When I've seen it done that way it's usually as a way to try and show that some White European groups do better than some Asian groups and therefore in those people's minds it makes the model minority a myth. Ofcourse that's misunderstanding averages as you rightly point out.
I've seen breakdowns by specific ancestry used to counter some "race realism" that is itself misguided, with no "race realist" way to explain, for example, why Hmong immigrants tend to be poor while Nigerian immigrants tend to be successful.
An average is just an average, and shouldn't be a scandal. But as long as someone, somewhere, is trying to make more of the average than an average, there'll be those pushing back against the myth that the average means more than an average.
My state passed a law a few years ago calling for a whole slate of educational outcomes to be broken out by ethnicity/country of origin, in part with this goal in mind.
The original version called for any group with 1000 or more members to be included, but that was scrapped in part after more people realized we don’t really need to dive back into the old German vs. Norwegian vs. Swedish vs. Finn vs… etc. analysis.
The new version sets specific numbers of categories to create for the largest populations within Asian, American Indian, etc.
The biggest set of categories is for Asian, where we’re doing seven. This naturally provoked hostile reaction from some members of the Chinese community, who see this as a way to carve them out of hypothetical affirmative action or similar programs in favor of Hmong, Karen, etc. (Interestingly, the Karen population was the only one named specifically in the law).
I bet it’s Minnesota based on the ethnic groups named. Minnesota has the largest population of Hmong and Karen in the country, as well as the Scandinavians and Germans everyone knows about.
Excellent piece. If people could just grasp the idea that what's true of groups on average is not necessarily true of specific individuals but *both* remain true - without their pearl clutching pavolvian moral reflexes kicking in - we'd be in a much better place.
It seems like so much social-critical writing is predicated on deliberately sloppy thinking, I suppose in the service of generating content (a word I hate) that will draw clicks. It is tremendously discouraging.
Just wanted to say that I wonder about this as well. Many woke people also subscribe to therapy and self-help (fyi, I also think therapy is good and important), but much that is recommended in therapy is not reflected in woke thinking. Woke thinking is black and white, often, and a therapist would advise you to not do that. Woke thinking blames peoples souls and inherent being (white supremacy) but a therapist would ask you to focus on actions rather than someone's character as a way to resolve conflict. Etc. It makes no sense.
Yes, I agree that social justice thinking relies on a crude and often reductive essentialism. It is a way to be lazy in one's analysis. But I also think that this habit of thought is not unique to the social justice set, but is rather a feature of our broader culture. Perhaps it is a side effect of mass culture's relentless division of everything unto categories and genres that we choose among to construct our identifies; and then this tendency is reproduced in our social relations, and in our thinking about them. Anyway, I see the same essentialism in the punditry of conservatives. If anything, it is even more perncious there.
I’m also generally a supporter of therapy and have benefited from it myself, but I’m wondering if therapy itself is changing these days. I feel like I see more and more people around me coming out of therapy with *more* black and white thinking, especially as it relates to identity. Honestly it sometimes reminds me uncomfortably of recovered-memories stuff - people who were struggling a bit but fundamentally healthy suddenly can’t stop talking about events that they learned in therapy *must* have traumatized them, or the inherent trauma that comes with their identity markers (some of which they didn’t really build into their public identity before they started therapy).
My therapist fifteen years ago focused on actions rather than character; people around me describe going to their therapist to cope with the basic trauma of living in a world full of apocalyptic evil, and their therapists seem to be wholeheartedly supporting them in the belief that the apocalyptic evil surrounding them is the cause of their distress.
I know there are absolutely still great therapists out there, and I may be mistaking correlation for causation here. But it is true that a majority of the people in my life are now in therapy who previously weren’t, that therapy-speak is a woke-progressive hallmark, and that most of these folks seem to be seeing woke-progressive therapists.
I do have friends that completely believe we are living in apocalyptic times and are hysterical and self-involved about it, and they are in therapy. I often wonder why their therapist isn't shutting that down.
I want to answer this fully. There’s a sort of prevailing pessimism I’m getting at when I refer to the sense of “apocalyptic evil” from - in my life - young, middle-class, largely white, liberal professionals. The nuclear threat is one small part of it (or was, before current events got more... current). But it’s bigger than that - the looming shadow of apocalypse is climate change, it’s racism, it’s transphobia, it’s capitalism, it’s fascism, it’s school shootings, it’s police murdering people, it’s Nazis walking the streets, it’s prisons, it’s the world order collapsing, it’s endless jokes about living in the “darkest timeline,” it’s a sense that literally every aspect of society exists to oppress and traumatize good people. Unfortunately, to my view, for people steeped in this who go to therapists who are also steeped in it, or who pick up therapy speak from Internet personalities who are steeped in it, “trauma” becomes a signifier that one is a good person -- because only good people are traumatized by evil.
it’s very hard to describe this phenomenon without sounding like an asshole, because of course I think everything I listed there is very bad, and I wouldn’t say it’s unreasonable for anyone to feel some level of anger or sadness about any of it!
But I feel concerned when a line about the fundamental horridness of society, that I know because I was there only became the liberal party line after 2015, becomes retroactive justification for every bad feeling any good person has ever felt, and ongoing justification for every bad feeling any good person will ever have. Therapy can be a fantastic tool for helping you see your life and the things that happened to you from another perspective, to understand and therefore to live with your past and your emotions. I’m leery of an approach that seems to be wholly rewriting the past, to layer the politics of the present over everything that’s ever happened to someone, and whose only conclusion is ever “you hurt because you are good and others are bad, and the work of dealing with their badness hurts you.”
I see this so much in my peers that I’ve started to feel like a sociopath for not being concerned-to-the-point-of-non-functioning due to world events.
I’m in a writing community where people were comforting each other and saying it’s okay not to make progress because of the war in Ukraine (not people who have friends or relatives there, just the fact that it is happening).
Obviously war is awful, but like…there’s always war somewhere.
There is an element of this in our current social order, definitely. Thomas Sowell calls it "Standing on the side of angels against the forces of evil" and calls out the many ways that this virtue signaling is used by intellectuals and media to convince others they are the "good people." Since our learned class greatly influences national culture, these posturing tendencies spread and you could argue metastasize.
Steven Pinker's "Enlightenment Now" lays out metric after metric that shows that the human race is actually improving in many ways but that we are addicted to seeing everything as worse than ever (which gives us a chance to stand on the side of the angels in reaction to all of the bad things). He references what he calls the Availability Heuristic which ascribes importance to things based on how much we have been exposed to them. Think of the negative, click-baity universe that the internet has become because of the way modern media is funded and also the anonymity of social media which allows small, but amplified mobs to attack and destroy people asserting the "wrong" narrative. This article discusses it in depth: https://medium.com/make-better-decisions/unhappiness-and-availability-heuristic-657060d3655a
Also, nukes have been around for 80 years. Are we supposed to stop living, having hope and joy, reproducing, having relationships, trying for a better future, and living with grace because nukes exist?
I think there is also some psycho-analytic work to be done about why we have such a hard on for the apocalypse. Like a death wish. You could time travel to the year 800 and people would have good arguments why the apocalypse was impending.
Hard on for the apocalypse - nice! Yes, nihilism is definitely ascendant at present. Where previous generations have rolled up their sleeves and got busy solving things (or at least enduring them), this generation is like "What? It's not already all solved? Waaaah!"
And we are to blame. We inculcated this attitude into our children. We taught them to expect and accept nothing less than utopia. But we don't teach them grit or resilience or patience or fortitude or even true problem solving, etc. Everything is ease and comfort and send your pennies to corporate America and we'll solve all of your problems for you - Idiocracy.
The ruggedness of the individuals that built this country is amazing (I don't wish to get into the land grab and treatment of natives and that whole thing. I'm not saying it doesn't matter just that it's not germane to the point I am making). But the character it took to strike out into the wilderness without the technology we have now and carve out something new was astounding. That took tenacity, grit, vision.
Is it any wonder that these impatient idealists with such a myopic view of life fell for woke ideology? It appears to provide a pat answer to all of life's worst ills. Except that it's a power and money grift that will solve nothing and most likely make things much, much worse.
We need some degree of challenge or adversity to bring out the best in us. Sports are a good stand in for building character. Competition in other arenas as well - business, academics, etc. It does our children no good to be handed the world on a platter. And I think that's what the Baby Boomers and Gen-X tried to do.
It might not be the whole nutshell but it's at least a kernel of the current zeitgeist.
Therapy is definitely not as unanimous and rigorous as we'd like it to be as a practice. Not only is it suffering ideologically and economically but also a lot of people are becoming extremely well versed in therapeutic language but getting all their guidance from hacks on TikTok
I have been concerned about the creep of this ideology into therapeutic spaces as well. I just watched this video which specifically addresses this issue: Critical Social Justice in American Institutions: A Challenge to Liberal Values https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3pKZ-FTe4g
I am concerned because as an Adult Survivor, shaming was one of the techniques used to silence and cow me. I think its use in therapy has the ability to destroy the self concept of someone with very low self esteem and is very dangerous as a result. You could actually push someone toward suicide or self-harm by shaming them for being white when their guard is down and they are emotionally vulnerable during therapy.
Very, very bad idea to allow therapists to use race essentialism and the immutable characteristics of patients as methods of "correcting" their patients’ world views. At that point, it's no longer therapy and borders on indoctrination. The fact that American therapeutic institutions are allowing and even encouraging this practice is very concerning. And, if it is allowed to continue, the fallout discussed in the video, of therapists no longer being trusted and people refusing to utilize therapy thereby destroying the industry is a distinct possibility.
