Comments

1. Cynthia wrote:

   I think *SOME* Asians don’t even realize they’re being discriminated, or they themselves believe the stereotypes to be true. I can’t tell you how many dinners I’ve been to where my (a Hong Kong immigrant who has been in Canada for 20something years) aunt goes on and on about how Asians aren’t that great at public speaking.

   Another issue is the lack of connections. Many Asians are relatively new to the country (even if they’re second or third generation), and lack the “good connections” to get the promotion, the job, or even to get into the “right clubs.” Often these “good connections” come in the form of historically, white-only organizations. While many may no longer be as restricted, reference letters are often needed to get in. If you don’t know anyone involved within these organizations to give you a reference, you’re out of luck. In any case, regarding jobs: many young people I know get their summer internship interviews through a parent, another relative or a family friend. A good reference is great to have.

   It’s probably a combination of the two which leads to these issues.

   Posted 02 Feb 2009 at 11:11 am ¶

2. linda wrote:

   I am not Asian but two of my co-workers are and I’ve noticed that when my boss makes offhanded comments towards them its usually in the form of a backhanded compliment like ‘Oh you Chinese eat so healthy….I wish I could just eat noodles and rice’. They never speak up, but I empathize with the feeling of being locked into a position of having to ‘educate’ the staff on Chinese culture. My boss is German btw, so not in a position to stereotype others…

   Posted 02 Feb 2009 at 11:53 am ¶

3. Renee wrote:

   Honestly I am surprised to read this post. I used to work in the gaming industry and let me tell you anti Asian sentiments are extremely common. Somehow some people don’t see what they are saying as racism because they understand that racism is something that happens to blacks. When I pointed out that consistently critiquing English language skills as though they indicated some marker of intelligence was indeed racist I was silenced. The idea that Asians were every bit as much Canadian and not foreign interlopers was also soundly rejected. It seems to many Asian constituted the eternal other. Despite many sensitivity training sessions that the company ran most could not see past the black/white binary and admit the racism in their behavior.

   Posted 02 Feb 2009 at 12:03 pm ¶

4. NancyP wrote:

   Is there a difference between the US and Canada in this?

   Posted 02 Feb 2009 at 2:53 pm ¶

5. Jess wrote:

   Perhaps there’s a little bit of not recognizing discrimination against oneself because eerything else looks relatively good.

   Such as, the simple fact that Asians (in the US) are not “over-represented” in things like unemployment or low literacy rates or college attendance. (While this is obviously not true for all ethnic groups, the point is it only shows when you break it down pretty finely, separating out the Hmong from the Filipinos from the Japanese, for instance).

   In any case, th point is that if you are Asian, odds are you are Chinese or Japanese descended ’cause that’s where, until recently, most came from. (I haven’t seen the crosstabs for the survey so I don’t know if they corrected for that, but a random sample of Asians would get you mostly Chinese- or Japanese-Americans).

   That means you are probably relatively middle class. You aren’t from a stereotypical ghetto, nor are you associated with that in the popular mind, so there’s a whole lot of baggage that you don’t have. You went to college, your job isn’t horrific, things are generally okay.

   So when discrimination happens, it’s a) subtle and b) doesn’t seem like such a big deal relative to all the other stuff that could be happening.

   I think it’s would be different if you are say, black, where the sense of fighting for every scrap of recognition is a little more raw, closer to the surface. Because as I see it — and maybe this is just what I am seeing — there’s a much greater consciousness among black folks or latin people that the bad shit is right behind you, and you fought long and hard to get away from it, and damned if you’ll let anyone dis you now.

   I was thinking of experiences I’ve had with people who had all kinds of weird prejudices (that might have applied to me if I bothered to point certain facts out to said people, ah, the joys of ‘passing!’/sarcasm) but I never thought about because other than that, I thought I was doing okay, and one guy being a jackass didn’t seem all that big a deal.

   I was like, “well, I’m not being treated as badly as some black people I know, so I shouldn’t complain, I have no right because they have it worse.” It seemed downright self-indulgent of me to complain at the time, you know? I felt like I was bitching over not getting served properly at a 5-star hotel when the other guy is homeless, that kind of thing.

   Am I making sense?

   Posted 02 Feb 2009 at 3:05 pm ¶

6. Cynthia wrote:

   @ Nancy P – I’m not sure if this was addressing my reply or not, but I don’t think there is much difference. In my experience, I often hear Asians perpetuating stereotypes on themselves (almost always people who aren’t Canadian-raised), which probably leads to issues like this. My parents have actually been upset with me when I tried to disagree with my aunt. Something about me not being respectful of elders.

