This article from the Sociology of Education (2017)
Read the article and use my annotations to answer questions about it. Then see the data source from the article below to look up data on your own.
As you read, look for both generalities and specifics of how to think about racial groups. As you read, please do these two items:
1. Annotate or make a list of generalities that are important to keep in mind when examining ANY racial group. 2. And make a list of insights that you find interesting that apply to specific racial groups.
Additionally, you may find this website helpful. Pamela Oliver, a professor from UW Madison has made a list of terms thatexplainsthe history and nature of racially-based terminology.
Beginning in the 1850s when young single men were recruited as contract laborers from Southern China, Asian immigrants have played a vital role in the development of this country. Working as miners, railroad builders, farmers, factory workers, and fishermen, the Chinese represented 20% of California's labor force by 1870, even though they constituted only .002% of the entire United States population. With the depression of 1876, amidst cries of "They're taking away our jobs!," anti-Chinese legislation and violence raged throughout the West Coast.
1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act—the only United States Iaw to prevent immigration and naturalization on the basis of race—which restricted Chinese immigration for the next sixty years.
In 1907, Japanese immigration was restricted by a "Gentleman's Agreement" between the United States and Japan.
By 1924, with the exception of Filipino "nationals," all Asian immigrants, including Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and Indians were fully excluded by law, denied citizenship and naturalization, and prevented from marrying Caucasians or owning land.
...immigration laws remained discriminatory toward Asians until 1965 when, in response to the civil rights movement, non-restrictive annual quotas of 20,000 immigrants per country were established.
Additionally, remember what we learned about racial formation in the U.S.:
Ozawa v. U.S.
Thind v. U.S.
Japanese internment camps
Korematsu v. U.S.
How did Americans with Asian Heritage Fight for Civil Rights?
All of this means that Asian-American success was severely limited by racism. Structural racism prevented Asian immigrant success in the U.S. and that had to be changed before Asian-Americans could thrive. Asian-Americans did not stay silent in this fight. They had to fight for equality:
Richard Aoki learned from the Black Panther Party.
Yuji Ichioka and Emma Gee created AAPA and changed the pejorative label of "orientals" to Asian-Americans.
Yuri Kochiyama worked so closely with Malcolm X that she held Malcolm X in her arms after his assassination.
Yuri Kochiyama holds the head Malcolm X after his assassination.
And here is Mrs. Kochiyama with the grandson of Malcolm X.
How did Americans with Asian heritage become "model minorities?"
One way that to prevent a larger coalition of Asian-Americans and African-Americans from fighting for civil rights together was to embrace Asian-Americans while resisting African-Americans. Additionally, because of geopolitics like the Vietnam war, the Korean War and the threat of communist China, it made political sense to embrace the Asian-American cause.
...according to a recent study (2016) by Brown University economist Nathaniel Hilger, schooling rates among Asian Americans didn't change all that significantly during those three decades. Instead, Hilger's research suggests that Asian Americans started to earn more because their fellow Americans became less racist toward them. How did that happen? About the same time that Asian Americans were climbing the socioeconomic ladder, they also experienced a major shift in their public image. At the outset of the 20th century, Asian Americans had often been portrayed as threatening, exotic and degenerate. But by the 1950s and 1960s, the idea of the model minority had begun to take root. Newspapers often glorified Asian Americans as industrious, law-abiding citizens who kept their heads down and never complained.
Some people think that racism toward Asians diminished because Asians "proved themselves" through their actions. But that is only a sliver of the truth. Then, as now, the stories of successful Asians were elevated, while the stories of less successful Asians were diminished. As historian Ellen Wu explains in her book, "The Color of Success," the model minority stereotype has a fascinating origin story, one that's tangled up in geopolitics, the Cold War and the civil rights movement.
[Promoting the myth of the Model Asian minority] 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 (excerpted here). 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."
Based on a survey and 140 in-depth interviews of the adult children of Chinese, Vietnamese and Mexican immigrants in Los Angeles -- fellow sociologist Min Zhou and I explain what actually fuels the achievements of some Asian American groups: U.S. immigration law, which favors highly educated, highly skilled immigrant applicants from Asian countries. Based on the most recent available data, we found that these elite groups of immigrants are among the most highly educated people in their countries of origin and are often also more highly educated than the general U.S. population.
