getting larger at the rate of $600 per year. The gap is actually WIDENING. .
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on Fri 17 Aug 2012 at 05:32:18 Jefe
I was born and raised in the USA but now live overseas in Asia.
*****************
Let me guess: As an English teacher in China? Or South Korea? With all the rest of us who couldn’t find a job in our discipline?
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I agree that the vast majority of primary and secondary schools in the USA are simply terrible. I really think most Americans are fooling themselves into thinking that they have good schools (at least from an academic perspective). 23rd in Mathematics and 31st in science seems better than I would have rated them myself. I don’t think Abagond is exaggerating one bit by saying that the schools in the USA are TERRIBLE.
*******************
1. What is your basis for comparison?
2. Are you an educator?
3. How many different school systems have you seen?
*****************************
The USA doesn’t produce enough skilled people in the Maths, Science and Engineering disciplines. If it were not for foreign students (those who may later form “brain drain” immigrants), I think the USA would be up shit creek. It would not surprise me if most of the “local” achievers were children of brain drain immigrants. Either the USA start educating their students, or expand brain drain immigrant pool or they will eventually sink to the very bottom.
***************
1. How many are enough?
2. How do you know when that point is reached? (Diminishing returns.)
3. At first you were passing yourself off as an education specialist. Now I guess you’re an economist. Which one is it? Or is it neither?
4. For the record, I am MS Chemist, and there are jobs for us NOWHERE. This article is more consonant with my experience.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/us-pushes-for-more-scientists-but-the-jobs-arent-there/2012/07/07/gJQAZJpQUW_story.html
I won the top math award for my county school system in high school, which at that time was the 10 largest school system in the country (with over 10,000 graduating seniors) and went on to compete in the East Coast Mathematics Olympiad. The majority of the participants seem to have Asian or Jewish ethnic backgrounds – saw relatively few Anglo, Hispanic or Black participants.
Still, these super math achievers in the USA would simply just be “normal” students in many overseas countries.
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I have been living in China for years now.
1. The students here can do math, but are otherwise functionally retarded. As in, no practical intelligence whatsoever.
2. A bridge collapse. This happens every day. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/25/world/asia/collapse-of-new-bridge-underscores-chinas-infrastructure-concerns.html
3. This is more subtle: People in China are VERY DISHONEST. There is too much to deal in this post, but the Readers’ Digest version is: That destroys a lot of value. So, it doesn’t matter how many hours people sit in school. If you don’t know what you are buying (and you often don’t in China), then the amount of value that you *could* have gotten is much less. Scientists and engineers be damned. The average person here is still working for peanuts.
****************************************
@abagond, I recognize some of this content. I have tons of fodder for other posts and have drafted some already. I guess I need to share the ones that are 90% done with you.
*******************
Has it ever occurred to any of you that you may be commiting the fallacy of composition? The Asian people who come to the United States are self selected (and therefore likely have higher IQs). But the broad population in their home countries is just not the same thing. Half of India can’t even read, but most of the Indians in the States are physicians/ hotel owners/ engineers.
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@ Disgusted
You got to be kidding. Lets me know you do not know enough mathematics to be an MS Chemist, that you are probably a troll.
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Let’s do this more simply:
1. USA. $45,000. Grow 3%. That is a total of $1,350 added. The new total would be: $46,350
2. China. $7,500. Grow 10%. That is a total of $750 added. The new total would be $8,250.
3. $1,350 is $600 greater than $750.
So, in that way, the US GDP per capita is getting greater than the Chinese GDP per capita by $600 per annum. That’s $1350 of growth is $600 greater than $750 of absolute growth. That’s why is easier to grow faster on a smaller base!
Plain enough?
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@ Disgusted
Wow, you do not even understand compound interest.
Using your figures, in a hundred years it will be:
USA: $864,838
China: $103,354,593
The average Chinese person will be more than a hundred times richer.
Now multiply that by their present populations and you get GDPs of:
USA: $271.8 trillion
China: $139,254.8 trillion
Making the Chinese economy 512 times bigger. Like the present-day difference between the USA and Ethiopia.
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No. No. No.
You can’t extrapolate current growth trends that far in the future.
Witness Japan. Remember when it was thought that they were going to take over the world?
