Asian Men Have the Highest Salaries: A Follow-Up

Joz asked me to do a follow up to my recent blog post, Asian Men Have the Highest Salaries, partly because it was one of the most viewed articles on 8Asians recently and partly because its one of the most referenced, even sparking an article on the Huffington Post. When I came across the original article pointing to statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, my initial reaction was, “Wow, good news about Asian men for once,” and “I need to share this.”  The question of how to share the news without just copying the article I found was another matter, choosing to share the news using another topic that seems to find popular attraction at 8Asians — dating Asian men.

I suppose I should have put more thought into it, because the reaction to my article has ranged anywhere from support to complete vitriolic attacks.

At least the response from The Huffington post was an agreement with the statistics — how can you argue with statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics? — but really, an explanation why those results were misleading. New American Media copied the article wholesale, which led to an interesting discussion on sduncensored.com. It even started a discussion on a Malaysian forum, which quickly degraded to referencing the size of an Asian man’s, well, you know. Yet Another blogger took offense to the implication that Asian men would have trouble dating without earning more money, which I never said; I simply said this would help Asian men in the dating pool — and for those that didn’t realize it, I said that jokingly.

What’s interesting is similar other posts on the same material from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics that didn’t reference my post, like this one on change.org, don’t seem to attract as much attention — the simple comment that a positive reflection on Asian men might help them in the dating pool, seems to have made all the difference. Yes, I agree that the statistics may be skewed (because Asians tend to live in areas of higher salaries, tend to be higher educated, the numbers aren’t broken out by Asian subgroup, etc), but it’s still good news, at least for Asian men.

All this negative attention to what should be good news is kind of sad, because Asian men get enough attacks without being attacked by other Asians and minorities. When there’s a piece of good news about Asian men, why is it so hard to just celebrate that piece of good news, without finding a way to demean its significance?