When we see white people in America from Generation X or Y, we stereotype them by cliques. Their dress gives us the clues we need to tuck them into a specific social category, like prep, goth, nerd, punk, hippie, and so on. When we see non-white people in America from Generation X or Y, no matter what they’re wearing, we stereotype them by race and leave it at that. Unless, of course, that non-white person is Asian, in which case we judge that person by race and clique, because “Asian kids are gaining ground in white culture” and “Asians are the closest to white people.” That is why Asians “are more easily able to transcend their race and find themselves in another social category.”
At least this is the contention of an op-ed article I ran into this morning at the Vanguard, see here.
Putting aside my opinion that this is a load of crap, I’m curious about why: 1) the author of this article, who I presume is white based on context, thinks Asians are more like white people than, say, Latinos or Eastern Europeans, and 2) by Asians, he must mean the yellow ones and not the brown ones and why did he completely and unabashedly omit brown Asians?
Second, the borderline defined by the author is wrong. People who see race more prominently than social cliques will see race first, even if that individual is Asian. Whites who see race more prominently may not call out the race of other white folks, but non-whites certainly do. “See that white hipster boy over there?” we say. People who see cliques more prominently than race may likely exclude race entirely. I’ve seen that happen before, too.
All in all, though, I’m glad Asians “are more easily able to transcend their race.” I mean, that’s why we have sites like APIA Blog Network, Angry Asian Man, the Model Minority forum, APAs for Progress, Hyphen, and heck, 8Asians, and why every established university in this country has to have an Asian American studies program. What kind of Asians have this author been mingling with? The white-washed ones?
What next?
Other posts you may be interested in:
- Thoughts on the shifting boundaries of race and identity
- Obama’s Race in America Speech: What does it mean for Asian-Americans?
- Asian Americans Saving a Bigger Portion of their Retirement Salary
- Seoul Hounds Dog Meat Vendors For Cleaner Chow
- Professional Poker Player Maria Ho Rumored to be on the Next Season of The Amazing Race
Recent Comments
- KFC vs. KGC: WTF???
- alienation: This is a great thread! I grew up eating Kentucky Fried Chicken. My family would make an effort to get it in East L.A., over by the King Cole Pizza. It was way better than the Kentucky Fried over in MPK and up in SG. I...
- Proof that Russell of Disney/Pixar’s Up is Asian: The Color Scripts
- Daul Kim: One Sassy ‘n Smart Bitch
- Najib: I wonder what is going on with this girl. She has been fooled into this simulacrum, and what she thought was real is not real at all.
- Mending Broken Glass: Khmer Rouge History Now to be Taught in Cambodia
- kbok: it may seem shocking to other people that kids don’t believe their elders when hearing about khmer rouge atrocities, but if your mother told you that soldiers shot at her, pushing her off a mountain and into landmine paths...
- Chinese Adoptees: Stolen or Abandoned?
- Dan: CSLI, I think my previous comment stated that I “hope” not “should”. It was not meant to belittle anyone and yes I can imagine just like most people, adopted or not. Though the effect will not be the same as...
- Obama Bows to Emperor Akihito
- JC: @ Eric: Not only that, he’s half brother lives in China and is married to a Chinese woman. There’s a lot of Asian in his family
- Yahoo! Games Writer Freaks Out Over Nintendo DS Dating Simulations
- JC: This guy knows next to nothing about Otaku culture and dare to write about Japanese games. It’s just another ignorant white person making self-righteous judgment calls against another part of Asian culture. He’s just...
