It is not an uncommon thing for someone to be wearing sunglasses a size too large in New York City. They might be a celebrity, simultaneously skirting and courting attention, or a Madison Avenue matriarch going halfway incognito after she finally decided to take the facelift plunge.
This week, I heard a new rationale for extra-large shades, and it felt like a punch in the gut. An Asian American friend confided over dinner that she has taken to covering her eyes because she fears being assaulted on the street. She told me that her parents are worried for her safety more insistently than before, that a lifetime of barbed comments and thoughtless jokes seems to have given way to something more sinister and threatening.
It isn’t hard to see why: a steady drumbeat of assaults against Asian-Americans seemed to culminate in a murderous spree in Atlanta. While the shooter’s motives are still a tangle of pathologies that don’t easily map onto much of the original meta-narrative of white supremacy, the overwhelming majority of the victims were Asian, and the targeting of massage parlors was a strike at a predominantly Asian industry. This was an attack on among the most vulnerable among us, even if it is precisely that vulnerability that has been less than fully visible for far to long.
That simply cannot continue. Covid-19’s origins in Wuhan and deteriorating relations between the United States and China have made Asian Americans vulnerable in ways tied to global trends but felt personally and intimately. In other ways too, Asian Americans seem to be bearing the brunt of developments that seem to place them between a cultural rock and a hard place.
The rise of critical race theory and calls to radically overhaul processes of evaluation and admissions on both the high school and university level are increasingly targeting grades standardized test scores, metrics in which Asian American students outperform nearly all their peers. It is difficult not to see the call to abolish these exams as a direct attack on the students who excel at them: in 2019, Asian students filled nearly seven in ten seats at Stuyvesant High School in New York.
In fact, this is a question that has already been litigated. Working with evidence that showed that Asian American students were being admitted to Harvard at a lower rate than correlated with their application profile, a group of plaintiffs accused Harvard of discrimination, in the same vein as its practice of artificially excluding Jews early in the twentieth century. While that litigation did not succeed, the process of discovery revealed that Asian students “would likely be admitted at a higher rate than white applicants if admissions decisions were made based solely on academic and extracurricular ratings."
What an astounding thing to admit. Asian Americans are one of meritocracies winners at a moment when that idea has lost adherents among the mandarins of culture and the very places where it is supposed to hold sway: elite universities and their feeder schools.
What emerges is a portrait of an American minority that has been astoundingly successful yet remains precarious and vulnerable. Asian Americans complicate our categories of victim and success, privilege and underdog. The perpetrators of violence against Asian Americans are often non-white, and minority on minority violence precludes pat bromides.
There is no one single Asian American story, but the consistency of prejudice from a madman in Atlanta to admissions committees in Cambridge to acts of violence against the elderly in New York suggests that this is a big story, or it should be. None of this is new: the Chinese Exclusion Act and the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII, sanctioned by the Supreme Court, speak to the long shadow of anti-Asian racism.
What is required in this moment is to realize that Asian American success does not make them immune to racism, but more vulnerable to it. The line between being a ‘model minority’ and a scapegoat is sometimes devastatingly thin. The astounding academic success of Asian kids provides no defense against bullying in the hallway or violence in the street.
I received the first dose of my vaccine in Chinatown, and among the most moving sights I’ve seen in months was elderly Asian men and women being shepherded by their English speaking children and grandchildren through the steps of the vaccination process. It was the best of America. What an utter tragedy it would be if through sins of commission we failed both the young and old who bring so much to this country, and will be so vital in building its future.
Have a good weekend, and happy Passover to those celebrating-
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