And you see that their growth rates have fallen and never resumed these torrid levels of the 80s?
China is set for the same thing to happen. I’d get into it, but I don’t want you to accuse me of derailing. But it is very unlikely that China will continue at 7.6% per year (regression to the mean).
But I understand compound interest very well (y=ne^kt).
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Sigh…
Have I been away so long? Is this this kind of thing common?
Are you serious?
What you are saying here is why doesn’t a conversational presentation of information sound more like a statistical analysis. The reason should be abundantly clear. It’s called a word count. If Abagond were to support every assertion with primary and contingency statistics on every scenario, his word count would go from 500 to 5000 and NOBODY would care to read it.
This is a nonsense argument.
What you are saying is that if 31 countries in the world were running the 100 meter dash and the US came in 23rd out of the 31 that it might still be OK. Because maybe the US is just a fraction of a second behind all the other counties ahead of it. Or in other words, the differences might not be significant enough to make any distinction beyond the race itself.
That’s a nice theory, but a bad argument. SInce the original post has limited space to make it’s point, it is incumbent upon the reader to bring the PARTICULARS of and objection to into the discussion. So, if you think that the U.S. educational system may only be a few fractions behind the 22 participating countries ranked ahead of it, then you should BRING THAT DATA into the discussion and point out that this is so. Simply surmising that MAYBE this is the case, without even checking to see if your supposition is correct does not advance your argument.
The rest of your points have similar appalling lapses in reasoning, but it would be too long to address each one by one.
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@ Disgusted
At 7.6% and 3% it will still take less than 30 years for Chinese incomes to catch up.
By that point the Chinese economy will be four times bigger. The USA will be the top power in name only, at best.
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@ Disgusted
The brain drain itself is proof enough that American public schools suck big-time. I threw in the rankings more as a heads-up.
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@ Disgusted
Right, but America is not even doing that, not even among its white people despite their supposedly amazing IQs.
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1. It is not a good idea to assume growth rates that far out. I DARE you to find someone that has grown at 7.6% for 30 years. The only countries that have even come close are Taiwan and South Korea. And they weren’t that high.
2. Chinese GDP numbers are known to be fake.
3. There is the issue of how much of Chinese growth is input driven or productivity driven. (Paul Krugman. Myth of Asia’s Miracle.)
4. Brain drain is proof? I am not sure about that. I happen to be in Nanjing right now. Chinese students are paying real money to be trained in English so that they can go to study in the United States. The only students that I see studying from the Western countries here in China are: a. Students who want to study Chinese; b. Students who couldn’t get into medical school in their own countries and so had to come here where there are no standards. What is the overall direction of people. Are there more people from China going to the United States or vice versa? I think you know the answer to that.
5. I’m not sure what you’ve been trained in. (I don’t think it’s history.) But if you do some reading, you will see that China has fooed up in the past. BIG TIME. Since the future is the past and the past is the future, I have no doubt that something in this “unbalanced, uncoordinated, unsustainable” (words of the Chinese Premier) http://singsupplies.com/showthread.php?59973-Wen-Jiabao-China-economy-unstable-unsustainable economy will give before then.
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@Agabond.
Can I get some answers to these questions?
1. How many are enough?
2. How do you know when that point is reached? (Diminishing returns.)
3. At first you were passing yourself off as an education specialist. Now I guess you’re an economist. Which one is it? Or is it neither?
4. For the record, I am MS Chemist, and there are jobs for us NOWHERE. This article is more consonant with my experience.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/us-pushes-for-more-scientists-but-the-jobs-arent-there/2012/07/07/gJQAZJpQUW_story.html
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The school rankings come from here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_Student_Assessment#2009
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You didn’t answer the other questions about diminishing returns. But,with respect to the wikipedia scores here we go:
1. Shanghai is a satellite city. It is emphatically not the whole mainland. Wealthy families from around the whole country send there children here (Jiangsu) in order to go to school. So, you have an atypical sample.
2. Shanghai, China is above three other Chinese provinces/ Special Administrative Regions are both richer (Taiwan, Macau and Hong Kong). So, what does that tell you about the value of these educational scores?
