Are Asian Americans privileged? For example, would you say that Vietnamese refugees and descendants of trafficked Chinese railroad laborers have been celebrated and given unfair advantages by white society?
This is an extremely touchy and hotbutton issue. Many scholors have researched this very topic quite a bit. It helps to illustrate the point when you look into historical tensions between the black and Asian communities, especially in California.
Asian communities face less discrimination from the white community as there hasn't been a lot of reinforcement of negative stereotypes relating to any of the Asian communities. Compare that with the history and treatment of the black community and you can trace a direct line from slavery to where many communities are today. A lot of propaganda regarding black people had been fed to whites for hundreds of years in order to justify their enslavement.
The black community has seen Asians as a "preferred minority" who has benefited from their civil rights work and at the same time given opportunities they didn't have without giving back to black communities.
There is a lot of nuance in there, but that's the super short version.
> Asian communities face less discrimination from the white community
I am based in Europe so I maybe things are different here. We still hear a lot about how minorities are discriminated against, but it always seems based on equality of outcome as the "proof", and it seems to be pretty selective where they are looking. I see little evidence of real discrimination in fact most people seem quite disgusted by it.
Asian-American encompasses an very diverse set of experiences in America, you can’t really create a cohesive narrative in the same way you could with other groups. The fact that you easily identify different groups with very distinct experiences should clue you in to that.
So your claim is that Asian-Americans are diverse, while black and Hispanic people each form unvariegated, homogeneous identities?
I very intentionally point out particular groups in my original comment, because proponents of race-based affirmative action always avoid grappling with why it's fair to discriminate against some relatively successful subgroups of Asian Americans by bringing up red herrings about Hmong and Cambodian refugees (who, it's worth pointing out, are typically excluded from the benefits of affirmative action anyway, which makes it even more of a red herring).
If you take the population of black Americans you’ll find that the overwhelming majority of them have their history in the ~3.9 million people trafficked during the slave trade and the following diaspora from the south throughout the 40s-60s, the majority as in 80%+. If you look at Asian Americans, you’ll find that the overwhelming majority of them do not descend from the ~20k transcontinental railroad laborers.
It’s not hard to tell that their experiences must be vastly different, because 20k is a very small proportion of the total Asian American population, while 3.5m is a much larger percentage.
I hope this help you with differentiating how relatively homogeneous groups are.
At the same time it's fair to say that many of the Asian Americans will come from families that arrived with very little and have managed to become successful in the US within a generation or two, through hard work and disciple, no?
Asian communities face less discrimination from the white community as there hasn't been a lot of reinforcement of negative stereotypes relating to any of the Asian communities. Compare that with the history and treatment of the black community and you can trace a direct line from slavery to where many communities are today. A lot of propaganda regarding black people had been fed to whites for hundreds of years in order to justify their enslavement.
The black community has seen Asians as a "preferred minority" who has benefited from their civil rights work and at the same time given opportunities they didn't have without giving back to black communities.
There is a lot of nuance in there, but that's the super short version.