Asian Lives Matter 2022
And a lit review on Affiliative (vs. Appropriated) Ethnoracial Identity
Utilitarian First Names
I mentioned in class that a few of my besties adopted Americanized/ Westernized first names when they came to the United States to avoid name based discrimination.
One response to such a strategy is that people should use their real names & if a potential employer doesn’t want to consider them then it’s the employer’s loss because they’d rather work at a more inclusive place anyway. In spirit, that response is correct. We all wish the world was such that no one would ever have to consider using a different first name… or consider cutting their hair because some find their afro/ dreadlocks/ braids to be unprofessional. We’re always working towards that world, but we don’t live in that world yet.
The world we live in is one where
Multiracial Asian-White individuals with a Chinese father (Chinese last name) make 11% less than those with a Chinese mother (White last name)
(Ooi, 2016).
Interracial Marriage & Last Names
White women marrying interracially may want to keep their last name to avoid hiring & wage discrimination due to taking the last name of her minority husband.
Indeed, “White women married to Asian men earn approximately 10% less than Asian women married to White men” (Ooi, 2016).
Moreover, the minority husband may benefit from taking his White wife’s last name because John Smith will be paid more than John Ruiz Nguyen-Singh.
Overall
East Asian applicants who adopt Westernized names experience more success in majority White labor markets (Chowdhury et al., 2020).
Chinese, Hispanic, & Indian ppl with #multiracial names (2+ Gen; Neha Patel) are more likely to be selected as roommates than those with names associated with their ethnoracial background (1–1.5 Gen; Sarah Patel)
Martiniello & Verhaeghe, 2021
— Some interracial couples opt for double names to transmit the multiracial identity (Collet, 2019), [&] the order of the names reflects the power distribution (Cerchiaro, 2007).
— “Immigrants are more likely to give 1st names that are common in the host country to their daughters (Gerhards & Tuppat 2020; Sue & Telles 2007)” (Martiniello & Verhaeghe 2021), which improves their daughter’s odds of employment (Chowdhury et al, 2020; Oreopoulos & Dechief, 2012).
— Additionally, the father’s ethnicity and religious identity is found to have an important weight on the name-giving of their sons (Sue & Telles, 2007). Some interracial couples opt for alternating the culture or origin of the names between newborns (Cerchiaro, 2007). —
Zhang et al., 2021
Asians experience the most interminority prejudice. Asians are more likely to experience hate crimes by non-White offenders (25.5%) than Blacks (1%) or Hispanics (18.9%) (Zhang et al., 2021).
2021 #StopAsianHate articles
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Table of Contents
∘ 2021 #StopAsianHate articles
∘ Table of Contents
· cupofcreative.co —
∘ Cup of Creative
· Adopting an Anglicized Name
· Name Discrimination (Kovie Biakolo)
∘ Jennifer Young Jin Kim et al., 2019
· Matthew Ming-tak Chew, 2021 — An Outcome of Globalization — The Globalization of Utilitarianism
∘ The Demand for CPOARAEs
∘ CPOARAE as “Ethnoracialized Symbolic Labor”
∘ Boundary Processes of CPOARAEs: The Audiences’ Perspective
∘ Results
∘ Discussions
· Angel Lau & Burney, 2008
· of Sinophobia —
∘ Revisiting the Asian 2nd-generation advantage — Van C. Tran, Jennifer Lee, & Tiffany J. Huang, 2019
· Inegalitarian Pluralism
∘ Milkman et al., 2015
· Model Minority Myth Via Kim Saira
· Sidenotes (will be abridged as time permits)
∘ Skin Tone & Identity
∘ Part 2
∘ Part 3
· Racial Malleability
Assume Direct Quotes Throughout
cupofcreative.co —
Cup of Creative
✊🏻Immigrants are what make America great. My grandparents immigrated to the US in the 80s, leaving their lives behind in Taiwan, bringing their 7 children to California. They opened a Chinese restaurant, in the middle of a white suburban neighborhood. It was a success, and a beloved hole in the wall type of place, where different cultures welcomed each other and enjoyed authentic Asian food. They contributed to the beautiful mixing pot that America should be.
✊🏼I grew up in a white suburban neighborhood for part of my life. From ages 1–7, I was typically one out of a few people of color in school. I didn’t feel seen or heard because I didn’t have role models who looked like me. I am grateful for this experience because I had to purposefully seek my roots — I am proud to be Taiwanese/Chinese-American.
✊🏽Fast forward to ages 8 to present day, I moved to an area where Asian Americans thrived, where East Asian and South Asian restaurants were neighbors, where I saw people who looked like me left and right. Suddenly my classes were 99% people of color. I felt comfort, I felt belonging and acceptance.
✊🏾Diversity and inclusion is critical, to the mental health of people of color, to the future of America. National Geographic determined what Americans will look like in 2050, and it’s beautiful — mixed race individuals will become the norm.
✊🏿Despite this, stark segregation still plagues many parts of the country. Poverty remains a barrier to social mobility. Interacting with a diverse range of people is still limited. Sadly, the inequalities that shape American society as a whole are equally present in interracial relationship patterns. We must work towards building an inclusive, loving place for everyone, no matter the country of origin and skin tone someone is. We must be PURPOSEFULLY inclusive.
Adopting an Anglicized Name
East & South Asian applicants “Americanized” their interests by adding outdoorsy activities like hiking, snowboarding, and kayaking that are common in white western culture.
One Asian applicant said she put her “very Chinese-sounding” name on her resume in her freshman year, but only got noticed after subbing in her American nickname later:
“Before I changed it, I didn’t really get any interviews, but after that I got interviews,” she said.
Some Asians covered up their race because they worried employers might be concerned about a possible language barrier.
“You can’t prove your English is good in a resume scan, but you can if you can get to the interview,” DeCelles says.”
Name Discrimination (Kovie Biakolo, 2021)
- “The practice of systematic prejudice and exclusion that affects those who do not have names that are considered “normal” from a Eurocentric perspective, further biased in favor of Anglo-Saxon identities. Whether in the U.K. or the United States, Anglophone-sounding names are considered standard. All other names, and especially those that honor communities of color and our heritage — Black, Brown, Native, etc. — are considered strange, deviant, and even unprofessional.
Research into how names affect prospective employment is readily available and demonstrates the prejudice people of color might face if they have non-Anglophone names. It’s the reason many potential employees of color with given names that honor their ancestry often replace them with White, Anglophone-sounding ones on their résumés. According to the data, people of color get more interviews that way.
Jennifer Young Jin Kim et al., 2019
Although the microaggression literature has been a rich source of information detailing the experiences and effects of subtle forms of discrimination (Constantine, 2007; Houshmand et al., 2014), not much had been studied on the manifestation and perpetuation of racial microaggressions in the workplace.
The current study contributes to our understanding of how Asians are made (in)visible in the workplace through the lens of workplace racial microaggressions. Very little is known about how microaggressions can make Asians (in)visible in the workplace, and consequently bar them from gaining access to the upper echelons of organizations (Gee et al., 2015; Sy et al., 2010). By focusing on how the perceiver’s race and color-blindness impact perceptions of the negative effects of racial microaggressions committed against Asians, we begin to shed light on who is most likely to see and understand the negative effects of these insidious workplace behaviors.
Findings
As hypothesized, racial group membership did impact how individuals perceived the negative effects of microaggressions.
Compared to White participants, Asian participants thought that targets who experienced a subtle microinsult or overvalidation microaggression would experience similar levels of difficulty concentrating on work-related tasks, rumination over the encounter, and avoidance of the perpetrator as they would from experiencing a blatant microassault.
This finding may be the result of the markedly different racial realities faced by people of color and the White majority (Nadal, Wong, et al., 2014).
Whites tend to believe that racial minorities, including Asians, do not experience discrimination any longer (Wong & Halgin, 2006).