"people around me describe going to their therapist to cope with the basic trauma of living in a world full of apocalyptic evil, and their therapists seem to be wholeheartedly supporting them in the belief that the apocalyptic evil surrounding them is the cause of their distress."
I agree this is a real problem.
It's like a... fragilization of our entire culture. I was thinking about this recently when I was watching a TV series with my family and was incredibly annoyed with the main character, almost to the extent I couldn't watch it. I had to ask myself, what was bothering me so much?
I realized it was because in response to every scary or distressing thing that happened on the show (and it's a drama, so there were a lot of things) she became almost feral in her terror, with whining and whimpering and loud breathing, such as I never imagined a person capable of (outside of perhaps a war zone?). But this character was celebrated for being traumatized -- and it wasn't a particularly traumatic backstory (no more so than any of us unfortunate humans who have been traumatized by various things) -- and I think that was the most annoying part. This adoration, maybe even fetishization, of the weak, traumatized main character, who fell apart every few minutes. It made her some kind of hero? It just rubbed me the wrong way.
Similarly, people's attitude toward the pandemic seemed to be that the universe owes them a pleasant easy time, and they're angry, deprived, traumatized, damaged if they don't get that. The pre-vaccine pandemic was not pleasant or easy. It was really hard, especially for kids, but I also recognize that living through hard times with resilience and grace, the best you can, is not the earth-shattering experience that was at times portrayed. Kids missed out on regular social experiences, celebrations, family and friends and school, some education, and they won't get that time back. But they also got something out of living through a difficult experience and doing OK -- in overcoming adversity, which all of us have to do sooner or later.
tl;dr People today seem sometimes to be encouraged to focus on (wallow in?) their trauma and weakness instead of focusing on their successes in overcoming it, and this cultural trend is probably indeed reinforced by therapists who highlight trauma and damage instead of coping and overcoming.
I agree. What happened to coping and overcoming? Why isn't resilience more prized in our society? And why does everyone expect Disneyland all the time? Good questions.
Content farms have found ragebait (deliberately stupid, frustrating videos) is more effective than typical clickbait. People see something dumb and share it with their friends going "look at this stupidity!" But clicks are clicks: sites don't care whether you're hate-reading or whether you love their content.
I'm curious how often this happens with politics too. Obviously there's true believers, and there's also people who want to do good but suck at critical thinking and so get drawn in. But is some of its popularity on certain sites just click-based?
"If the idea is that we should pay a lot less attention to demographic identity because these groupings always distort who we are as individuals, I say, yeah!"
Very few people out there in The Discourse know how to talk about Asians intelligently because their prevailing dogma & racial hierarchy instinctively recoils at nuance, and nuance is the only way to understand the Asian experience. I came to the US when my country of birth was still under rule by a military junta. My parents grew up with food insecurity. My father has a masters degree and is a top 10-15% earner. I am not white and that had an impact on me growing up. I am also, in my current circumstances, very privileged.
All these things are true at once, and the current rigidity in liberal thinking, which desperately wants me to be just one thing, fails over and over again to find language that can talk about me in a way that isn't inaccurate, insulting, patronizing, or stupid. That is why you see phrases like "white adjacent" - in the effort to coin a phrase this dumb you can see they're trying to acknowledge that there's some level of ambiguity and confusion in how to characterize me, but it just collapses into itself and just calls me "white." Which I am not. Idiotic.
Is it fair to place all of the blame for this on so-called liberals? I see it as an attempt to rebut the arguments of people who use the relative success of Asians as a basis for undermining the claims of visible minorities who (as groups) have done worse.
The argument is common - "The Asian community came here with nothing and look how well they've done, obviously racism is a myth". It's a stupid argument and while the primary response is to get into the different experiences of different groups (e.g. anti-Black racism is far more pervasive and pernicious than anti-Asian racism) I think another one is to say "Actually, not all Asians have done well".
It isn't particularly effective, and your and Freddie's basic point about seeing people as individuals is right, but I'm not sure we can lay this as the feet of liberals looking to make sure all minorities are seen as suffering.
If success makes you white, doesn't that discourage success? Or if it's possible to turn white then isn't race irrelevant?
As you say, using the term "white supremacy" or defining racism as something that only flows from whites outward makes the logic fall apart. This is also a problem with the phrase "white privilege." This does describe a real thing but is a poor name for it. White privilege is not really something that whites have, but it describes the absence of certain disadvantages. Asians face different kinds of discrimination than blacks who face different kinds of discrimination than Latinos. It's true that whites don't face any of those particular disadvantages, but despite that they still can find themselves in circumstances that aren't particularly privileged. It's strange and backwards to describe different and distinct minority disadvantages by framing the lack of them as a tangible thing that white people have. It also suggests that white people ought not to have the "privilege" of not being subject to disadvantage and discrimination, when actually we should be striving to remove the disadvantages from those who suffer from them. It frames things like we need to drag whites down rather than pulling others up.
"It frames things like we need to drag whites down rather than pulling others up."
Yes! That's what bothers me about the "white privilege" concept. It's grotesque to say that white people not having to worry (too much) about police officers shooting and killing them is a "privilege." Leaving aside the fact that unarmed white people have, on occasion, been killed by police officers, not being killed by a police officer is a g-damn right, not a "privilege."
A lot of dumb new rules (like “racism can only be done by white people”) are attempts to disqualify inconvenient arguments that liberals have no good rebuttals to, and this seems like another one. “Racism is a myth” is not the actual conclusion. Of course racism exists but the implication of average Asian success is that it is not the ultimate determining factor of outcomes. One factor is the education/ambition level of immigrants, but others could be things like cultural emphasis on academics or intact family structures which are conversations liberals don’t want to have, so instead they try to short circuit it by criticizing the model minority concept. Then we get bogged down in the circular logic Freddie describes here and liberals are saved from exploring any potential solutions they dislike.
I don't even really understand why people don't want to have that conversation. "There are cultural patterns that contribute to success and they are attainable to you right now" is a much more positive and humanistic message than either the "race realist" explanation (Asians r smart, blacks r dumb) OR the woke explanation (you might think anyone could adopt these cultural patterns, but the omnipresent force of "white supremacy" prevents it, and white supremacy will never be defeated --
I don't even think that view requires you to be blind to the history of racism in America. Indeed, the strong form of the theory would be that black culture has been harmed and handicapped precisely because of that history. I can't remember if it was Freddie or Jesse Singal who pointed out recently that it's bananas for liberals to not want to measure performance gaps anymore, because those gaps are exactly what you would expect if the liberal narrative is TRUE. Well... why wouldn't the same thing be true of culture?
(Aside: one of the many ways that Bill Cosby turned out to be a profound moral failure is that he was the most prominent black figure who would say stuff about culture and behavior -- and then he turned out to be a monster. I really think it's possible that fact alone has contributed to a certain amount of nihilism and cynicism about those arguments.)
I believe it was Thomas Sowell who pointed out that a lot of what white people think of as dysfunction in the Black community was in fact inherited (culturally) from the white Borderer culture in the American South. How ironic!
Why, indeed, would they not want to have that conversation? It's almost as certain interests are more interested in exploiting grievances for political advantage than they are in actually helping people succeed. But that couldn't be it. Oh well, if we keep thinking I'm sure we can figure it out.
I think the reason for this is simple. The woke left is obsessed with blame. If there’s a problem, it can never just be caused by something: the causal explanation is insufficient and is branded as “blaming the victim.” I can’t think of a single notion that’s been more destructive to the left — it’s deeply obstructive to progress. In short, cause must yield to blame. That obviates the more pragmatic discourse of, “if you do A the result will likely be B — it worked for that other group there.”
I think they are wrong about the liberal explanation. African immigrants to America do fine, generally around the typical American level of higher. This is not controversial as a fact. If anti-black racism "explains" the situation of blacks in aggregate, how come it doesn't explain immigrant Africans? Well, it can't. Instead it is something that is not explained, but either ignored or explained away.
Thomas Sowell has written about this at length.
I'm not by the way denying that discrimination exists. But the existence of discrimination does not show it causes any specific effect. Everyone in academic knows that blacks are heavily recruited in schools as students and as hires, but they aren't particularly successful there.
I heard of a people who went through 2000 years of persecution and the greatest genocide in history and did OK. Interestingly, that group is hardly ever mentioned by the intersectional left. I’m not sure why, though I have a theory. But it is odd, as you would think people who are all about oppression would be so at least somewhat proportionally to the degree of oppression. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I thought about mentioning the rightwing side of this up top but didn't for the sake of length. Yes, of course rightwing talking points about Asians poisoned the well. One of the most cursed things about this topic is that there are no ways to make factual statements about Asian success without liberals fretting and panicking that an unspoken "and therefore..." aimed at black people is coming up right behind it that is racist and accusatory.
But all this handwringing and obfuscation actually does the opposite of what's desired: it treats Asians as a problematic concept people would rather avoid writing or thinking about, not as real people, such that even when liberals are writing about the recent Asian attacks, the authors make their own guilt & neurosis around this topic the main axis of every story. And it's been deeply disheartening and frustrating to watch.
This is exactly why many Asians don’t like the label even while acknowledging the validity of the label to some extent. We’re more than just political pawns.