3. Luxembourg is #30 and it is WAAAAAY richer than any Chinese city or the United States. By almost a factor of 2. Luxembourg has something like the highest per capita income in the world. So, what is the point of the educational scores if it doesn’t translate into money?
4. China is notorious for fake data. Is it also quite possible that this data is fake (if it is self reported).
5. UAE is #49 and they are rich. VERY rich. So, again, I know that you really want to generalize the failure of black Americans to get ahead to some failing of the United States. But it might be just what I think it is: The US has a large standard deviation of IQs and the average scores reflect that. Full stop.
I think you messed up. I count NOT ONE single African country in even the top 75. So which is it: Are the scores valid and African countries are never going to go anywhere? Or are the scores not really all that great of a predictor?
You choose.
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@ Disgusted
You are backpedaling from your original argument.
Given its past China could easily sink into civil war if the communists fall from power. But China, within living memory, has gone from famine-prone to “Made in China”. Back in the 1960s “Made in Japan” was a joke. By the 1980s no one was laughing.
China is not perfect but neither is America: it sits on a house of cards made of international debt and fossil fuels.
China has four times more people. That means that all it has to do to pass America economically is to get its people to a FOURTH of American living standards. That can be done OFF THE SHELF. No amazing breakthroughs required.
If the past is the best predictor of the future, then:
GDP according to the World Bank (in current American dollars using current exchange rates):
1980:
USA: $2767.5 billion
China: $189.4 billion
2010:
USA: $14,447.1 billion
China: $4,991.2 billion
So if both countries keep growing at the same average rate over the next 30 years:
2040:
USA: $75,418 billion
China: $131,532 billion
And the exchange rate, if anything, understates the size of the Chinese economy.
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I am not backpedaling.
1. I said that predicting growth over 30 years is a fool’s errand.
2. Japan and China are two VERY DIFFERENT things. China has NOTHING LIKE a sense of quality improvement (and never will). If you pay attention to the strategy of the PRC government, it is low cost/ cheap currency. NOT quality products. (Japan has had a floating currency for decades. All 4 Chinese currencies are pegged to the US dollar in some way or another.)
3. Regression to the mean makes it unlikely that China will keep on at 10% per year. There are already cracks in the surface this year. Patrick Chovanec is also on wordpress and he studies this topic extensively.
4. You keep ducking my other questions. I have asked you MANY questions that you have not answered.
5. China has JUST AS MUCH debt as the US, but the way that is structured is not the same. This is too much to get into here, but I will just give you the brief version: “State owned banks. Overinvestment. Bad loans. Cleaned up with ‘asset management companies.’ Debt still exists, but is technically on the books of the AMC.”
6. China likes petroleum just as much as the USA. If petroleum supplies run out, we all fall down.
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@ Disgusted
Sorry, you cannot use Chinese stats and then call them fake once they no longer make your case. That is backpedaling in my book.
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@ Disgusted
I never said having good schools means economic growth. It is not that simple. Otherwise there would hardly be any Filipinos or Jamaicans in America. And where did I ever say anything about Africa?
My point was that American public schools suck in terms of science and mathematics and that is why there is a brain drain. The schools are not keeping up.
From almost Day One American power has been heavily based on its technological edge. Once India and China get it together the brain drain will dry up. It is as much of a threat to America’s future as a hostile power taking over the Persian Gulf, something America has spent gazillions to prevent.
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Wow. I guess those things that they say about black people being at the lower end of the IQ distribution are true. (Thank God our child will have more Asian blood than anything else. At least it will have something of a chance.) If you noticed, I was making three different cases.
I was doing some other things, but looking back.
1. We talked about Chinese GDP statistics. (Which may be fake.) That was one separate case.
2. We talked about Chinese educational statistics (which may also be fake/ suffer from selection bias). That was another separate case.
3. When I talked about the statistics on the Chinese Asset Management Companies, they came from a book called “Red Capitalism.” They were from both Chinese and Western sources. That was a third case (that was a subset of your talking about the US international debt levels– which is also incorrect, since most US debt is just back and forth between the Treasury and the Federal Reserve).
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@ Disgusted
A word of advice: you are better off sticking to what I write instead of trying to read my mind. People who stereotype me misunderstand me.
