The Real Secret to Asian American Success Wasn't Education | Hacker News Reader

The Real Secret to Asian American Success Wasn't Education

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16 pointsDarkContinent31 comments

This is some really dubious logic and it's terrible that this should be considered valid research.

To exclude the fact that some groups work harder, have completely different attitudes towards self preservation, who might have skills passed down from generation to generation, who might actually be more intelligent (contentious, I know, but it could be true).

It's ridiculous.

I grew up with a lot of Asian kids, and enough Black kids, and they were definitely different ethnic groups, in so many ways. It's crazy to think that 'only societies attitudes towards them' made the difference.

I really hate these comments which imply that black (african) people are intellectually inferior. If so, how do you explain the fact that African immigrants and their children have consistently been the most successful group in terms of educational and income achievement?

Just do a little research before insinuating that africans/blacks are less intelligent. Data says otherwise.

[0] http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=2014101... [1] http://atlantablackstar.com/2012/10/06/obama-education-initi... [2] http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2007-03-18/news/070318034...

I'm not implying anything other than it's plausible there may be some variation among ethnic groups in terms of applied intelligence - which is roughly the current scientific consensus.

Just Google the Wikipedia article for 'race and intelligence'. It's quite clear there is still a lot of ambiguity.

FYI - I believe cultural issues are the primary driver - in which case, your articles would support that thesis: Africans from African perform very differently on so many measures than African Americans, which might lead one to conclude that the issues is not 'racism' (I'm assuming Black people from Africa would face the same kind of racism as African Americans, rather culture/ethnicity.

I don't think you can exclude 'racism' as the main or contributing factor in the achievement gap. African immigrants grow up believing that they are just as intelligent as the rest of the world and are free from the constant insinuation of intellectual inferiority fired at them from the media and other ethnic groups on a daily basis as African Americans are. I could be wrong but I believe this plays a major role.

I don't mean to take it out on you but it suddens me to read such hurtful comments on HN on a constant basis whenever the topic of race comes up, and I finally had to say something. Unfortunately you happened to be on the receiving end of it, and I apologize for it.

Aren't you committing an error in attributing the achievements of a select group (African immigrants/descendants, mostly Nigerian, living in Western countries) to a broader category (all black people)? This is just a step above saying: "Neil DeGrasse Tyson is intelligent, therefore Black Americans are intelligent".

Does it not stand to reason that the immigrants from Nigeria who come here are likely to be more talented and ambitious than the average Nigerian? Nigeria has over 200 million people, is it any surprise that a selection of their best would produce offspring who are on average more intelligent and successful than the wider swathe of American-born blacks?

I don't have a dog in this fight or a particular strong opinion either way, but your cherry-picked anecdotes fly in the face of statistical distributions that hold much more weight.

Pretty much all the articles I linked above address the same argument you are raising, they have data that says otherwise.

Also interesting that I have yet to encounter the same argument when comparing the achievements of African Americans and Asians. I have honestly never heard of anyone saying that there are 1.4 billion Chinese and roughly the same number of Indians, so it could be argued that those who come here are more talented and ambitious than the average Chinese or Indian, so it would be unfair to compare that group and African Americans.

Yes - I agree. Africans are brought up in an environment where all their leaders, great figures - are black, like them - which leads them to have a different (better?) self-identity.

So when they come to America - they succeed, whereas African Americans might have some systematic self-esteem issues.

But this doesn't help your case - just the opposite: it shows that culture is a driving factor - not racism. Again - we are assuming that both African Americans and African-Africans face the 'same amount of racism' and yet one group succeeds because of their cultural values.

I don't doubt that racism holds people back - but I don't think it's the primary driver. Your example illustrates this quite well.

Here is an even more extensive study on the academic achievements of African immigrants and their descendants in the U.S. and U.K. [0]

If anything, the research demonstrates that the Igbo from Nigeria are exceptionally successful - more high achieving than Chinese and Indians:

"Africans speaking Luganda and Krio did better than the Chinese students in 2011. The igbo were even more impressive given their much bigger numbers (and their consistently high performance over the years, gaining a 100 percent pass rate in 2009!). The superior Igbo achievement on GCSEs is not new and has been noted in studies that came before the recent media discovery of African performance. A 2007 report on “case study” model schools in Lambeth also included a rare disclosure of specified Igbo performance (recorded as Ibo in the table below) and it confirms that Igbos have been performing exceptionally well for a long time (5 + A*-C GCSEs); in fact, it is difficult to find a time when they ever performed below British whites."

[0] http://www.unz.com/article/the-iq-gap-is-no-longer-a-black-a...

What you are doing is proving that there is a strong difference in behaviour among ethnic groups and that racism doesn't really account for (assuming 'Black people' face the same degree of racism wherever they are from).

Your articles say nothing about the possibility of variance in intelligence among different groups.

I don't know. I have personally been told by good meaning friends that 'but you are different from African Americans' by other ethnic groups when I was in Engineering grad school.

Also on your point regarding variance in intelligence among ethnic groups, African Americans mainly came from west Africa, and according to the article I linked above, west African immigrants in the US and UK are the highest achievers, so genes don't seem to be the issue.