Yes, it IS fair to blame current Democrats (who dishonestly call themselves liberals? or redefine that word.)
Most Asian individuals choose to avoid committing crimes, and avoid getting pregnant (or impregnating) a partner before marriage, and are willing to keep a job for at least a year, and graduate from high school.
Every Single Group that has done these 4 things "does well". (When the majority of individuals do it, the group "does" it.)
The "suffering" is real - because so many sufferers are victims of their parents' choices to irresponsibly fail at one or more of the above 4 steps.
I think that saying “white adjacent” is an attempt to acknowledge ambiguity is overly charitable. It feels more like an attempt to punish us by making other minorities (and their own social theories) look bad with our success. But it turned out that stirring resentment by calling us white adjacent seemed to just rationalize more hate crimes against us so they had to quickly back off and act like they are on our side, while trying to ignore who is doing the majority of the anti Asian hate crimes.
I'm also seeing "white adjacent" starting to be used to describe conservative Latinos who voted for Trump. It's like when Nikole Hannah-Jones tweeted about being "politically black" vs "racially black" -- people of color have to act and think a certain way and, if they don't, they're "white adjacent" which is a not-too-subtle put-down.
What parents? The offenders were pretty much thugs. Berkeley High School has a serious gang problem. She started hanging with the Asians. She's a little Japanese, too. Beautiful.
Right, and Amiri Baraka called Condi Rice a “skeeza,” and not just because it rhymes with Condoleezza. This is the ugliest side of identity politics. See also Linda Sarsour saying [certain people] “don’t deserve to be women — I would take their vaginas away.” Bad juju.
This is such a great post. Over the weekend, I started reading Thomas Chatterton William’s book, Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race, which makes similar arguments. He’s a mixed American living in France with a French wife and mixed kids, and the experience caused him to change his thinking on race. He now believes we should be working to move past race:
“a flawed paradigm cannot be re-imagined and shifted in the future simply because we are dealing with its practical consequences as they exist today… It is a mistake to reify something that is as demonstrably harmful as it is fictitious.”
It’s a good book, and you all would like it.
[Back to Freddie] “the more you tell people that they’re not a part of your tribe the more you ensure that they will mistreat you.”
This is a huge problem in social justice politics. There’s an expectation that white people must become hyper-conscious of being white, without any negative consequences like… being racist. But it’s delusional to think you can persuade all white people to adopt the Robin DiAngelo view that they should atone for existing. Some whites respond to woke politics by deciding “actually, white people are oppressed” and fighting for white rights. Which is not a great outcome.
The “white adjacent” thing strikes me as a power struggle between people of color in the social justice movement. Just like changing the acronym to BIPOC to make sure Asians and Latinos know they come second in the movement. It’s backfiring – Asians are starting to vote Republican in response to some of the efforts to prioritize other groups over them, especially efforts to reduce the Asian populations in elite schools. They’re inadvertently creating a coalition of white and Asian people who are sick of this shit.
I've always read that it's "Black, Indigenous, and People of Color" and that the idea is to "center" Black and indigenous people. From my reading, Asians are included but they're part of the "POC" -- not centered.
Then who or what decides which groups should be prioritized and which should not be?
I'm assuming here that centered can be readily replaced with the word prioritized. One of my pet peeves is coming up with new terms when there are plenty of good ones already existing...for no other reason than it signals you're on the same team or something. Sorry for that tangent, it's just exasperating.
It's interesting that Indigenous (previously know as Native Americans) have been relegated to the #2 position. They were (at least in the past) the first group trotted out in the suffering parade. From what I've heard, Native Americans got the biggest pump from AA. I don't know if that's true anymore but this is what I recalled from my college days in the early 2000s.
I found Williams' book incredibly moving. And it made me realize how much mental pain is self-inflicted. In a social moment when we're being told to lean in hard to group identity (unless you're white), doesn't that only further cause mental anguish for the ever-increasing group of kids who are of mixed race? I've heard so much from mixed-race people about how difficult it is to feel as though they belong in "either group."
This seems to be much less of a problem for the kids coming up now, for whom race/ethnicity feels much less important--because they're used to the visual diversity in ways that even large portions of my elder millennial generation was not. Adults need to let this shit go.
I'm reading the book in part because I feel conflicted about what to tell my own mixed kid about race. I hope the growing number of mixed kids will help to make race less important -- but I also see some mixed people going hard the other way (Nikole Hannah Jones, for example, is half-white).
Yes, that's the case for us as well (we're not both on board). I taught myself the basics of the language and pushed my wife for years, but she refuses to speak it around our son. Long story, but she's estranged from her family and associates the language with them.
One of my kid’s friends is half Vietnamese. But he told his dad he was also part Korean, because he takes taekwondo. I found this adorable. Obviously his maternal heritage displays itself phenotypically, but at age 8 he’s defining his own cultural belonging by what he likes, not just what he looks like.
With absolutely no personal experience since my kids aren’t mixed race, it seems to me like acknowledging the potential cultural accompaniments to phenotype is a good idea, but it would also be weird to foist on him a cultural requirement he may not connect with (not that *you* would do that, but social justice definitely seems to think we must).
I'm mixed, and my kids are mixed. They look like me in a way I never looked like either of my parents. But while I did have my fair share of Asian culture in upbringing, I'm not deep in it enough to pass much on to my kids. For example, I spoke the language with my grandparents, but I don't know it well enough to use it all the time or teach someone else. This is not unlike the dilemma that many second or third generation immigrants would experience, especially if they don't live in some kind of ethnic enclave. Gradually losing some of the culture and assimilating is just what happens and doesn't make your race less authentic. Hang on to what you love and what comes naturally but obsessing over it might not be healthy.
What if you could reframe things. Musicians are often asked who their influences are. What if we could present as human beings with cultural influences and interests. I mean, in a way, all human lives are works of art in the making.
So, you could frame yourself as a human being who grew up with (insert mix here) cultural influences who is interested in (insert interests, areas of study, and talents here). This way of describing yourself steps outside of stereotypical language to some degree and allows some creativity in how you present yourself. It allows you to showcase a broader, more complex persona to world.
I think our brains like pat answers and that is why labels are so popular in spite of the loss of nuance that accompanies them. Since woke ideology is so focused on language, and in particular, correct labeling, then finding the language to describe yourself that does not submit to rigid labeling is the way to fight back. It requires some thought and creativity but who knows, it might catch on and become a trend.
I’m “white” but have a hard time answering where I’m “from.” I grew up mostly in Los Angeles, but I’m half Irish and lived on the island for several years as a kid. I learned to talk in a place that gave me an accent by American standards. Then I spent my formative teen years in Chicago. Each cultural experience is inextricably part of who I am; if I were to pick one, it’d be an incomplete picture.
You crack me up. I love kitties. They can definitely teach us a thing or two about self possession and taking beingness more seriously than labels! :-)
I'm also a Mixie. I always thought it was cool growing up. I liked when people asked "What are you?" because it was a chance to blow their minds. Get this: I'm MORE THAN ONE THING! BOOM! Folks always seemed to agree that it was cool and unique. Also back then liked to say how good-looking Mixies are. Keep it coming folks, I don't get tired of being told I look great, I don't care if it's for my race. I was surprised when I discovered so many Mixies feel so conflicted about identity. I always felt being mixed was a boon because I could go between spaces and claim whatever identity was convenient. I see now that I never fully fit in with one group or another, but I was also shy and socially awkward so I probably wouldn't have anyway. Who can say that it was because of half of my race? Despite, that, I was still able to move between these ethnic spaces more easily than a fullblood could have, which is its own reciprocal advantage. But sure, yeah, let's say that was super hard for me never fitting in fully anywhere. Isn't it only fair that I get to pick and choose whether I'm white or Asian depending on the context and what fits the moment? I really am both after all! If I'm in a who's the most Asian contest I'll happily let a full-Asian claim victory, but I'm not not-Asian. Anyway my advice is don't worry and just claim whatever identity you want if you want it. If anyone questions you just give them the line about how a mixed identity is so hard and they're bad for doubting you. Hey, maybe that's why we act like it's hard!
I have mixed race or mixed ethnicity kids (my husband is Latino and Native American) who are completely “white passing). My husband is quite obviously not white but my kids are essentially white. If not for their last name, I don’t think people would see them as anything but white. This has been a struggle for them and me personally to navigate “how to identify”. Part of me wants to just be like “it doesn’t matter! You’re you!” Part of me worries I’m discounting their identity because I’m white, and the other part worries about them leaning too much into an identity that doesn’t disadvantage them in the way it did my husband or does other people. They are relatively privileged kids. On the other hand, this identity is quite important to my husband and he does see them as embodying it. I wonder what my kids would do in one of those DEI exercises where you separate by race. Where do they belong? I mostly keep this struggle internal so as not to put more angst on them but I do naively miss the days when seeing past race was the progressive stance. Even though I acknowledge the downsides. Maybe I’m alone in this here, but I do still worry about how much of my discomfort is my own white fragility.
You'd likely find it very insightful. His situation sounds a lot like yours does: he was excited to pass on his black heritage to his children, but because genetics get weird his children ended up pale, blue-eyed, and blonde. Much of the book is him exploring how strange it is to say a child can't or shouldn't access a part of their heritage because they don't "look the part".
Moving beyond race appears to be a burgeoning field of study that I find intriguing. Not because I want to sweep everything under the rug. But because I think it's creative and outside the box and may promote the actual healing of this societal rift in a way that humanizes everyone involved. Wouldn't that be a win-win?
