Of course, Asian-Americans are "model minorities"

Theodore Johnson writes about race, often nonsensically, for the Washington Post’s op-ed page. He outdoes himself in this piece called “How the myth of a ‘model minority’ works to divide Americans.”

The model minority (scare quotes aren’t necessary) is Asian-Americans. Johnson writes:

The model-minority myth is the idea that Asian Americans, relative to other people of color in the United States, have a stronger commitment to hard work and determination that has resulted in economic and academic success.

That’s the idea, all right, but why is it a myth? Asian Americans do enjoy far greater economic and academic success than blacks and certain other minority groups “of color.”

Their academic success is so pronounced that, as evidence in the Harvard case demonstrated, absent racial discrimination against them (and in favor of blacks), Asian-Americans — 7.2 percent of the U.S. population — would comprise more than 40 percent of Harvard’s student body. Their presence would exceed even that of whites.

This remarkable level of academic performance is due, in significant part, to the fact that Asian-Americans have an unusually strong commitment to hard work. Harvard certainly thinks so. In discriminating against this group, it stereotyped many of its members as, in effect, all work and no play.

Anyone with even a modest familiarity with Asian-American communities will reject the “no play” part, but concur that Asian-American students, as a group, work very hard and very seriously.

As one of my cousins said of her time at Yale, the way instantly to measure the seriousness of a course was to compute the ratio of Asian-American students to white guys wearing baseball caps.

So, yes, Asian-Americans are a special minority group. And if one believes that academic excellence and economic success are virtues, they are a model.

The second claim in the title of Johnson’s piece is that the myth (or rather reality) of Asian-American specialness “works to divide Americans.” But in the body of his op-ed, Johnson admits that what really divides Americans is preferring blacks over Asian-American on the basis of race. According to Johnson:

Affirmative action [i.e., racial preferences for blacks] was destined to pit Asian and Black Americans against one another. It was always going to end this way.

Actually, it amazes me how little resentment Asian-Americans as a group exhibit (at least outwardly) towards the blatant discrimination against them by institutions like Harvard. But yes, giving spots at elite colleges to comparatively weak black applicants rather than to highly qualified Asian ones — and denigrating the personal qualities of the Asians in the process — pits Asian and black Americans against one another. And it’s bound to produce some resentment.

If anything, this is another argument against racial preferences.

There’s another howler in Johnson’s piece. Citing the occasional “taunting and beating” of Asian-Americans, he asks: “If this is how the nation treats its model minorities, what hope is there for [members of other minority groups]?”

But a plurality of violent crimes against Asian-Americans comes at the hands of blacks, a group that’s responsible for 305 percent more violent crime against Asians than neighborhood demographics would predict, Thus, the evidence regarding violence against Asian-Americans does nothing to support the suggestion that blacks can’t hope for acceptance from whites. And the fact that corporations, government entities, and institutions of higher education go out of their way to prefer blacks belies any such claim.

Ultimately, we can make sense of Johnson’s piece only if we look askance, or at least with indifference, at the behaviors that distinguish Asian-Americans as a group from blacks as a group. Johnson gives this away when he says that “portrayal of Asian Americans as model assimilators is not a compliment.”

In what world is it not a compliment to be model assimilators? In a world where the values of the nation into which one is assimilating are misguided or — worse yet — “white supremacist.”

That’s a world where working hard is no better than doing the minimum needed to get by. It’s a world where doing well in school is no better than performing poorly. It’s a world where a strong family is no better than a dysfunctional one and where those who obey the law are no better than those who violate it.

Sadly, this is the world that the many on the far left — and certainly the BLM-sympathizing portion of it — desire. And it’s the world many others on the left are willing to accept, lest they be called racists.

Hard work, punctuality, politeness, doing well in school, marrying before having kids, and the like are indicia of “whiteness." Those who exalt these attributes are “white supremacists.”

That Asian-Americans exalt them more than whites do confirms that this narrative is pure nonsense. It’s also defeatist because it repudiates behaviors needed to succeed in the world for no other reason than fear that blacks as a group will never adopt them to the same degree as other groups.

But if we take Johnson’s denial that Asian-American are model minorities to its logical conclusion, that’s where we end up.