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Geez! A self-loathing Black HBD devotee? Ha! WHat is this world coming to?
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Don’t give me these Marxian visions about what brain drain *could* mean. Why not give me a QUANTITATIVE value of what could happen. And let me point out to you what you said:
abagond
Being 23rd in mathematics and 31st in science education is terrible for a country like America. It is extremely bad news. If it continues America has no long-term future as an advanced nation.
So I guess we are going to just fall into the sea.
The nice thing about economies is that they can find *other* things to do that are not foreseeable at present. So was Silicon Valley foreseeable? Would it have been forseeable?
Was the VC industry of israel foreseeable? (Look in the book “Start up Nation”)
There are other things that the US can sell besides technology. (Chinese students are paying good money to study garbage subjects at American universities– like *English* and *Sociology.* And I’m sorry, but English classes in which you sit around speculating about what someone who has been dead for several hundred years are not technologically sophisticated. But they are saleable.)
Bermuda/ Barbados/ Cayman aren’t technological centers, but they are financial centers. They just hold onto other peoples’ money. Why couldn’t the US do something more like that?
Or maybe they could sell oil (there is some of that sitting around). Not too technically difficult (after all, AFricans can do it).
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@ Disgusted
America could do other stuff but it will be on Chinese (or Indian) terms.
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Does that include your mama?
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@ Disgusted
Did that with GDP – using World Bank, not Chinese numbers.
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Well, to be honest: I think I have your number. A product of the American university system.
1.Every difference between some group of people is defined as “institutionalized racism” (or something like that).
2.Every time someone thinks that they have observed something, it is either because they are racist or because they have internalized racism.
3. Everything that is not racism is a “legacy of slavery.”
I’m also going to deduce that you have studied some type of humanity (if anything at all), because people who study Engineering and Serious Things don’t preoccupy themselves with things like this.
In other words, to a hammer, everything is a nail.
(In another forum, I had written a careful post with some quantitative details about black women. But it didn’t get posted. Oh well.)
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[@ SomeGuy]
^I assume that it does. How very interesting… I wonder if he actually believes in HBD or if he just raises it as yet another way to strike back at his own reluctant “blackness”… really a fascinating specimen for a case study!
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abagond
@ Disgusted
That is not the question. How much GDP is that going to cost? Any projections? Confidence estimates of said projections?
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@ Disgusted
And I think I have YOUR number:
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SomeGuy
Wow. I guess those things that they say about black people being at the lower end of the IQ distribution are true.
Does that include your mama?
Afraid so. But since I have found an Asian wife it doesn’t have to include my children. I have a girl from a farm, but honestly I could have picked a girl out of a whorehouse and it would have been better than the average black woman anywhere.
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@ Disgusted
Given that blacks on average LOSE IQ points during high school I think the causation, if anything, is the other way round.
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@ SomeGuy
Thank you.
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abagond
@ Disgusted
America could do other stuff but it will be on Chinese (or Indian) terms
If that’s true, then:
1. Does China now do things on American terms?
2. Does Britain now do things on American terms (that Amerca used to do on British terms)? If so, what?
3. Is it also true for Switzerland and Norway?
4. For that matter, Canada is our neighbor and we buy something like 90% of their exports. Do they do things on our terms? What?
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abagond
@ Disgusted
So, the country causes blacks to be stupid instead of the other way around? The country lowers the average IQ of blacks? Is that what you are asserting?
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@ Abagond
You want to know something; if this guy is really Black (which a part of me doubts), I am less angry at him and more angry at the system that created him. What the f*ck happen to some of us? Growing up in the 70s and 80s, we used to be BEAUTIFUL! Now look at this sh*t.
I despair, sometimes. I really do.
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@ Disgusted
You can use simple HTML in the comments. So you can put block quotes between <blockquote> and </blockquote>
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Thank you for the HTML information. So, anyway…….back to the questions before I have to go to bed:
If that’s true, then:
1. Does China now do things on American terms?
2. Does Britain now do things on American terms (that Amerca used to do on British terms)? If so, what?
3. Is it also true for Switzerland and Norway?
4. For that matter, Canada is our neighbor and we buy something like 90% of their exports. Do they do things on our terms? What?