Take Chinese immigrants to the United States, for example: In 2010, 51% were college graduates, compared with only 4% of adults in China and only 28% of adults in the United States. The educational backgrounds of immigrant groups such as the Chinese in America -- and other highly educated immigrant groups such as Korean and Indian -- is where the concept of "Asian privilege" comes in. When highly educated immigrant groups settle in the United States, they build what economist George Borjas calls "ethnic capital." This capital includes ethnic institutions -- such as after-school tutoring programs and after-school academies -- which highly educated immigrants have the resources and know-how to recreate for their children. These programs proliferate in Asian neighborhoods in Los Angeles such as Koreatown, Chinatown and Little Saigon. The benefits of these programs also reach working-class immigrants from the same group. Ethnic capital also translates into knowledge. In churches, temples or community centers, immigrant parents circulate invaluable information about which neighborhoods have the best public schools, the importance of advance-placement classes and how to navigate the college admissions process. This information also circulates through ethnic-language newspapers, television and radio, allowing working-class immigrant parents to benefit from the ethnic capital that their middle-class peers create. Our Chinese interviewees described how their non-English speaking parents turned to the Chinese Yellow Pages for information about affordable after-school programs and free college admissions seminars. This, in turn, helps the children whose immigrant parents toil in factories and restaurants attain educational outcomes that defy expectations. The story of Jason, a young Chinese American man we interviewed, is emblematic of how these resources and knowledge can benefit working-class Chinese immigrants. Jason's parents are immigrants who do not speak English and did not graduate from high school. Yet, they were able to use the Chinese Yellow Pages to identify the resources that put Jason on the college track. There, they learned about the best public schools in the Los Angeles area and affordable after-school education programs that would help Jason get good grades and ace the SAT. Jason's supplemental education -- the hidden curriculum behind academic achievement -- paid off when he graduated at the top of his class and was admitted to a top University of California campus. This advantage is not available to other working-class immigrants.
Hyper-selectivity benefits all members of an immigrant group, because these groups are more likely to generate “ethnic capital,” which manifests into ethnic institutions like after-school academies and SAT prep courses that support academic achievement. The courses range in price tags (some are freely available through ethnic churches), so they are often accessible to the children of working-class Chinese and Korean immigrant parents. Hence, the hyper-selectivity of an immigrant group can assuage a child’s poor socioeconomic status (SES) and reduce class differences within an ethnic group. In turn, this produces stronger educational outcomes than would have been predicted based on parental SES alone.
Here are a few results from Lee and Zhou's publications available in JSTOR. They are shorter journal articles that highlight segments of their later published book (mentioned above).
Although on average Asian Americans have a higher median income and higher educational level than all racial groups in the US, they face implicit bias in their own ways. It should be noted that the higher average level of income and education hide the wide disparities within the Asian American community. This post should show that Asian Americans as a model minority is an overgeneralization that hides important realities about implicit biases both in the Asian American community and in other communities.
The Model Minority Myth of "Asian Americans" This 2009 research published in the Annual Review of Sociology explains that many laws, and racial resentments changed in the second half of the 20th century which allowed more opportunities for Asian Americans, but the successes of Asians on average hide wide disparities that still exist.
This article published by Kevin Kumashiro, dean of the School of Education at the University of San Francisco highlights findings that were published in the Journal of Higher Education.
"Research in higher education shows that class and ethnicity shape Asian-Americans’ post-secondary decisions, opportunities and destinations. The model minority stereotype, in fact, begins to break down when we look at the data by ethnicity and class. While Chinese-Americans and Indian-Americans do have high rates of educational attainment, it’s a different story for Southeast Asian-Americans.Southeast Asian-Americans have among the lowest educational attainment in the country (e.g., fewer than 40 percent of Americans over the age of 25 of Laotian, Cambodian or Hmong descent have a high school diploma). Compared to East Asians (Chinese, Korean, Japanese) and South Asians (Indian, Pakistani), Southeast Asians in the U.S. are three to five times more likely to drop out of college. Southeast Asian-American students struggle with high rates of poverty and are often trapped in programs for English learners, which fail to prepare them for college. But this diversity among Asian-Americans is often lost in conversations about the “Asian disadvantage.” As a result, the interests of the most vulnerable Asian-Americans are not represented by anti-affirmative action rhetoric."
