This is some really dubious logic and it's terrible that this should be considered valid research.<p>To exclude the fact that some groups work harder, have completely different attitudes towards self preservation, who might have skills passed down from generation to generation, who might actually be more intelligent (contentious, I know, but it could be true).<p>It's ridiculous.<p>I grew up with a lot of Asian kids, and enough Black kids, and they were definitely different ethnic groups, in so many ways. It's crazy to think that 'only societies attitudes towards them' made the difference.
> But the greatest thing that ever happened to them wasn't that they studied hard, or that they benefited from tiger moms or Confucian values. It's that other Americans started treating them with a little more respect.<p>It seems strange to ignore the possibility that one led to the other.
<i>Instead, his research suggests that society simply became less racist toward Asians.</i><p>I think some more interesting questions are why that happened, and why the same didn't happen with blacks.
There certainly does appear to be a white supremacist fixation on black people. I was thinking the other day how odd it is that "white supremacists" (in America ) seem to spend a majority of their time talking about blacks when Asians are on average performing better in every metric. Life expectancy, earnings, education. I thought white supremacists would see Asian American success as a threat to their ideology (that whites are genetically superior and should be performing better than all races).<p>I only asked this question once on a YouTube race thread to self proclaimed white supremacists, and the response I got was that Asians don't commit crime or cause trouble so it's alright if they're performing better.<p>Which makes me believe a more accurate term for most white supremacists (in America at least) would be "anti-black".
So was it that<p>> Journalists were praising Asians for being hard workers who kept their heads down, cherished education and didn’t complain<p>? Or maybe it was just that<p>> Asians [were] being hard workers who kept their heads down, cherished education and didn’t complain.<p>I'll go further than another top-level comment and say that embracing the first sentence unironically is being <i>intentionally</i> obtuse, given that one literally has to write the second sentence to get there.<p>But it's the unsurprising consequence of a worldview that "hard work never gets anyone anywhere". Note that you don't have to reject the idea of privilege entirely in order to acknowledge that hard work is also a path to success; and this article goes to show that hard work and success is also a path to privilege, not [just] the other way around.
I'd like to see a similar look at how and why attitudes changed towards Italian-americans, Irish-americans, and Jews. These groups were all discriminated against and considered undesirable by the majority for a long time, and now are mostly accepted.<p>I have suggested in jest before that what determines whether or not a minority will gain acceptance in the US is their food. Americans like Asian, Italian, and Jewish food, and Irish drinking culture, so ethnic restaurants from those groups became popular, and acceptance of the people behind the food followed. We like Mexican food, and Hispanics seem on track for mainstream acceptance.<p>Black food is too similar to general Southern food for the mainstream to see it as a separate cuisine, so acceptance has been harder for blacks.
I suspect that the "them and us" mentality of our inner chimp is binary not n-ary so if society is really anti-black our minds cannot easily handle also being anti-"something else". So Asians simply became "honouray white" in order to make room for racism elsewhere.<p>It's something similar to the waves of immigrants hitting Londons docklands for generations - each wave suffers then moves outwards to the suburbs and the newest wave becomes the focus of ire.<p>Just a thought - depressingly maybe we always need a "them"
what a load of racist bullshit. So a $8,000 difference in wages in young men is proof that Asians got to where they are today because white people allowed them to?<p>so other people's respect will put money in my pocket? Damn why did I bother going to college?