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