The Loneliest Americans by Jay Caspian Kang

Author:Jay Caspian Kang [Kang, Jay Caspian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Cultural; Ethnic & Regional, Asian & Asian American, history, United States, General, Social Science, Ethnic Studies, American, Asian American Studies
ISBN: 9780525576228
Google: C6JHEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2021-11-15T00:18:15.672522+00:00

* * *

—

I followed the SHSAT debate with great interest. Like all education debates, it seemed to lie right on the fault line between the stated liberal values of upwardly mobile, urban professional Asian Americans and their actual practices. Nearly all the wealthy, assimilated Asian parents I knew kept their opinions to themselves or, when pressed, spewed out gibberish about “complicated situations” and pined for some utopia where minority groups would not be pitted against one another. This, I quickly realized, was their way of saying that they wanted the SHSAT to remain, not only because they wanted their own children to benefit from it, but because they knew that underneath their finely tuned progressive manners, they still believed in the virtues of a pure meritocracy. The reason Asian parents drill their kids in math and violin or piano is because they understand that those fields, where skill can be acquired through relentless practice, give their kids the best shot at overcoming racial barriers. Assimilated Asians don’t talk about this much because we don’t know how to discuss discrimination against us, in part because it feels so trivial when compared to police shootings, child detentions, and all the more pressing forms of racism, but also because it seems to contradict the progressive consensus that the system has been rigged to favor white people and, in the words of the CRJE, all those who “benefit from white supremacy.”

The result of all these conflicting thoughts is a mass neurosis. One night at the peak of the SHSAT debate, I went out to dinner with a very progressive Asian friend who had two kids in middle school. He, like me, had grown up around white people and endured a great deal of bullying, but he had tried his best at his studies, which carried him into his twenties. But after graduate school, he took a look above him and saw the only way up was through the white liberal elite. I don’t think this was a conscious realization, but rather the slow and almost inevitable molding of a young, idealistic person into the more pragmatic version of himself. My friend ranted about de Blasio and Carranza for half an hour straight and complained about a wealthy white friend who sent her kids to private school but nonetheless felt the need to constantly weigh in on how unjust the SHSAT had been to Black and Latino kids. He hadn’t said anything to her because he expressed his true feelings only to people who had also walked the shaky bridge between a childhood of racial abuse and assimilation. We will one day be white, he seemed to be saying. But we aren’t quite there yet.

Young-Dae Kwon, for his part, does not understand the controversy over the types of schools he popularized throughout the city. “It’s not a logical argument,” he told me. “When you compare Asian immigrants to the other races, how do we measure up? Asians are shorter and we walk around wearing masks.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.