What I find interesting about this new idea is that it is being catalyzed by a reaction to the dehumanizing impacts that woke ideology is having on people. I have often wondered how far woke ideologists would go in their quest for power and revenge. Would they begin to support imprisonment and death? With only a few media types and a couple of non-profits standing up to this juggernaut, I have been truly concerned about the end point of this dance.
With the rise of this nascent idea about moving past race as a social construct, I am now hopeful again. I think this is what Morgan Freeman was alluding to when he said stop talking about it. Not that we should stop considering the fallout of past harms and inequities or how the institution of slavery contributed to the current imbalance in black culture, but what if that weren't the only way we looked at black or other oppressed people? What if we just considered them as fellow human beings instead of oppressed beings? How would that change not only how we view them but their own self concept? Would this enable a sense of belonging to a greater whole and begin to dissolve their victim identity?
It seems counter-intuitive to not tackle the problem head on. But, what if this is exactly what we need to engender true healing on this issue? I think it's worth considering at any rate.
I see this more as doing an end run around the goat - taking the wind out of its sails. This is also a way to win. Creating something new instead of confronting something directly. It may not be as emotionally satisfying as beating your opponent directly. But, it's still a win.
I'm not usually a very visual thinker, but just now I had sequential images of doing an end run around the goat, and taking the wind out of a goat's sails, and it make my day just that much lighter and better.
Who comes up with words like 'white adjacent' and how/why they gain hold in current discourse is a subject worth discussing about. Who gets to define whom is matter of real power and therefore politics.
Freddie, you are an amazing writer and I find everything you say in this piece profoundly convincing, but what's up with the word "profound" today? I mean, a "profound social problem" - ok - "profoundly racist" - maybe. But "profoundly wealthy"? Do these profoundly wealthy Black people have money bins like Scrooge McDuck into the depths of which they dive? Or maybe - with all their wealth - they are trapped in a vault made from coagulated racism, de profundis of which they cannot escape.
I work in government, specifically government programs to improve welfare and health. We have a DEI committee, and our department is heavily influenced by a local professional organization that is 110% woke. Our DEI committee recently created a worksheet, which we use in small workgroups and all be graded on, with the grading overseen by a peer who is on the committee and has be deemed an "equity champion." We fill out the form for any project we are work on, and part of that form requires a discussion ranking all the groups of people the project would serve, from most oppressed and deserving of support to least oppressed and deserving of support. I am absolutely horrified at the idea of literally ranking people's pain, having it documented, and having one of my brainwashed, very ambitious peers decided if I've done a good job or not. However, believe it or not folks, its not the white people that have a huge problem with this, surprise, surprise many of my Hispanic and Asian co-workers are livid.
Of course it's doing the exact opposite of building a coalition, as Ruy Texeira has pointed out repeatedly.
The Virginia elections last year was the beginning of the end for this stuff I think. It's not going to endure very long as the electoral losses start to pile up.
It wasn't driven by angry Asian and Hispanic parents wanting the schools open, that's for sure. I don't know why Hispanics voted more for Youngkin (assuming they did),although the economy would be my first guess. But it's a rock-solid certainty that Asians voted for Youngkin because of TJ, and the problem there for Republicans is that giving Asians what they want school wise tends to alienate whites.
I thought that might be the case. This is completely tangential, but I think that it is a symptom of our broken politics that outsized attention is paid by outsiders to local races in individual states, which are read like tea leaves to divine the broader national fate of whichever party. In the worst cases, this national attention can have a negative effect on local races, allowing politicians to exploit them as opportunities to broadcast their political brand to a larger audience. DeSantis in Florida is a master at this; so far, Youngkin does not seem quite as bad, at least.
Outsiders are also prone to misread local elections. Sure, it's likely true that conservative hysteria over Critical Race Theory influenced some voters, but there were other issues at play as well, such COVID-19 school closures that many parents were worried about.
I think you also have way too much confidence in the capacity of the Democrat party for self-reflection.
I agree with this. My point was that people who use Youngkin's win to talk about Asians and Hispanics agreeing with them on thing a or thing b, and they are usually wrong. Asians are pissed off about ending test-based schools because they want majority Asians schools and it's the best way to get them. Hispanics were probably pissed off about the economy. Anyone who thinks either Hispanics or Asians were pissed off about closed schools doesn't understand reality.
And whites who think ending AA is a good thing because MERITOCRACY have to accept that eventually they'll be pissing off whites. And it's a bad idea to piss off whites just to make Asians happy.
It's fundamentally illogical to believe that on one hand diversity is real and valuable and on the other to simultaneously argue that diversity won't lead to different outcomes in real world metrics like educational attainment, salary, and so on. It's hard not to shake the feeling that the woke set are comfortable with the idea of "diversity" as it applies to skin color but balk at the idea that it could affect individual perceptions and cultural values: for example, views on the proper role of women in society.
I agree with this column 100%. Freddie points out one of the contradictions of woke thought: If you treat a POC as a member of their race, you're othering and tokenizing them, which is bad; but if you treat them as an individual, you're invalidating their experience as a POC in a racist society, and that's equally bad. "Colorblindness is racist!"
And the idea of "white-adjacent" is just a No True Scotsman fallacy:
"No person of color can be successful in a white supremacist society!"
"But [Asian-American person] is wealthy and well-educated."
"Well then, [Asian-American person] is No True Person of Color! She's white-adjacent!"
These points are all excellent. I have a tangential one:
I've begun to think that the term "stereotype" obfuscates more than it illuminates. It's easy to forget that it is of relatively recent vintage. It serves only to discredit the making of generalizations as a pejorative synonym for them. Whereas any reasonable person recognizes that generalizations serve a purpose, when used correctly.
The criticism I’ve seen of the model minority is that it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison. It takes immigrants who are selected based on their skills and education and compares it with a population of local peasants. It’s not a fair comparison to compare the upper crust of one society with the dregs of another.
But the generic immigrant advantage is not nearly as large or consistent as the Asian advantage; east Asian students who stay in their home countries perform very well on international comparisons; and though students from refugee populations like Cambodian or Laotian do lag behind their Chinese and Korean peers they are catching up quickly with successive generations. So I dunno.
What you didn't mention was the advantage of immigrants from some Caribbean countries like Jamaica, etc., who are similarly successful to some asian groups...
Look at the PISA scores for the home countries of those immigrants. The problem can be multivariate--it can be both an immigrant self-selection effect plus cultural values in their country of origin.
The percentage of Asian Americans living in poverty in NYC is higher than any other ethnic group. Simultaneously Asian students make up the majority of students at New York's elite public high schools.
Some people prefer to break it down by specific country of ancestry eg Japan, Korea, India, etc.
That way you can see which specific groups tend to do much better than others.
I have to tell you, I don't think slicing the identity onion even further is gonna get us anywhere
When I've seen it done that way it's usually as a way to try and show that some White European groups do better than some Asian groups and therefore in those people's minds it makes the model minority a myth. Ofcourse that's misunderstanding averages as you rightly point out.
I've seen breakdowns by specific ancestry used to counter some "race realism" that is itself misguided, with no "race realist" way to explain, for example, why Hmong immigrants tend to be poor while Nigerian immigrants tend to be successful.
An average is just an average, and shouldn't be a scandal. But as long as someone, somewhere, is trying to make more of the average than an average, there'll be those pushing back against the myth that the average means more than an average.
“It’s not that all Asians do better, it’s that all Chinese do better!” “Oh okay cool now we have no issues!”
If we slice it thin enough we eventually find ourselves back at universalism!
More tears, likely.
My state passed a law a few years ago calling for a whole slate of educational outcomes to be broken out by ethnicity/country of origin, in part with this goal in mind.
The original version called for any group with 1000 or more members to be included, but that was scrapped in part after more people realized we don’t really need to dive back into the old German vs. Norwegian vs. Swedish vs. Finn vs… etc. analysis.
The new version sets specific numbers of categories to create for the largest populations within Asian, American Indian, etc.
The biggest set of categories is for Asian, where we’re doing seven. This naturally provoked hostile reaction from some members of the Chinese community, who see this as a way to carve them out of hypothetical affirmative action or similar programs in favor of Hmong, Karen, etc. (Interestingly, the Karen population was the only one named specifically in the law).
Which state is this?
I bet it’s Minnesota based on the ethnic groups named. Minnesota has the largest population of Hmong and Karen in the country, as well as the Scandinavians and Germans everyone knows about.
Excellent piece. If people could just grasp the idea that what's true of groups on average is not necessarily true of specific individuals but *both* remain true - without their pearl clutching pavolvian moral reflexes kicking in - we'd be in a much better place.
It seems like so much social-critical writing is predicated on deliberately sloppy thinking, I suppose in the service of generating content (a word I hate) that will draw clicks. It is tremendously discouraging.
Upvote purely for hating that word 'content' too, at least when it's used like that.
Just wanted to say that I wonder about this as well. Many woke people also subscribe to therapy and self-help (fyi, I also think therapy is good and important), but much that is recommended in therapy is not reflected in woke thinking. Woke thinking is black and white, often, and a therapist would advise you to not do that. Woke thinking blames peoples souls and inherent being (white supremacy) but a therapist would ask you to focus on actions rather than someone's character as a way to resolve conflict. Etc. It makes no sense.