AND
So, the country causes blacks to be stupid instead of the other way around? The country lowers the average IQ of blacks? Is that what you are asserting?
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So Disgusted, your understanding is that I.Q. is based on race? And Blacks have the dumbest genetics? Asians and Ashkenazi Jews have the smartest genetics? – Yet Asia will not become predominant based on their genetically elevated I.Q.s
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That is a bit much for this board. I don’t want to be accused of derailing.
I contacted a professor. His name is Garrett Jones and his work is public. He tries to write a function to map IQ into national income.
Up until now, the best that had been done was to correlate IQ and income (JP Rushton. Vanhanen. et al). It goes in the direction that you would expect.
The highest IQ of any ethnic group is Ashkenazi Jews. The lowest is Australian Aboriginals.
As far as what lowers Chinese income (what I have directly observed over many years) is CORRUPTION. In general, if Chinese people have the choice between taking 5 steps to trick someone and 2 steps to deliver and honest service, they will take the 5 step path. Laws here are also very unclear and change *ALL THE TIME*. Again, I don’t want to derail, but: if you had a aisle full of cans of fruit priced from $1-$5 and the labels were washed off in a flood, then they would all become worth $1. So, that is what happens to a lot of Chinese economic output. YOU JUST DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE BUYING SO OFTEN that a lot of times you can’t buy it at all. There is also some work that has been done by George Akerlof that talks about how markets will not exist in the face of imperfect/ incomplete information. (That was covered in Tim Harford’s “The Undercover Economist.”) So, a lot of markets for things here that *should* exist DON’T. (Say, for Chinese teachers of English at 120RMB/ hour.)
There are many black countries that have higher income than China. Botswana. RSA. Barbados. Bermuda. Trinidad (I believe). Cayman.
But, ceteris paribus, no black country would ever have a higher income than an Asian one. But then………..ceteris paribus only exists in people’s minds.
I have to say, though, that the Africans make a pretty poor showing when they call on Chinese (as in Nigeria) for help with their oil infrastructure or for their mining projects (as in Zambia) when China doesn’t actually have that much oil here.
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@ Disgusted
This is starting to get off topic, but to answer your question, IQ tests are a very poor measure of intelligence. For example, according to them the average IQ in Jamaica is 71. That is absolutely nuts.
The Economist’s list of IQs by country:
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We then… I’m your daisy…
Why don’t you meet me over here:
and explain your rather puerile conception of genetic destiny?
C’mon let’s go.
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@ Disgusted
Not everything is because of racism or a “legacy of slavery”. You are not going to see me blame out-of-wedlock births on that, for example. Black people are human and fully capable of screwing up things on their own. In fact they can even screw stuff up, like Ethiopia or a church, without it being “because they’re black” – as your comments seem to assume.
I have a degree in computer science. Things like preoccupy me because it affects me. By your own account it affects and concerns you too but you have dealt with it in a different way.
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Abagond
I went to the PISA website.. it stated that the tests are administered every 3 years to participating countries and the age of the students taking the test is 15. Between 4,000 to 10,000 students take the test. Let’s assume that the US is one of the countries that has 10,000 students taking the test.. there were roughly 4 million 15 year olds in the US in 2009. Given that the test is administered every 3 years we would have a sample rate of 1 student out of 1200 taking the PISA test in the US.
Given the low sample rate and your distrust of standardized IQ testing and some of the examples where you have discussed Black IQ and academic performance rising in college, I would suggest that you might want to take the PISA results with a grain of salt.
Also note how much the US spends on K-12 compared to other nations in the OECD:
http://mercatus.org/publication/k-12-spending-student-oecd
The figures above suggest to me it is not a lack of money causing the problems for US students.
I would suggest that the so called brain drain is caused by US corporations wanting to depress wages. College students see the score and go into fields where their jobs will not be threatened by outsourcing or insourcing.
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@abagond
This is on the money. 😛
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The American school systems is too politically correct. They blame the teachers, when in general teachers can’ t even teach most of these kids without interference. (there is just so much a teacher can do. It shouldn’t be their job to do anyone’s homework, be the counsellor, food bank, psychologist etc…) . The most successful countries have something else that America does not have, and that is respect for education and teachers. It’s not just the teacher who has a role, the student should have one too. The teachers spend half of the classroom time having to discipline, and asking the most basic courtesy out of way too many of these students and then some, however no one wants to admit that.
