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Man, I remember appplying to colleges and being rather selective about how I self identified. I'm half Asian, and half "white" (which is weird in itself because
by nataz 6y ago
Man, I remember appplying to colleges and being rather selective about how I self identified. I'm half Asian, and half "white" (which is weird in itself because it's technically a bunch of different races bundled into one light skinned bucket).
On almost all my applications I identified as Asian (better chance of acceptance and scholarships!).
The only exceptions were Ivy and California schools which even in the late 90's were obviously discriminating against Asians. You know it's bad when you identify as white to get a diversity edge.
Even today at work,I regularly get ignored for diversity metrics. Being an Asian American is so weird.
- scruple 6y agoMy brother-in-law is half Vietnamese and half Chinese. He asked me to review his personal statement and help him with college applications a few years back. I encouraged him to self-identify as Vietnamese instead of Chinese. He was accepted to multiple Ivy's (but ended up staying in state in the end) where his Chinese friends were all rejected. They are otherwise indistinguishable. Even their personal statements were all more-or-less on the same level, at least the few that I helped out and recall. They all learned a pretty valuable lesson there.
- xiaolingxiao 6y agoWhy is Vietnamese the right kind of Asian?
- scruple 6y agoIt's not that Vietnamese is the "right kind" of Asian. It's that Chinese-Americans dominate the landscape compared to Vietnamese-Americans. So here you have a Vietnamese-American who has excelled (just ever so slightly, in his case) beyond his immediate Chinese-American peers, which made him a standout in that regard.
- usaar333 6y agoTrue, but Vietnamese Americans are well represented in undergrad at least. In fact about double the white representation in UCs (https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/disaggregated-data https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/disaggrega...)
- scruple 6y agoWhat's the representation at Yale, I wonder. Without checking I just assume that (from living in SoCal for a long time) California has most of the country's Vietnamese-Americans.
- reaperducer 6y agoI just assume that (from living in SoCal for a long time) California has most of the country's Vietnamese-Americans There's a very large Vietnamese population in Houston. Probably other cities.
- scruple 6y agoI'm finally off my phone, so I had a look. There's a Wikipedia on it here [0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_large_Vietnamese-American_populations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_large...
- sizzle 6y agoBy that logic, what about Taiwanese?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- scruple 6y agoWell that's complicated. I believe that it's been made deliberately confusing (the geopolitical issues between the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China are at least known to exist today) and it's pretty hard to talk about. I wanna tap out of this conversation before I even say anything about it because I feel like it's way over my head. But, in the very specific context of what I was saying regarding university admissions in 2017, I don't think there was a lot that a Taiwanese-American person could do to distinguish themselves from being labeled or otherwise considered Chinese-American.
- pedroma 6y agoIt's like finding a rare Pokemon, except human.
- kabacha 6y agoVietnamese Americans: 1.3M[1] Chinese Americans: 2.5M[2] It's almost double, but is it really on a rare pokemon level? 1 - https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/vietnamese-immigrants-united-states-5 https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/vietnamese-immigrant... 2 - https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/chinese-immigrants-united-states-2018 https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/chinese-immigrants-u...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- pedroma 6y agoI'm curious to see how many applications they get from ethnically Chinese and Vietnamese students. My guess is there's much more ethnically Chinese applicants (which includes international students).
- xapata 6y agoFor a light-hearted take, Google Ali Wong's bit about Jungle Asians. The gist is that different waves of immigrants from different countries ended up with wildly different average socioeconomic outcomes in the US. Even different waves from the same country. Sadly, cohort matters. Note that Vietnamese here is good, because in other situations, it ain't good. The college admissions context is a confounder that flips the desirability of being a particular ethnicity.
- sbierwagen 6y agoAverage household income, Vietnamese American, 2018: $67,331 Average household income, Chinese American, excluding Taiwanese, 2018: $91,944 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...
- DataWorker 6y agoThere are simply more Chinese so brain drain will be more pronounced. But I would also speculate that a larger percentage of Vietnamese are second generation or more. Very true in little Saigon. Poor Vietnamese who were born in the USA live in east San Jose, Chinese live in Cupertino. Very different levels of privilege.
- scruple 6y agoYou see this in Orange county, too. Garden Grove and Westminster vs. Irvine.