   Posted 02 Feb 2009 at 3:06 pm ¶

7. atlasien wrote:

   One reason (this is an unscientific theory of mine) is that some Asian-Americans have too much faith in meritocracy.

   We’re often raised to believe that with hard work and dedication to education, we can make it to the top. That does get you a long way, but not all the way. After a certain point it’s more about who you know, not what you know. That’s a difficult realization. A typical response is to pretend you can overcome it by keeping your head down and working even harder.

   Another explanation is much simpler… fear and caution. If you complain, who’s going to believe you?

   I did read an interesting story (I can’t find it now on Google) that Asian-Americans in corporate leadership positions were way disproportionately first generation. The explanation offered was that they’d come over to America after going to school in Asian countries, and so they’d already formed powerful social networks.

   Posted 02 Feb 2009 at 3:28 pm ¶

8. Monie wrote:

   I really don’t think that this is an Asian thing. I think most people don’t report discrimination in the workplace.

   I know a ton of African Americans that talk about how they are discriminated against at work and very few of them report it.

   I think most people don’t like to make waves at work. Usually when people report these incidents the outcome isn’t really that good.

   Also I think that the Asian population is fairly small nationwide so that may also account for the lower figures. I would be interested to see what the numbers are concerning Asians reporting workplace discrimination in areas where there are very high numbers of Asian Americans such as the San Francisco Bay Area.

   Posted 02 Feb 2009 at 3:53 pm ¶

9. Paz wrote:

   *Just curious – How do other groups fare in reporting discrimination in the workplace? I’m inclined to think that white women are the most likely to report discrimination, but that’s my own uninformed assumption.
   Also, back to Asians, is there a difference between first generation Asians and 2nd, 3rd, … in terms of the frequency of which they report discrimination?

   Posted 02 Feb 2009 at 4:02 pm ¶

10. Antonio wrote:

    I never heard the term “bamboo ceiling” before. It seems like the kind of term that’d be racially insensitive if it was said by a non-Asian.

    I suspect the discrimination is very subtle too, and it might be difficult to call out if there isn’t one specific act to push you over the edge.

    Posted 02 Feb 2009 at 5:31 pm ¶

11. Lxy wrote:

    Alpha Asian had something on this last week.

    http://alpha-asian.blogspot.com/2009/01/asian-american-employees-underreport.html

    @Jess

    Actually, Japanese Americans are only the sixth largest ethnic Asian American group.

    And Racialious had a blog post on a University of Maryland study that questions the idea that Chinese Americans can be so easily painted as “relatively middle class.” There is extreme variation in the community, which can be better described more as “bipolar.”

    http://www.racialicious.com/2008/12/11/comprehensive-new-report-on-chinese-americans/

    Posted 02 Feb 2009 at 7:25 pm ¶

12. Katie wrote:

    Yeah, Antonio, I was kind of weirded out by “bamboo ceiling” too. I mean, come on. Why do we need a special phrase? I can just hear it used on Fox with a little gong sound effect….

    Posted 02 Feb 2009 at 8:05 pm ¶

13. Asada wrote:

    me as well,
    I lost it after “Bamboo ceiling”. I mean, no glass!?
    I wonder what ceiling blacks get…..

    Posted 02 Feb 2009 at 8:54 pm ¶

14. Phrone wrote:

    I don’t want to sound like a troll, but I’m confused by those statistics. It’s not that only roughly 3% of Asians actually report being discriminated against, it’s that they only make up 3% of all discrimination cases. (Right? The rest of my argument is nil if I read that wrong.) I’m not really good at statistics, but is it possible that these results are skewed because Asians aren’t that big of a population group, comparatively? (Wikipedia tells me they’re 5% of the United States population — again, this could be different if it included Canada, and Wikipedia could be wrong.)

    Of course, it’s still possible that there’s a gap between those who experience discrimination and those who report it, but I don’t think it’s as big of a gap as 30% to 3% makes it seem….

    Posted 02 Feb 2009 at 11:53 pm ¶

15. Winnie wrote:

    @ Lxy
    Thank you for providing those sources. It pains me to so often hear comments that simply classified the entire Asian American population as mainly either Chinese or Japanese and wholly middle-class. That rigid image of the API community has been greatly shaped by the Model Minority Myth. If you don’t know already, the MMM has been mostly used to legitimatize the struggle of APIs as well as other minority groups.

    Which brings me to my next point:

    @Jess
    Reading your comments made me very uncomfortable. I felt what you were saying portrayed the position of different races in a hierarchy of who is more oppressed.

    Oppression Olympics.

