Downlo

post-colonial:

Note: I am not getting involved into Tumblr clusterfucks about ‘Asian privilege’ but this is worth reading for Asians and non-Asians alike who doubt that the model minority MYTH is proof that Asians are Most Favored

It’s not every day that deep and rigorous research about Asian Americans is released to the public. So when the well-respected Pew Research Center released “The Rise of Asian Americans,” a comprehensive report on the community on Tuesday, it should have been reason enough to celebrate. Instead, the report, which hailed Asians as the fastest-growing and highest-achieving racial group in the country, drew widespread criticism from Asian American scholars, advocates and lawmakers who raised alarm about the report, and warned against taking it seriously at all. Poor research of an oft-overlooked community, it turns out, might do more damage than no research at all.

We are “deeply concerned about how findings from a recent study by the Pew Research Center have been used to portray Asian Americans,” the Asian American Center for Advancing Justice, a network of civil rights advocacy groups said on Wednesday. The report’s authors, the AACAJ said, “paint a picture of Asian Americans as a model minority, having the highest income and educational attainment among racial groups. These portrayals are overly simplistic.”

The Pew report included both census data and social trend polling of the six largest Asian-American ethnicities—Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese. These communities make up 85 percent of the roughly 17 million Asian Americans. According to Pew, half of Asians in the U.S. graduated from college, compared with just 30 percent for the general population, and report a median annual household income of $66,000* when Americans as a whole make $49,000…

Critics say the Pew report mixes some fact with too much mythology about what people imagine Asians to be. While a portrayal of Asian Americans as high-achieving, and adept at overcoming humble beginnings to reach great financial and educational success seems flattering, many Asian Americans say this frame is not only factually inaccurate, it’s damaging to the community.

*One of the reasons the median ‘Asian’ income is higher than most racial groups is because there are very few Asian Americans compared to most other groups (they make up less than 3% of the population) and the vast majority live in extremely expensive cities. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they are richer, it means that the cost of living in these cities is higher but for specific reasons, Asians have patterns of settling there (think LA, Cali, Texas is cheap but living in Houston is not always cheap, etc). Again this is a statistical slight that doesn’t show you the whole picture.

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Glossing over the class and educational disparities (among other things) among Asian Americans not only reinforces racist perceptions of Asians as interchangeable (“all the same”), but serves to reinforce the white supremacist race hierarchy:

The narrative fits in neatly with a very American “bootstraps” ethos, where people rise and fall on their own skills and merits. It’s a convenient narrative for silencing other groups who try to make claims of institutional racism and racial discrimination. “There’s this aspect of the media coverage where races are being played against each other,” said Yeung. “The not so implicit message is Asians are the better people of color whereas blacks and Latinos are seen as having all these kinds of problems, so why can’t all people of color be like us.”

For whatever reason, many white Americans seem to think that ‘white’ = WASP (white Anglo Saxon Protestant) and that folks whose forebears came over on the Mayflower are the actual whites, not the Italians, Russian Jews, Irish Catholics, etc. It’s certainly true that non-Anglo European ethnic groups were once considered nonwhite. But the definition of whiteness changed generations ago to encompass pretty much any European ethnicity that embraced white supremacy. So nonwhites from Europe got to become white ethnic Americans and enjoy white privilege. And nonwhites from every other continent remained nonwhite…because what’s the point of being white if there are no nonwhite people around to oppress?

Yet I’ve had many conversations with white Americans who’ve tried to employ that throwback definition of whiteness, to treat ‘white’ as though it only means ‘WASP’. Conveniently, this distancing from whiteness tends to only occur during conversations about racism. I don’t think they realize that whiteness is achieved, but that non-whiteness is thrust upon you. Their European ancestors gladly handed in their nonwhite badges as soon as they were able to do so. This was an opportunity that many others at the time did not have (though some tried) because their ethnicity was visible in their skin color, hair texture, eye shape, etc.