And this working paper by Nathanial Hilger writing for the National Bureau for Economic Research shows
"US immigration policy generated positive selection of Asians
both into migration and family formation, that Asians likely experienced similar or worse
prejudice and legal discrimination than blacks living in CA before the 1960s, and that
all of the harshest forms of legal (though not necessarily de facto) discrimination against
non-white minorities in CA disappeared during the period 1943-59."
From the LA Times March 28, 2018 implicit bias affects hiring of Asian Americans:
by Jennifer Lee (@JLeeSoc), a professor of sociology at Columbia University and Karthick Ramakrishnan (@karthickr), a professor of public policy at the UC Riverside.
"In numerous interviews with corporate leaders, we learned that Asian Americans are less likely to be seen as leadership material, and are thus given fewer opportunities to advance and succeed. Part of this is based on stereotype. Asians are often viewed as smart, diligent, focused, quiet and technically competent — traits that make them desirable employees, but not desirable leaders. So strong are these stereotypes that even when Asian workers take creative risks, supervisors may still prefer to promote someone else."
"While many Asian Americans have high educational attainment and work in professional fields, some encounter a glass ceiling that blocks their professional advancement. This often takes the form of perceptions that Asian Americans have poor communication skills or that they are passive and lack leadership potential. Reliance on stereotypes should not continue to pose barriers to advancement in the workplace."
A Russel Sage 2015 publication authored by Jennifer Lee, professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine and Min Zhou, professor of sociology at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and the University of California, Los Angeles.
"While pundits ascribe Asian American success to the assumed superior traits intrinsic to Asian culture, Lee and Zhou show how historical, cultural, and institutional elements work together to confer advantages to specific populations. An insightful counter to notions of culture based on stereotypes, The Asian American Achievement Paradox offers a deft and nuanced understanding of how and why certain immigrant groups succeed.
Asian Americans are often stereotyped as the “model minority.” Their sizeable presence at elite universities and high household incomes have helped construct the narrative of Asian American “exceptionalism.” While many scholars and activists characterize this as a myth, pundits claim that Asian Americans’ educational attainment is the result of unique cultural values. In The Asian American Achievement Paradox, sociologists Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou offer a compelling account of the academic achievement of the children of Asian immigrants. Drawing on in-depth interviews with the adult children of Chinese immigrants and Vietnamese refugees and survey data, Lee and Zhou bridge sociology and social psychology to explain how immigration laws, institutions, and culture interact to foster high achievement among certain Asian American groups."
"More than half of Asian Americans with Type 2 diabetes don’t even know they have it. That compares to one in four Americans with the disease overall who are unaware. Even though the American Diabetes Association changed its screening guidelines for Asian Americans, a large number are still going unscreened....That difference is so significant that two years ago, the American Diabetes Association changed the screening guidelines to recommend Asians are screened for diabetes at a lower body mass index, but that didn’t necessarily result in more screenings, according to Elizabeth Tung, a physician at the University of Chicago. She recently wrapped up a study looking at the disparities in diabetes screening between Asian Americans and other adults.
What we found was that Asian Americans were the only racial and ethnic group that was consistently screened less than other racial and ethnic groups,” Tung says. “We found that overall, Asian Americans had 34 percent lower odds of being screened than whites.”
Educationally, teachers will call home disproportionately for different races of students. This article from the Atlantic highlights research by Hua-Yu Sebastian Cherng, a sociologist and an assistant professor of education at New York University's Steinhardt school.
"Cherng’s statistical analysis found sharp contrasts in how math and English teachers communicate with parents from different racial, ethnic, and immigrant backgrounds, reflecting many existing stereotypes of black, Latino, and Asian American students....Cherng attributed this to the “very implicit, really deep bias” that certain kids “get math” and certain kids don’t...teachers were less likely to contact immigrant Asian parents about academic and behavioral struggles. Only 5 percent of math teachers and 9 percent of English teachers communicated with parents of first- and second-generation Asian students about misbehavior. And less than 5 percent of English teachers contacted parents of first-generation Asian students who rarely do homework, which was 10 points less than the frequency of contact with the parents of their third-generation white counterparts."