    “I think it’s would be different if you are say, black, where the sense of fighting for every scrap of recognition is a little more raw, closer to the surface. Because as I see it — and maybe this is just what I am seeing — there’s a much greater consciousness among black folks or latin people that the bad shit is right behind you, and you fought long and hard to get away from it, and damned if you’ll let anyone dis you now.”

    Positioning different races in a “I am more oppressed than you” to legitimize why a problem in the API community is no longer an issue is very problematic.

    Posted 03 Feb 2009 at 12:34 am ¶

16. Winnie wrote:

    sorry that was supposed to be:

    “If you don’t know already, the MMM has been mostly used to DElegitimatize the struggle of APIs as well as other minority groups. ”

    not legitimatize.

    Posted 03 Feb 2009 at 1:35 am ¶

17. Minotaar wrote:

    Perhaps this is my own skewed perspective, but from what I’m seeing, a lot of the gen Y Asian Americans are a lot more savvy about glass ceilings (eeyew bamboo is not for ceilings!) and old-boy networks. I find them inquisitive about how the network “works”, how to play the game, how not to play the game, and generally very sensitive about not being the stereotypical Asian that keeps his or her head down. Maybe its just me.

    I do, however, find that despite their desire to break these barriers, they are uncomfortable talking about issues of diversity and equality among other Asian Americans. I dont understand this. Why not compare notes? There seems to be a need to appear as if you are “simply successful” and not the type who plays networking games and pulls strings. It feels as if there is a certain dishonor (probably the wrong word) about being a good-ol boy and being in on the network and the connections. Can I get any comments on that?

    I also find that Asian American women strongly associate with issues of gender, and have no problems talking about it. This seems especially jarring in contrast to an unwillingness to discuss issues of race. Why is it not ok to stand up for your teamate when someone makes a racially insensitive remark, when you wont think twice about complaining that two other women you know got bonuses that seemed low? Again this may be a result of my experience and not the general trend, but I always found that particular intersection of gender and race to be so .. unusual.

    Posted 03 Feb 2009 at 7:30 am ¶

18. Jess wrote:

    @Winnie–

    I was trying to get across differences in perception, not necessarily reality.

    Let me put it another way. If the discrimination you face is relatively mild, or not that obvious, and other parts of your life are all right, it can feel a little wrong to complain when someone else has it bad in a more obvious way.

    Like, I get miffed at some of the weird anti-semitic undercurrents from some right-wing politicians, but then I think to myself, “What the hell am I complaining about? I don’t get stopped by cops whenever I drive.”

    That’s the kind of thing I am talking about. That doesn’t mean the shit’s okay, but just that when you look at it personally, it’s easy to rationalize things when your own life is all right.

    @Ixy–
    Yeah, I remember that post. I didn’t realize Japanese-Americans were so far down the list, though.

    That said, I’d stand by the statement that as a group, Asian Americans have had a bit more success than some other groups. The post from Racialicious (via Angry Asian Man) notes that the people who are more working-class tend to be recent arrivals. That makes perfect sense — whenever you move from one country to another your standard of living takes a bit of a hit, especially if you aren’t in a very small class of jobs.

    Some of that success is just a function of being here a while. Chinese-Americans have been a part of the demographic landscape for 150 years now. So, you’d sort of expect they’d learn the system a bit.

    Also, the cost of coming here sort of weeds out a large chunk of people. If you come from Mexico, you can walk, if you have to. Can’t do that from China.

    A similar phenomenon affected European immigrants, by the way– the people that came from Europe were not illiterate farmers, but highly skilled people who could raise the money to go someplace and had highly transferable skills — craftsmen, traders, factory workers. The cost of getting across the Atlantic was just too high for everybody else.

    @altasien– I think you have something there. My (Japanese) grandma said something very funny to my mom. When she was like, 12, my mother wasn’t asked to dance at this junior high sock hop thing (this was about 1955) because she was asian-looking. My grandma’s response: “Well, you’re just going to have to be a better student than any of them and show how dumb they are.”

    Now, this is obviously the wrong response to any kid in that situation — I mean, I’m no child psychologist, but I can think of a stack of things to say that would have been way more helpful to a crying teenage girl.

    But it was not an uncommon response from people like her, I think, who had gone through what she had. And there is a deep cultural tradition in Japan, China, Vietnam, and Korea, dating from the days of the old entrance exams for the imperial bureaucracies, that says anyone who works at it can succeed. (Yes, the exams were obviously geared towards people with the time and means to study for them, but the idea is there).

    Posted 03 Feb 2009 at 10:58 am ¶

19. Lxy wrote:

    @Jess

    The study makes the specific point that Chinese Americans can’t be so easily fit into the the European immigrant (propaganda) model of success.