In addition, perhaps the covert nature of the subtle microaggressions makes it harder for Whites to notice the negative effects of these behaviors, particularly if they believe that Asians do not experience bias or discrimination (Sue et al., 2009). Whites may also be unconsciously motivated to turn a blind eye to the negative effects of these subtle forms of microaggressions, allowing these behaviors to continue in order to reduce the potential threat that Asians may pose to valued resources (Berdahl & Min, 2012; Maddux et al., 2008).
Another contribution of our study was the examination of the role that color-blind racial attitudes play in allowing one to “see” the negative effects of workplace microaggressions.
As hypothesized, results indicated that White participants who were higher on color-blindness were less likely to view the subtle racial microaggressions as problematic compared to White participants who were lower on color-blindness. This may be because Whites higher on color-blindness do not see the complex racial dynamics that exist, believing instead that race does not play a role in how people are treated (Neville et al., 2000).
If a person believes that racism is a thing of the past and that all racial groups in America are treated the same way, they are denying the racial reality faced by people of color, including the disadvantages that people of color face.
Denying these disadvantages is also denying the existence of White privilege because one cannot know the disadvantaged without having an understanding of the advantaged (Neville, Worthington, & Spanierman, 2001). Thus, by not acknowledging the role that race plays in how people navigate social systems, including the workplace, Whites high on color-blindness may allow for the perpetuation and enactment of microaggressions.
Importantly, White participants who were lower on color-blindness did see these negative effects, demonstrating that Whites who are more aware of racial dynamics may be more cognizant of the plight experienced by Asians in the workplace.
The results of this study shed light on the subtle ways through which the contributions of Asians are made invisible through unintentional, subtle behavior.
The experience of invisibility is commonplace for many Asians in the U.S. where they are often left out of race conversations & are overlooked as a group needing resources that other minority groups may receive (Wong & Halgin, 2006).
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“Without recognizing the unjust association of a minority group with a national crisis, history will repeat itself; Asians will experience discrimination just as Muslims did after the 9/11 terrorist attacks (Aziz, 2020).
Asian-Americans do not experience discrimination on a day-to-day basis as much as other minorities do, but with the recent coronavirus outbreak it has caused an increase in the discrimination that Asian-Americans are faced with (Liu and Finch, 2020).
Nomenclature is a large factor in the way that the public views the pandemic (Shah, 2020); in racializing the coronavirus, it leads to a collective societal schema of Asian people transmitting the virus to other Americans, ultimately resulting in an increase in anti-Asian sentiment.
The disproportionate rate at which Asian-Americans are experiencing discrimination during this pandemic highlights how xenophobic rhetoric influenced a shift in collective societal schemas.
According to Ellen Wu, Asians were deemed the Model Minority and the American government utilized this to form an alliance with China during World War II (Leung Coleman, 2020). Essentially, this depicts that Asians are conditionally accepted as beneficial members of American society as long as it promotes the success of the country. Not only was the Model Minority Myth utilized to gain an ally, it was also used to divide Asian-Americans from other people of color. With that being said, it was used as political propaganda to further enforce the white hegemonic structures that have persisted since the birth of our nation. Through this it is evident that racism has been normalized as a byproduct of whiteness.”
Warning: This is long & a direct quote
Affiliative (vs. Appropriated) Ethnoracial Identity
Matthew Ming-tak Chew, 2021 — An Outcome of Globalization — The Globalization of Utilitarianism
This study identifies an unexplored kind of performance of race and ethnicity and analyzes its outcome for ethnoracial inequality. It does so by investigating the boundary processes of ethnoracial majority (i.e. Han-Chinese Hongkonger) customers’ encounter with Nanyayi (or South Asian, including Filipina, Indian, Pakistani, Nepalese, and Thai) service workers in restaurants in Hong Kong. I coined the term “commercialized performance of affiliative race and ethnicity” (CPOARAEs) to refer to this type of performance. CPOARAEs are uncommon in western societies but increasingly common in economically developed parts of non-western societies. There are three parties in CPOARAEs: managers of capitalistic businesses, workers lowly positioned in the ethnoracial hierarchy, and ethnoracial majority customers. The managers hire the workers, at market wage rates, to carry out racial and/or ethnic performances for customers. This performance is a key part of the work routine. It aims to generate the perception, for ethnoracial majority customers, that they are being served by workers who belong to relatively highly positioned ethnoracial groups. This perception yields added value and profit. My main informants perceive their migrant Filipina waitpersons as “Italians”, “Southern Europeans”, “Hispanic Americans”, “Indians”, “Filipina Americans”, or “native Hongkongers of Filipino descent”. Their perception shows that CPOARAEs involve workers’ simultaneous performing of multiple races and ethnicities. They involve a racial shift or whitening (to being Italians), an ethnic shift (to being Indians), a citizenship shift (to being Filipina Americans), and a migrant status shift (to being Hong Kong natives). These shifts would in turn affect customers’ perception of their ethnoracial identity.
Managers design a performance script, as a part of the formal work requirement, that specifies workers’ behavior. Workers must speak in English to all customers including customers who do not know any English, interact with customers in cheerful ways, and wear formal western-style uniforms. An optional item, one which different waitpersons fulfill to different extents, is to interact with customers in American manners and vocabulary. The managers monitor workers to ensure that they “look good and sound right” in ethnoracial terms (Walters, 2018; Williams and Connell, 2010). The performance script does not include explicit or overt claims of race or ethnicity. Workers are not required to whiten their skin or lie to customers that they are from Europe
This study adopts the term “ethnoracial” to frame the integrated relevance of ethnicity and race in CPOARAEs (Aranda, 2017; Valdez and Golash-Boza, 2017). According to Aranda (2017: 2237), the ethnoracial perspective attends to:
ethnicity-related aspects of [non-white persons’] social identities and the racialized meanings they invoke[, which] represent not just the role of cultural racism in positioning blacks [and other non-white persons] in an ethnoracial hierarchy that varies regionally and internationally, but also how cultural attributes are linked to larger assumptions regarding nation-states and their native and diasporic populations, facilitating global analyses of race and racism.
Building upon the theoretical frameworks of Butler’s gender performativity and Goffman’s presentation of the self, a cross-disciplinary field that examines racial and ethnic performance has developed since the 1990s (Butler, 1990; Clammer, 2015; Goffman, 1959). The field’s basic problematic is how racial and ethnic performance matters to inequality. Ethnoracial performance is found in large-scale, public, or mediated contexts as well as mundane daily occasions where individuals perform to a small audience in small-scale settings. A special characteristic of large-scale and public ethnoracial performances is their susceptibility to appropriation by capitalists and states. Many studies investigate commercialized ethnoracial performance in urban or touristic sites where minority individuals sing, dance, carry out rituals, or dress in indigenous ways to earn revenue from customers (Edensor, 2001; Osmond, 2011; Tilley, 1997). Other studies examine ethnoracial performance in popular cultures or mediated platforms including fashion and films (Arzumanova, 2013; Everett and Watkins, 2008; Kondo, 1997; Sastre, 2014). Yet others explore ethnoracial performance organized by religious, educational, and state institutions for ideology and power (Borland, 2003; Petit, 2013).
The word “affiliative” in “CPOARAE” is borrowed from Jiménez’s (2010) theory of “affiliative ethnic identity”:
[A]ffiliative ethnic identity [is] an individual identity rooted in knowledge, regular consumption and deployment of an ethnic culture that is unconnected to an individual’s ethnic ancestry until that individual regards herself, and may be regarded by others, as an affiliate of a particular ethnic group. (Jiménez, 2010: 1756)
This term “affiliative” avoids the difficult task of having to define “original” race and ethnicity. The word “affiliative” refers to a person extending her ethnoracial identities from whatever ethnoracial identity she had. It does not claim that her ancestral ethnoracial identity is the original one and the affiliative ones are less original. Moreover, studies of affiliative ethnic identity recognize affiliative ethnic identity and affiliative racial identity (Jiménez, 2010; Vora et al., 2019).
