It is the face of someone who shares some of my history and has done the thing I fear to do when faced with injustice—nothing. Solidarity or complicity. Rise against abusive power or stand with our back turned to the abuse of power. If we as Asian Americans choose the latter, we are indeed the model minority, and we deserve both its privileges and its perils. This is not a problem of assimilation or multiculturalism. This is a contradiction, inherited from the fundamental contradiction that ties the American body politic together, its aspiration toward equality for all, bound with its need to exploit the land and racially marked people, beginning from the very origins of American society and its conquest of Indigenous nations and importation of African slaves.
The end of Asian Americans only happens with the end of racism and capitalism. Faced with this problem, Asian Americans can be a model of apology, trying to prove an Americanness that cannot be proved. Or we can be a model of justice and demand greater economic and social equality for us and for all Americans. If you think America is in trouble, blame shareholders, not immigrants; look at CEOs, not foreigners; resent corporations, not minorities; yell at politicians of both parties, not the weak, who have little in the way of power or wealth to share.
Many Americans of all backgrounds understand this better now than they did in Then, angry protesters burned down Koreatown. Now, they peacefully surround the White House. Demanding that the powerful and the wealthy share their power and their wealth is what will make America great.
Until then, race will continue to divide us. To locate Tou Thao in the middle of a Black-Hmong divide, or a Black-Asian divide, as if race were the only problem and the only answer, obscures a fatal statistic: the national poverty rate was The problem is race, and class, and war—a country almost always at war overseas that then pits its poor of all races and its exploited minorities against each other in a domestic war over scarce resources. So long as this crossbred system of white supremacy and capitalist exploitation remains in place, there will always be someone who will write that sign: Another American Driven Out of Business by [fill in the blank], because racism always offers the temptation to blame the weak rather than the powerful.
The people who write these signs are engaging in the most dangerous kind of identity politics, the nationalist American kind, which, from the origins of this country, has been white and propertied.
The police were created to defend the white, the propertied and their allies, and continue to do so. Black people know this all too well, many descended from people who were property. My parents, as newcomers to America, learned this lesson most intimately. When they opened the New Saigon, they told me not to call the police if there was trouble. In Vietnam, the police were not to be trusted.
The police were corrupt. But a few years later, when an armed white gunman burst into our house and pointed a gun in all our faces, and after my mother dashed by him and into the street and saved our lives, I called the police.
The police officers who came were white and Latino. They were gentle and respectful with us. We owned property. We were the victims. And yet our status as people with property, as refugees fulfilling the American Dream, as good neighbors for white people, is always fragile, so long as that sign can always be hung.
But the people who would hang that sign misunderstand a basic fact of American life: America is built on the business of driving other businesses out of business. This is the life cycle of capitalism, one in which an Asian American Dream that is multicultural, transpacific and corporate fits perfectly well.
My parents, natural capitalists, succeeded at this life cycle until they, in turn, were driven out of business. The city of San Jose, which had neglected downtown when my parents arrived, changed its approach with the rise of Silicon Valley. Realizing that downtown should reflect the image of a modern tech metropolis, the city used eminent domain to force my parents to sell their store.
Across from where the New Saigon once stood now looms the brand-new city hall, which was supposed to face a brand-new symphony hall. I love the idea that a symphony could have sprung from the refugee roots of the New Saigon, where my parents shed not only sweat but blood, having once been shot there on Christmas Eve.
The symphony was never heard. This, too, is America. She spoke in Hmong, but her feelings could be understood without translation. The original version of this story misstated the spelling of the last name of the police officer who killed Fong Lee.
It is Andersen, not Anderson. Contact us at letters time. And It Creates Inequality for All. By Viet Thanh Nguyen. Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. In , Asians earned more than other groups at the middle and near the top of the income distribution. The same ranking by income exists at the median 50th percentile.
Asians did not hold the same edge over all other groups at the lower rungs, however. Hispanics and blacks switched positions near the top of the income ladder from to The influx of Hispanic immigrants in recent decades, many with less education, likely played a role in shaping these trends see below. As a result, whites had the highest income at the 10th percentile in , and lower-income blacks and Hispanics narrowed the gap with lower-income Asians in recent decades.
From to , higher-income Asians moved further out in front of higher-income whites, but lower-income Asians did not keep pace. The gaps in income between whites and blacks are large, but they narrowed slightly from to Nearly five decades later, this gap was unchanged in While the gap between blacks and whites closed a bit from to , Hispanics fell even further behind, whether at the 10th percentile, the median or the 90th percentile.
A closer look at the gap between whites and other groups across the income distribution reveals the diversity of experiences from to The majority of Asians, especially those at the lower rungs of the income ladder, ceded ground to whites from to , but all experienced a rebound to some extent this century.
Hispanics, regardless of where they were in the income distribution, fell behind from to , but lower-income Hispanics recovered some ground from to Among blacks, some of the gains from to were erased since In , Asians, as long as they were situated above the 5th percentile of their income distribution, had incomes equal to or greater than the incomes of whites.
