By any empirical standard, there actually are model minorities — and model majority groups too.
By any empirical standard, there actually are model minorities — and model majority groups too.
A popular recent Vox article, “Vivek Ramaswamy and the lie of the ‘model minority,’” gets its central premise backwards. In fact, the so-called model-minority myth is no myth at all. By any empirical standard, there actually are model minorities — and model majority groups too.
On September 5, one of the left-wing magazine’s stable of writers, Prachi Gupta, argued that current GOP presidential contender Ramaswamy is dangerously and “pernicious[ly]” using his own success to “perpetuate the myth of America as color-blind” and to argue for the existence of a meritocratic U.S. By so doing, Gupta contends, Vivek (“like cake”) perpetuates the old MMM, ignores the fact that minority immigrants like himself sometimes succeed only despite America’s “expansive wealth gap and staggering inequality,” and minimizes the reality of historical discrimination against Asians in immigration policy.
Gupta goes on to engage in some increasingly common critiques of the claim that U.S. Asians in fact represent a unique success story at all. Among these: Asian Americans have the “deepest income inequality” of any broadly defined racial census group in these States United, and Asian-American youngsters are the only group for whom the leading cause of death is consistently suicide. Harsh stuff.
However, all of these arguments are fairly easily revealed to be just typical leftist wordplay. To take them one by one: The “racial wealth gap” in the U.S. exists, but it does not disadvantage Asian Americans relative to whites or anyone else. The median Asian-American household outearns the typical white household by roughly $26,000 per annum — $100,572 to $74,932. Similarly, the United States does have a racist history, but American immigration policy has — if anything — favored minority immigrants from Asia and Latin America since the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act.
Asian-American “income inequality” exists among a pool of very high-earning groups, and is driven largely by the fact that Indian Americans ($141,906) are the single most successful group in the country — ahead of Jews, Australians, Anglo-Saxons, and so forth. The lowest-earning Asian group, the Burmese, checks in at a solid $60,376, exactly two of 17 Asian groups fall below the national average, and none of the nation’s truly low-income groups (Appalachians, inner-city blacks, Apache Indians, Somalis, etc.) is of East or South Asian extraction. Finally, even relatively high rates of suicide for Asian males are largely a tragic reflection of success: This community simply does not suffer from the sky-high rates of homicide and drug overdose that plague blacks and poor whites respectively and can eclipse the self-harm numbers.
Gupta goes on to claim, a few pages later, that — to the extent it does exist — Indian/Asian immigrant success is the result of the fact that high-class migrants with stable families have lately been more likely to come to the U.S. First and importantly, even should this be true, it would completely debunk the bizarre claim that all gaps in performance between large population groups are due simply to racial or ethnic bias. Obviously, no racist white hiring director, intent on an all-white workforce, would be expected to distinguish between a married Indian man from a “twice born” mercantile caste and a bachelor with an agricultural background.
However, even more to the point, this claim does nothing to explain the academic and economic performance of long-resident Chinese ($93,007/year), Hmong ($80,702), and Vietnamese ($77,884) Americans who came here generations ago fleeing a bloody war, or relatively non-selected migrants from close American allies like Japan ($87,789). It is also noteworthy that recent immigrant success is hardly confined to allegedly “white adjacent” Asians. Black immigrants — some fairly stringently selected, but others from quite poor states located within sail-boating distance of the U.S. — also do quite well.
In the most recent year on record, Guyanese ($83,412), Ghanaian ($72,089), Barbadian ($72,053), Trinbagonian ($71,920), and Nigerian ($71,465) immigrants all performed well above the national average, with West Indians as a group just a few thousand dollars below it. Nigerians also often rank as the best-educated group in the country: Their already fairly substantial group dollar haul would certainly be higher if fewer chose to become penurious academics. By the by, South African Americans ($94,159) — a group that obviously includes some whites as well as blacks — score as the seventh-richest ethnic/national-origin population in the U.S.
Once we put aside the weird-to-insane idea that all outcomes in society (the composition of the National Basketball Association?) are due to some obscure form of racism, obvious reasons for the successes of all of these groups emerge. For example, time spent studying rather obviously predicts both success in school and positive outcomes later in life. And, as the liberal Brookings Institution has (rather awkwardly) noted, young Asian Americans study far more than white Americans and about twice as much as American blacks.
More sweepingly, the absence of a father predicts virtually every imaginable negative outcome. And, current rates of single motherhood at birth stand at 69 percent for U.S. blacks, 65.7 percent for Native Americans, 63.6 percent for U.S.-born Puerto Ricans, 52.6 percent for Mexican Americans, and 35.3 percent for American whites — as opposed to just 17.1 percent for all Asian Americans and not too terribly far from 0 percent for many successful foreign-born immigrant populations. Notably, almost none of this is due to the oft-cited “legacy of slavery.”
Whites and Puerto Ricans were never slaves in the United States, and the black out-of-wedlock birth rate was roughly 11 percent back in 1938 — if I’m correctly reading the great Walter Williams’s data citations. Thomas Sowell has written entire books about the solid black — and working-class white — neighborhood schools of a less fashionable past. A great many of today’s problems, in fact, seem to trace directly to well-intentioned but foolish policy programs adopted during the liberal Great Society era of the 1960s.
Tragedies that had a starting point can and should have an end date: We can pretty easily think up logical counters to the policies just mentioned, and must begin to. When looked at in this light, the “model minority” controversy has real lessons to teach about how to do that. The harsh reality is that some ways of being work better than others, some groups engage in these success strategies more often than other groups do today, and we as a society should aggressively encourage all members of every race and class to adopt them.
That, at least, is no myth.