Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Con-fusion Ethic: How Whites Use Asians to Further Anti-Black Racism / Oct 05

[Howard Landman (howard]

Tim Wise makes some important points.  I just wish he had been less sloppy
in his reasoning.  If you're trying to counter incorrect and biased logic,
it's a good idea not to make the same kind of blunders as the people you're
correcting.

For example, consider:
> "If racism is such a big deal in America, then why have Asians done so
> well? Why is Asian income higher than white income? Doesn't this prove
> that the problem with blacks is simply a lack of effort?"   
and:
> I thought about the Asian families whose members have to put in 80 hours a
> week just to keep their heads above water; and I wondered, in what sense
> were they "doing so well?"   

Tim describes how hard some Asian families work as a COUNTER-EXAMPLE to the
notion that Asian-American families work harder than African-American
families.  Isn't he directly undermining his own argument?

> I thought about the Asian women working twelve
> hours a day in garment sweatshops both abroad and in places like Los
> Angeles

Tim is mixing in Asians outside America and using them to imply that
Asian-American are poorer than we think.  This is just wrong.  He does
make a valid point about poverty of non-American Asians elsewhere, but
that's not the topic of discussion for the above quote.

Note the times in the following:
> the Asian "model minority" myth has long been a staple
> of white conservative race commentary ... The
> genesis of this argumentation goes back to the 1950's and '60's,
...
> Neither [the media] nor any adherent to the model minority
> image spoke out against internment of "hard-working" Japanese Americans
> during World War Two

Tim apparently expects us to find it shocking that no adherent of a concept
which he claims originated in the 1950s and 60s spoke out against something
which occurred in the 1940s.

Also, while few spoke out against the relocation and internment (even the
Japanese American Citizens League cooperated fully with it!), there were many
who spoke out against the shoddy conditions of the camps and against the
movement to strip Japanese-Americans of their citizenship.  For example,
Governor Ralph L. Carr of Colorado:

         One of the few voices of reason during wartime was Governor Carr,
         who continued to treat the Japanese-Americans with respect
         and sought to help them keep their American citizenship. He
         sacrificed his political career to bravely confront the often
         dark side of human nature. "If you harm them, you must harm
         me. I was brought up in a small town where I knew the shame
         and dishonor of race hatred. I grew to despise it because
         it threatened the happiness of you and you and you." Carr's
         selfless devotion to all Americans, while destroying his
         hopes for a senate seat, did in the end become extolled as,
         "a small voice but a strong voice."
                (http://www.archives.state.co.us/govs/carr.html)

Compare:
> the Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi taxi drivers who
> endure crappy working conditions [etc.]
with:
> Asian immigrants are largely drawn from an occupational and educational
> elite in their countries of origin. ... between
> two-thirds and three-quarters of the highly-educated APA community in the
> U.S. already had college degrees or were in college upon their arrival.  
> ... Asian Americans are
> two-thirds more likely than whites and three times more likely than blacks
> to have a college degree. More than eight in ten Indian immigrants from
> 1966-1977 had advanced degrees and training in such areas as science,
> medicine or as engineers.  
and it becomes clear that Tim is not interested in making any kind of
statisticaly valid arguments, as he throws in anecdotal stories that
(by his own quoted statistics) are about a small and atypical fraction
of the population he's discussing.

> to claim superior Asian genes or culture as the reasons for achievement in
> the U.S. requires one to ignore the rampant poverty and lack of success
> for persons from the same genetic or cultural backgrounds in their
> countries of origin. There is no shortage, after all, of desperately poor
> Asians in the slums of Manila, Calcutta and Hong Kong: testament to the
> absurdity of cultural superiority claims for Asians as a group.  

Again Tim confuses Asians with Asian-Americans.  If one happened to
be an adherent of the viewpoint that there is a genetic component
to intelligence, for example, AND one accepted Tim's argument
that Asian-Americans have been highly selected from the elites of
their countries of origin, then it would be natural to suppose that
Asian-Americans have better genes (on average) than the population from
which they emigrated.  This doesn't "require one to ignore" anything.

The same analysis applies to "culture", since the average educational
level, family expectations, literacy rate, number of languages spoken,
etc. are MUCH higher among Asian-Americans than among general Asians.
The culture is different, measurably so, and this has obvious and
measurable effects (for example on school success of Asian-American
children).  Yet Tim assumes there is no difference.  He's wrong.

I'm not saying that all of Tim's conclusions are wrong.  He has lots of
good points.  But his reasoning is extremely shoddy, he abuses statistics
frequently, and many times he doesn't even seem to know what point he's
trying to make.  Which is sad, because some of his points deserve to be
made clearly.

        Howard A. Landman
        River Rock Commons
        Fort Collins, CO

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