What’s particularly annoying is when white Americans not only deny their whiteness, but attempt to use their immigrant ancestry to appropriate ‘person of color’ as an identity. ‘People of color’ was devised as a positive, empowering alternative to terms like ‘minorities’ and ‘nonwhites’, which can be inaccurate or suggest otherness and inferiority. The term subverts the usual racial dynamic by suggesting that white people lack color instead of us lacking whiteness. ‘People of color’ is a specifically racial term. It does not mean ‘ethnic people’ or ‘non-WASPs’.

It is also a modern term that began gaining prominence by being employed by racial justice advocates in the 1960s and ’70s. It is nonsensical and self-serving to use an archaic definition of non-whiteness in order to claim a label that modern nonwhites popularized.

So the fact that your ethnicity wasn’t considered white generations ago doesn’t mean you can get away with claiming to be nonwhite or a person of color today. You still benefit from white privilege. And claiming POC status so on the basis of your Euro ethnic identity is particularly offensive since your ancestors chose to leave non-whiteness behind by stepping on black people, Mexicans, Chinese, Indians, and other nonwhites on their way up the racial hierarchy.

Some further reading:

• Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America, Mary C. Waters
• How the Irish Became White, Noel Ignatiev
• Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race, Matthew Frye Jacobson (pdf with excerpts)
  

Ross Douthat wrote a predictable, pageview-grabby piece about America’s declining birthrate. It’s not entirely terrible, but he chose to end with an eyebrow-raising point:

Beneath these policy debates, though, lie cultural forces that no legislator can really hope to change. The retreat from child rearing is, at some level, a symptom of late-modern exhaustion — a decadence that first arose in the West but now haunts rich societies around the globe. It’s a spirit that privileges the present over the future, chooses stagnation over innovation, prefers what already exists over what might be. It embraces the comforts and pleasures of modernity, while shrugging off the basic sacrifices that built our civilization in the first place.

Such decadence need not be permanent, but neither can it be undone by political willpower alone. It can only be reversed by the slow accumulation of individual choices, which is how all social and cultural recoveries are ultimately made.

Well that bit of nuttiness pretty much undermines all of the more sensible things he says earlier in the column. I’m lazy, so here’s a roundup of responses to Douthat that cover all the points that I was going to make anyway:

Echidne-of-the-Snakes highlights the implicit sexism of Douthat’s editorial, as well as its short-sighted nationalism:

Douthat’s piece wonders what might happen if the drop in fertility becomes permanent.  He even hesitantly suggests public sector support for families with children but not the kind of support which has been shown to raise birth rates:  Paid parental leaves and subsidized daycare.  Those were probably omitted because they allow women to work in the labor force AND have more children.  But anything which does NOT support women’s ability to remain in the work force will not affect the reduced fertility rates.

Whether high birth rates are desirable, from a global point of view, is a different question. Douthat limits his viewpoint to competition between countries, failing to ask how many people this earth can support if, as is most likely, all of them wish to have a style of living which is currently available for only the wealthier parts of the world.

Jamelle Bouie for The American Prospect points out that there’s nothing ‘decadent’ or wrong about people wanting to enjoy lives freed from the burdens of childrearing, especially given how difficult it is to balance work with raising a family. Douthat’s column seems to be insidiously blaming women, who are still the primary caretakers of children in most households, for not choosing motherhood in greater numbers:

The simple fact is that it’s only been in the last century that a substantial number of ordinary people have been been able to build decent lives free of severe hardship. If men andwomen are choosing to “embrace the comforts and pleasures of modernity,” it’s because they are far preferable to the pains and troubles of an earlier time, where happiness was a luxury for ordinary people.

Which isn’t to say that things are perfect now, or even good. But they are substantially better than in the past. That is especially true for women, who seem to be the chief target of Douthat’s disdain.

I think Douthat has accurately described the attitude of modern people in the world’s richest societies. The fact of the matter, however, is that this is only “decadence” to those who—by dint of class and identity—can harbor fantasies of an earlier, harder time, secure in the knowledge that they would never have to suffer.

Lawyers, Guns, and Money notes the nativism in Douthat’s concern over the declining U.S. birthrate:

…while there’s generally a hefty amount of dishonesty in Douthat’s columns, one claim from today’s stands out: “with fertility in decline across Mexico and Latin America, it isn’t clear that the United States can continue to rely heavily on immigrant birthrates to help drive population growth.”