- xapata 6y agoThat would only be true if the US allowed only the same number of immigrants from each country. I don't think that's been the policy historically. I'm not familiar with the current policy. People immigrate for different reasons at different times. The causes combine with changing US immigration policies and the dynamics of preferential attachment to diaspora clusters to create distinct cohorts that have similar socioeconomic outcomes.
- ucgradtemp 6y agoI was accepted by a graduate program at one of the more selective UCs. An alum of my college who was a current student at the UC contacted me to invite me to a recruiting shindig for accepted minority students (she knew I was Asian from the club activities on my resume). But when she found out what my specific racial background was (half white and half Chinese), she said I would not be invited. The only people who were invited to the recruiting trip were those from other Asian backgrounds (anything but Chinese/Korean/Japanese), or students who were black or hispanic. Instead of an all-expense paid visit spanning from Thurs-Sun and including sitting in on lectures, I was allowed to come for a single Sunday-only event. I spent more money on that trip than I had ever spent on anything in my life, except for my college computer. I was pretty ticked that the school was treating different minorities differently, and that for all the money I spent I couldn't even visit a class in session (since I was only allowed on Sunday). I remember meeting a half-Chinese / half-Vietnamese guy there, who regaled me with tales of the wining and dining that the favored-minority students had enjoyed. I should note that this was way after Prop 209 (barring affirmative action at the UCs) was passed. I ended up attending the UC, and I asked an administrator about how recruiting trips like this were legal (he happened to be a lawyer). He gave some hand-wavey answer about federal pre-emption that, if true, would have completely gutted Prop 209.
- icelancer 6y agoThis is true about one of my workplaces. Diversity this, diversity that. As a Director, I remind them that I'm not white. They seem to handwave it away and not count it despite Asian-Americans being underrepresented in this line of work. Such is life. EDIT: If you're an Asian-American you get used to this kind of "model minority" discrimination / racism. It just is what it is. My guess is it is similar for Jewish people.
- ralfd 6y agoInteresting thought. Is it racism if you feel minority but are counted among the majority? If I would immigrate to the US I would count as white, even though I would be a clueless foreign stranger and would have difficulty connecting culturally with many. Still I wouldn't count as "diverse".
- prohobo 6y agoAccording to critical race theory, the identity group you fall into has systemic power over others. That means that no, you would not be considered disadvantaged or part of any oppressed group. Therefore it's not possible to be racist towards you. Of course, there are still plenty of people who don't see white immigrants through the prism of Woke ideology so you'd likely find some sympathetic to considering you as a diverse hire, despite not checking any boxes on the Woke identity list. It would be an unofficial acknowledgement though.
- hh3k0 6y ago> Therefore it's not possible to be racist towards you. I do wonder occasionally, when did institutional racism become the only flavor of racism?
- ipsocannibal 6y agoAbout the time that descriptive studies departments in the mid 1980's decided that narrative telling was more important than making falsifible claims.
- retox 6y agoReplace White with European and it's comparable to saying Asian.
- vonmoltke 6y agoIt's not. Spanish and Portuguese people are European, but in the US they're "Hispanic", and so not really "white". Conversely, people from Turkey, the Middle East, and North Africa frequently get lumped in as "white".
- techer 6y agoCaucasian is an odd term...
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y agoHonestly, most race/culture terms seem weird to me: Caucasian (random geographical area), white (tan-pink), black (brown), African-American (regardless of being from Africa, or being American in some cases), native American (as opposed to immigrants?), Asian (sure, the biggest continent can be lumped together)... I assume it's from trying to describe a very complicated combination of factors in a single term, but the results do not make my programmer's brain happy.
- enriquto 6y agoA truly non-racist policy would be to remove these ridiculous categories from any official documentation. European countries do not need to rely on these stupid labels to implement social welfare.
- colordrops 6y agoIt's not because you've got a programmer brain. It's because these categories are truly stupid but academics and other people in a position to challenge then will not out of fear of ostracization.
- Natsu 6y ago
- dragonwriter 6y ago> "white" (which is weird in itself because it's technically a bunch of different races bundled into one light skinned bucket). No, it's not. There aren't “technically” multiple light-skinned races. While there are a few different models of race, they tend to descend from the old three-race (Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid) model and tend to have only a few more categories than those old models, which are now more commonly labelled White, Asian, and Black, with Native American typically added and, in the case of the US Census, “Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander” also added as a distinct category. (Both of the latter would generally have previously been considered part of the Mongoloid category.)
