[rayiner]

> The background of a lot of these immigrants made them well-qualified to succeed despite their American socio-economic status on arrival

Immigration filtering explains a lot, but the general trend holds even for subgroups that aren’t subject to those filters.

Some Asian groups, like Vietnamese, came to the US as refugees, not skilled workers. In 1980, poverty rates among Vietnamese people were among the highest off any ethnic group. Today, Vietnamese have similar income levels to non-Hispanic whites.

Moreover, the kids of poor Asians have much more income mobility than the kids of similarly placed whites. Asian children who grow up in the bottom 20% of the income distribution have a 25% chance of ending up in the top 20%, compared to an 11% chance for white kids. These poor Asians are typically in America as a result of family reunification. Thus, neither the kids nor the parents are subject to filters such as H1B job requirements.

How do you escape the conclusion that culture makes the difference?

[908B64B197]

Asians are actually a huge problem for Critical Race Theory supporters, because almost every measurable statistic about them contradict CRT.

Hence, some scholar coined the term "white-adjacent" so they can conveniently cherry-pick and ignore Asians when it's convenient. [0] [1]

[0] https://www.newsweek.com/critical-race-theory-has-no-idea-wh...

[1] https://www.asian-dawn.com/2020/11/17/school-district-catego...

[tedivm]

Your examples are two opinion pieces that seem to not actually understand what critical race theory even is. Asians aren't a problem for the people who study critical race theory, it's really only a problem for people who have no clue what they're talking about.

[rayiner]

Asians and Hispanics create two problems for critical race theory, one pretty easily fixable another less so.

1) CRT, originally developed in the 1970s, generally assumes a black-white dichotomy. Insofar as it addresses Hispanics and Asians, it does so by putting them in the “black” column—victims of oppression in a system of “white supremacy.” But that’s plainly not true. If you look at the statistics, the closest comparison to the experience of poor Latino and Asian immigrants is poor white immigrants like Italians. They are achieving economic parity with whites within a couple of generations. They don’t face persistent multi-generational gaps like black and indigenous people do.

2) Asians (and to a lesser extent Latinos) broadly do not share the political premise of CRT: that our economic and political systems are tainted by “white supremacy” and must be fundamentally changed. That flows partly from culture. Animosity between different ethnic and cultural groups is widespread in Asia and Latin America. Generally speaking, it’s perceived as bad manners, not an existential threat to prosperity. My parents never talked to me about racism growing up, and I suspect that’s pretty typical in Asian and Latino families. By contrast, I think such conversations is very common among black Americans. That attitude is reinforced by the economics. The experience of the overwhelming majority of the kids of Asian and Latino immigrants is closing the gap with whites as compared to their parents. The notion, fundamental to CRT, that non-whites can only make progress through coordinated changes to the system isn’t compatible with their lives experience.

[kelseyfrog]

> Insofar as it addresses Hispanics and Asians, it does so by putting them in the “black” column—victims of oppression in a system of “white supremacy.”

Can you point to CRT works that do this? I'd like to read them.

[rayiner]

Sure, look at the California Model Ethnic Studies Curriculum: https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/cr/cf/documents/esmcchapter4.pdf. It takes Kendi's black-white oppressed-oppressor dichotomy, and simply shuffles asians into the oppressed, non-white category.

Lesson 14:

> It presents a false narrative that Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) have overcome racism and prejudice. It glosses over the violence, harm, and legalized racism that AAPIs have endured, for example, the 1871 Chinese massacre in Los Angeles, the annexation of Hawaii, shooting of Southeast Asian schoolchildren in Stockton.

Lesson 16:

>Chinese Americans are Americans and have played a key role in building this country. Had it not been for this workforce, one of the greatest engineering feats of the nineteenth century (the first transcontinental railroad and others that followed), would not have been achieved within the allotted timeline.

It's a projection of how CRT views black history, where ethnic identity is defined in terms of historical discrimination. Meanwhile, do kids of German, Italian, or Irish descent in California learn about the intense racism their ancestors faced when they came here? Of course not.

What's especially galling is that German, Italian, and Irish Americans are at least the descendants of people who faced intense discrimination when they got to America. Meanwhile, virtually all Asian Americans are descended from people who came here after 1950, and mostly after 1990. California is teaching Asian kids to identify with historically discriminated people who aren't even their ancestors.

[908B64B197]

> What's especially galling is that German, Italian, and Irish Americans are at least the descendants of people who faced intense discrimination when they got to America. Meanwhile, virtually all Asian Americans are descended from people who came here after 1950, and mostly after 1990. California is teaching Asian kids to identify with historically discriminated people who aren't even their ancestors.

Especially for Asians, a lot of them came to America fleeing persecutions in their home countries... from other Asians! I'm thinking Vietnamese refugees fighting against the communist regime and people from Hong Kong fleeing the Chinese Communist Party at home.

[kelseyfrog]

I should have been more clear. I mean like original works by CRT scholars that do this. Something with a DOI would be great.

[rayiner]

I also think the CRT worldview naturally produces a prejudice against Asians. For example: https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Alison-Collins-San-F...

The CRT worldview makes slavery the central event of history, and oppression by whites the central theme. That’s what’s going on in the Nikole Hannah-Jones quote above. How do those folks perceive immigrant groups that come here and tell their kids to shut up and work hard? I think that leads straight to the idea that Asians are complicit in “upholding white supremacy.” And even white people like John Oliver get in on that narrative.

Of course from our perspective we are just raising our kids according to our culture. In broad strokes, both east and south Asian cultures tend to be deferential to authority and emphasize an internal locus of control. If you ask my mom why bangladesh is poor, she’ll point to corruption and other moral failings, not British colonialism. Whether that is accurate or not, that’s completely at odds with the CRT worldview, which emphasizes an external locus of control—blaming oppression by whites for everything.

[tptacek]

Nikole Hannah-Jones is a journalist, not a Critical Race Theorist. Find a better descriptor for this (perhaps prevalent) "worldview" than "the CRT worldview". Prompted by a bunch of unproductive discussions like this one, I took some time and actually read a bunch of CRT journal articles, and none of these discussions intersect what actual CRT work says. That may be as much a fault of popular culture and pop sociology as it is HN's, but either way, it's annoying.

It is easy to make a case that Nikole Hannah-Jones essentializes the transatlantic slave trade. But it is unreasonable to generalize from Hannah-Jones to a whole field of study without evidence.

[rayiner]

Nikole Hannah-Jones has a degree in African American Studies, so I think the label is perfectly apt. It's like "supply-side economics." It's a useful label for political ideas that are adjacent to an academic theory of the same name.

[tptacek]

Hannah-Jones has a bachelors in history. My sister has a degree in Russian Literature. But she's a lawyer, not a literature critic. Hannah-Jones is not a Critical Race Theorist. That is an actual thing, and your education brought you closer to it than Hannah-Jones' did.

[rayiner]

https://profiles.howard.edu/nikole-hannah-jones (“Hannah-Jones holds a Master of Arts in Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and earned her Bachelor of Arts in History and African-American studies from the University of Notre Dame.”).

The ship has sailed on trying to limit “CRT” to its original academic meaning. People needed a word to refer to the ideology that had suddenly become prominent in public discourse, and “CRT” won. See: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/please-just-fucking-tel...

[derangedHorse]

I put a lot of work into my citing the data sources from my comments so that the numbers can be vetted by the institutions they were reported by. Do you have any sources you can reference that show where you get your numbers from?