For this study’s purpose, the most important insight of the theory is that it shows that race and ethnicity can be strongly affected by culture. Namely, a person’s cultural practices such as cultural consumption and acquisition can gain her affiliative ethnoracial identities. Note that this insight significantly differs from the well-recognized fact that ethnicity and nationalism are partly composed of culture. The field of racial and ethnic studies has not fully capitalized on this insight, though partially relevant terms such as “cultural racism” are in use. For instance, the insight is less debated than that regarding whether race is affected by class and status (Saperstein and Penner, 2012). This insight is relevant because ethnoracial performance is a cultural practice. It is often though not necessarily carried out in association with popular cultural consumption. For example, Clammer (2015: 2159) argues that: “Dress, hairstyles, food, body language, jokes, choices of preferred music, accent and other ‘projected’ self-images are common ways in which an ethnic identity is performed: it is a dynamic phenomenon constantly expressed through these and other cultural devices.”
I made some conceptual adjustments to adapt the idea of “affiliative ethnic identity” to investigating CPOARAE. Jiménez’s original formulation of affiliative ethnic identity is needlessly narrow in two ways. It presumes that the person in question proactively conducts the relevant cultural practices on one hand, and that she conducts these practices for relatively benign intentions on the other. This narrow conception overlooks passive ethnoracial affiliation and the strategic use of this affiliation for commercialized or other instrumental purposes (Ivory, 2017: 174). My revised conception of “affiliative ethnoracial identity” includes in its scope passive ethnoracial affiliation and its instrumental uses.
The Demand for CPOARAEs
Ethnoracial performances are ethnoracial cultural products demanded by an increasingly large number of consumers. More consumers across the world demand these products due to three broad sociocultural trends: the escalating significance of cultural consumption in contemporary consumers’ lives; the social shift toward cultural omnivorism, multiculturalism, and cosmopolitanism; and the enhancement of global hyperconnectivity through travel, migration, and information technologies (Chew, 2021; Jiménez, 2010; Peterson and Kern, 1996; Rössel and Schroedter, 2015). Consumers increasingly demand experiences of unfamiliar ethnoracial cultures (Bankston and Henry, 2000; MacCannell, 1973).
Conventionally, commercialized ethnoracial performances cater to western consumers’ demand for non-white and non-western cultures. Most consumers with spending power were white and from economically developed western societies. To these consumers, non-white and non-western cultures were the Other. In the past few decades, middleclass non-white consumers in non-western societies are also influenced by the three sociocultural trends. They also begin to demand ethnoracial performances, but the ethnoracial cultures they demand would include white and western ones. For example, in China, a lucrative specialized industry emerged in the 2000s to cater to the consumer demand for white ethnoracial performances (Haoju, 2018). These white performers selfdeprecatingly refer to themselves as “white monkeys” (Haoju, 2018; Phan, 2016). They usually perform in mediatized formats such as advertisements and non-mediatized events such as ceremonies.
A multiscalar ethnoracial field provides the grounds for “ethnoracial arbitrage”, which capitalists can milk for profit. Ethnoracial minorities such as South Asians in Hong Kong are relatively constricted in their affiliative ethnoracial efforts concerning Hong Kong’s local-scale ethnoracial hierarchy component. They cannot easily pass as the racial majority (i.e. the yellow race) or the host ethnic group (Han-Chinese Hongkongers). But they are less constricted concerning the global-scale hierarchy component. Han-Chinese Hongkongers cannot easily gatekeep it. Most Han-Chinese Hongkongers can readily tell the phenotypical difference between a Filipina and a Han-Chinese, but not that between a Filipina and a Southern European. Restaurant managers capitalize on this differential ability of Han-Chinese Hongkongers to gatekeep the different parts of their dual-structured ethnoracial hierarchy.
CPOARAE as “Ethnoracialized Symbolic Labor”
I coined the term “ethnoracialized symbolic labor” to make sense of CPOARAEs from the perspective of the sociology of service work. “Symbolic labor” is a general term coined to cover the various kinds of non-manual labor in service work (Mears, 2014). Emotional labor is the first type of non-manual labor that captures sociologists’ attention. Aesthetic labor, embodied labor, and other types of non-manual labor are subsequently identified. Because CPOARAEs are performances, most instances of them should require emotional, aesthetic, and embodied labor.
It is already known that capitalistic exploitation in service work intersects with gender and class (Hanser, 2012; Hochschild, 2012). Namely, symbolic work is often gendered or classed. But the intersectionality between capitalistic exploitation and ethnoracial inequality is neglected.
The only study that discusses ethnoracialized service labor is Walters (2018), who coins the term “tri-racial aesthetic labor” to describe how white, black, and racially ambiguous retail workers carry out racial performance in fashion stores in the USA. This study supports Walters’ (2018) general argument that symbolic labor has an ethnoracialized dimension.
In some respects, CPOARAEs offer clearer evidence than Walters’ case.
According to my interviews with workers and managers and participant observation in restaurants, CPOARAEs are systematically, centrally, and explicitly ethnoracialized, whereas the racial performance in Walters’ (2018) case is only partly so.
A contrast of CPOARAEs with other familiar cases of symbolic labor compels us to distinguish between ethnoracialized symbolic labor, “gendered symbolic labor”, and “classed symbolic labor”. The symbolic labor of many service occupations requires female workers to sell their femininity, caringness, and physical attraction (Hochschild, 2012; Otis, 2011). In commercialized performances of “original” race and ethnicity, gender sometimes intersects with race and ethnicity. For example, “oriental femininity” is marketed to the white male gaze in touristic settings. But race and ethnicity do not intersect with gender in the CPOARAEs that I observe. For instance, I find that Filipina waitresses perform Americanness but not American femininity in Hong Kong’s restaurants.
…ethnoracialized symbolic labor has strict requirements about workers’ race and/or ethnicity. For example, only people with white skin and Caucasian phenotype can join the white monkey industry.
Boundary Processes of CPOARAEs: The Audiences’ Perspective
Performances of “original” race and ethnicity are in most cases found to yield socially negative outcomes. They reinforce established ethnoracial hierarchies in various ways: they enforce ethnonationalism, generate ethnocultural inauthenticity, commodify minority cultures, and tokenistically represent minorities (Cole, 2007; Sautman, 2014; Sieg, 2013; Tolen, 1998; Young, 2007). Socially positive outcomes are found only in exceptional cases (Kachtan, 2017; Maghbouleh, 2013). According to deductive logic, one expects the performance of affiliative race and ethnicity to yield more positive social outcomes. In contrast to performances of “original” race and ethnicity, it should disrupt and remake established ethnoracial hierarchies. Current studies supply inconclusive empirical evidence to support this hypothesis (Vasquez, 2014; Vora et al., 2019). They focus on the performers or the performance but neglect to explore the reactions of audiences:
Boundary erosion through assimilation and re-classification may [. . .] provoke a counterreaction by members of the [. . .] group who attempt to “seal” the boundary. [. . .] Whether or not a boundary can be crossed obviously depends on those on the other side. (Wimmer, 2008: 1040)
The perspectives of audiences, bystanders, and others “on the other side” are marginalized in studies of racial identity contestation, affiliation, mixing, and fluidity (Vargas and Kingsbury, 2016). This marginalization has compelled Roth (2018) to propose a “sociology of racial appraisals” to fill the research gap.