The community/home environment/culture/peers pressure etc.. also plays a role on how well students do.
Asians aren’t label as “acting” White when they do well in school for example, and often finds supports amongst their peers when it comes to education. They are not looking for excuses as to why the school system don’t work (even those born in the US still excel) , or why they don’t teach Asian history blah,blah,blah.
I can go on..
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If the school system was so bad, then all other groups would be failing too.
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To the person who pointed out that Ashkenazi Jews have the highest IQ, I would like to add that we outperform asians at every level, also.
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I never knew this about Asian Americans. I always thought White people accepted them more, and that Asians worshiped Whites.
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Kiwi,
Among the 4 groups above, I think I had a lot of experience with the brain drain, the refugee and the “old school” groups.
In High school, I attended a Taiwanese church to learn Mandarin — the entire congregation was primarily brain drain people. I used to hang out with a lot of the Taiwanese graduate students in the 1980s, and through my involvement in a Filipino cultural ensemble in the 90s and working in hospitals and living in a neighborhood that was 1/3 Filipino, I knew many of the educated Filipinos who came to the USA. I also knew many of the HK people who were trying to get overseas residency as a prelude to the 1997 handover. I got to know a lot of the 1st generation Taiwanese, Hong Kong and Filipino brain drain – many of my friends.
I attended a church in the 1980s which was an eclectic mix of brain drain, refugee and “old school” groups.
I worked part-time in a Chinese-American restaurant which hired primarily refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia. I lived in the house with them for 4 years and not only talked to them, but also went to their weddings and their family get togethers. Their stories are shocking – watching the Khmer rouge slaughtering their families in front of them.
Regarding “old school” – my father’s family members came to the USA during the Exclusion era in the 30s-40s, and can even trace back to an ancestor that first came to the USA in the 1860s-70s. My Filipino-American godmother’s family came by 1930 as her father had joined the US military during the American occupation period and came to the USA during that time. Most of the ABC and Phil-Am I know are children of the old school group.
I think the “old school” did not stop in 1965. Many of those that came 1965-1985 and beyond were not only brain drain and refugees, but also for family reunification resulting from the exclusionary pre-1965 practices. Danny Chen’s family should probably still be classified as “old school” despite the fact that his parents came to the USA after 1965 as they can probably still trace their origin to an ancestor in the 19th century.
Most Asian-American politicians are related to the old school group, esp. those from the West Coast and Hawaii (e.g., Gary Locke). I do personally know John Liu, the former city controller of New York City who ran for Mayor of New York City last year – I think he should fall into brain drain.
What I have less experience with are the American born children of the brain drain group. I met some young ones when I was going to the churches, but many of those Taiwanese post-graduate students in the 1980s got married late 80s – 1990s and had kids. They moved to suburbs that were 25-40% Asian so grew up in neighborhoods and went to schools that were primarily Chinese / Indian / Jewish. I know they have their own experience that I can only read about. I also left the USA in the 1990s, so I cannot meet up with them on a regular basis.
I also have less experience with those involved in the post-80s Hapa movement, but I have interacted with them heavily online. I got to know the one of the persons who formed “Swirl” and “Racialicious”. Most of the Eurasians I personally knew in the USA were war bride children with white fathers. I rarely got to meet the hapa children of brain drain American born children (like Amy Chua’s kids), but I think most of them must be young
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An interesting article on Asians as people of color and Black indigenous people of Asia
http://www.blackgirldangerous.org/2015/02/become-oppressive-ally-asians-anti-blackness-accountability/
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^Thanks.
Yes, it is good to have a discussion on the meanings between “black” and “people of colour”.
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I’m not ashamed to admit anti-blackness is a part of the Asian community. I remember as a little girl, one of my mom’s closest friends, who happened to be black, and she told me to treat people of all races the way I want to be treated. You don’t know how often I had reproach other Asians for using the N-word among themselves. As for online, there was one Asian site (now defunct) I used to go to frequently, and I would get into heated “fights” with idiotic Asians who said disparaging comments about black people.
