So, how was it, I asked, when he took off his scarf and put on a simple mask, and he looked just like another Asian guy?
“I’ve been on the streets of New York and on the subway several times without wearing the ‘Yang For New York’ mask and everything,” he said after a pause. “And the first time someone dodges you on the subway, or looks at you for a long time, you think, ‘well, maybe that was in my head.’ But then, if it happens repeatedly, you start to think: ‘this is not in my head’. And you can feel a certain degree of visibility and hostility or awareness of your presence, but not in a welcome way. It’s like, ‘I’m aware of your presence and I’m not very happy about it.’ And that is a very different feeling and a very different energy. “
But on that sunny Chinatown street, everyone knew that the guy wearing a “Yang for New York” mask and being followed by a professional photographer was The Andrew Yang: the Universal Basic Income guy, the former presidential candidate, the mayoral candidate – a guy who also became the most prominent Asian-American political figure in the country. It was as if Yang had wanted his own post-racial celebrity, simply because he believed in himself as much as he could.
“Frankly, I’m used to being able to mix with wood for most of my life. Because I think it’s kind of an Asian American superpower, where, like, before the last 14 months, you could become very discreet, ”he said. “When I’m very obviously Andrew Yang – the scarf, the mask – I get a lot of love, warmth and support. But if I am not so easily identifiable, then there is a different energy. ”
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The term “model minority” entered the mainstream in a 1966 New York Times magazine article, when sociology professor William Petersen drew an indelible line between Japanese Americans and “troubled minorities” who suffered several – and, he believed, equal – types of setbacks.
“When whites defined blacks as inherently less intelligent, for example, and therefore provided them with lower schools, the products of those schools often validated the original stereotype,” wrote Peterson. “Since cumulative degradation has gone far enough, it is notoriously difficult to reverse the trend.”
And yet, he marveled, Japanese Americans did, less than 20 years after World War II internment camps. “By any criterion of good citizenship, Japanese Americans are better than any other group in our society, including native whites. In addition, they set this record notable for their own efforts almost entirely without assistance. Each attempt to hinder his progress has only resulted in an increase in his determination to succeed. ”
With that indirect praise, Japanese Americans and the millions of other Asians who followed them as America’s immigration laws changed were squeezed into an almost impossible to escape box: How could they prove they face discrimination if everyone thought they were the personification of the “hero Horatio Alger”, as Peterson said? How could they find allies to achieve equality – cultural, political, social – if everyone thought they were successful by some sort of ethnic disposition? And if they weren’t successful, well, weren’t they just bad at being Asians?
There are countless books, essays, films and programs that try to break this idea. But it also has many Asian Americans who meet all the criteria of this myth, and even more Asian parents who pressure their children to incorporate it. Andrew Yang grew up as one of those children.
With two parents with graduate degrees in Berkeley, an education in the picturesque city of Somers, in the interior of New York, and an education by Phillips Exeter, Brown University and Columbia Law – a pedigree that Mayflower descendants would stab each other to obtain – Yang occupies an elite demographic position, as said Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen (unrelated), who interviewed Yang: “Ivy League, East Coast, Asian American minority model, be it whether it calls itself that or not. “
“I feel some sympathy for him, because he is stuck in a running dynamic in which he doesn’t want to be caught and nobody should be caught,” said Nguyen. “But that is just the nature of the race in the country. If [he] can be a good politician, he has to find an answer to that. Not because he cares, but because other people do. “
I wondered if, on his journey to progress in America, Yang had distanced himself from the AAPI community or from any characteristic of being a Taiwanese immigrant boy, especially after talking to Peter Kiang, director of Asian American studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston .
In the 1980s, Kiang told me, he had worked as a consultant to New England prep schools, including Exeter – the alma mater of billionaires, diplomats and the Anglo-Saxon power elite – on how to diversify their campuses to be more inclusive for the Asian Americans, especially the children of immigrants, after a series of stories exposing racism on the enclosed campuses of these schools.
“They were facing this new population and they had no idea how to approach it,” he recalled, noting that schools would try to integrate them into the student body – incorporating Asian American studies into the curriculum, for example – or simply stack the classroom. input with Just enough Asians, leaving this new class to fend for themselves and assuming they were exemplary minorities who could increase their Ivy League acceptance rates.
Kiang remembered a focus group he conducted with a group of Asian American students at one of these schools, where he asked if they had any complaints. After prodding, they admitted that they were not fans of the quality of rice – but they felt they could not say anything about it and instead kept electric rice cookers in their dorms.
“They did not know if, if they complained or protested, they would be expelled from school and their parents’ dreams would evaporate,” recalled Kiang. They had no language, he said, to call whites.