Andrew Sullivan's perpetuation of model minority and black pathology myths is pretty bo... - 0 views
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What gives? It couldn’t possibly be that they maintained solid two-parent family structures, had social networks that looked after one another, placed enormous emphasis on education and hard work, and thereby turned false, negative stereotypes into true, positive ones, could it? It couldn’t be that all whites are not racists or that the American dream still lives?
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there is still a host of problems with Sullivan’s question-begging argument. That includes, but is not limited to, an ignorance of selection effects—a substantial cohort of Asian Americans chose to come here and entered the United States with advanced degrees—as well as an invocation of “culture” without any awareness that this image is a construction, a contingent narrative tied to the politics and political atmosphere of the mid-20th century United States.
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As historian Ellen Wu explains of these historical realities in The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority, “The United States’ battles against fascism and then Communism meant that Asiatic Exclusion, like Jim Crow, was no longer tenable.” The result, she argues, was the “entrance of Asian Americans into the national fold” and, in the 1960s, a “profound metamorphosis [of Asian Americans] into the model minority: the Asiatic who was at once a model citizen and definitely not-black
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In the major scale used to measure “racial resentment,” participants are asked to respond to questions like “Irish, Italians, Jewish, and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors,” and “It’s really a matter of trying hard enough; if blacks would only try harder that would be as well off as whites.” People who answer yes are more likely to harbor racial resentment than others.
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this reasoning, in turn, “undergirded contentions that African Americans’ cultural deficiencies was the cause of their poverty—assertions that delegitimized blacks’ demands for structural changes in the political economy and stigmatized their utilization of welfare state entitlements.”
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Even as he avoids the words black or African American, that charge—that black deficiency (or even pathology) drives black disadvantage—is the core of Sullivan’s inquiry. And his argument, unstated but clear as the blue sky, is that black Americans have only themselves and their culture to blame for continued racial inequality.
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The reason we call this racial resentment and not simple “racism” is that it stems from different psychological processes. Less a belief in biological inferiority and more a moral and cultural judgment, what political scientists Donald Kinder and David Sears called “a blend of anti-black affect and the kind of traditional American moral values embodied in the Protestant Ethic … a moral feeling that blacks violate such traditional American values as individualism and self-reliance, the work ethic, obedience, and discipline.”
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Had Sullivan written about the biological inferiority of black Americans, there’s no doubt it would have raised red flags among his editors. But to frame the subject as a question of black culture, well, that’s just being provocative.