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“125 years late, Chinese lawyer earns right to practice law in California”
Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article14738441.html#storylink=cpy
“Acknowledging a “sordid chapter” in state history, the California Supreme Court ruled Monday that a Chinese immigrant denied the right to practice law in California 125 years ago because of his race should be licensed posthumously.
The unanimous ruling came in response to a petition filed in 2014 by the Asian Pacific American Law Students Association at UC Davis.”
“Chin called it “particularly poignant that this historic decision comes from what is perhaps the most diverse state Supreme Court in the country, at the request of the UC Davis APALSA future lawyers, many of whom would have been barred under the 1890 decision.
The court is made up of three Asian Americans, two white women, a Latino and a black.”
Comment: I had a white judge cast up to me that the CA supreme court is full of people of color when I was criticizing the institutionalized racism throughout the court system and law. In my understanding, all of the “people of color” on the CA supreme court, except for recent Brown appointments, are tokens.
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“Punjabi Sikh-Mexican American community fading into history”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-faith/punjabi-sikh-mexican-american-community-fading-into-history/2012/08/13/cc6b7b98-e26b-11e1-98e7-89d659f9c106_story.html?postshare=841425385082885
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“All Students Count: Changing the AAPI Narrative”
http://www.asamnews.com/2015/03/19/all-students-count-changing-the-aapi-narrative/
“Many in the education community are talking about the need for disaggregated student data – meaning that instead of simply bubbling in Hispanic or African American on school documents, students will have the option to identify as their unique subgroup – be that Mexican or Nigerian. Such disaggregation has significant implications for how we think of diversity within communities of color, and will help us create better support systems to meet the unique needs of individual ethnic subgroups.
For Asian American & Pacific Islander (AAPI) students, who have long been grouped together under the “Asian American” model minority umbrella, disaggregation is necessary to shed light on the realities faced by so many. With more than 48 ethnicities and over 300 spoken languages, the AAPI community is far from universally privileged (as is often concluded) – we see a vast socioeconomic and academic spectrum as befits a community of our size. When we ignore these differences, however, we paint an incomplete narrative that does many of our students a major disservice.
I am a first-generation Cambodian American…My parents weren’t alone – there were countless other Cambodian families who didn’t have the support systems they needed to deal with the horrors that they had seen and experienced. For many of my peers and I, this often resulted in unspoken challenges at home and in school – including language barriers, a lack of support with school work and constant bullying (from both Asians and non-Asian peers) because we were seen as the “low-class Asians.”
Because of this I struggled in school, but one wouldn’t know this by looking at my data – because on surveys and tests I simply bubbled in “Asian American.” While my teachers saw me receiving poor grades and getting into fights, they also saw that Asian Americans were high-performing in the aggregate. The data said my people were successful and so we were easy to ignore.
Data disaggregation is the game-changer needed to help our AAPI students. Nationally 35-40 percent of Laotian and Cambodian students do not finish high school, and the Hmong and Marshallese communities experience a poverty rate more than twice the national average. These students require tailored services – from counseling to scholarships to mentorship opportunities, and so much more – to grant them exposure and access to the institutions which so many take for granted.
Teach For America supports Congressman Mike Honda’s “All Students Count Act,” which would require State Education Agencies to report more enhanced, segmented data at the K-12 levels for their annual state report cards.”
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Interesting article: http://scroll.in/article/724552/if-asian-americans-saw-white-americans-the-way-white-americans-see-black-americans
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Jefe,
not sure where to put this, so I am putting this here.
the cop in NY Peter Liang has been found guilty for the shooting of Akai Gurley.
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/former-nypd-cop-peter-liang-s-guilty-verdict-leaves-community-n518056
Has it made the news in Hong Kong, mainland China, or anywhere else in Asia?
The Asian community in New York seems surprised and I don’t know why– I knew he was going to be found guilty
because, like Kizzy Adonis, Peter was not going to escape “punishment” because the blue shield is not there for him
Do you think that Asian Americans have finally noticed that they are getting their “n*^ger wake up call” from white America
or are they still sleeping?
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Linda, I know that your question was addressed to jefe, but I’m pretty certain that Asian Americans will not notice, because, after all, they are not “n*^ger”s.
