Like many Asian Americans, I was once a firm believer in the American ideals of merit and grit.
Growing up, I attended a magnet school in New York City, a public high school like San Francisco’s elite Lowell High that required an admissions test. Tens of thousands of middle schoolers prepared for years to take this test. The overwhelming majority didn’t make the cut. The ones who did seemed to already know each other from the prep courses they’d taken to get there.
Each day, the lucky few of us who were admitted into this bastion of privilege made the trek to lower Manhattan from all over the city — where we were told by our teachers and our communities that we were special: that we were the champions of our own success. At college admissions time, students and teachers alike would obsess over how many of us got into Yale, Harvard, Princeton and the other Ivy League schools.
About three-quarters of the student body were Asian Americans, with a majority of East Asians (Chinese, Taiwanese, Korean and Japanese). On the other hand, the number of Black students on campus was so low that they could all fit on about three lunch tables. This was New York: there was no dearth of Black students in the city. The public high school that I walked by every morning on the way to the subway had a clear Black majority.
At the time, I justified this disparity by finding refuge in the idea of meritocracy. All of us are where we belong due to the work we put in, I reasoned. Asians work harder, so there more Asians in elite schools like mine. We deserved this. We were the wheat; the chaff deserved to go to the bad schools.
I certainly wasn’t alone in this line of thinking. In her upcoming book, “Asian Americans in an Anti-Black World,” political scientist Claire Jean Kim observes that Asian American history includes many versions of the idea that the superior quality of our labor is the origin of our successes and that denying us the boons of that hard work flies in the face of everything this country stands for.
“The poor Chinaman does not come here as a slave. He comes because of his desire for independence … he sets to work with patience, industry, temperance, and economy,” Chinatown leaders in San Francisco wrote in an 1852 open letter, protesting then-California Gov. John Bigler’s comparison of “degraded Asiatics” to enslaved Africans.
In 1968, S.I. Hayakawa, the nisei interim president of San Francisco State College and an eventual U.S. Senator, reprimanded strikers at his university led by the newly founded Black Students Union by saying, “We (Asian Americans) are a colored race of non-whites — we’ve been through the same thing but we’ve been able to come through it better than the Negroes have.”
More recently, in a 2021 letter addressed to the Department of Justice, the president of the Asian American Coalition for Education, an anti-affirmative action lobbying group, wrote, “Asian Americans have been historically discriminated against in American society. Nevertheless, many of us have achieved our American dream mainly through hardwork (sic), as well as an emphasis on education and family valuces (sic), rather than political favorism (sic) or privilege.”
The idea of a group using its superior work ethic and grit to transcend American racism and discrimination is a tempting means to stroke the ego, and I fell for it. That was until college, when I randomly picked up “The Dispossessed,” a novel by Ursula K. Le Guin. I couldn’t help reading these two sentences over and over again: “No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.”
When I stepped back and looked at the bigger picture, I began to realize that my high school classmates and I weren’t particularly special. I was never the most well-behaved student, but I was given any number of breaks by authority figures. My open love for reading and writing seemed to charm my teachers into forgiving me for, say, habitually handing in essays weeks after they were due.
Black students are rarely given this kind of runway and are punished harshly when they slip up. A 2018 analysis found that while Black youth make up 15.5% of all public school students, they experience 39% of the suspensions. Another study of middle schools found that discipline methods escalated much faster for Black students for the same number of infractions. In counties where researchers measured an “average” amount of anti-Black and pro-white implicit (subconscious) bias, 16% of Black students were given an out-of-school suspension in a given school year, compared to 5% of white students. From unequal access to $1,200 test prep courses to chronically underfunded public schools, there were clear structural reasons that explained my school’s three-table population of Black students. And they had little to do with merit or deservedness.
All of this speaks to a deepening rift among Asian Americans and an existential one at that: Are we on the side of racial justice only when it benefits us?
In the name of justice for Asian American victims of violent crime, for instance, vocal contingents within the community have called for tougher hate crime laws while sharing viral social media posts pointing almost exclusively at Black offenders. Yet according to the FBI’s latest hate crime data (which admittedly relies on the sometimes-uneven reports of local law enforcement), the single most common perpetrators of violent hate crimes are non-Hispanic white people.
In fighting to avoid desegregating the San Francisco public school system in the 1990s, thus denying equal access to education to Black students, Chinese American activists invoked Jim Crow and the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case.
“The San Francisco school district, the state, and the NAACP have put themselves in the same position as George Wallace in the early 1960s — they are saying quotas then, quotas now, and quotas forever,” said Amy Chang of the Asian American Legal Foundation, which supported lawsuits against the district, as quoted in Kim’s book.