Results
My informants’ positive evaluation of their waitresses’ make-up style demonstrates a distinctive set of boundary processes that contain reclassification and universalist blurring. It differs from other boundary processes I observe in the field because it involves “yellowening” and is gendered. By “yellowening”, I refer to boundary processes that shift waitpersons toward Asian ethnoracial identities and away from white western ones. Three female informants praise their waitresses’ make-up style. One of them, a middleclass woman in her 30s, strongly approves of her waitress for “authentically adopting the Asian style of make-up”. This style has been popularized by South Korean celebrities, pop culture, and cosmetic industries since the 2000s. Its influence reaches China, Thailand, and other Asian societies. She observes, largely rightly in my opinion, that most South Asian migrants in Hong Kong adopt western make-up styles that are unsuitable for Asian faces. Importantly, she feels that a South Asian girl with Asian-style makeup is much more “relatable”, whereas one with western-style make-up is unrelatable and looks ugly.
This informant is imagining a pan-Asian style-based identity that linked the waitress to her and other fashionable Asians.
Apart from reclassification, the three informants’ reactions contain a fashion aesthetic-based kind of universalist blurring.
A lower-middle-class woman praises her waitress for avoiding the western fashion aesthetic. This informant de-emphasizes the ethnoracial difference between her and the waitress. She instead emphasizes the superior fashion aesthetic sense that is common between her and her waitress. Both reclassification and universalist blurring in this case involve yellowening.
Asia is not necessarily imagined as yellow and Northeast Asian. It could be imagined as brown and South Asian instead. But when these three informants say, “Asian make-up style”, they mean the Northeast Asia-based make-up style originally created for yellow ethnoracial groups.
Discussions
The previous analysis clarifies an emerging type of ethnoracial performance: the CPOARAE. It involves affiliative ethnoracial identities instead of ancestral ones, top– down organizing instead of self-initiation, capitalism instead of activism, and the disruption of established ethnoracial hierarchies in addition to the reinforcing of them. It disrupts and remakes the symbolic boundaries that exist in the minds of ethnoracial majority customers. It does so by unsettling their ethnoracial ideological beliefs about South Asians and their perception of South Asians’ position in the ethnoracial hierarchy. The general direction of the remaking is the elevation of South Asians’ position on the ethnoracial hierarchy. The most salient kinds of boundary processes it entails are reclassification, normative inversion, and universalist blurring. Reclassification and normative inversion are the more subversive types of boundary remaking in Wimmer’s (2008) taxonomy.
If CPOARAEs can yield socially positive outcomes, their capitalistic nature deserves attention. Capitalists pay workers to disrupt and remake ethnoracial hierarchies — is this too good to be true? Being a product of capitalism instead of activism gives CPOARAEs important advantages. CPOARAEs are not conditional on the successful mobilization of activists or the goodwill of ethnoracial majority individuals. They are self-sustaining in terms of finance, infrastructure, and operation. In contrast to well-researched and conventional cases of ethnoracial performances, they do not operate by inauthenticating ethnoracial minority cultures. Regardless of CPOARAEs’ commercialized nature and worker exploitation, they have created a rare (though transient) opportunity for HanChinese Hongkongers and South Asians to interact in face-to-face, friendly, and selftransformative ways.
But CPOARAEs are surely not unproblematic. The primary problem is that their elevation of minorities’ position in the ethnoracial hierarchy inevitably couples with the reconfirming of white westerners’ dominant position in this hierarchy. My informants revise their views on South Asians through various boundary processes. But most of them involve the affiliation of their waitpersons with white westerners and western culture. Only the boundary processes that feature yellowening are different. The global white–black hierarchy, namely white supremacy, is one of the bases on which CPOARAEs operate.
A secondary problem of CPOARAEs is that they are far from sufficient to eradicate ethnoracial inequalities. An informant who used to stereotypically view South Asians claims, during an interview conducted 13 months after the first interview, that her experiences of CPOARAEs have substantially changed her. She “wouldn’t return to her previous stereotypical views” of South Asians. However, those who clearly show such substantial change are a minority among my informants. Most of them change less thoroughly. A reason is that customers’ reception of CPOARAEs occurs in a commercialized, voluntary, and apolitical way. The advantage is that individuals who are originally insensitive to ethnoracial issues are encouraged to participate in this reception. The disadvantage is that even as they participate, they are not well informed about the sociopolitical aspect of CPOARAEs and may not be enthusiastic about it.
Another secondary problem is that CPOARAEs do not necessarily trigger progressive boundary processes. Most of my secondary informants remain unaffected by CPOARAEs. Some of these informants insist on a color-blind principle, some fail to understand or notice the CPOARAE of their waitpersons, some understand it but are not impressed, and some simply reinforce their stereotypical views as they experience CPOARAEs. Future studies may conduct surveys to find out how large a share of customers is like this.
This study’s findings also contribute to subfields other than ethnoracial performance. First, they enrich the debate on racial fluidity. They substantiate the undervalued insight that cultural practices directly affect race and ethnicity. They also develop this insight by extending the conception of “cultural practices” to commercially organized cultural practices. Second, my findings answer Roth’s (2018) call for a sociology of racial appraisals by substantiating its significance and suggesting a useful framework (i.e. boundary processes) to carry out the relevant empirical analyses. Third, this study’s analysis strongly substantiates Aranda’s (2017: 2237) argument that the ethnoracial perspective facilitates “global analyses of race and racism”. Fourth, my findings contribute to the sociology of service work by demonstrating that symbolic labor can be highly ethnoracialized. Fifth, they demonstrate the utility of a multiscalar perspective for the global sociology of race and ethnicity. They illustrate that paying attention to the multiple levels of ethnoracial fields is indispensable for comprehending race and ethnicity in the globalizing context of contemporary societies.
Angel Lau & Burney, 2008
Before beginning this research and before I had personally experienced overt racist incidents, I felt that racism was something that happened to “those” people; it did not happen to people like me who were born and raised in Canada, who spoke with no accent, and did not wear clothes from “back home.” I paid little attention to the comments that my white friends would often share with me. I did not understand the meanings attached to what they were saying nor did I have the conceptual tools to unpack these statements that were fraught with meaning: a friend from university who once said to me
“You are the coolest Chinese person I have ever met” or my high school friend who said “I never thought we would become friends because all your other friends are Chinese.”
I remember feeling uncomfortable after these statements had been made but I could never figure out why I felt this way; after all, we lived in Canada where racism did not exist. I would usually muster up a weak smile and a “thank you” because I truly did not know how to react or how to respond. What do you say when someone calls you the “coolest Chinese person they have ever met?” Are we to infer that Chinese people are not cool or that the inquisitor just has not been exposed to “cool Chinese people?”
At the time that these statements were made, these situations posed a series of problems for me that I did not know how to mediate. In most cases, I did not know how to deal with the feelings and questions so I continued my life, diminishing their salience. The fact that I can recall these statements (that at the time, seemed meaningless or nonchalant) years after their utterance, bears testimony to their importance and the turmoil that they created in my frame of reference.
I was not theoretically equipped to dissect these statements or to understand their significance to my experience or situation but with the conceptual tools I have now acquired,
it is easy to see the underlying racism that was simmering beneath the surface of these experiences. I just was not able to see it because society had conditioned me to ignore the subtleties of racism.
I had been raised in a time and a place where multiculturalism was thought to be a reality.
I believed that we as Canadians had achieved multiculturalism and this could not even be questioned… It was not until much later in my life that I was brutally awakened to the fallacy of this notion.
I now invite you to take this journey with me; each stop along the journey will help you to understand the contexts that have shaped my life and my research.
Lau, A., & Burney, S. (2008). Invisible visible minorities: The experiences of racial minority teacher candidates on practicum and in teacher education programs.