Yes, I agree that social justice thinking relies on a crude and often reductive essentialism. It is a way to be lazy in one's analysis. But I also think that this habit of thought is not unique to the social justice set, but is rather a feature of our broader culture. Perhaps it is a side effect of mass culture's relentless division of everything unto categories and genres that we choose among to construct our identifies; and then this tendency is reproduced in our social relations, and in our thinking about them. Anyway, I see the same essentialism in the punditry of conservatives. If anything, it is even more perncious there.
I believe that. I only know liberals well enough to be able to dissect their thought patterns.
Start an alternative newspaper in the home of the John Birch Society.
You'll learn how paleoconservatives think. Useful label.
I’m also generally a supporter of therapy and have benefited from it myself, but I’m wondering if therapy itself is changing these days. I feel like I see more and more people around me coming out of therapy with *more* black and white thinking, especially as it relates to identity. Honestly it sometimes reminds me uncomfortably of recovered-memories stuff - people who were struggling a bit but fundamentally healthy suddenly can’t stop talking about events that they learned in therapy *must* have traumatized them, or the inherent trauma that comes with their identity markers (some of which they didn’t really build into their public identity before they started therapy).
My therapist fifteen years ago focused on actions rather than character; people around me describe going to their therapist to cope with the basic trauma of living in a world full of apocalyptic evil, and their therapists seem to be wholeheartedly supporting them in the belief that the apocalyptic evil surrounding them is the cause of their distress.
I know there are absolutely still great therapists out there, and I may be mistaking correlation for causation here. But it is true that a majority of the people in my life are now in therapy who previously weren’t, that therapy-speak is a woke-progressive hallmark, and that most of these folks seem to be seeing woke-progressive therapists.
That could be true too.
I do have friends that completely believe we are living in apocalyptic times and are hysterical and self-involved about it, and they are in therapy. I often wonder why their therapist isn't shutting that down.
We're NOT living in apocalyptic times?
Nukes aren't real?
I want to answer this fully. There’s a sort of prevailing pessimism I’m getting at when I refer to the sense of “apocalyptic evil” from - in my life - young, middle-class, largely white, liberal professionals. The nuclear threat is one small part of it (or was, before current events got more... current). But it’s bigger than that - the looming shadow of apocalypse is climate change, it’s racism, it’s transphobia, it’s capitalism, it’s fascism, it’s school shootings, it’s police murdering people, it’s Nazis walking the streets, it’s prisons, it’s the world order collapsing, it’s endless jokes about living in the “darkest timeline,” it’s a sense that literally every aspect of society exists to oppress and traumatize good people. Unfortunately, to my view, for people steeped in this who go to therapists who are also steeped in it, or who pick up therapy speak from Internet personalities who are steeped in it, “trauma” becomes a signifier that one is a good person -- because only good people are traumatized by evil.
it’s very hard to describe this phenomenon without sounding like an asshole, because of course I think everything I listed there is very bad, and I wouldn’t say it’s unreasonable for anyone to feel some level of anger or sadness about any of it!
But I feel concerned when a line about the fundamental horridness of society, that I know because I was there only became the liberal party line after 2015, becomes retroactive justification for every bad feeling any good person has ever felt, and ongoing justification for every bad feeling any good person will ever have. Therapy can be a fantastic tool for helping you see your life and the things that happened to you from another perspective, to understand and therefore to live with your past and your emotions. I’m leery of an approach that seems to be wholly rewriting the past, to layer the politics of the present over everything that’s ever happened to someone, and whose only conclusion is ever “you hurt because you are good and others are bad, and the work of dealing with their badness hurts you.”
And yet, we dance, and hug, and swap cute kid/dog/cat photos/stories.
We all have "black dog" days, but the metaphor I go with is the
Coast Guard rescue lifeboats that can be overturned and
right themselves, through good design.
The personality that the therapist designs should right itself.
"“trauma” becomes a signifier that one is a good person -- because only good people are traumatized by evil."
I've seen people embrace their trauma / hurt / weakness and think this might really be part of it.
I see this so much in my peers that I’ve started to feel like a sociopath for not being concerned-to-the-point-of-non-functioning due to world events.
I’m in a writing community where people were comforting each other and saying it’s okay not to make progress because of the war in Ukraine (not people who have friends or relatives there, just the fact that it is happening).
Obviously war is awful, but like…there’s always war somewhere.
There is an element of this in our current social order, definitely. Thomas Sowell calls it "Standing on the side of angels against the forces of evil" and calls out the many ways that this virtue signaling is used by intellectuals and media to convince others they are the "good people." Since our learned class greatly influences national culture, these posturing tendencies spread and you could argue metastasize.
Steven Pinker's "Enlightenment Now" lays out metric after metric that shows that the human race is actually improving in many ways but that we are addicted to seeing everything as worse than ever (which gives us a chance to stand on the side of the angels in reaction to all of the bad things). He references what he calls the Availability Heuristic which ascribes importance to things based on how much we have been exposed to them. Think of the negative, click-baity universe that the internet has become because of the way modern media is funded and also the anonymity of social media which allows small, but amplified mobs to attack and destroy people asserting the "wrong" narrative. This article discusses it in depth: https://medium.com/make-better-decisions/unhappiness-and-availability-heuristic-657060d3655a
What Sarah said.
Also, nukes have been around for 80 years. Are we supposed to stop living, having hope and joy, reproducing, having relationships, trying for a better future, and living with grace because nukes exist?
I think there is also some psycho-analytic work to be done about why we have such a hard on for the apocalypse. Like a death wish. You could time travel to the year 800 and people would have good arguments why the apocalypse was impending.
Hard on for the apocalypse - nice! Yes, nihilism is definitely ascendant at present. Where previous generations have rolled up their sleeves and got busy solving things (or at least enduring them), this generation is like "What? It's not already all solved? Waaaah!"
And we are to blame. We inculcated this attitude into our children. We taught them to expect and accept nothing less than utopia. But we don't teach them grit or resilience or patience or fortitude or even true problem solving, etc. Everything is ease and comfort and send your pennies to corporate America and we'll solve all of your problems for you - Idiocracy.
The ruggedness of the individuals that built this country is amazing (I don't wish to get into the land grab and treatment of natives and that whole thing. I'm not saying it doesn't matter just that it's not germane to the point I am making). But the character it took to strike out into the wilderness without the technology we have now and carve out something new was astounding. That took tenacity, grit, vision.
Is it any wonder that these impatient idealists with such a myopic view of life fell for woke ideology? It appears to provide a pat answer to all of life's worst ills. Except that it's a power and money grift that will solve nothing and most likely make things much, much worse.
We need some degree of challenge or adversity to bring out the best in us. Sports are a good stand in for building character. Competition in other arenas as well - business, academics, etc. It does our children no good to be handed the world on a platter. And I think that's what the Baby Boomers and Gen-X tried to do.
It might not be the whole nutshell but it's at least a kernel of the current zeitgeist.
Therapy is definitely not as unanimous and rigorous as we'd like it to be as a practice. Not only is it suffering ideologically and economically but also a lot of people are becoming extremely well versed in therapeutic language but getting all their guidance from hacks on TikTok
I have been concerned about the creep of this ideology into therapeutic spaces as well. I just watched this video which specifically addresses this issue: Critical Social Justice in American Institutions: A Challenge to Liberal Values https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3pKZ-FTe4g
I am concerned because as an Adult Survivor, shaming was one of the techniques used to silence and cow me. I think its use in therapy has the ability to destroy the self concept of someone with very low self esteem and is very dangerous as a result. You could actually push someone toward suicide or self-harm by shaming them for being white when their guard is down and they are emotionally vulnerable during therapy.
Very, very bad idea to allow therapists to use race essentialism and the immutable characteristics of patients as methods of "correcting" their patients’ world views. At that point, it's no longer therapy and borders on indoctrination. The fact that American therapeutic institutions are allowing and even encouraging this practice is very concerning. And, if it is allowed to continue, the fallout discussed in the video, of therapists no longer being trusted and people refusing to utilize therapy thereby destroying the industry is a distinct possibility.
"people around me describe going to their therapist to cope with the basic trauma of living in a world full of apocalyptic evil, and their therapists seem to be wholeheartedly supporting them in the belief that the apocalyptic evil surrounding them is the cause of their distress."
I agree this is a real problem.
It's like a... fragilization of our entire culture. I was thinking about this recently when I was watching a TV series with my family and was incredibly annoyed with the main character, almost to the extent I couldn't watch it. I had to ask myself, what was bothering me so much?
I realized it was because in response to every scary or distressing thing that happened on the show (and it's a drama, so there were a lot of things) she became almost feral in her terror, with whining and whimpering and loud breathing, such as I never imagined a person capable of (outside of perhaps a war zone?). But this character was celebrated for being traumatized -- and it wasn't a particularly traumatic backstory (no more so than any of us unfortunate humans who have been traumatized by various things) -- and I think that was the most annoying part. This adoration, maybe even fetishization, of the weak, traumatized main character, who fell apart every few minutes. It made her some kind of hero? It just rubbed me the wrong way.
Similarly, people's attitude toward the pandemic seemed to be that the universe owes them a pleasant easy time, and they're angry, deprived, traumatized, damaged if they don't get that. The pre-vaccine pandemic was not pleasant or easy. It was really hard, especially for kids, but I also recognize that living through hard times with resilience and grace, the best you can, is not the earth-shattering experience that was at times portrayed. Kids missed out on regular social experiences, celebrations, family and friends and school, some education, and they won't get that time back. But they also got something out of living through a difficult experience and doing OK -- in overcoming adversity, which all of us have to do sooner or later.
tl;dr People today seem sometimes to be encouraged to focus on (wallow in?) their trauma and weakness instead of focusing on their successes in overcoming it, and this cultural trend is probably indeed reinforced by therapists who highlight trauma and damage instead of coping and overcoming.
