The law professor and writer Tim Wu grew up in Canada with a white mother and a Taiwanese father, which allows him an interesting perspective on how whites and Asians perceive each other. After graduating from law school, he took a series of clerkships, and he remembers the subtle ways in which hierarchies were developed among the other young lawyers. “There is this automatic assumption in any legal environment that Asians will have a particular talent for bitter labor,” he says, and then goes on to define the word coolie,a Chinese term for “bitter labor.” “There was this weird self-selection where the Asians would migrate toward the most brutal part of the labor.” By contrast, the white lawyers he encountered had a knack for portraying themselves as above all that. “White people have this instinct that is really important: to give off the impression that they’re only going to do the really important work. You’re a quarterback. It’s a kind of arrogance that Asians are trained not to have. Someone told me not long after I moved to New York that in order to succeed, you have to understand which rules you’re supposed to break. If you break the wrong rules, you’re finished. And so the easiest thing to do is follow all the rules. But then you consign yourself to a lower status. The real trick is understanding what rules are not meant for you.” This idea of a kind of rule-governed rule-breaking—where the rule book was unwritten but passed along in an innate cultural sense—is perhaps the best explanation I have heard of how the Bamboo Ceiling functions in practice. LEAP appears to be very good at helping Asian workers who are already culturally competent become more self-aware of how their culture and appearance impose barriers to advancement.
Jeffrey Plaman on 11 May 13Kids are growing up in a digital world. They connect, share, learn, explore, and play in way unimaginable just a generation ago. This is the only world they know and their parents, teachers, political leaders and even the media are all doing what they can to catch up. The emergence of social media, in all its extraordinary forms, is pushing the boundaries of what we think of as private while giving us all, and our children, a platform to express ourselves anytime, anywhere. It can be an unnerving prospect to a parent or teacher to see their kids pack so much processing power in their pockets. The media have played on these fears with screaming headlines and nightly news leads about cases of online predators, pornography, cyberbullying and sexting. Some lawmakers have proposed online safety legislation based on a single event, such as a suicide that had an online component to it. At least RQHVtate Dttorney Jeneral suggested raising the age limit for kids accessing social media to 16 years. While understandable, these reactions are not always helpful or healthy