Contemporary mainstream United States (U.S.) racial/ethnic discourse presumes that Asian Americans experience less social and economic hardship than other racial/ethnic minority groups (Brand, Hull, Park, & Willwerth, 1987; Cheng, 1997; Committee of 100, 2009; Gee, Ro, Shariff-Marco, & Chae, 2009; Sue & Okazaki, 1990; Wong & Halgin, 2006).
of Sinophobia —
Revisiting the Asian 2nd-generation advantage — Van C. Tran, Jennifer Lee, & Tiffany J. Huang, 2019
Asian Americans generally have been underrepresented in research on discrimination, which historically [and annoyingly, and counterproductively] has emphasized Black–White relations (Williams, Neighbors, & Jackson, 2003; Sue, Bucceri, Lin, Nadal, & Torino, 2007).
Asian Americans as “model minorities” — individuals seen as industrious, achievement-oriented, quiet, passive, and naturally and culturally resourced (e.g., family oriented, intelligent; Chao, Chiu, Chan, Mendoza-Denton, & Kwok, 2013; Kim, 1999; Ng, Lee, & Pak, 2007; Wong et al., 1998). The history of the model minority stereotype can be traced to the 1960s, during which academic achievement and economic advancement among Asian Americans were seen as embodying the American Dream in light of minority status (Takaki, 1998).
Asian Americans comprise 6.4% of the US population, but account for over 20% of the country’s elite Ivy League students.
While researchers have studied mechanisms that promote an “Asian second-generation advantage” in education, including immigrant hyper-selectivity, few have examined whether this advantage extends into the labour market. Focusing on the five largest Asian groups — Chinese, Indians, Filipinos, Vietnamese, and Koreans — we revisit the thesis of Asian second-generation advantage.
Focusing on the five largest Asian groups who comprise 83% of the Asian American population (Chinese, Indians, Filipinos, Vietnamese, and Koreans), we find that how we define advantage — as outcomes or mobility — matters, as does the domain we study — education or the labour market. Our analyses of the Annual Social and Economic Supplement of the Current Population Survey (CPS ASEC) over the last decade reveal four main findings. First, all five Asian immigrant groups are highly selected from their countries of origin, and all but Vietnamese are hyper-selected. Second, all five Asian second-generation groups graduate from college at rates that far exceed native-born blacks and whites — pointing to a distinctive “Asian second-generation advantage” in educational outcomes.
The educational advantage disappears in the labour market for all groups except for second-generation Chinese. To be clear — despite the hyper-selectivity of contemporary Asian immigrants and the second generation’s exceptional educational outcomes,
the educational advantage fails to transfer to the labour market for most second-generation Asians.
Unlike Latino immigration, in which Mexico predominates as the single largest source country, Asian immigration is not dominated by a single sending country. Rather, the top source countries — China, India, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Korea — account for 71% of the Asian immigrant population, and 83% of US Asian population. Chinese, who have the longest migration history in the United States, account for the largest share of the US Asian population, totaling 4.9 million, or one-quarter (Pew Research Center 2017). At 4.0 and 3.9 million, Indians and Filipinos are the second and third largest groups, respectively, each accounting for about one-fifth of the total Asian population. Vietnamese and Koreans round out the top five, accounting for 2.0 and 1.9 million, respectively. Immigration has not only increased the Asian American population, but has also diversified it. Prior to 1965, 80% of US Asians were East Asian, but today, they account for only 36% of the US Asian population. The recent growth in the US Asian population is driven primarily by South and Southeast Asians (Lee, Ramakrishnan, and Wong 2018). Today, the US Asian population is composed of twenty-four national origin groups with diverse migration histories, languages and dialects, phenotypes, legal statuses, and socioeconomic profiles at both extremes of the distribution (Lee, Ramakrishnan, and Wong 2018). Chinese, Indians and Koreans are economic migrants, whose educational attainment exceeds that of the native-born Whites. Vietnamese are the largest Asian refugee group, who exhibit a range of human capital and occupational skills; the first wave of Vietnamese refugees was highly educated and hyper-selected, but later waves, far less so (Zhou and Bankston 1998). Filipinos are also economic migrants, but unlike East and South Asians, their migration was influenced by the Philippines’ status as a former US territory.
Despite the high median household income for all Asian groups, more than 14% of Chinese and Vietnamese live in poverty, as do close to 13% of Koreans. Indians and Filipinos — the two Asian groups who report the highest rates of English language proficiency — report the lowest poverty rates at 7.5%.
Hyper-Selectivity
Beyond high selectivity, Lee and Zhou (2015) coined the term hyper-selectivity, to describe a dual positive immigrant selectivity in which immigrants are not only more likely to have graduated from college than their non-migrant counterparts from their countries of origin, but also more likely to have a college degree than the host society. This hyper-selectivity helps to explain the favourable socioeconomic outcomes of the first generation, as well as the second generation’s exceptional educational outcomes (Kao and Thompson 2003; Lee and Zhou 2015; Tran et al. 2018).
Hyper-selectivity’s effects extend beyond the reproduction of advantage. Hyper-selectivity has cultural, institutional, and social psychological consequences that can boost the second generation’s educational outcomes in ways that defy the status attainment model.
Hyper-selectivity has social psychological consequences that have “spillover effects” across ethnic origin groups. For example, the hyperselectivity of Chinese immigrants leads to the perception that all Chinese are highly educated, hard-working, and deserving (Lee and Zhou 2015). And because of the racialization that occurs in the US context, this perception extends to other Asian Americans, despite differences among them.
For example, residential proximity among Asian ethnic groups in the United States also promotes spillover effects. This allows, for example, Vietnamese immigrants to benefit from institutional resources like after-school programmes that are available among Chinese communities.
The spillover effects of hyper-selectivity help to boost opportunities and outcomes in ways that defy the status attainment model (Hsin 2016) and explain why the daughter of Chinese immigrants whose parents have only an elementary school education, work in ethnic restaurants, and live among working-class co-ethnics is able to soar past her parents and graduate from Harvard (Kasinitz et al. 2009; Lee and Zhou 2017).
Indeed, Asian American educational achievement has reached such a level that academic success has become racially coded as an Asian American norm in some contexts (Drake 2017; Jiménez and Horowitz 2013).
Despite Asian Americans’ out-performance of white Americans in education, Asian Americans have been less successful in translating these gains into the labour market. For example, researchers have found that Asian Americans were systematically overeducated relative to their labour market attainment, implying that some degree of ethnic or racial discrimination still persists in the labour market (Hirschman and Wong 1984; Madamba and De Jong 1997). Saad et al. (2012) suggest that ethnic minority factors — including degree of English proficiency and acculturation — influence the relationship between income and education for Asian Americans. In their survey of this literature, Sakamoto, Goyette, and Kim (2009) also document that foreign schooling leads to a lower rate of returns across all racial and ethnic minority groups (see also Bratsberg and Ragan 2002).
Kim and Sakamoto (2010) find that among college graduates, US-born Asian men earn 8% less than white men, even after controlling for years of education, school type, major, and region of residence. US-born Asian women are likely to earn as much as white women, but are less likely to hold supervisory positions (Kim and Zhao 2014). These findings suggest that second-generation Asian Americans of both genders have yet to achieve full equality across multiple labour market indicators compared to their native white counterparts. One area of significant disadvantage is in supervisory and leadership positions, where Asian Americans are still less likely than native whites with the same educational background to rise to such positions (Sakamoto, Goyette, and Kim 2009). More recent research on Asian Americans’ labour market outcomes points to inter-ethnic and inter-generational differences in attainment and occupational field among Asian groups. Lee and Kye (2016) find that disaggregating labour market outcomes by gender, national origin, and educational attainment reveals both significant disadvantages for underachieving Asian groups, as well as a “bamboo ceiling” that limits advancement for overachieving Asian groups.
Asian Americans across generations are disproportionately concentrated in STEM and healthcare-related fields, compared to both native-born whites and non-Asian minorities.