However, from to , incomes in the bottom half of the Asian income distribution did not grow at the same rate as incomes in the bottom half of the white income distribution. Indeed, the incomes of about half the Asian adult population — those with incomes less than the median the 50th percentile — were less than the incomes of whites in Asians with incomes above the median still out-earned whites in , but often by smaller margins than in Since , Asians gained on whites all across the distribution, reversing the trend from to About one-in-four Asians, those at the 25th percentile of income and below, earned less than whites at similar points in the income distribution in , however.
As noted, the ebb and flow in the economic status of Asians, compared with whites, is perhaps related to the ebb and flow in the skill characteristics of Asian immigrants. Asians who came to the U. Most blacks, with the exception of those at the 95th percentile, saw gains relative to whites from to But there were two distinct episodes in this period, with gains from to followed by setbacks from to A similar regression describes the experience of most blacks with incomes above the 25th percentile of the income distribution from to The reversal for blacks this century may reflect the impact of the Great Recession of Although no group was immune to the effects of the recession, the unemployment rate for blacks spiked to a high of Also, the employment of blacks dipped below its potential what it might have been absent a recession more so than among whites during the Great Recession.
It is worth noting that the economic downturns this century came on the heels of a record-long expansion in the s that yielded noticeable benefits for blacks. For Hispanics, incomes sagged in comparison with whites at all points of the distribution from to The slippage was almost uniformly high across the distribution, near 10 percentage points whether at the 5th percentile, the median or the 95th percentile.
There was little change from to , with the notable exception of gains for lower-income Hispanics. While they continue to earn much less than their white counterparts, Hispanics at the lowest percentiles of the income distribution experienced an improvement in their relative position from to The regression in the economic status of Hispanics relative to whites may be driven by the characteristics of immigrants in recent decades.
The result is that Hispanic immigrants streamed into the lower rungs of the income ladder at a faster rate than into the higher rungs. From to , the Hispanic foreign-born population all ages increased from 7.
Meanwhile, from to , the number of unauthorized immigrants in the U. The increase in the unauthorized immigrant population from Latin America leveled off in , however. In , there were 9. The decrease in new arrivals meant that unauthorized immigrants increasingly are likely to have been in the U.
Because the earnings of unauthorized immigrants are much lower than average , their initial influx likely dampened the earnings potential of Hispanics, which explains at least some of the widening of the income gap with whites since More recently, unauthorized immigrants are a declining share of the Hispanic population, and those who remain are longer tenured in the U. That could help explain some of the improvement in the economic status of lower-income Hispanics relative to whites since All members of a household have the same income.
Incomes are expressed in dollars. Income is the sum of earnings from work, capital income such as interest and dividends, rental income, retirement income, and transfer income such as government assistance , before payments for income taxes and social security contributions.
The Gini coefficient, another commonly used measure of income inequality, is derived from the share of aggregate income held by each individual. In a perfectly equal world, everyone has the same income, or the same share of aggregate income, and the Gini coefficient equals zero. In a perfectly unequal world, one individual holds all of the aggregate income and the Gini coefficient is equal to one.
Income distributions, incomes at various percentiles, and measures of inequality are computed separately for each racial and ethnic group. However, Asian Americans are often stereotyped as being meek, passive, or well-to-do—all qualities that would make them more attractive targets, according to research.
That kind of passive form of racial prejudice can still harm Asian Americans even if explicit hatred is not the reason they are being targeted. That being said, there is quite a lot of evidence suggesting that people of Asian descent are becoming special targets of violence. What is the source of this animosity? Download a guide on how to bridge differences,. Jamil Zaki argues that we need empathy in a time of division. Foreign-born Asian households earned slightly more than those headed by U.
These overall figures hide differences among Asian origin groups, however. All told, 12 Asian origin groups had higher median household incomes than the median among all Americans. Poverty rates among U. Again, there are large differences in poverty rates among Asian subgroups. Most of the Asian origin groups analyzed 12 of 19 had poverty rates that were as high as or higher than the U.
Similar shares of U. Both figures are substantially higher than the share of all U. Much like economic trends within the U. Asian population, there are wide disparities among origin groups. Indians ages 25 and older have the highest level of educational attainment among U. The Asian population , or the number of individuals choosing one or more Asian races, is The shares reporting specific Asian origin groups have been corrected to reflect the shares of the Asian population, rather than the shares of the Asian responses.
No other findings in the report and fact sheets have been affected by these changes. Note: This is an update of a post originally published Sept. Read full methodology here. In times of uncertainty, good decisions demand good data.
Please support our research with a financial contribution. It organizes the public into nine distinct groups, based on an analysis of their attitudes and values. Even in a polarized era, the survey reveals deep divisions in both partisan coalitions. Use this tool to compare the groups on some key topics and their demographics.
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