- white-flame 6y ago> I'm half Asian, and half "white" (which is weird in itself because it's technically a bunch of different races bundled into one light skinned bucket). Do you see the term "Asian" as having the same weirdness? It's even more geographically & ethnically overbroad than the word it replaced, as well as compared to 'white/european/caucasian'. To my recollection, a big part of the reason the former term was shunned is because it verbally homogenized distinct ethnicities from south-east asia that would prefer to identify distinctly... only to now double down in literally including the entirety of the largest continent in the world! (which I guess just returns to the more historical use of the former term, but whatever) :)
- nataz 6y agoValid point. Weird in its own way. White is a skin tone, Asian is a geographic location. Defending either definition would be an exercise in absurdity and I'm not even going to try.
- eli_gottlieb 6y ago>Weird in its own way. White is a skin tone, Asian is a geographic location. Asian is also a skin tone: the Middle East is in Asia, but counts as White for the US Census.
- white-flame 6y agoYep. All of it is just emergent shorthand, and none of it makes literal sense. :) If we had some specifically correct terminology, it would likely be quite a mouthful, either including genetic terminology or some mix of geography and time period, but both of those would probably still be insufficient. Race basically doesn't really exist in any clean delineation.
- retox 6y ago>Do you see the term "Asian" as having the same weirdness? It's even more geographically & ethnically overbroad than the word it replaced This was the point I was ham-handedly trying to make earlier; White is broad, European is broader but neither are as broad as Asian in terms of population or even geographically.
- globular-toast 6y ago> "white" (which is weird in itself because it's technically a bunch of different races bundled into one light skinned bucket). Nowhere near as weird as "black". Not only is there more genetic diversity within Africa than anywhere else, anyone who has a single drop of black in their lineage is considered black, unless they have completely white skin. It's a ridiculously broad bucket.
- reaperducer 6y ago"Black" is not just Africa. It also encompasses many Caribbean nations, and probably some others that escape my mind at the moment. Also, portions of Africa have white populations. South Africa, for example. And North Africa is Arab. Ethnicity ≠ geography.
- blanche_ 6y agoEuropean here, is stating your ethnicity normal on uni applications? What is the reasoning behind that? To me it seems very odd as being female in IT I try to hide it when I can (having resume without photo etc) and I would be outraged if we had to state our ethnicity/religion/other on resume.
- renewiltord 6y agoYes, it is fairly normal. US universities attempt to control the percentages of each ethnicity using a short list of ethnic buckets. I believe certain government universities are not permitted to do this (the UC system?) EDIT: Found it. The UC system can't do it because Prop 209 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_California_Proposition_209 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_California_Proposition_20...
- GhostVII 6y agoThere is a referendum (prop 16) to repeal that, and allow for discrimination based on gender/race/orientation again. Up for vote this year.
- renewiltord 6y agoI will notify friends. Thanks for heads up.
- enriquto 6y ago> Yes, it is fairly normal. US universities attempt to control the percentages of each ethnicity using a short list of ethnic buckets. This is outrageous. Inasmuch many people do not fall neatly into these idiotic "buckets". Moreover, people with exceptional academic records and belonging to the categories that are biased positively have legitimate reasons to be incensed by this. How on earth anybody thought it to be a sensible policy?
- lipstone 6y agoWe've gotten to the point in US culture where many view it as sexist or racist to rally against affirmative action policies that are blatantly sexist and racist.
- cwhiz 6y agoPeople don’t know what to do with Asians because, as a group, they achieve better than white people. However, this shouldn’t be possibly in systemically racist white America.
- babycake 6y agoBut they don't achieve better than white people, they just have that perception based off school grades. When it comes to life, that is career, they tend to not get promoted as much or be in much executive positions.
- Meekro 6y agoAsian median income is quite a bit higher than whites. https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizations/2018/demo/p60-263/figure1.pdf https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizat...
- cwhiz 6y agoMedian and average income for Asians is significantly higher than any other race or group in the US.
- BoDlulu 6y agoSource?