Asians face higher risk from environmental health hazards than Whites (Clark et al., 2014; Cushing et al., 2015; Downey et al., 2008; Houston et al., 2014; Lievanos, 2015; McKelvey et al., 2007; Morello-Frosch and Jesdale, 2006; Payne-Sturges and Gee, 2006).
Over 40% of the Japanese population and 30% of the Filipino population in the US lived in counties that exceed PM2.5 air quality standards; when aggregated together, they found that 20% of the US Asian population lived in exceedance counties (Gordon et al., 2010).
Cancer is the leading cause of death for Asian Americans (CDC, 2010; Chen, 2005), yet physicians recommend preventative cancer screenings to Asian patients at a lower rate than other groups, in part because of the model minority stereotype (Ibaraki et al., 2014).
Inegalitarian Pluralism
Milkman et al., 2015
“An audit study in academia of over 6,500 professors at top U.S. universities drawn from 89 disciplines and 259 institutions
Students of Asian descent experience particularly pronounced bias (contrary to what past research on stereotypes of Asians as “model minorities” might predict, Lin et al., 2005). Seven of the ten discipline-discipline estimates of the “discriminatory gap” in the treatment of minorities and females relative to Caucasian males in Figure 1a are statistically significant and an eighth is marginally significant (social sciences), indicating that in all broad disciplines except health sciences and humanities, women and minorities are ignored at rates that differ from Caucasian male students.
The only remaining pathway through which representation could impact response rates is by affecting the bias towards women and minorities shown by faculty who do not share a student’s race or sex.
Sex: Across all models, we observe no benefits to women contacting female faculty, consistent with recent work by Moss-Racusin et al. (2012).
Race: Only Chinese students experience significant benefits from contacting Chinese faculty (the effect is marginally significant for Indian students contacting Indian faculty, and other groups do not benefit at all, consistent with findings presented in Milkman, Akinola, and Chugh (2012).
Teacher Salary: Notably, if we disaggregate the nine separate female and minority groups studied, greater bias is observed in higher-paid disciplines for every group.
Bias harms Caucasian males in the fine arts. Notably, the magnitude of the bias we find is quite large.
In the most discriminatory discipline we observe in our study — business —
minorities and females seeking guidance are ignored at 2.6 times the rate of Caucasian males,
and even in the least discriminatory academic discipline — the humanities (where bias does not reach statistical significance) — minorities and females are still ignored at 1.3 times the rate of Caucasian males.
These “micro-inequities” (Rowe, 1981; 2008) and “micro-aggressions” (Sue, 2010) are often on the pathways that lead to (or emerge after) gateways. It is important to recognize that bias, even if unintended, in the way faculty make informal, ostensibly small choices can have negative repercussions (Petersen, Saporta, and Seidel, 2000), especially as seemingly small differences in treatment can accumulate (Valian, 1999; DiPrete and Eirich, 2006).”
Milkman, K. L., Akinola, M., & Chugh, D. (2015). What happens before? A field experiment exploring how pay and representation differentially shape bias on the pathway into organizations. Journal of Applied Psychology, 100(6), 1678.
Model Minority Myth Via Kim Saira
Correction to 2nd slide: Should be 1991, not 1982!
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The MMM was originally coined in 1966 by sociologist William Petersen to explain how Japanese Americans were able to “overcome the discrimination against them” & “achieve success in the US.”
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There are many reasons why it was weird for a white man to create this term, especially during that time.
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The 1960s-70s was a time for civil rights activism within the Asian American community. AAPI were calling for the end of the Vietnam War & reparations for Japanese Americans forced into intermittent camps during WWII.
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During this same time, Black activism played a huge role in the AAPI civil rights movement, and vice versa. MLK spoke out against the Vietnam War in his speech, “Beyond Vietnam”, & a founding member of the Black Panther party, Richard Aoki, was Japanese American.
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In short, the MMM was created to directly wedge a divide between AAPI & Black communities, especially when AAPI & Black people were showing up for each other in solidarity.
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Over time, some AAPI have assimilated with the MMM, therefore assimilating to whiteness & upholding white supremacy & anti-Black racism.
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The MMM does NOT apply to all AAPI (because we cannot monolith Asians) & there IS inner work being done, including many orgs that have been working to dismantle this within their communities. Many of us aren’t aware about this inner anti-racism work because the MMM works to only highlight the disparities & hate between Asian and Black folks.
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Regardless, we as an Asian community need to continually address & take accountability for this, so that we can improve our unity with other BIPOC, particularly with Black & Brown folx, & take down white supremacy!✊🏽
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There are action items & learning resources for Asians Americans in here, so PLEASE share this!!
Comment: Dr. Kiona → “AA were FORCED to assimilate, changing their names and losing language, in order to get jobs, clients, bank loans, etc. Phrasing assimilation as a privilege or choice is upholding MMM.”
Sidenotes (will be abridged as time permits)
Skin Tone & Identity
Self-identification choices are bounded by daily experiences with observers: people self-identify their race based on reflected appraisals from observers (Khanna 2010; Rockquemore and Brunsma 2008; Sims 2016).
many white people express egalitarian beliefs but also feel an aversion to racial minorities (Bonilla-Silva 2003; Dovidio and Gaertner 2000). Samuel L. Gaertner and John F. Dovidio (2005) label this new approach to race “aversive racism,” which is enacted in more subtle, indirect, and rationalizable ways than old-fashioned racism.
Ellis P. Monk (2014) showed that among respondents identified as black, lighter skin tone predicts higher educational attainment, occupational status, and income. These scholars provide evidence that macro-level outcomes correlate with skin color
Edward Murguia and Edward E. Telles (1996) found that among people identified as Hispanic or Latino, lighter individuals have higher educational attainment than darker individuals. Similarly, Arthur H. Goldsmith, Darrick Hamilton, and William Darity (2006) demonstrated that among men identified as black, having lighter skin provided a wage advantage relative to having darker skin
Research on people’s associations with the categories white versus black tells us that blackness is perceived more negatively than whiteness (Nosek et al. 2007).
Black women are constantly developing unique racial and gendered- race based techniques for applying highly adaptive and active coping strategies (Pierce, 1995; Smith, Allen, & Danley, 2007; Smith, Yosso, & Solórzano, 2007).
There is growing research on the effects of racial microaggressions, discrimination, stereotypes, and prejudice (Feagin, 2001, 2006; Feagin, Vera, & Imani, 1996; Harper, 2006, 2009; Jackson, 2008; Jackson & Moore III, 2008; Jenkins, 2006; McCabe, 2009; Smith, Allen, & Danley, 2007; Smith, Yosso, & Solórzano, 2006, 2007; Solórzano, Ceja, & Yosso, 2000).
Collins (2005) outlines how Black masculinity, for instance, was constructed to serve the interests of the transatlantic slave trade
In the American west during the mid-19th century, newly arrived white settlers were predominantly men, leaving female laborers in short supply. In constructing Asian men as feminine and weak, however, they were able to force Chinese male immigrants into such emasculated occupations as domestic service, food preparation, and laundry work. Moreover, the presence of Asian men in these un-manly occupations worked to further solidify stereotypes of Asian masculinity and Asian men as inferior to whiteness.
Early racial constructions served to keep interracial labor relations under control, & they continue to help police the boundaries of the sexual and romantic spheres to the present day: to “encode people in and out of the possibility of love” (Gebrial 2017).
Returning to the subject of Black men, Collins (2005) further discusses how Black men’s constructed hypersexuality rendered them unfit mates for white women and their delicate purity.