**UPDATE**
Just to clarify, Metzel's book is about politics, but it is not an indictment of one political party. It is about (as the title says) the specific politics of racial resentment, that is, using bias against minorities to achieve specific political outcomes. This does not mean an entire political party. It is a specific set of policies that help to explain why Americans who are white have been dying earlier on average for three years in a row: 2015, 2016, 2017. This has not happened in 100 years. And it is almost unheard of in the developed world. Life expectancy should be going up.
If you read the last 2 pages of the reading (18-19), Metzel explicitly states that,
It is not liberal or conservative politics in general, but a specific type of politics:
"It is best to avoid knee-jerk assumptions that more money or health care are automatically good....There are far too many examples of liberal or Democratic initiatives that result in poor health for minority and low-income populations...When politics demands that people resist available health care, amass arsenals, cut funding for schools, or make other decisions that are perilous, this is literally asking people to die for their whiteness."
I argue that the way forward requires a white America that strives to collaborate rather than dominate, with a mind-set of openness and interconnectedness that we have all-too-frequently neglected. This is not to suggest that everyone become a Democrat - far from it. Rather, our nation urgently needs to recognize how systems of inequality we build and sustain aren't benefitting anyone...."
We have been studying race and racism. While we usually think of racism as harming minority groups, Johnathon Metzel's book, Dying of Whiteness, explains how racism also hurts those in the majority. Please answer the questions on the student notes sheet as your classmates enter.
Pgs 2-3
As a sociological study, what methods does Dr. Metzel use? (pg 2 and 6)
What is the paradox that he finds? What are some examples from the reading?
Is Trevor an example of the paradox? Why? Why not?
Pgs 4-5
What was Trevor explicitly and implicitly dying from?
How was Trevor's situation an example of Du Bois' "wages of whiteness"?
What are "white 'ways of life'"?
Pgs 6-9
How does gender play a role?
What are the five trends (evidence) that influence Dr. Metzel's overall claim?
What are the threats to white authority?
A host of conservative political movements brought fringe agendas into mainstream politics
One example of conspiracy theory politics which attempted to use race to raise doubts and fears about President Obama is that if elected in 2012, he would institute Sharia law in the United States and destroy democracy:
Another example is the following book published during the Obama administration which tried to cast President Obama as a Muslim terrorist. From Wikipedia, "throughout the Obama administration, McCarthy promoted views about the Obama administration's advancement of a "Sharia Agenda", arguing that radical Islamists were working with liberals within the United States government to subvert democracy in the West.[15][16][17][18][19] "
And this website details the dogged claims that President Obama was a Muslim who was not born in the United States who was anti-American.
It should be noted that during the 2008 primary election, the Clinton campaign engaged in the same politics of racial resentment when they circulated a photo of Mr. Obama visiting Africa and wearing traditional garb as an attempt to paint him as unAmerican.
Threats to white authority.
There are numerous examples that show the use of racism throughout the Obama administration, including this article from NBC news here.
Ian Haney Lopez is a constitutional law professor from University of California Berkley. His book shows how racism has been used subtly since Richard Nixon and the "Southern Strategy". This subtle racism is sometimes called dog whistles - phrases that only register with some people who are tuned in to hear them. For example, a politician can say, "welfare costs too much taxpayer dollars" and a neutral person would hear simply that paying money to the poor is expensive. But to those who believe that the poor are mostly black, this phrase says that Americans who are black are taking advantage of tax payer dollars.
Michael Tesler shows how, in the years that followed the 2008 election—a presidential election more polarized by racial attitudes than any other in modern times—racial considerations have come increasingly to influence many aspects of political decision making. These range from people’s evaluations of prominent politicians and the parties to issues seemingly unrelated to race like assessments of public policy or objective economic conditions. Some people even displayed more positive feelings toward Obama’s dog, Bo, when they were told he belonged to Ted Kennedy. More broadly, Tesler argues that the rapidly intensifying influence of race in American politics is driving the polarizing partisan divide and the vitriolic atmosphere that has come to characterize American politics.