I agree. What happened to coping and overcoming? Why isn't resilience more prized in our society? And why does everyone expect Disneyland all the time? Good questions.
BTW, what is the series?
Oh it was called Pieces of Her on Netflix. I couldn’t bear it! The daughter (main character) was tooooo much.
Content farms have found ragebait (deliberately stupid, frustrating videos) is more effective than typical clickbait. People see something dumb and share it with their friends going "look at this stupidity!" But clicks are clicks: sites don't care whether you're hate-reading or whether you love their content.
I'm curious how often this happens with politics too. Obviously there's true believers, and there's also people who want to do good but suck at critical thinking and so get drawn in. But is some of its popularity on certain sites just click-based?
"If the idea is that we should pay a lot less attention to demographic identity because these groupings always distort who we are as individuals, I say, yeah!"
As do I.
Very few people out there in The Discourse know how to talk about Asians intelligently because their prevailing dogma & racial hierarchy instinctively recoils at nuance, and nuance is the only way to understand the Asian experience. I came to the US when my country of birth was still under rule by a military junta. My parents grew up with food insecurity. My father has a masters degree and is a top 10-15% earner. I am not white and that had an impact on me growing up. I am also, in my current circumstances, very privileged.
All these things are true at once, and the current rigidity in liberal thinking, which desperately wants me to be just one thing, fails over and over again to find language that can talk about me in a way that isn't inaccurate, insulting, patronizing, or stupid. That is why you see phrases like "white adjacent" - in the effort to coin a phrase this dumb you can see they're trying to acknowledge that there's some level of ambiguity and confusion in how to characterize me, but it just collapses into itself and just calls me "white." Which I am not. Idiotic.
Is it fair to place all of the blame for this on so-called liberals? I see it as an attempt to rebut the arguments of people who use the relative success of Asians as a basis for undermining the claims of visible minorities who (as groups) have done worse.
The argument is common - "The Asian community came here with nothing and look how well they've done, obviously racism is a myth". It's a stupid argument and while the primary response is to get into the different experiences of different groups (e.g. anti-Black racism is far more pervasive and pernicious than anti-Asian racism) I think another one is to say "Actually, not all Asians have done well".
It isn't particularly effective, and your and Freddie's basic point about seeing people as individuals is right, but I'm not sure we can lay this as the feet of liberals looking to make sure all minorities are seen as suffering.
If success makes you white, doesn't that discourage success? Or if it's possible to turn white then isn't race irrelevant?
As you say, using the term "white supremacy" or defining racism as something that only flows from whites outward makes the logic fall apart. This is also a problem with the phrase "white privilege." This does describe a real thing but is a poor name for it. White privilege is not really something that whites have, but it describes the absence of certain disadvantages. Asians face different kinds of discrimination than blacks who face different kinds of discrimination than Latinos. It's true that whites don't face any of those particular disadvantages, but despite that they still can find themselves in circumstances that aren't particularly privileged. It's strange and backwards to describe different and distinct minority disadvantages by framing the lack of them as a tangible thing that white people have. It also suggests that white people ought not to have the "privilege" of not being subject to disadvantage and discrimination, when actually we should be striving to remove the disadvantages from those who suffer from them. It frames things like we need to drag whites down rather than pulling others up.
Bob Dylan said that, too.
"It frames things like we need to drag whites down rather than pulling others up."
Yes! That's what bothers me about the "white privilege" concept. It's grotesque to say that white people not having to worry (too much) about police officers shooting and killing them is a "privilege." Leaving aside the fact that unarmed white people have, on occasion, been killed by police officers, not being killed by a police officer is a g-damn right, not a "privilege."
A lot of dumb new rules (like “racism can only be done by white people”) are attempts to disqualify inconvenient arguments that liberals have no good rebuttals to, and this seems like another one. “Racism is a myth” is not the actual conclusion. Of course racism exists but the implication of average Asian success is that it is not the ultimate determining factor of outcomes. One factor is the education/ambition level of immigrants, but others could be things like cultural emphasis on academics or intact family structures which are conversations liberals don’t want to have, so instead they try to short circuit it by criticizing the model minority concept. Then we get bogged down in the circular logic Freddie describes here and liberals are saved from exploring any potential solutions they dislike.
I don't even really understand why people don't want to have that conversation. "There are cultural patterns that contribute to success and they are attainable to you right now" is a much more positive and humanistic message than either the "race realist" explanation (Asians r smart, blacks r dumb) OR the woke explanation (you might think anyone could adopt these cultural patterns, but the omnipresent force of "white supremacy" prevents it, and white supremacy will never be defeated --
https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/04/us/census-browning-of-america-myth-blake/index.html https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/05/ta-nehisi-coates-racism-afro-pessimism-reparations-class-struggle ). The culture explanation seems like by far the kindest, most optimistic, and most expansive vision of things, AND it has at least as much observable support as the "racism as sole cause" theory.
I don't even think that view requires you to be blind to the history of racism in America. Indeed, the strong form of the theory would be that black culture has been harmed and handicapped precisely because of that history. I can't remember if it was Freddie or Jesse Singal who pointed out recently that it's bananas for liberals to not want to measure performance gaps anymore, because those gaps are exactly what you would expect if the liberal narrative is TRUE. Well... why wouldn't the same thing be true of culture?
(Aside: one of the many ways that Bill Cosby turned out to be a profound moral failure is that he was the most prominent black figure who would say stuff about culture and behavior -- and then he turned out to be a monster. I really think it's possible that fact alone has contributed to a certain amount of nihilism and cynicism about those arguments.)
Well said.
I believe it was Thomas Sowell who pointed out that a lot of what white people think of as dysfunction in the Black community was in fact inherited (culturally) from the white Borderer culture in the American South. How ironic!
Yeah, I've been meaning to check out that book for ages. It's sort of on my permanent "to read" list, but you know how that goes.
Borderer meaning Scots-Irish immigrants from the Scottish borderlands?
Why, indeed, would they not want to have that conversation? It's almost as certain interests are more interested in exploiting grievances for political advantage than they are in actually helping people succeed. But that couldn't be it. Oh well, if we keep thinking I'm sure we can figure it out.
Haha. Area rogue speaks in jest.
I think the reason for this is simple. The woke left is obsessed with blame. If there’s a problem, it can never just be caused by something: the causal explanation is insufficient and is branded as “blaming the victim.” I can’t think of a single notion that’s been more destructive to the left — it’s deeply obstructive to progress. In short, cause must yield to blame. That obviates the more pragmatic discourse of, “if you do A the result will likely be B — it worked for that other group there.”
I think they are wrong about the liberal explanation. African immigrants to America do fine, generally around the typical American level of higher. This is not controversial as a fact. If anti-black racism "explains" the situation of blacks in aggregate, how come it doesn't explain immigrant Africans? Well, it can't. Instead it is something that is not explained, but either ignored or explained away.
Thomas Sowell has written about this at length.
I'm not by the way denying that discrimination exists. But the existence of discrimination does not show it causes any specific effect. Everyone in academic knows that blacks are heavily recruited in schools as students and as hires, but they aren't particularly successful there.
I heard of a people who went through 2000 years of persecution and the greatest genocide in history and did OK. Interestingly, that group is hardly ever mentioned by the intersectional left. I’m not sure why, though I have a theory. But it is odd, as you would think people who are all about oppression would be so at least somewhat proportionally to the degree of oppression. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I thought about mentioning the rightwing side of this up top but didn't for the sake of length. Yes, of course rightwing talking points about Asians poisoned the well. One of the most cursed things about this topic is that there are no ways to make factual statements about Asian success without liberals fretting and panicking that an unspoken "and therefore..." aimed at black people is coming up right behind it that is racist and accusatory.
But all this handwringing and obfuscation actually does the opposite of what's desired: it treats Asians as a problematic concept people would rather avoid writing or thinking about, not as real people, such that even when liberals are writing about the recent Asian attacks, the authors make their own guilt & neurosis around this topic the main axis of every story. And it's been deeply disheartening and frustrating to watch.
Yeah, the whole discussion requires a level of good faith and complexity that we just aren't getting.
This is exactly why many Asians don’t like the label even while acknowledging the validity of the label to some extent. We’re more than just political pawns.
This is how real liberals get tarred as racists, eh?
Thinking too clearly.
Yes, it IS fair to blame current Democrats (who dishonestly call themselves liberals? or redefine that word.)
Most Asian individuals choose to avoid committing crimes, and avoid getting pregnant (or impregnating) a partner before marriage, and are willing to keep a job for at least a year, and graduate from high school.
Every Single Group that has done these 4 things "does well". (When the majority of individuals do it, the group "does" it.)
The "suffering" is real - because so many sufferers are victims of their parents' choices to irresponsibly fail at one or more of the above 4 steps.
I think that saying “white adjacent” is an attempt to acknowledge ambiguity is overly charitable. It feels more like an attempt to punish us by making other minorities (and their own social theories) look bad with our success. But it turned out that stirring resentment by calling us white adjacent seemed to just rationalize more hate crimes against us so they had to quickly back off and act like they are on our side, while trying to ignore who is doing the majority of the anti Asian hate crimes.