According to the mythology of the “Black rapist,” Black men were seen as naturally sexually violent, “primarily through the potential use of the penis as a weapon of violence against White women” (P. 64). In her essay on 19th century European art and literature, Ponzanesi (2005) observes a similar pattern in how the sexualized colonial images of the Hottentot and the harem have framed, and continue to frame, African-American and “Oriental” women, respectively. On the one hand, she outlines how the harem woman’s construction as simultaneously sexually restrained and sexually potent feeds into a certain objectifying and exoticizing fascination with the hidden mystique of women from the East. On the other hand, the archetypal Hottentot, an African woman with abnormal bodily proportions and an insatiable, animalistic sexual appetite, made it so that Black women were deemed ill-suited for the love of white men and only fit for sexualized violence; and because of Black women’s presumed hypersexuality, many still struggle to even conceive of such aggressions as violent or non-consensual to this day (Freedman 2013; West and Johnson 2013).
Chito Childs (2009) examines how racial stereotypes continue to pervade popular culture in ways that cast interracial love as dangerous and/or undesirable. Asian men, for instance, are portrayed as awkward and emasculated in their interactions with desirable white woman. A clear example is the 2006–07 season of the reality television show Beauty and the Geek, where three nerdy Asian brothers compete for the affections of mostly white women, who are implicitly considered “out of their league.” In the world of film, a white woman’s relationship with a black man is often employed to symbolize the woman’s “downward spiral,” in keeping with time-worn tales of white women losing their purity in wild liaisons with Black men. Yet in cases where white men are depicted with women of color, the white men almost always come out looking like benevolent colonists. The relationship is still doomed to fail, of course, but blame will rarely fall upon the white man, who “remains the gentle conqueror, the savior, even if the only thing being conquered or invaded is a woman of color” (P. 89).
Goffman (1959), the social world is analogous to being on a stage, and one is thus required to perform one’s “role” in order to give off a favorable presentation of self. In terms of racial “roles,” white people have a vested interest in properly embodying whiteness, which affords them greater freedom of movement and higher social esteem, among various similar advantages (McIntosh 1992).
whiteness is essentially an absence, a default against which all other races are to be understood. So for whiteness to maintain its constructed invisibility, white people must interact with people of color, especially Blacks, in ways that render them hypervisible. At the same time, however, white individualism tends to render Black people invisible to the extent that Blacks remain undifferentiated as distinct individuals. For W. E. B. Du Bois (1909), this paradoxical combination of hypervisibility and invisibility is a characteristic of the “veil” through which whites view Blacks in the United States. Beneath the veil, Black people are invisible in their singularities and hypervisible in their “problem”-ness.
Du Bois (1909) makes clear through the notion of double consciousness. In response to slavery and myriad oppressions in the United States, the Black American suffers the fate of “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others,
choosing instead to appropriate white identity for its superior racial capital. Charsley and Bolognani (2016), for example, note this tendency among many British Pakistanis. By denigrating those “fresh off the boat” migrants who have yet to gain fluency in British cultural practices, these relatively-acculturated British Pakistanis construct their own belonging-ness within the white-coded British mainstream. In such cases, however, individuals can only gain honorary whiteness for themselves. They cannot truly challenge the premise of racial hierarchy in any fruitful way; one cannot simply opt out of race, or simply present oneself as raceless. Scott’s (1990) discussion of the master-slave dynamic, wherein African American slaves, despite expressing an often vicious loathing of their white masters whilst offstage, deemed it beneficial, and even necessary for survival, to enact strategic performances of gratitude and deference.
Part 2
The possibilities of biraciality to reframe & reimagine interracial pair-bonds as desirable, and to deconstruct the assumed monoracial normativity of love
Fong: “gay pornography serves as a form of anticipatory socialization, teaching the skills and knowledge needed once the male assumes the new sexuality.” However, as feminists and antiracist activists have long asserted, pornography is far from an ideal place to learn about healthy, non-hierarchical social dynamics. With little oversight and with “nothing in the gay community [saying] it’s not okay” (as cited in Plummer 2007), …
may in fact lead gay men of different races to interact in ways that reinforce existing patterns of racialization.
‘I’m not into you. I don’t like Asian guys.’ (Plummer 2007:18).
Racialization in the Sexual Marketplace
Gay men appear to make greater use of racial classifications and be more overtly expressive of racial preferences than the wider society (Plummer 2007; Fong 2003; Raj 2011; Williams 2016).
Gay men of all races have shown a general preference for white men and white bodies (Callander, Holt, and Newman 2012; Caluya 2006),
Despite white gay men’s assertions of it’s “just a preference,” gay men often express little hesitation to discriminate amongst potential sexual and romantic partners purely on the basis of race (Callender et al. 2012; Caluya 2006).
Declarations like “no fats, no fems, no Asians,” which are quite prevalent on gay dating websites, preemptively discourage certain people color, among other undesirables, from even engaging with white gays. Overall, Raj (2011) notes in his study of the gay dating app Grindr that “non-white bodies are either invisible [. . .] or castigated for being unappealing” (P. 8).
Gay white men appear unable and/or unwilling to recognize queer people of color as human beings. if they are actually interested, they want either to dominate weak oriental bodies (Raj 2011) or submit to a hypermasculine black male caricature (Williams 2016).
Understandably, however, both Raj and Williams find it difficult to simply cast aside the few gays who deem them worthy of sexual contact, and so each of them submits in part to this sadistic fetishization, relishing in the meager validation it affords: “While I find such an encounter [with racial fetishization] troubling on a theoretical level,” Raj (2011) admits, “there is a bodily excitement that emerges in being desired” (P. 10). Williams (2016), too, finds himself wondering, “why am I so caught up in wanting adoration for something that only loves me when it’s convenient for them?”
Importantly, these interpersonal dynamics function not only as assertions of power and powerlessness; they also serve as racial projects that performatively uphold the racial formations of the interactants. Whether a white gay man rejects and ignores a man of color or objectifies him in the service of a fetish, he is under both circumstances viewing him through a Du Boisian veil.
Part 3
Plummer (2007) acknowledges the tremendous resilience shown by gay men of color when faced with such raw and cutting moments of racialization. “By establishing a social sanctuary comprised of similar others, and resisting sexual racism’s external and internal manifestations, these individuals have managed to heal and protect their sense of sexual and general self-worth” (Plummer 2007:76–77). Heartening as this fact may be, I cannot help but wonder: is this really the best the gay community can do?
Emphasizing the “work” in “racework,” Steinbugler conceptualizes the maintenance of interracial intimacy as “an ongoing process, rather than a singular accomplishment” (P. xiv). The racework process is one that requires effort, commitment, and large amounts of emotional labor, but it is also a highly rewarding endeavor, enabling interracial couples to develop ever-stronger bonds.
Not only does a commitment to racework break down barriers between interracial partners; it might even help to undermine the whole system of racial division. As Nagel (2010) explains, “the intense interpersonal involvement associated with sexual intimacy pulls willing partners towards one another on many social and cultural fronts, blending their lives and biographies, and creating conditions conducive to assimilation” (P. 203).
Racial Malleability
Racial malleability is the everyday adoption of so-called White linguistic/ cultural practices to lessen the stigma of one’s racialized position in particular situations. [Which differs from trying to pass as White]
Roth-Gordon uses the concept of racial malleability to explore how these racialized youth alter negative perceptions of their racial appearances through the use of linguistic Whiteness.
In police interactions, for instance, one participant notes how he engages in ‘self-whitening’ by using standardized Portuguese to present himself as a law-abiding citizen rather than a potential criminal, which his racialized body usually signifies. This instance of racial malleability should not be seen as someone wanting to pass as White. For Roth-Gordon, this shifting of race through language reinforces raciolinguistic ideologies by suggesting that improving one’s race entails borrowing ‘white’ qualities. The notions of racial malleability and raciolinguistic ideologies highlight how language and the body are deeply intertwined and can thus prove useful in making connections between body and voice in aesthetic labour.
As a result of complaints about having incomprehensible accents and racist backlash over their alleged stealing of jobs from workers in the Global North, Indian agents are often required to present themselves as non-Indian through specific language training.