The US currently admits a tiny fraction of those who apply for legal resident status, and the number who apply is almost certainly depressed by the extraordinarily long odds of success, especially for those without a plausible asylum claim or family reunification angle. We could change immigration policy to admit substantially more immigrants than we now do…

Of course, a steady or slightly growing population generated by high immigration rather than birth rates will lead to a more racially and culturally diverse polity. This would be a welcome development for a host of reasons, one of which would be that it would hasten the coming of the moment in which the Republican party is forced to choose between being a nationally competitive party or a party heavily invested in nativist white identity politics.

Matthew Yglesias points out that social conservatives need to shift their views on economic policy if they’re serious about promoting families:

Josh Barro wrote a shrewd column the other day arguing that conservatives need to get over their gut-level hostility to “redistribition” in order to find an intellectually respectable way of making their agenda relevant to middle-class concerns. The sensible parts of Douthat’s column offer perhaps another way of looking at this. In much of the aughts, the GOP seemed to be pushing an unpopular, elite-focused economic agenda and getting away with it by yoking it to a popular social conservative agenda. But with public opinion rapidly shifting on gay equality and the demographic composition of the electorate shifting, that particular combo doesn’t work as well as it used to. The way back could involve shifting economic policy for social conservative reasons exactly as the extensive welfare states in Sweden and France are designed, in part, to specifically promote the interests of people with kids.

So whenever you see someone freaking out about the declining native birthrate in first world countries like the U.S. or Japan or Europe, question why that’s such a bad thing. In nearly all cases, the hand-wringing over fertility is really a concern over increasing immigration and greater reproductive freedom and economic opportunities for women.

Finally, if conservatives really are serious about wanting more young workers to help support an increasingly aging population, then they have to 1) institute a more liberal, flexible immigration policy and/or 2) figure out how to provide incentives for people who want to start families. Not just child tax credits, but things that allow people (especially women) to be workers and parents at the same time, like affordable daycare, universal preschool education, flexible work hours/career paths, etc. Blaming ‘decadent’ individual choices as if they’re divorced from the economic and social realities of having children is just conservative nonsense.

dammitcaleb:

This statement came across my tumblr dashboard today w/o any further explanation, information, etc. I haven’t received a response to my simple question of “Why?”. This post isn’t a direct response to the OP, so much as my thoughts around this sentiment, as I’ve heard it plenty of times in many situations in my life, and I’ll consider some basic assumptions based on what I know about the OP, namely that he is a white man living in San Diego, California which has a considerable resident population of people born outside of the US—from Mexico, largely. 

First, I can’t imagine a situation in which it is not xenophobic to make a generalised statement to an un-named group of people in which one demands that this group of people should learn your language.

This is not to say that life in general would not be simpler if everyone involved had a common language. That goes without saying, but statements like this imply that the subject of your statement hasn’t already considered that this is probably a good idea. I guarantee you, someone who is in a situation in which a lot of people speak a language that they don’t speak has considered how much easier it would be if they all spoke the same language. Telling people that they should learn your language is patronising, narcissistic, and rude.

Learning a foreign language is not easy for many people. If you’re one of those for whom this comes naturally, consider yourself lucky and learn one. For the others, learning a new language becomes more difficult as one approaches adulthood. English is considered to be one of the harder languages for non-native speakers to learn, owing to its many “exceptions to the rule” when it comes to spelling and pronunciation. These are, themselves, the result of the English Language’s history of absorbing words from literally all over the world (following the path of colonisation, naturally). 