I'm also seeing "white adjacent" starting to be used to describe conservative Latinos who voted for Trump. It's like when Nikole Hannah-Jones tweeted about being "politically black" vs "racially black" -- people of color have to act and think a certain way and, if they don't, they're "white adjacent" which is a not-too-subtle put-down.
My cinnamon daughter was called an Oreo for doing well in school.
Did you have a talk with their parents? Your daughter's teacher?
What parents? The offenders were pretty much thugs. Berkeley High School has a serious gang problem. She started hanging with the Asians. She's a little Japanese, too. Beautiful.
Right, and Amiri Baraka called Condi Rice a “skeeza,” and not just because it rhymes with Condoleezza. This is the ugliest side of identity politics. See also Linda Sarsour saying [certain people] “don’t deserve to be women — I would take their vaginas away.” Bad juju.
This is so very well put.
This is such a great post. Over the weekend, I started reading Thomas Chatterton William’s book, Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race, which makes similar arguments. He’s a mixed American living in France with a French wife and mixed kids, and the experience caused him to change his thinking on race. He now believes we should be working to move past race:
“a flawed paradigm cannot be re-imagined and shifted in the future simply because we are dealing with its practical consequences as they exist today… It is a mistake to reify something that is as demonstrably harmful as it is fictitious.”
It’s a good book, and you all would like it.
[Back to Freddie] “the more you tell people that they’re not a part of your tribe the more you ensure that they will mistreat you.”
This is a huge problem in social justice politics. There’s an expectation that white people must become hyper-conscious of being white, without any negative consequences like… being racist. But it’s delusional to think you can persuade all white people to adopt the Robin DiAngelo view that they should atone for existing. Some whites respond to woke politics by deciding “actually, white people are oppressed” and fighting for white rights. Which is not a great outcome.
The “white adjacent” thing strikes me as a power struggle between people of color in the social justice movement. Just like changing the acronym to BIPOC to make sure Asians and Latinos know they come second in the movement. It’s backfiring – Asians are starting to vote Republican in response to some of the efforts to prioritize other groups over them, especially efforts to reduce the Asian populations in elite schools. They’re inadvertently creating a coalition of white and Asian people who are sick of this shit.
I've always read that it's "Black, Indigenous, and People of Color" and that the idea is to "center" Black and indigenous people. From my reading, Asians are included but they're part of the "POC" -- not centered.
Then who or what decides which groups should be prioritized and which should not be?
I'm assuming here that centered can be readily replaced with the word prioritized. One of my pet peeves is coming up with new terms when there are plenty of good ones already existing...for no other reason than it signals you're on the same team or something. Sorry for that tangent, it's just exasperating.
It's interesting that Indigenous (previously know as Native Americans) have been relegated to the #2 position. They were (at least in the past) the first group trotted out in the suffering parade. From what I've heard, Native Americans got the biggest pump from AA. I don't know if that's true anymore but this is what I recalled from my college days in the early 2000s.
I recommend Walter Benn Michael's: "The Trouble with Diversity"
I found Williams' book incredibly moving. And it made me realize how much mental pain is self-inflicted. In a social moment when we're being told to lean in hard to group identity (unless you're white), doesn't that only further cause mental anguish for the ever-increasing group of kids who are of mixed race? I've heard so much from mixed-race people about how difficult it is to feel as though they belong in "either group."
This seems to be much less of a problem for the kids coming up now, for whom race/ethnicity feels much less important--because they're used to the visual diversity in ways that even large portions of my elder millennial generation was not. Adults need to let this shit go.
I'm reading the book in part because I feel conflicted about what to tell my own mixed kid about race. I hope the growing number of mixed kids will help to make race less important -- but I also see some mixed people going hard the other way (Nikole Hannah Jones, for example, is half-white).
Yes, that's the case for us as well (we're not both on board). I taught myself the basics of the language and pushed my wife for years, but she refuses to speak it around our son. Long story, but she's estranged from her family and associates the language with them.
One of my kid’s friends is half Vietnamese. But he told his dad he was also part Korean, because he takes taekwondo. I found this adorable. Obviously his maternal heritage displays itself phenotypically, but at age 8 he’s defining his own cultural belonging by what he likes, not just what he looks like.
With absolutely no personal experience since my kids aren’t mixed race, it seems to me like acknowledging the potential cultural accompaniments to phenotype is a good idea, but it would also be weird to foist on him a cultural requirement he may not connect with (not that *you* would do that, but social justice definitely seems to think we must).
I like this. Very creative.
I'm mixed, and my kids are mixed. They look like me in a way I never looked like either of my parents. But while I did have my fair share of Asian culture in upbringing, I'm not deep in it enough to pass much on to my kids. For example, I spoke the language with my grandparents, but I don't know it well enough to use it all the time or teach someone else. This is not unlike the dilemma that many second or third generation immigrants would experience, especially if they don't live in some kind of ethnic enclave. Gradually losing some of the culture and assimilating is just what happens and doesn't make your race less authentic. Hang on to what you love and what comes naturally but obsessing over it might not be healthy.
What if you could reframe things. Musicians are often asked who their influences are. What if we could present as human beings with cultural influences and interests. I mean, in a way, all human lives are works of art in the making.
So, you could frame yourself as a human being who grew up with (insert mix here) cultural influences who is interested in (insert interests, areas of study, and talents here). This way of describing yourself steps outside of stereotypical language to some degree and allows some creativity in how you present yourself. It allows you to showcase a broader, more complex persona to world.
I think our brains like pat answers and that is why labels are so popular in spite of the loss of nuance that accompanies them. Since woke ideology is so focused on language, and in particular, correct labeling, then finding the language to describe yourself that does not submit to rigid labeling is the way to fight back. It requires some thought and creativity but who knows, it might catch on and become a trend.
I like to identify as Roma<--Navy brat, from all over.
I talk like Walter Cronkite. We had TV very early.
I’m “white” but have a hard time answering where I’m “from.” I grew up mostly in Los Angeles, but I’m half Irish and lived on the island for several years as a kid. I learned to talk in a place that gave me an accent by American standards. Then I spent my formative teen years in Chicago. Each cultural experience is inextricably part of who I am; if I were to pick one, it’d be an incomplete picture.
As a cat, I have no need to identify as anything. I am tabby.
You crack me up. I love kitties. They can definitely teach us a thing or two about self possession and taking beingness more seriously than labels! :-)
"I don’t think race is the most important characteristic, but in settings where I have to identify myself, I want to be accurate."
Maybe be resistant to identifying?
I'm also a Mixie. I always thought it was cool growing up. I liked when people asked "What are you?" because it was a chance to blow their minds. Get this: I'm MORE THAN ONE THING! BOOM! Folks always seemed to agree that it was cool and unique. Also back then liked to say how good-looking Mixies are. Keep it coming folks, I don't get tired of being told I look great, I don't care if it's for my race. I was surprised when I discovered so many Mixies feel so conflicted about identity. I always felt being mixed was a boon because I could go between spaces and claim whatever identity was convenient. I see now that I never fully fit in with one group or another, but I was also shy and socially awkward so I probably wouldn't have anyway. Who can say that it was because of half of my race? Despite, that, I was still able to move between these ethnic spaces more easily than a fullblood could have, which is its own reciprocal advantage. But sure, yeah, let's say that was super hard for me never fitting in fully anywhere. Isn't it only fair that I get to pick and choose whether I'm white or Asian depending on the context and what fits the moment? I really am both after all! If I'm in a who's the most Asian contest I'll happily let a full-Asian claim victory, but I'm not not-Asian. Anyway my advice is don't worry and just claim whatever identity you want if you want it. If anyone questions you just give them the line about how a mixed identity is so hard and they're bad for doubting you. Hey, maybe that's why we act like it's hard!
A rather surprising number of activists have a white mother and an (often absent) black father. Freud could probably have a lot of fun with them.
I too have noticed that.
I have mixed race or mixed ethnicity kids (my husband is Latino and Native American) who are completely “white passing). My husband is quite obviously not white but my kids are essentially white. If not for their last name, I don’t think people would see them as anything but white. This has been a struggle for them and me personally to navigate “how to identify”. Part of me wants to just be like “it doesn’t matter! You’re you!” Part of me worries I’m discounting their identity because I’m white, and the other part worries about them leaning too much into an identity that doesn’t disadvantage them in the way it did my husband or does other people. They are relatively privileged kids. On the other hand, this identity is quite important to my husband and he does see them as embodying it. I wonder what my kids would do in one of those DEI exercises where you separate by race. Where do they belong? I mostly keep this struggle internal so as not to put more angst on them but I do naively miss the days when seeing past race was the progressive stance. Even though I acknowledge the downsides. Maybe I’m alone in this here, but I do still worry about how much of my discomfort is my own white fragility.
Maybe I should pick up Williams’ book.
You'd likely find it very insightful. His situation sounds a lot like yours does: he was excited to pass on his black heritage to his children, but because genetics get weird his children ended up pale, blue-eyed, and blonde. Much of the book is him exploring how strange it is to say a child can't or shouldn't access a part of their heritage because they don't "look the part".
In line with FDB's essay, maybe heritage is not relevant.
I read a lot of books when very young and they're my heritage:
Being a Reader. Ain't that the point?
Left Florida from college to join the SFBay nerds.
Found the Beats. Then the Hippies...
