Tag: South Asian diaspora identity

Being Asian American is often about tests. Doing well on tests. That’s what Asian Americans are supposed to do. Two conventionally liberal (“woke”) publications have stories about test-prep, testing, and Asian American academic life.

First, in The Juggernaut, Why Test Scores Can Be a “Proxy for Privilege”. To be franky, I did not like this story, because the conclusions were already there to begin with, and the author was just figuring out how to buttressed the preexistent argument. For example:

Mettu, for example, is well aware of her advantages as the daughter of educated, middle-class Indian immigrants who could invest in her college preparation. She recognizes that few students enjoy such privilege. That is why Mettu sympathizes with efforts at higher education institutions across the country to downplay — or altogether eliminate — test scores as a criterion in admissions. “In terms of equal opportunity,” she said, “it is a good shift.”

That’s the general gist. “Actually, testing is bad for the underprivileged.” Even though standardized testing actually emerged as a way to get around the unfairness of recommendations.

Meanwhile, Refinery29 has a much better story, An Interview with an Asian student at Stuyvestant. Since it’s an interview, most of the talking is given over to the student. That results in more candor and less canned conclusions:

How do students talk about the lack of Black and Latinx students?

When the news came out, it just wasn’t a big thing in Stuy. No one cared about it. We saw it in a random newspaper and everyone was just like, okay. We’re used to places writing about us. I remember one time, one of the chairs broke during one of our theater productions, and that made headlines. Everyone was like why?

Honestly, we were more vocal about school shootings. There was a whole walkout, a lot of us missed class for it, and we went to city hall. We were way more vocal about guns. The reason that Stuy is Stuy is that we’re the smart kids who do well on tests. NYC has LaGuardia, which is for people who are good at dance or music or singing. We have other schools with different talents that anyone else with those talents can get into. I think that’s one of the reasons that everyone in Stuy thinks the SHSAT test should be there, because if the test wasn’t here, what’s the point of Stuy then? What’s the point of even being here?

One thing to note: well-off white New Yorkers send their kids to exclusive private schools like Dalton. Stuyvesant is populated by children of working-class immigrants by and large.

A new episode of ABCD Politics is out. For those of you who can, can you please subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts. And give us a rating too! Surya has submitted to Stitcher and Spotify, so it will be on those platforms soon too (my experience is that Stitcher approves fast, while Spotify approves slow).

The topic of the second podcast was nominally our own political evolution. It turned out to be mostly about me, and my own “conservatism.” Though Surya has followed my work, after a fashion, for 15 years, my politics are somewhat cryptic to him, so it was a useful exercise in exposition. Surya is a center-Left Democrat and ran as one in 2010. Myself, my own views are a bit more heterodox and difficult to pin down.

A simple way one can summarize my evolution is that I have gone from being a moderate libertarian in the early 2000s to more of a populist conservative in 2020, albeit of a moderate and cosmopolitan personal bent.

But when someone on Twitter asked to summarize my politics recently in five words or less, I said “family first family last.” What did I mean by this?

The issue came up on the podcast because I expressed by “pro-nuclear family” stance as one reason I aligned with the Right and was skeptical of BLM. One of Surya’s correspondents asserted that I didn’t characterize BLM correctly. As it happens, BLM has an “official” website. It has a section on the nuclear family, which I read a while back:

We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.

In early September the evolutionary anthropologist Joe Henrich will come out with a book, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. I obtained a review copy, so I will probably post my thoughts closer to the publication date. But, the book outlines a simple and widely discussed thesis: that unique aspects of Western Europe’s kinship and family structure that dates to the period after the fall of the Roman Empire were amenable to the emergence of economically dynamic liberal democratic societies.

The nuclear family is key to that argument. Obviously people can be happy in joint-families, clan compounds, or as part of dense tribal networks. But the nuclear family has some social and cultural consequences which I strongly favor. In the American context, the nuclear family is associated with positive outcomes for children, and a level of material and emotional well-being that many of us aspire to.

This does not mean that those who are not in nuclear families should be ostracized or thought of as second-class citizens. Rather, the idea is that society and politics should have the dominant family structure, the nuclear family, at the heart of its understanding, and that that should shape policy (e.g., tax-credits for having children). My impression and understanding are that the modern Left does not believe this privileging should occur (explicit in the platforms of groups like BLM above). Therefore, I am against the modern Left.