The Times today reports:
The image of Asian-Americans as a homogeneous group of high achievers taking over the campuses of the nation’s most selective colleges came under assault in a report issued Monday.
The report, by New York University, the College Board and a commission of mostly Asian-American educators and community leaders, largely avoids the debates over both affirmative action and the heavy representation of Asian-Americans at the most selective colleges.
But it pokes holes in stereotypes about Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders, including the perception that they cluster in science, technology, engineering and math. And it points out that the term “Asian-American” is extraordinarily broad, embracing members of many ethnic groups.
Perhaps because I’m Asian-American myself (Japanese American, to be precise) and also perhaps because I’m often spectacularly out of touch, I’m flummoxed to find that this constitutes something surprising. Do we really need a report to poke holes in the idea that all Asian Americans are alike, or do well in school, or go on to become engineers and scientists and mathematicians? Honestly!
I don’t mean to belittle the fact that Asian American students are sometimes subjected to various demeaning stereotypes, or to deny that awareness of cultural differences among Asian nationalities is often virtually non-existent, or to dismiss out of hand the possibility that some (elite) universities may be trying to keep a lid, more or less, on their Asian American student enrollments. But I find it paradoxical that the point of the report was to emphasize that not all Asian Americans are alike but are actually quite diverse – without really telling us much about that diversity, other than to say that many struggle in school, don’t go into engineering, and don’t have a lock on admissions into an elite university. Of course, I’m being unfair to the report, since I haven’t read it, but the news summaries (not only in the Times, but Inside Higher Ed as well) suggest that the instruction we should take away is: look really hard, and you’ll see the differences. But we’re only going to give you hints about where and how to look.
Some of my irritation with discussions of this kind has to do with comparisons and gestures such as these:
The report quotes the opening to W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1903 classic “The Souls of Black Folk” — “How does it feel to be a problem?” — and says that for Asian-Americans, seen as the “good minority that seeks advancement through quiet diligence in study and work and by not making waves,” the question is, “How does it feel to be a solution?”
To which my response is: Oh good grief. I’ve never felt like ‘a solution’ to anything, and I don’t know any of my Asian American friends or cousins who do, either. Of course, this limited sample, such as it is, hardly constitutes a refutation of the point; as I mentioned, I may simply be out of touch, and there may be hordes of Asian American students out there, laboring under the demand that ‘they are a solution.’ But I think not – they may be laboring under parental demands or various forms of peer pressure, and these can be significant, but I hardly think that the social burdens they carry can be even remotely characterized in this way, which invites a kind of comparison with the black American experience that’s not warranted. And so even to suggest that *this* captures the problems faced by young ‘Asian Americans’ (as a unit? as a whole?) is to succumb to or indulge in a kind of patronizing stereotyping itself.
Perhaps my incredulity at the necessity of being presented with such seemingly self-evident findings – self-evident, at any rate, to anyone who bothers to pay the least bit of attention – is the effect of living in New York, where the juxtaposition and overlapping of so many different communities induces awareness of ethnic and cultural difference, not only within the various Asian American communities but across the cultural spectrum. (Although this is perhaps a patronizing assumption of my own, about New York vis-a-vis the rest of the country.) Yet the report’s findings still strike me as truistic, rather than revelatory.