Dr. Carol Anderson is a history professor from Emory University who has research and published about the reaction of whites to black civil rights gains. She calls the backlash by whites reacting to black gains "white rage" as detailed in her history book at the left. Below is a summary of her claim: "Since 1865 and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, every time African Americans have made advances towards full participation in our democracy, white reaction has fueled a deliberate and relentless rollback of their gains. The end of the Civil War and Reconstruction was greeted with the Black Codes and Jim Crow; the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision was met with the shutting down of public schools throughout the South while taxpayer dollars financed segregated white private schools; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 triggered a coded but powerful response, the so-called Southern Strategy and the War on Drugs that disenfranchised millions of African Americans while propelling presidents Nixon and Reagan into the White House, and then the election of America's first black President, led to the expression of white rage that has been as relentless as it has been brutal. Carefully linking these and other historical flashpoints when social progress for African Americans was countered by deliberate and cleverly crafted opposition, Anderson pulls back the veil that has long covered actions made in the name of protecting democracy, fiscal responsibility, or protection against fraud, rendering visible the long lineage of white rage."
Here is a funny take from comedian Hari Kondabolu about the growing threat to white authority:
Below are some other examples of political fringe messages or conspiracy theories that paint Obama as un-American:
Examples of fringe political campaigns trying to capitalize on racial resentment:
Tea Party Patriot ads that were distinctly anti-Asian featuring fictional Chinese executives speaking Mandarin and boasting about how much land they bought in Missouri.
Local nbc affiliate reported on the story here.
Asian community leaders spoke out about the ads here.
Middle and lower-income people experienced negative effects from white backlash policies.
Welfare backlash tied to white fear of declining status published in the Journal of Social Forces from Rachel Wetts, a Ph.D. student in sociology at UC Berkeley. “This research suggests that when whites fear their status is on the decline, they increase opposition to programs intended to benefit poorer members of all racial groups.” The findings, published in the journal Social Forces, highlight a welfare backlash that swelled around the 2008 Great Recession and election of Barack Obama.
Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton's (Nobel Prize winner) study, Mortality and Morbidity in the 21st Century, explains the decreasing life expectancy among whites available at the Brookings Institution here. "Case and Deaton find that while midlife mortality rates continue to fall among all education classes in most of the rich world, middle-aged non-Hispanic whites in the U.S. with a high school diploma or less have experienced increasing midlife mortality since the late 1990s. This is due to both rises in the number of “deaths of despair”—death by drugs, alcohol and suicide—and to a slowdown in progress against mortality from heart disease and cancer, the two largest killers in middle age."
Pg 10 How does white backlash politics influence whites to vote?
What I found most intriguing in her book was the concept of the "deep story", or a story that shapes the way people feel. It doesn't matter if the story is real or true or not. What matters is that the story is believed to be true so people shape their feelings and actions as if it were real. Dr. Hochschild's ideais explained on NPR's Hidden Brain,
In her new book, Strangers in Their Own Land, sociologist Arlie Hochschild tackles this paradox. She says that while people might vote against their economic needs, they're actually voting to serve their emotional needs.Hochschild says that both conservative and liberals have "deep stories" — about who they are, and what their values are. Deep stories don't need to be completely accurate, but they have to feel true. They're the stories we tell ourselves to capture our hopes, pride, disappointments, fears, and anxieties.
Pg 11-14 What states does Dr. Metzel focus on? What issues in each state?
Dr. Harel Shapira's research from University of Texas Austin highlights the way that gun schools teach gun owners to embrace guns. See a brief clip of his explaining his research here.
In Missouri, policy went even further than Dr. Shapira's research by passing a law allowing permitless carrying of guns, Missouri now joins Idaho, West Virginia and Mississippi as one of four states to adopt “permitless carry” in 2016, bringing the total number of US states to 12. Missouri Democrats strongly opposed the law, calling it a “perfect storm” that would cause fatal shootings—already a more common cause of death in Missouri than car accidents.
Media Matters highlights the many ways that NRA ads try and use fear to influence voters here.
And this story from Quartz about the way NRA ads promote a generalized and vague us vs. them conflict. One ad that drew the most criticism is here.
Pg 15-16 What type of racism is Dr. Metzel most focused on in the reading? Pgs 16-18 Why is "whiteness" important consideration in Dr. Metzel's research?
