Last week, the Pew Research Center released a report called \u201cThe Rise of Asian Americans,\u201d offering a portrait seemingly full of good news. Asian Americans, Pew said, are on the whole more educated, affluent and happier than other Americans. They hew more strongly to family values and an ethic of hard work. And, quietly, these 17 million Asian Americans have surpassed Hispanics as the largest and fastest-growing cohort of immigrants to the U.S.<\/p>\n
The report made headlines everywhere: \u201cAsians Top of the Immigration Class\u201d was a typical, if somewhat ham-handed, one. The leading advocacy groups for Asian Americans were silent for a beat. Then they decried the report. It was \u201cdisparaging,\u201d \u201cshallow,\u201d \u201cdisturbing.\u201d It perpetuated a patronizing stereotype of Asians as dutiful nerds, a \u201cmodel minority.\u201d It overlooked the true cultural diversity of the Asian population and obscured the struggles and pain of countless Asians.<\/p>\n
Rarely in either the Pew report or in the advocates\u2019 response was this possibility raised: both the good and the bad could be true at the same time.<\/p>\n
Welcome to race in America. It may be 2012, and we may have a black President, but public discussion of race remains inexorably, insanely binary. American race talk used to be literally black-and-white, leaving no room for other colors. Now the problem is it\u2019s figuratively black-and-white. For all our rainbow multiculturalism, there are still basically two choices \u2014 in or out, mainstream or opposition, powerful or powerless. Sometimes the labels white and black are used, but they signify more than hue or actual demography \u2014 they signify polarity \u2014 and any cognitive dissonance must be resolved to one or the other.<\/p>\n
This is why those Asian-American advocates felt they had to blast the Pew report. When forced by the media to choose between telling an achievement story or an injustice story \u2014 Is yellow white or black? \u2014 they felt compelled to choose the latter. That\u2019s understandable. There is privation and injustice in Asian America \u2014 from high poverty among Hmong refugees to forgotten elders in Chinatowns to the health struggles of Pacific Islanders \u2014 and if activists privileged enough to have a voice use it to express complacency or self-congratulation, then they aren\u2019t doing their job. Moreover, Asian Americans rightly resist being used by whites to criticize other groups who aren\u2019t deemed \u201cmodel.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yet this binary is a box. It limits the freedom of Asian Americans to call progress progress, or to discuss openly the causes of the challenges that persist. It makes it harder to unpack the fact that in Asian America, as in America at large, widening inequality and the cult of meritocracy has created more anxiety for both winners and losers. It means we all keep speaking a language of race when we are trying to communicate about issues of class.<\/p>\n
Consider Chinese Americans, the largest Asian-American subgroup. Pew tells us that on average the 4 million Americans of Chinese descent have both more college attainment and more poverty than other Americans, both higher incomes and less optimism about race relations. As China grows stronger, Chinese Americans are going to be cast as both valuable bridge-building citizens and aliens of uncertain loyalty. Are we ready for both?<\/p>\n
We may be. Last week, as the Pew report and its backlash broke, two other Asian-American story lines unfolded. First was the commemoration of the 30th anniversary of the killing of Vincent Chin, a Chinese American who was beaten to death in Detroit by resentful white autoworkers who assumed he was Japanese. Those assailants never spent a day in jail. Meanwhile, thanks to Chinese-American Congresswoman Judy Chu, the House of Representatives last Tuesday passed a historic apology for the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the \u201cyellow peril\u201d law that for decades banned the immigration or naturalization of people from China.<\/p>\n
Both good news and bad. Complexity is here, and it\u2019s not going away. If we must have a binary in our reckoning with race, then, let it be between those who know how to navigate complexity and those who don\u2019t. And let Asian Americans be at the forefront of the first group, showing their compatriots how to embrace diversity and contradiction: how to be truly American.<\/p>\n