So, what is left, culture? If so, the culture of the African American people is molded by racism, both personal and institutional racism.

All I am asking of you really is to not lightly dismiss racism as a contributing, if not the main factor in the achievement gap. It would be easy for me to say that if I can go to school and do well, why can't they do it too? But even though I grew up in a poor, war torn African country, fortunately I was never told on a daily basis that I was inferior because I happened to be black. And I am enormously thankful for that.

> But the greatest thing that ever happened to them wasn't that they studied hard, or that they benefited from tiger moms or Confucian values. It's that other Americans started treating them with a little more respect.

It seems strange to ignore the possibility that one led to the other.

Had the same idea while reading this post. It tries to prove that "all myths are rooted in truth", is wrong because asian american succeded, not because they worked better, but because they benefitted from better popularity.

My interpretation is : asian worked harder (as a group) it was noticed and it improved their reputation. Thanks to this, they got better wages.

Instead, his research suggests that society simply became less racist toward Asians.

I think some more interesting questions are why that happened, and why the same didn't happen with blacks.

US law.

US law doesn't happen on itself though.

Law itself has very little power without change in social norm. Look into Foucault's modern philosophy of power.

The menacing culture of anger, retaliation, violence, crime and drug abuse which appears so frequently in rap music could have something to do with that.

The degree to which those things are exalted and praised is an indicator - and part of a closed circuit - of the negative cycle of poverty in a depressed demographic.

There's a much different history there. A culture was erected around black slavery. The country was divided politically by black slavery and then split in half by war over it. It hasn't been very long since all that happened. Black people haven't forgotten. White people haven't forgotten.

There certainly does appear to be a white supremacist fixation on black people. I was thinking the other day how odd it is that "white supremacists" (in America ) seem to spend a majority of their time talking about blacks when Asians are on average performing better in every metric. Life expectancy, earnings, education. I thought white supremacists would see Asian American success as a threat to their ideology (that whites are genetically superior and should be performing better than all races).

I only asked this question once on a YouTube race thread to self proclaimed white supremacists, and the response I got was that Asians don't commit crime or cause trouble so it's alright if they're performing better.

Which makes me believe a more accurate term for most white supremacists (in America at least) would be "anti-black".

Interesting response.

Really interesting given that white supremacists also tend to be anti-semitic, and most of the same tropes about Asians also apply to the Jewish community: Focus on education, low rates of crime, etc.

Maybe that's just a factor of how modern white supremacy came to be, though (i.e. Nazis).

So was it that

> Journalists were praising Asians for being hard workers who kept their heads down, cherished education and didn’t complain

? Or maybe it was just that

> Asians [were] being hard workers who kept their heads down, cherished education and didn’t complain.

I'll go further than another top-level comment and say that embracing the first sentence unironically is being intentionally obtuse, given that one literally has to write the second sentence to get there.

But it's the unsurprising consequence of a worldview that "hard work never gets anyone anywhere". Note that you don't have to reject the idea of privilege entirely in order to acknowledge that hard work is also a path to success; and this article goes to show that hard work and success is also a path to privilege, not [just] the other way around.

The Irish and Italians used to be considered non-white. I wonder if one day society will consider Asians as "white".

I predict that it will.

I argue that they already are seen as such. So called white supremacists (emphasis on supremacist) in America spend a curiously small amount of time talking about how Asians are outperforming them on average, which sounds to me antithetical to their ideology (that whites are superior). If they really believed in white supremacy they would spend more energy on Asians than black people.

Disproportionately successful minorities such as East Asian and Indian immigrants are considered functionally white for propaganda purposes, as their success in modern institutions is significant evidence that these institutions are not discriminating based on anything other than ability.

I'd like to see a similar look at how and why attitudes changed towards Italian-americans, Irish-americans, and Jews. These groups were all discriminated against and considered undesirable by the majority for a long time, and now are mostly accepted.

I have suggested in jest before that what determines whether or not a minority will gain acceptance in the US is their food. Americans like Asian, Italian, and Jewish food, and Irish drinking culture, so ethnic restaurants from those groups became popular, and acceptance of the people behind the food followed. We like Mexican food, and Hispanics seem on track for mainstream acceptance.

Black food is too similar to general Southern food for the mainstream to see it as a separate cuisine, so acceptance has been harder for blacks.

I suspect that the "them and us" mentality of our inner chimp is binary not n-ary so if society is really anti-black our minds cannot easily handle also being anti-"something else". So Asians simply became "honouray white" in order to make room for racism elsewhere.

It's something similar to the waves of immigrants hitting Londons docklands for generations - each wave suffers then moves outwards to the suburbs and the newest wave becomes the focus of ire.

Just a thought - depressingly maybe we always need a "them"

It was their family unit.

what a load of racist bullshit. So a $8,000 difference in wages in young men is proof that Asians got to where they are today because white people allowed them to?

so other people's respect will put money in my pocket? Damn why did I bother going to college?

Whole lot of 'race realism' in this thread even for hacker news.

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