Acting White
<p><a href="http://volokh.blogspot.com/">Eugene Volokh</a> comments that<br />
many of the leading promoters of racial identity politics in the<br />
U.S. have begun to lump Asians in with white people, but declines to<br />
attempt an interpretation.  Actually this development is very easy to<br />
understand.  All you need to break the code is to know that &#8220;white&#8221; =<br />
&#8220;assimilated&#8221;.</p>
<p>Asians tend to be perceived as &#8220;white&#8221; not<br />
because they have white skin but because they behave as white people<br />
are expected to behave &mdash; they pursue prosperity and value education,<br />
and seek to blend into the U.S.&#8217;s broad middle class rather than<br />
creating a defiant, adversarial ghetto or barrio culture.  Compare the<br />
epithet &#8220;acting white&#8221;, used among urban blacks to sneer at kids with<br />
black skin who work at being good students or holding down regular<br />
jobs.</p>
<p>This is nothing new.  Historically, &#8220;whiteness&#8221; has never been a<br />
purely racial category.  As late as the turn of the 20th century,<br />
Irish immigrants in the U.S. were sometimes separated from &#8220;whites&#8221; in<br />
speech and writing. Later, Eastern Europeans and Italians had to<br />
assimilate to U.S. cultural norms before being considered as &#8220;white&#8221;<br />
as the English, Germans, and Irish who had preceded them.  Today,<br />
prosperous Asians have edged over that border.  In our big cities,<br />
Chinese New Year is headed the way of the St. Patrick&#8217;s Day Parade,<br />
becoming as American as apple pie.</p>
<p>So why aren&#8217;t black people white too?  The answer, I suggest, has<br />
very little to do with race and a lot to do with class &mdash;<br />
specifically, the persistence of the black urban underclass.  Not just<br />
as a population but as a culture that remains mired in high crime,<br />
high rates of single motherhood, high unemployment, and all the other<br />
symptoms of high dependency on government largesse.  The &#8220;Great<br />
Society&#8221; programs of the 1960s and the race-hustling identity politics<br />
that followed stalled out the assimilation process that turned Irish,<br />
Italians, and (recently) Asians into whites.</p>
<p>Try to imagine a Korean equivalent of gangsta rap.  Or a bunch of<br />
Vietnamese high-school students taunting one of their own for &#8220;acting<br />
white&#8221;.  Or Chinese kids fixating exclusively on Chinese adults as<br />
role models.  These things don&#8217;t happen. And that&#8217;s why Asians are<br />
white.</p>
<p>UPDATE: Several Asians have written to tell me that I was doing OK<br />
until the last paragraph.  There are anti-assimilationists among Asian<br />
immigrants, as it turns out; there is, in fact, even Korean gangsta<br />
music.  However, my sources agree that these phenomena don&#8217;t persist<br />
among American-born Asians.  I think it&#8217;s also significant that Asian<br />
anti-assimilationism is not a <em>public</em> phenomenon &mdash; it&#8217;s<br />
visible to other Asians but there are no movies glorifying it nor<br />
political organizations trading on it.</p>
<p><a href="http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=76523509">Blogspot comments</a></p>