This training typically entails the ‘neutralization’ of various elements in their Indian-accented English, which often means learning American and/or British accents in particular (e.g. Cowie, 2007; Mirchandani, 2012, 2015; Nath, 2011; Poster, 2007; Raghuram, 2013; Taylor and Bain, 2005). Apart from accent neutralization, workers further disguise their identities through taking up western aliases and making reference to western culture, both of which are intended to make callers believe that they are receiving service from someone in their home country (Nath, 2011; Poster, 2007; Rajan-Rankin, 2018). These above-mentioned practices are what Poster (2007: 273) calls national identity management, a labour tactic in which Indian racial/national identity is ‘considered malleable and subject to managerial control’.
While racial malleability may entail completely passing as a White service provider, it can also involve lessening the salience of one’s race (Roth-Gordon, 2016). In the context of Indian call centres this point is significant, because in recent years companies have abandoned the location masking of workers due to increasing public awareness of the outsourcing of jobs to the Global South (Mirchandani, 2012; Nath, 2011). Therefore, it is now often the case that the Indian identity of the call centre worker is known to the western caller. The implication of this knowledge is that agents may need to continue ‘whitening’ their English to diminish the stigma of being Indian (Nath, 2011). Indeed, it has been noted that workers who successfully use ‘western-sounding’ English report positive encounters with callers, who are delighted to hear that a foreign worker can speak a familiar variety of English (e.g. D’Cruz and Noronha, 2008).
July 2nd Update
Do not collapse South Asians with East Asian groups because South Asians often have very different experiences from East Asians (Mishra 2013)
What is the American experience for these SES Asian individuals, Latino individuals, compared to White Americans? — Daniel
https://www.pnas.org/content/117/9/4590 (Why East Asians but not South Asians are underrepresented in leadership positions in the United States)
“An intuitive explanation for the bamboo ceiling is prejudice, which Allport (12) defined as “antipathy” toward a social group. Much research in the United States indicates the existence of intergroup prejudice toward nonwhites, including Asians (13⇓⇓⇓–17). Nevertheless, little research has compared the prejudice faced by EAs and SAs in the United States. As one of the only studies that compared different Asian subgroups, the recent National Asian American Survey (18) suggests that SAs may experience greater prejudice than EAs in everyday life, possibly because of SAs’ darker skin tone and physical resemblance to certain Middle Easterners (19). For instance, SAs experienced considerable ethnic hostility in the aftermath of 9/11. For these reasons, we tested prejudice as an external, intergroup mechanism of the bamboo ceiling. If SAs were in fact more likely to attain leadership positions despite facing greater prejudice than EAs, then prejudice would be unlikely to be the main reason for the leadership attainment gap between EAs and SAs.”
— This explains the prejudice differences between south and east Asian that they experience in the US
“South Asians experience more prejudice than East Asians in the United States (mostly phenotypic) (Lu et al., 2020).
“Analyses revealed that East Asians faced less prejudice than South Asians” Jackson Lu et al. (2020).
“Next, studies 4 and 5 examined the leadership attainment of EA, SA, and white Master of Business Administration (MBA) students at a top business school, where all students had undergone the same competitive admissions process. Consistent with study 1, studies 4 and 5 found that EAs were less likely than SAs and whites to attain leadership at the business school, whereas SAs actually outperformed whites. Again, assertiveness — but not leadership motivation — emerged as a significant mediator.”
— East Asians and south Asians differ in opportunities for leadership positions (south Asians get more leadership positions than whites and whites get more than east Asians)
— Explanations in the article discussed cultural differences between EA & SA (more assertive)
https://news.trust.org/item/20200619140502-oxrkp
— racism in India against north east Indians (border between China and India)
— Indians being racist to those who look East Asian living within India.
— Article talks about negative psychological implications of model minority stereotypes on Asian americans
“…wealth inequality between high and low SES Asian Americans is even larger than it is for White Americans, with the wealthiest Asian Americans earning more than their White counterparts, and the poorest Asian Americans earning less [9]. Breaking down Asian Americans based on national origin further clarifies this picture. For example, Indian and Filipino Americans have the highest median household income (of $95,000 and $80,000 respectively), while Hmong and Bangladeshi Americans have the lowest (of $52,500 and $46,950 respectively).
In terms of educational attainment, we see similar disparities. A review of Census data by Ngo and Lee (2007) revealed that although fewer than 15% of Chinese, Japanese, and South Asian Americans broadly have less than a high school education, the numbers for Cambodian, Hmong, Lao, and Vietnamese Americans are significantly higher (52%, 59%, 49%, and 38% respectively) [10]. Similar disparities are revealed when the percentages of Asian Americans holding at least a bachelor’s degree are disaggregated by national origin.”
-southeast Asians are experiencing high disparities in education when compared to northeast Asians (Chinese, Japanese)
-national origin plays a huge role in SES and educational outcomes, not just being south Asian or east Asian
“Recent work by Kim and Lee (2014) with East and Southeast Asian American college students has demonstrated that internalization of the Model Minority Myth is negatively correlated with advantageous help-seeking behaviors [13]. In other words, Asian American students who subscribe to the stereotypes comprising the Model Minority Myth (e.g., being exceptionally hard workers, performing better than other minority groups) are less likely to seek out assistance in times of emotional distress than Asian American students who do not subscribe to such stereotypes. Other work on internalization of the Model Minority Myth reveals that, among Asian American adolescents with poor academic performance, increased internalization of the Myth was positively correlated with emotional distress [14].”
-students may not raise their hand as much or feel pressured to do better on tests
-they might also feel like not scoring better on exams will mean they feel less associated with their culture
“The Model Minority Myth also serves to minimize, if not completely erase, the racism that Asian American students face on college campuses. Research shows that university administrators are less likely to take action when these students are victims of racial discrimination, thus leaving them to fend for themselves in a hostile and unwelcoming environment [22].
The Model Minority Myth has also limited Asian Americans’ access to appropriate mental health care, given its pervasive nature [23]. Pictures of Asian Americans as high-functioning and successful individuals have resulted in severe inattention to mental illness among Asian Americans. This inattention has contributed to the lack of targeted community outreach and culturally sensitive care for Asian Americans [24]. Furthermore, even among mental health practitioners who are aware of the needs of their local community, the care provided is inadequate due to the lack of research and educational material available to them that explicitly deals with Asian American mental health [25].”
“Instead of conducting research on Asian Americans as a whole, it is worthwhile to break participant samples down by ethnic origin (e.g., South, Southeast, and East Asian Americans), or by socioeconomic status.”
-this article goes in depth on educational challenges that south east Asian americans face in America’s education system
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2019/12/countering-stereotypes
“Clinicians might infer that their low rate of service utilization means that Asian Americans don’t face significant psychological problems, but research suggests otherwise. Several studies have found that Asian Americans present more severe symptoms when they do enter treatment (Hwang, W.C., et al., Psychiatric Services, Vol. 66, №10, 2015). And in a doctoral dissertation study of 17 years of archival data from a university student counseling center, Asian American and international Asian students reported more distress and experienced less improvement during psychotherapy compared with white students (La Stokes, H., Brigham Young University Scholars Archive, 2018).
“Asian Americans do have psychological problems,” says Gordon C. Nagayama Hall, PhD, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon who studies culture and mental health, “but when they experience distress, they tend not to seek treatment — in part because of these stereotypes.””
-model minority stereotype internalization preventing Asian americans from seeking treatment → higher mental distress
“Hall and his colleagues explored the effectiveness of such adapted interventions in a 2016 meta-analysis that included nearly 14,000 participants, 30% of whom were Asian American or Asian. The analysis found that culturally relevant interventions were significantly more likely to lead to remission from psychopathology than unadapted versions of the same interventions (Behavior Therapy, Vol. 47, №6, 2016).”