The real secret to Asian American success was not education
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Seems chicken vs. egg to me.
> Hilger found some evidence that there were underlying differences in skill. Between Asians and African Americans with the same amount of schooling, African Americans tended to achieve lower scores on military enlistment tests during the 1940s.
Those claims really start to stick in the 1940s, when the nation was gearing up for global war. American leaders started to worry about the consequences of their domestic racial discrimination policies. They were concerned it would get in the way of forging alliances with other people abroad. That really motivated American leaders and the American people to work on race relations.
During World War II, lawmakers thought that Chinese exclusion made for bad diplomacy. So Congress decided to overturn Chinese exclusion as a goodwill gesture to China, who was America’s Pacific ally.
With the beginning of the Cold War, American policymakers became really attentive to putting their best image out into the world. They were very interested in winning hearts and minds in Asia.
Japan is a very good example. Japan lost the war and the United States took charge of reconstructing Japan in its own image as a rising democratic, capitalist country. And because Japan became such an important ally, that was the moment when Japanese exclusion laws could finally be overturned, which happened in 1952.
Again, people in Congress worried that if we left these laws on the books, it would endanger a billion hearts and minds in the Far East
Discrimination apparently still exists with the disparity in terms of executive positions when comparing equivalent levels of education. There's less competition at the very top where who you know with money likely counts more than technical skill, i.e. paying for CEO's rolodex.
>This dramatic shift had nothing to do with Asians accruing more education.
Here's a thought experiment: It's well known that Asians attend university at a higher proportion than any other group. So if society thinks of Asians as smart and hard working then this stereotype, by definition, would logically extend to individual Asians regardless of their actual education level. With the same level of education this would put an Asian at an advantage over someone who is Black because the later would likely face greater discrimination than the former.
Similarly, more educated people are less likely to commit violent crimes, and so because a large percentage of the Asian population is highly educated then Asians in general, even those with criminal backgrounds or at-risk backgrounds, would benefit from a positive stereotype of the non-violent Asian.
So while there is still discrimination at play it may be that high levels of education in a large proportion of that group could ameleorate negative stereotypes and close the discrimination gap. This is comes back to education and we need to do a much better job with low-income communities who are trapped in both socio-economic a cultural cycle of poverty.
This article is a clear example of why so many dismiss the grey sciences as ideology masquerading as science.
Reading the OP, I'm struck by how little Asian-American suffering was covered in my school history curriculum. I remember Sacco and Vanzetti clearly, but had never heard of the The Chinese Massacre of 1871. Even the internment of Japanese was a relatively small footnote, mollified by the commendable heroic sacrifice of the Nisei 442nd Regiment.
Whenever people complain about blacks or other disenfranchised "loud" groups and point to the shining examples of Asian-American achievement, I can't help but see the power of selection bias and bliss of ignorance. I can't speak for all Asians, but I imagine the narrative that Asians operate under would be much different if the injustice that Asian groups suffered were given more focus. The upshot is that it's pretty nice growing up Asian today, when the suffering and injustice against past Asians is wiped clean.
I'm not advocating that the solution is to whitewash history for the other minority groups to reduce their resentment. I just think that it's wrong to think of Asian success as some kind of conscious collective effort to "just work hard and get along" -- as if Asian elders got together and put a vote to it -- rather than a forced consequence of history.
But I suspect rather, this author is confusing cause with effect and attributing success to a change in attitudes toward Asians rather than successful Asians changing attitudes toward Asians.