While the rhetoric of civil rights can elevate a cause into something lofty, there’s something deeply strange and unaware about those references being weaponized to actively continue segregation and the criminalization of Black people.
In her summation of the desegregation case, Kim wrote: “Chinese Americans displaced Black people from their own history and occupied it instead, borrowing the moral authority of the Black struggle to undercut a program that was the fruit of that struggle.”
Friends of Lowell Foundation director Diane Yap, who became nationally known for leading last year’s recall of three San Francisco school board members, is arguably one such activist. She recently testified at a U.S. Commission on Civil Rights briefing on anti-Asian discrimination, where she asserted that there’s a wrench stuck in the otherwise smooth turnings of American meritocracy — and it’s called “equity.”
“When poverty and low academic achievement no longer plague San Francisco’s black community at today’s rates, perhaps they won’t feel so much resentment towards Asians that they violently lash out on a regular basis,” she wrote this month in a Substack post on Black-on-Asian crime.
Channeling Hayakawa in a Substack post from last year, she wrote, “Asians continue to be the victims of systemic racism” just like other people of color, but excel in standardized tests and other “objective” measures of intelligence despite it.
So why, she asks, are others playing victim and trying to take opportunities away from us?
In an email, Yap told me that school admissions are the most important fight for Asian Americans today. “Unfortunately, Asian Americans do not currently enjoy equal rights under the law. It is a shame that Asian Americans are not seen as deserving of civil rights like other groups, including the right to not be discriminated against based on race.”
But there’s a lot of history missing in this view. And in taking these beliefs at face value, Asian Americans risk pulling up the ladder as we climb, ultimately worsening opportunity for everyone.
Yes, Asian Americans have experienced and continue to experience racism in this country. But denying the structural advantages that Asian Americans have, simply by virtue of not being Black, isn’t anti-Asian: It’s reality. Asian Americans were never subject to chattel slavery, weren’t steered into subprime mortgages based on our race, and aren’t seeing staggering rates of homelessness and incarceration due to systematic and multigenerational economic inequality.
And it’s not just conservatives like Yap who have a tendency to blur reality regarding race in America. In her book, Kim argues that appropriation of racial oppression happens on the left, too; it’s an opportunity cost of the coalitional fight for civil rights among people of color.
“(Progressives) say, ‘Yeah, we’re all racialized, we’re all oppressed,’ ” Kim told me in an interview. “But, you know, being called too good at math is not the same thing as being shot by the police for walking down the street. If we want that dream of racial solidarity to actually happen, we need to look at the truth.”
According to Kim, it’s not just that Asian Americans are pawns pitted against Black people by powerful whites. In her book, she outlines the numerous ways throughout history that Asians have worked to separate themselves from Black people, from using eugenics to justify racial hierarchies to suing to be on the right (white) side of Jim Crow laws.
In an 1897 opinion piece criticizing Chinese exclusion, San Francisco activist Wong Chin Foo wrote, “We (Chinese) feel grieved and humiliated every time we behold our colored brethren, even from the wilds of African jungles, sit and eat from the National family table, while we, the descendants of the oldest race on earth, are not even allowed to pick up the crumbs from under the table!” This piece was published one year after Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court case that upheld (actual) Jim Crow. And it’s a far cry from famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass’ pro-immigration stance, expressed in an 1867 speech. “I want a home here not only for the negro, the mulatto and the Latin races; but I want the Asiatic to find a home here in the United States, and feel at home here, both for his sake and for ours.”
To me, Wong’s crumb metaphor really sums up the crux of the problem. Instead of demanding more bread for everyone, it’s easier to strategically point at the ones you think are undeserving of it. Then, you don’t have to change or give anything up. This scarcity mindset implies that there must be a finite amount of opportunity in the world and a finite number of ways to be a good, valuable person, principles that make equity out to be a zero-sum game. Conveniently, this view aligns with white right-wingers like conservative judicial activist Ed Blum, who has spent decades fighting affirmative action, the Voting Rights Act and diversity efforts in the corporate world; all are efforts to shrink the size of America’s metaphorical bread.
The idea that we live in a historical vacuum and succeed solely based on our own efforts is a fantasy, a convenient lie that we tell to justify who wins and who loses. But we can and should get creative and find other ways to thrive. We don’t all have to battle it out over crumbs.
Reach Soleil Ho: soleil@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @hooleil
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May 13, 2023 at 06:03PM
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