    Despite long-term settlement in the USA, Chinese Americans cannot be decribed as having “made it ” or achieved equality–contrary to the tired Model Minority myth peddled by White America.

    “It makes for a rather bi-polar picture of wealth and poverty, high and low education levels, white and blue collars,” Shinagawa says. “It’s a pattern you expect to see after a wave of immigration. But in this case, the long-term settled population has yet to achieve full equal treatment.”

    Major Study of Chinese Americans Debunks ‘Model Minority’ Myth
    http://www.racialicious.com/2009/02/02/asian-american-employees-underreport-discrimination/

    “Also, the cost of coming here sort of weeds out a large chunk of people. If you come from Mexico, you can walk, if you have to. Can’t do that from China ”

    This rationale cannot the arrival of significant numbers of *poor* immigrants from SE Asia like Hmong, Laotian, Filipinos and others.

    Posted 03 Feb 2009 at 2:21 pm ¶

20. Lxy wrote:

    URL for the quote should be:

    http://www.newsdesk.umd.edu/sociss/release.cfm?ArticleID=1786

    Posted 03 Feb 2009 at 2:23 pm ¶

21. Winnie wrote:

    @ Jess

    I believe the fact that the perceptions, (or more accurately the stereotypes of Asian Americans that you refer to) do not align with reality is EXACTLY the problem. And I feel you used these INACCURATE, broad, and homogeneous images of the identities of Asian Americans in a problematic way. It feels as if you were comparing the extent of oppression each racial group would face. The fact that the terms Asian American, Latino, Black encompass such a diverse range of identities within each racial category complicates the simple hierarchy you seem to perpetuate.

    Who is more oppressed–
    Black > Latino > Asian American

    NO!

    This totally forgets the intersections of class, gender, Ethnicity, education, length of stay in US, family connections and other aspect that brings a mix of privilege and oppression. Within each race, there are sub populations of the more privileged because race is not the only defining factor.

    If you would like to continue advocating the idea that Asian Americans have it good, I’d suggest you specify which part of the racial group. Do you mean the small part that actually is specifically East Asian, with a college background, English-speaking family, male, and actually upper middle class?

    Posted 03 Feb 2009 at 6:04 pm ¶

22. Jess wrote:

    Ixy–

    I’m not saying that people can’t come from poor countries far away, just that it’s no accident that many groups of people — in the past as now — aren’t illiterate peasants when they come here. It costs money to get here, and that automatically selects out chunks of people. THe folks who do manage to get the money together will almost always be those that if they stayed home would be considered middle-class people. (Not by an American standard, mind you– just relative to the rest of the home population. It’s pretty well-documented that when you move to another country your living standard takes a hit, at least initially– people move because they figure the future opportunity will be better).

    Using the data from the very study you are citing (as well as the census bureau), it’s interesting that Chinese immigrants are more likely to be college educated than white people even when they get here. Why is that? Maybe because the educated folks are the ones with enough resources to make the trip.

    The same is true of Filipinos, who are by and large well-educated. Vietnamese– same thing.

    This is partly because in their home countries education systems are actually not bad (the Philippines in particular has much better access to higher education than the US in many ways). But it’s also the cost factor I was talking about. For the most part, it’s easier to make the jump to emigrate if you are in a position to set yourself up to do so, you know? Like make enough money that you can save to go.

    But farmers aren’t the people that usually can do that, nor are unskilled workers. Not that a few don’t, but odds are if you are emigrating you’ll be someone with at least a high school education or university, and you’ll be in a position that is affected the most by industrial changes (otherwise you wouldn’t move). This pattern happens over and over again, no matter what country you are in.

    (The Hmong might be an exception but they were brought in a whole evacuation program, rather different from the way most immigrants came).

    I wasn’t trying to say that the European immigrant model of success was completely transpose-able, just that there are a lot of parallels that hold cross-culturally. The Chinese who came to work the railroads in the 19th century were not unskilled laborers by any stretch.

    I also wasn’t trying to say the Chinese were “model minority” however defined. Just that there has been a certain amount of success there, and it would be foolish to discount it. Success doesn’t equal equality. But it accounts for the very bifurcation between new arrivals and old ones that you cite. (If there was no success that wouldn’t exist).

    And this might be why people might under-report discrimination — I didn’t see (it wasn’t clear) whether the study broke down what country people were from and what sub-sets reported more incidents thereof. I would bet $$ that those who have been here longer and are relatively comfortable are more likely to report incidents, for instance, than those who are more recent arrivals — that is, the underreporting would be less.