Moving beyond race appears to be a burgeoning field of study that I find intriguing. Not because I want to sweep everything under the rug. But because I think it's creative and outside the box and may promote the actual healing of this societal rift in a way that humanizes everyone involved. Wouldn't that be a win-win?
https://www.fairforall.org/fair-perspectives/ Check out the We're All Raceless interview with Dr. Sheena Mason. Long, but worth it.
Also: https://www.theoryofracelessness.org/ and https://www.amazon.com/Racecraft-Soul-Inequality-American-Life/dp/1781683131
What I find interesting about this new idea is that it is being catalyzed by a reaction to the dehumanizing impacts that woke ideology is having on people. I have often wondered how far woke ideologists would go in their quest for power and revenge. Would they begin to support imprisonment and death? With only a few media types and a couple of non-profits standing up to this juggernaut, I have been truly concerned about the end point of this dance.
With the rise of this nascent idea about moving past race as a social construct, I am now hopeful again. I think this is what Morgan Freeman was alluding to when he said stop talking about it. Not that we should stop considering the fallout of past harms and inequities or how the institution of slavery contributed to the current imbalance in black culture, but what if that weren't the only way we looked at black or other oppressed people? What if we just considered them as fellow human beings instead of oppressed beings? How would that change not only how we view them but their own self concept? Would this enable a sense of belonging to a greater whole and begin to dissolve their victim identity?
It seems counter-intuitive to not tackle the problem head on. But, what if this is exactly what we need to engender true healing on this issue? I think it's worth considering at any rate.
Well, if you like butting heads with a goat...
I see this more as doing an end run around the goat - taking the wind out of its sails. This is also a way to win. Creating something new instead of confronting something directly. It may not be as emotionally satisfying as beating your opponent directly. But, it's still a win.
I'm not usually a very visual thinker, but just now I had sequential images of doing an end run around the goat, and taking the wind out of a goat's sails, and it make my day just that much lighter and better.
Awesome! I am a very visual thinker and that probably influences my prose.
It truly delighted me!!!!! :D
One more link. If the Dr. Sheena Mason video linked above is too long, try this article from Free Black Thought substack: https://freeblackthought.substack.com/p/theory-of-racelessness-a-case-for?s=r
Who comes up with words like 'white adjacent' and how/why they gain hold in current discourse is a subject worth discussing about. Who gets to define whom is matter of real power and therefore politics.
pretty sure it's Nikole Hannah-Jones
Robin DiAngelo has entered the chat
Freddie, you are an amazing writer and I find everything you say in this piece profoundly convincing, but what's up with the word "profound" today? I mean, a "profound social problem" - ok - "profoundly racist" - maybe. But "profoundly wealthy"? Do these profoundly wealthy Black people have money bins like Scrooge McDuck into the depths of which they dive? Or maybe - with all their wealth - they are trapped in a vault made from coagulated racism, de profundis of which they cannot escape.
just comes from writing in chunks
As ever, you may undue the damage by writing something better yourself
Unlikely that I will achieve that, but I will probably have to try soon.
Undue? Is that profound?
Not unduly
Lay off Freddie, it's providing thematic unity to the piece.
Easy with the no-pants-Scottish-duck stereotypes please
I work in government, specifically government programs to improve welfare and health. We have a DEI committee, and our department is heavily influenced by a local professional organization that is 110% woke. Our DEI committee recently created a worksheet, which we use in small workgroups and all be graded on, with the grading overseen by a peer who is on the committee and has be deemed an "equity champion." We fill out the form for any project we are work on, and part of that form requires a discussion ranking all the groups of people the project would serve, from most oppressed and deserving of support to least oppressed and deserving of support. I am absolutely horrified at the idea of literally ranking people's pain, having it documented, and having one of my brainwashed, very ambitious peers decided if I've done a good job or not. However, believe it or not folks, its not the white people that have a huge problem with this, surprise, surprise many of my Hispanic and Asian co-workers are livid.
What a way to build a coalition.
Of course it's doing the exact opposite of building a coalition, as Ruy Texeira has pointed out repeatedly.
The Virginia elections last year was the beginning of the end for this stuff I think. It's not going to endure very long as the electoral losses start to pile up.
Out of curiosity, are you a Virginian? (I am.)
Nope. I brought up Virginia as a nationally prominent example of a backlash that is partially driven by angry Asian and Hispanic parents.
It wasn't driven by angry Asian and Hispanic parents wanting the schools open, that's for sure. I don't know why Hispanics voted more for Youngkin (assuming they did),although the economy would be my first guess. But it's a rock-solid certainty that Asians voted for Youngkin because of TJ, and the problem there for Republicans is that giving Asians what they want school wise tends to alienate whites.
https://theliberalpatriot.substack.com/p/the-democrats-hispanic-voter-problem-dfc?s=r
https://theliberalpatriot.substack.com/p/the-democrats-hispanic-voter-problem?s=r
https://theliberalpatriot.substack.com/p/the-democrats-coming-asian-voter?s=r
https://theliberalpatriot.substack.com/p/the-democrats-working-class-voter?s=r
What's TJ?
I assume Thomas Jefferson High School. News from 2 hours ago:
https://wtop.com/fairfax-county/2022/03/fairfax-county-school-board-files-appeal-over-admissions-ruling-for-thomas-jefferson/
I thought that might be the case. This is completely tangential, but I think that it is a symptom of our broken politics that outsized attention is paid by outsiders to local races in individual states, which are read like tea leaves to divine the broader national fate of whichever party. In the worst cases, this national attention can have a negative effect on local races, allowing politicians to exploit them as opportunities to broadcast their political brand to a larger audience. DeSantis in Florida is a master at this; so far, Youngkin does not seem quite as bad, at least.
Outsiders are also prone to misread local elections. Sure, it's likely true that conservative hysteria over Critical Race Theory influenced some voters, but there were other issues at play as well, such COVID-19 school closures that many parents were worried about.
I think you also have way too much confidence in the capacity of the Democrat party for self-reflection.
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/loudoun-county-virginia-a-culture?s=r
Yes, this is exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about.
I agree with this. My point was that people who use Youngkin's win to talk about Asians and Hispanics agreeing with them on thing a or thing b, and they are usually wrong. Asians are pissed off about ending test-based schools because they want majority Asians schools and it's the best way to get them. Hispanics were probably pissed off about the economy. Anyone who thinks either Hispanics or Asians were pissed off about closed schools doesn't understand reality.
And whites who think ending AA is a good thing because MERITOCRACY have to accept that eventually they'll be pissing off whites. And it's a bad idea to piss off whites just to make Asians happy.
I am white, I think ending AA is a good thing because MERITOCRACY, and I don't care how many whites that pisses off.
Maybe the Dems don't have a "self" to reflect on.
Big tent problem.
It's fundamentally illogical to believe that on one hand diversity is real and valuable and on the other to simultaneously argue that diversity won't lead to different outcomes in real world metrics like educational attainment, salary, and so on. It's hard not to shake the feeling that the woke set are comfortable with the idea of "diversity" as it applies to skin color but balk at the idea that it could affect individual perceptions and cultural values: for example, views on the proper role of women in society.
I agree with this column 100%. Freddie points out one of the contradictions of woke thought: If you treat a POC as a member of their race, you're othering and tokenizing them, which is bad; but if you treat them as an individual, you're invalidating their experience as a POC in a racist society, and that's equally bad. "Colorblindness is racist!"
And the idea of "white-adjacent" is just a No True Scotsman fallacy:
"No person of color can be successful in a white supremacist society!"
"But [Asian-American person] is wealthy and well-educated."
"Well then, [Asian-American person] is No True Person of Color! She's white-adjacent!"
POC can never be white, but if they succeed or diverge in their political views, it’s because they’re white.
Or has internalized "whiteness." Heterodox black intellectuals get that one a great deal.
These points are all excellent. I have a tangential one:
I've begun to think that the term "stereotype" obfuscates more than it illuminates. It's easy to forget that it is of relatively recent vintage. It serves only to discredit the making of generalizations as a pejorative synonym for them. Whereas any reasonable person recognizes that generalizations serve a purpose, when used correctly.
Such a great piece. Agree 100%
The criticism I’ve seen of the model minority is that it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison. It takes immigrants who are selected based on their skills and education and compares it with a population of local peasants. It’s not a fair comparison to compare the upper crust of one society with the dregs of another.
But the generic immigrant advantage is not nearly as large or consistent as the Asian advantage; east Asian students who stay in their home countries perform very well on international comparisons; and though students from refugee populations like Cambodian or Laotian do lag behind their Chinese and Korean peers they are catching up quickly with successive generations. So I dunno.
What you didn't mention was the advantage of immigrants from some Caribbean countries like Jamaica, etc., who are similarly successful to some asian groups...
Look at the PISA scores for the home countries of those immigrants. The problem can be multivariate--it can be both an immigrant self-selection effect plus cultural values in their country of origin.
The percentage of Asian Americans living in poverty in NYC is higher than any other ethnic group. Simultaneously Asian students make up the majority of students at New York's elite public high schools.
Are you saying that poor people can have a desire to have their kids do well?
And devote their efforts to helping kids instead of being consumers?
Dangerous Visions, indeed!
Wow, Day After Daylight Savings Time Brain Fog is really a thing. I’m not alert enough for Freddie’s prose this PDT morning.
Great piece.
I think Asian demographic outcomes are proof that culture matters and race, gender, etc... do not.