Reproducing a recent (slightly edited) tweet in full, originally written in response this article:
Yes, I read your piece, and I’ve read countless others like it over the last decade. That Indian Americans are a “model minority” is not a myth, it’s a statement of fact that is apparent to anyone who has taken even a cursory look at the community’s social/economic outcomes in recent decades as measured by any reasonable metric. It’s not culturally chauvinistic or triumphalist to point this out. There is an important conversation to be had about the structural factors that enabled this including, e.g., inequities in Indian society and American immigration policy (so-called “double selection”), but it is also apparent that our success as a community in recent decades has been a product of both the openness and economic dynamism of American society and the Indian community’s emphasis on financial success, educational attainment, and family stability. That this picture doesn’t capture the diaspora community as a whole is obvious, but it doesn’t have to. That’s why we use averages.
The assertion that the model minority is a “myth” is not an empirical argument, but an ideological one, and in my view it reflects an underlying anxiety among Indian Americans regarding their position in the elite left/democratic coalition. On the one hand, Indian Americans enjoy socio-economic outcomes that surpass those of the average white American, but on the other hand we are from a post-colonial country, are brown, largely non-Christian, etc. and therefore have a natural affinity to the “POC” coalition. It’s a tenuous position to be sure, and the result is an emergent elite that feels the need to apologize for the community’s success, to be embarrassed of it, or to attribute it to wholly structural factors. Even more pernicious is the characterization of certain cultural values that enabled our success in the first place as “White, Christian” measures of success. This is nonsensical and dismissive of the struggles of first generation immigrants who escaped destitution and successfully created a better life for themselves and their families.
The success of Indian Americans in recent decades throws a wrench in the American racial binary (in fact this has been the case since Bhagat Singh Thind), but it also casts doubt on the prevailing ideological shibboleths of the left, namely that America is a white supremacist country, that we are all victims of structural racism, etc. Look, these critiques of American society might have some truth to them, but Indian Americans are not convincing spokespeople for a view that is so at odds with our own experience. To pretend otherwise is to try and fit a square peg in a round hole. So when someone holds up Indian Americans as “ideal” or “model” immigrants, this aggravates the anxiety, because it reveals the truth that our community’s success has been enabled by a political and social culture that many Indian Americans are ideologically compelled to condemn as fundamentally inequitable.
What is most ironic, however, is that the result is often not considered reflection on these ideological axioms, but rather the construction of a “model minority” of their own. The dutiful, hard-working immigrant who is grateful to their adopted country and a model for other immigrants is rejected as a normative ideal in favor of the committed ally who recognizes their privilege and dutifully subordinates the lessons of their own experience and culture to the demands of the coalition. Those who dissent from this model are increasingly condemned as some sort of traitors to the “culture” or, increasingly, “hindu supremacists.” I’d like to think there’s a third path, one that unabashedly celebrates Indian American success and the society and culture that enabled it, while also thinking critically about how Indian Americans can leverage that success to contribute to the national fabric in a way that does not require ritual self-flagellation as a demonstration of political and ideological loyalty.
There are undeniable tensions within the “Big Blue Tent” that is the Democratic Party between South and East Asians on one hand and African-Americans and Hispanics on the other. In terms of the principles articulated by Laurence J. Peter, East and South Asians believe in “push” as a way to advance economically and politically as opposed to African- and Hispanic-Americans, who believe that control of the government – “pull” – is preferred. South and East Asian cultures have historically valued literacy and learning long before European colonization. Not surprisingly, Asians tend to gravitate towards STEM occupations: medicine, science, engineering, and computers. African- and Hispanic-Americans tend towards “soft” fields of study such as political science and public administration but especially law. (“Talky-talk” occupations.) These tendencies reflect the Democratic Party’s traditional dogma inherited from earlier waves of European Catholic and Jewish immigrants that all ethnic groups get ahead by “clout”: that is, by influencing hiring and contracting decisions in favor of their own group. Many African-Americans disparage the trend among Asians to follow the job market and take advantage of demand for workers with highly technical skills as a form of “weakness”. It is perhaps not surprising that Kamal Harris who appears to have set her mind on a political career at an early age would have preferred to identify as “Black” because by doing so, she would be assured herself of an automatic political base. Being identified as “Indian” OTOH would have resulted instead being steered into a medical or scientific career. Whether Southern or East Asians want to admit it or not, their cultural inclinations and values are more in line with traditional “WASP” (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) culture.