    I would also bet dollars to donuts that the odds of reporting go up with the level of education and income.

    But that isn’t clear form the OP or the links.

    Posted 03 Feb 2009 at 7:34 pm ¶

23. Lxy wrote:

    “Using the data from the very study you are citing (as well as the census bureau), it’s interesting that Chinese immigrants are more likely to be college educated than white people even when they get here. Why is that? Maybe because the educated folks are the ones with enough resources to make the trip.”

    You forgot to mention that the University of Maryland study also suggests that “recently arrived Chinese Americans represent the largest number of U.S. adults without the equivalent of a high school education.”

    To echo what Winnie was saying, you have a tendency to make broad brushstroke generalizations about Asian Americans that tacitly–if not explicitly–reinforce the Model Minority propaganda myth.

    And the very point of the Maryland study is that there is extreme variance in the Chinese American community that defies easy generalizations.

    Posted 04 Feb 2009 at 12:20 pm ¶

24. spaghetticat wrote:

    Here’s what Richard Rodriguez says. (http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2001/05/30/hispanics/)

    “I would remember how, not so many generations ago, Hispanics, particularly Mexicans and Cubans, routinely resisted the label “minority.” In a black-and-white America, Hispanics tended to side with white, or at least tended to keep their distance from black. But then came the success of the black civil rights movement in the South. And when that movement moved north, African-Americans gained bureaucratic notice and remedies from Washington.

    Suddenly, all sorts of Americans who would never have thought to compare themselves to African-Americans wanted to compare themselves to blacks. White, middle-class feminists claimed the black analogy. And so did gays. “

    Posted 04 Feb 2009 at 9:27 pm ¶

25. c.n.edaw wrote:

    I’m not nearly as learned on this subject as many of you are, but this topic made me recall a situation when I was working at a Southern t.v. station as a reporter in 1999. We had just hired the first and only Asian female reporter the station ever had.

    Her first few months there she could not understand why the white people didn’t treat her as “one of them”. I figured it was because she was from L.A. and came from a rich family and it was just a little culture shock she was dealing with.

    She had dyed blonde hair , mind you. And up to that point all of her friends had been white and she only dated white men. She had this picture on her desk of all her female friends and it was like six leggy typical California Girl blondes and her. She assumed she would be welcomed into a similar clique in Arkansas.

    But in Arkansas, people routinely made the typical jokes about “slanty eyes” or made references to her complexion being “yellow” despite the fact she was quite fair. They would say just really ignorant things in meetings and make snide remarks about her blonde hair or dating white guys.

    She was really bothered by it but she would never stick up for herself or report it. One day she complained to me and a photographer (both black) and the male photographer looked her in the eye and said ,

    ” You don’t get it. In the South you are a nigger too. A different kind of nigger but still a nigger. You ain’t white here!”

    She burst into tears. Later, she told me that what the photographer said had really affected her because up to that point she had always been treated just like white people due to her family’s status. I had kind of thought that might be the case.

    Growing up I never had a lot of Asian friends or knew a lot of Asian people, period. But the ones I did know seemed to associate and align themselves more with white people than other Asian people, especially if they had a little money, and without a lot of hostility in return from whites or even the other Asians they really didn’t seem to associate with.

    It was like it was understood that assimilation was the most important thing whereas blacks emphasize racial solidarity much more.

    I know that may not be the case for all Asians, but it’s how it appeared to me from the outside looking in.

    Posted 08 Feb 2009 at 10:24 pm ¶

26. KiranP wrote:

    :: underreporting instances of discrimination on the job

    Exactly. Excellent post. Most Indian friends of mine take it easy and sometimes even fearful except for one; that’s what exactly he did. I have linked his website here.

    I would like to know authors comments on this.

    Posted 13 Feb 2009 at 11:09 pm ¶

27. Audrey wrote:

    Wanted to point towards this article that shows “University-educated immigrants less likely to find good jobs” in Canada than their Canadian counterparts.

    http://noii-van.resist.ca/?p=950

    Posted 13 Mar 2009 at 4:30 pm ¶

28. Audrey wrote:

    In response to Renee’s comment, I agree with you.

    Even if your family has been in Canada longer than most Caucasian Canadians, an Asian Canadian will still get asked “where are you from?”, and people wonder why Asians may like to stick together in communities, well maybe if you are constantly singled out, might be a good reason.

    Not to say that ‘white’ Canadians do not like to live in white neighbourhoods, go to white schools, work in a mostly white company, nobody just points fingers at the mostly white company or the mostly white neighbourhood or calls different sections of town white-town in Canada.

    Posted 18 Mar 2009 at 1:07 am ¶