Also, when people say this, there’s an underlying assumption (sometimes outrightly stated) that people who are in the US and who don’t speak English are somehow being inconsiderate or disrespectful or that they’ve at some point made a decision to not learn English. My first-thought reaction to this is always: It’s not all about you! Again, English isn’t easy to learn. People who don’t speak English are in the US for lots of reasons. People who migrate to the US without fluency in English do so for many more reasons, and not a single one of them is so they can be a nuisance to Ugly Americans. These people generally understand (in my admittedly limited, though representative, experience) that their assimilation into and success in US society would be simpler with fluency in the common language. Many of the people you encounter who have immigrated to the US from Mexico and who don’t speak English are likely poor people who might be working more than one low-wage job in the US. Even someone who has only one low-wage job might not have the resources (ie, money for classes) to learn a foreign language. 

Immigrants historically settle in communities with people of similar background, reducing the need to learn a foreign language. This is true throughout history, around the world, and is not likely to change any time soon.

People who say things like this (and other, sometimes more blatantly racist statements) often say, “But my friend/spouse/sibling-in-law is [insert type of Brown Person] and agrees/doesn’t get mad/thinks this is OK to say!”.

I believe you. I do. 

I believe you without a doubt, without qualification, and without even needing to confirm that this person you described exists and, in fact, doesn’t mind when you say these incredibly dehumanizing things. I believe this because People of Color (POC) are all individuals and all have different ways of managing the racism that is directed at us consistently and constantly when we live in the US. Many of us start to agree with parts of it, or tell ourselves it’s “not that bad”, or “that’s just how things are”, etc. This doesn’t make it The Right Thing To Do. Also, don’t use your friend/spouse/sibling-in-law as a human shield. Fight your own goddamned fight & try to understand this on your own.

“But English is the Official Language of America.”

No, it’s not.

English is the Common Tongue, really. Besides the fact that the US just doesn’t have an Official Language, nothing would really change if it did. When a country has an Official Language, this generally means that matters of Law & Business are conducted in that language. In the US, these are already conducted in English, & it’s already required that those petitioning for US citizenship should demonstrate fluency in English so… what is there to gain from declaring an Official Language, really? You can’t really penalise people for speaking another language—what would that do for tourism and foreign relations?

In closing: It’s not all about you. Quit being a jerk. If it bothers you that much, then take some Spanish classes. I say that knowing more languages means you can talk to more people. The French say, “La personne qui parle deux langues en vaut deux!”

This makes me so angry. My parents came to the U.S. when they were well into adulthood and learning a second language was a slow and painful process. They are still not fluent, though their comprehension is pretty good. They don’t primarily speak in their native language to piss off racists, but because it’s easier for them. Why should they have to make things more difficult for themselves in order to make an American bigot feel more comfortable?

Also, the are-you-making-fun-of-us? issue that sometimes seems to be at the heart of these English-only campaigns:

We don’t spend all our time talking about you. Your nail techs, gardeners, servers, taxi drivers, dry cleaners, etc. are probably talking about things that are far more interesting than your Anglo ass. Quit being so paranoid.

But there might be occasions when we are talking shit about you. We have to deal with your racism. I think you can deal with being made fun of in a language you can’t understand anyway.

sigawla:

ABUSED FILIPINO CAREGIVER SETTLES WITH EMPLOYER FOR $100,000

By Henni Espinosa, ABS-CBN North America Bureau

Nov. 9, 2012

SAN JOSE, Calif. – Nelly Gonzales, 58, still gets emotional when she talks about her ordeal as a caregiver in the U.S.

For 15 years, Gonzales was abused by her Filipino employer, paying her as low as $150 a month, to care for six developmentally-delayed adults 24/7.

She said, “All I wanted was respect. No matter your stature in life, you deserve some respect.”

It took her 15 long, agonizing years but Gonzales finally found the courage to fight back, after she saw Filipino caregiver Victoria Aquino on Balitang America talk about filing a case against her abusive employer.

She pointed out, “If she could do it, I thought, I could do it too. I could fight for my rights.”

Through the help of the Pilipino Association of Workers and Immigrants or PAWIS, Gonzales filed a claim for back wages against her employer in 2010.

Click here to read full article 

If you are an abused caregiver and want to know how you can fight for your rights, call PAWIS at (408) 657-8947.

Domestic workers in Southern California can also reach the Filipino Migrant Center at (310) 421-8362 or info@filipinomigrantcenter.org. Click here for the FMC website.