Recent Events
- [Nov 3] NORTHERN CA: Intro to Movietelling (Neo-Benshi) with Dennis Somera
- [Nov 14] SOUTHERN CA: Grace Kim & the Spiders From Mars
- [Nov 20] NORTHERN CA: CATS 9th Annual Asian Comedy Night starring 18 Mighty Mountain Warriors
- [Nov 21] SOUTHERN CA: BANANA: Where Infamous Asian-American Bloggers Unite to Chop It Up
- [Nov 22] TORONTO: S.M. Global Audition
7 Comments to “That Goth Kid Over There or That Asian Goth Kid Over There? Race, Cliques, and How We’re Still Viewed as the Other White Meat”
courageous kiwi wrote:
The omission of Brown Asians stems from the fact that the imaginary construct known as ‘race’ is more or less defined by similarities in outward appearances rather than geographical proximity of countries of origin or any other factors, which is probably why Chinese folks are lumped together with Japanese and Korean folks, in spite of the formers’ proclivity towards inbreeding and the latter’s tendencies to beat their women.
GOOD GOD THAT WAS A LONG SENTENCE.
Posted on 25-Oct-07 at 11:58 am | Permalink
darkmoon wrote:
Did you know that there are actually blonde haired blue eyed Asians? I kid you not.
On the border between China and Russia, there are trading villages there and some of them are… Chinese. Go figure that eh?
Maybe the author was hanging out with those “Asians”.
Posted on 25-Oct-07 at 1:39 pm | Permalink
John wrote:
Actually, if you’ve heard director Justin Lin talk, Hollywood considers Asian-Americans “white” / Caucasians because our movie attendance and spending patterns are quite similar. Justin Lin said this was a real shocker when he first became an “insider” in Hollywood.
Posted on 25-Oct-07 at 10:17 pm | Permalink
Chook wrote:
“…there are blonde-blue eyed Asians..”
It’s true, in fact some poplations in Europe are considered Asiatic in origin. The Lapplanders of Scandinavia are believed to have come from Far East Siberia, the Hungarians can trace their origins partly to the Huns who came from Central Asia. Plus if you go anywhere in Central Asia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kirgystan you will see blondes or red-heads with East Asian eyes and bone structures. The Ainu “aborigines” of Japan also have mixed East Asian and Caucasian features although blondes are unknown. In fact I’ve read somewhere that the Caucasian race is believed by some scientists to be an Asiatic race by origin. Weird.
Posted on 25-Oct-07 at 11:32 pm | Permalink
courageous kiwi wrote:
My trolling usually wraps around some truth-isms that no one seems to acknowledge (possibly a symptom of said trolling?). There are Slavic-”Mongoloid” mixes live in Harbin. There are Chinese Jews in Keifeng. The South Americans are a mix of indigineous peoples and Spanish peoples, who thenselves are, along with Italians, if we are to believe Tarantino’s “True Romance”, a mix of European and Moor (African) blood.
One of the last Sopranos episodes touched on this idea briefly, when some of the Italian kids beat the snot out of an African kid from Africa. “Come here, nigger,” they said. “I’m not a nigger,” he replied. Race is, sadly, for all intents and purposes, skin color, which has a correlation, though not exclusively, to hereditary origin in geographic locales.
Where do the differences in this definition of race stem from? Jared Diamond, an evolutionary biologist at UCLA makes the argument that the differences in race are nothing more than the reflections of thousands of years of sexual preference. In Asia, they liked yellow skin and slanty eyes, and in Europe they liked blonde hair and blue eyes.
Race in and of itself is simply unimportant. Race just happens to be a fairly accurate two-second indicator of culture, which is far more important in dealing with the (Huntington-esque) “clash of civilizations”.
(See? I can be a pretentious hippie fuck too)
Posted on 26-Oct-07 at 12:08 am | Permalink
akrypti wrote:
Oh lord. Who ticked off the Kiwi?
Posted on 26-Oct-07 at 12:53 am | Permalink
Bertie wrote:
hrm. if i want to point out a particular person within a group, i find the most easily identifiable characteristic of that individual. if someone is wearing glasses and everyone else isn’t, i’ll say “the guy in glasses.” if there is a white guy standing in a group of asian guys, i’ll say “the white guy.” if i’m trying to point out a south asian hipster out of a group of asian and white hipsters, first i’ll say “the indian dude” and then immediately afterwards “friggin’ hipsters! all of ‘em!”
Posted on 26-Oct-07 at 9:28 am | Permalink
Post a Comment