A number of them felt that this cop should have been protected like the white cops in the Garner case! They practice selective amnesia. They forget the treatments meted out to Vincent Chin, Wen Ho Lee and others. You might find these articles of interest:
http://atimes.com/2015/10/racial-profiling-of-chinese-american-scientists-never-ends/
Ethnic identities are resistant to facts, because they are programs for survival.
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Linda,
Thanks for the heads up.
I did not see it covered in the mainstream news in HK. After seeing your note, I did searches for both English and Chinese media and only found one English article (in the South China Morning Post) and one Chinese article (online website). I could not find it in any of the anti-establishment media sites in HK in either language (but I did find one in Taiwan).
This might seem odd as Peter Liang was in fact born in HK and moved to New York as a young child.
To be fair, HK has been recovering from a violent police crackdown over street hawkers last week during the New Year holiday. The conviction of Peter Liang might not register on their radar screens.
The NYPD is a white racist club. Always has been. So not surprised black and Asian police officers will take the fall for them.
What has occurred in the USA is a severe case of amnesia about Asian American history. Even Vincent Chin’s slaying occurred over 30 years ago, which is the ancient past in the white American teflon version of history, the version that young Asian Americans learn.
I really think Asian American studies need to be part of the curriculum, for all Americans really, but especially for young Asian Americans. This event does not have quite the impact of the Vincent Chin case, so I doubt the “wake-up” will be more than ephemeral. Post-80s Asian Americans might not even make the connection.
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GroJo
I see you… but as you and I well know… it doesn’t matter what colour you are, to white America, “if it’s not white, it ain’t right” — that’s why they’re all dazed and confused that Peter Liang got convicted.
I think it’s mainly immigrant Asian Americans, that pat on the head that they got from white America, causes them to miss the smoke signals and messages
this younger generation of Asian Americans seem to be waking up and recognizing the signs for what they are
There is a group called CAAAV Organizing Asian Communites, that is calling Peter Liang to be prosecuted and they also want white policemen to held accountable too:
This group formed in order to represent low-income Asian Americans and refugees in NY City. They see themselves as natural allies with the Black Lives Matter movement and they are taking a lot of sh’t for it.
Here is part of their memo about concerning Peter Liang:
http://caaav.org/caaav-statement-to-asian-and-asian-american-communities-on-the-murder-of-akai-gurley-by-nypd-officer-peter-liang
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Jefe,
What’s sort of pis$ing me off about the whole situation is that, once again, there is now a divide caused by this case.
Somehow the Asian community in NY believes it’s black peoples fault that Peter was found guilty by a jury.
There is a group, Chinese Action Network (CAN) that supports Peter Liang and they are calling the black DA Ken Thompson a “racist” and they want to support a candidate to run against him.
here’s their facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FreePeterLiang
They are taking the playbook straight from white American racists and playing into the same “okie dokie, we’re the better minority” game.
The comments on the facebook are interesting, I wonder how many of them are actually Asian or white nationalist trying to stoke the flames?
NY police department would love to get rid of Ken Thompson, he’s a pain in their a’s because he actually does his job and prosecutes policemen. He did the Abner Louima case
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/kenneth-thompson-conviction-review-unit-brooklyn
So, if Chinese activist believe they can get rid of Kenneth Thompson easily, then they are in for a surprise (I think, not sure how is viewed in general)
instead of recognizing that Peter was scapegoated because the white supremacist institution that he worked for, is f’cked up – they want to focus their energy in the wrong direction.
His white partner would have gotten off scott free but Akai Gurley’s family pushed for him to be fired.
Who does Kizzy Adonis get to blame for her getting fired and prosecuted for Eric Garners death, while the white policemen who killed him are home free and expecting pay raises and their large a’s pensions!
What is it going to take for these sleeping sheep to wake up and realize that once again, they are being used as tools– it’s not about black people– it’s really between Asians and white America
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@Linda,
There must be some people in the white establishment lapping this up. They managed to split the Asian-American community apart on this, as well as been blacks and Asians.
Neat trick.
I really don’t know when enough Asian Americans will finally wake up to realize how they are being used and abused to enforce the racial hierarchical system in the USA.
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