The WSJ says whites are fleeing Cupertino, a Bay Area city with good public schools and thus an influx of middle class East Asian Americans (MCEAAs).
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Monta Vista High School |
My parents tell me the same is happening in our neighboring town of Saratoga, which was first a white retirement community and then a magnet for Silicon Valley CEOs. Five years ago, all our immediate neighbors were white; today, two families are East Asian and one is desi. When I went to high school, there were only four or five desis in the entire school. Many kids assumed that if you wanted to date, you’d only date one of the three desi girls. I studied captive markets in econ class and lived them outside. Today, I hear the dating ‘study group’ pool has gone from baby-sized to Olympic.
… the town of about 50,000 people now boasts Indian restaurants, tutoring centers and Asian grocers. Parents say Cupertino’s top schools have become more academically intense over the past 10 years. Asian immigrants have surged into the town, granting it a reputation — particularly among recent Chinese and South Asian immigrants — as a Bay Area locale of choice. Cupertino is now 41% Asian, up from 24% in 1998…It’s not competition that makes white parents uncomfortable, it’s competition with Asian-AmericansSome white Cupertino parents are instead sending their children to private schools or moving them to other, whiter public schools. More commonly, young white families in Silicon Valley say they are avoiding Cupertino altogether… Many white parents say they’re leaving because the schools are too academically driven and too narrowly invested in subjects such as math and science at the expense of liberal arts and extracurriculars like sports and other personal interests. The two schools, put another way that parents rarely articulate so bluntly, are too Asian…
Cathy Gatley, co-president of Monta Vista High School’s parent-teacher association, recently dissuaded a family with a young child from moving to Cupertino because there are so few young white kids left in the public schools. “This may not sound good,” she confides, “but their child may be the only Caucasian kid in the class…”
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Top schools in nearby, whiter Palo Alto, which also have very high test scores, also feature heavy course loads, long hours of homework and overly stressed students… But whites don’t seem to be avoiding those institutions, or making the same negative generalizations, Asian families note, suggesting that it’s not academic competition that makes white parents uncomfortable but academic competition with Asian-Americans…At Cupertino’s top schools, administrators, parents and students say white students end up in the stereotyped role often applied to other minority groups: the underachievers… in advanced-placement chemistry, only a couple of the 32 students are white and the rest are Asian. Some white parents, and even some students, say they suspect teachers don’t take white kids as seriously as Asians.
“Many of my Asian friends were convinced that if you were Asian, you had to confirm you were smart. If you were white, you had to prove it…” “White kids are thought of as the dumb kids…” Grades are so high that a ‘B’ average puts a student in the bottom third of a class. [Link]
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p>I think the MCEAA influx is great. More debate, less football. Learning what it’s like to be at a good university. My parents agree, because MCEAAs value education. They’re an absolute boon for cities: smarter kids, better schools, higher tax base. What’s not to like? Too much Xbox and anime?
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p>I love these quotes:
When Matthew, now a student at Notre Dame, finished middle school eight years ago, Ms. Doherty decided to send him to Bellarmine College Preparatory, a Jesuit school that she says has a culture that “values the whole child.” It’s also 55% white and 24% Asian. [Link]
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p>What’s not to like? Too much Xbox and anime?Bellarmine was our archrival in everything because as an expensive, private prep school, it was so well-funded. They had four full-time speech and debate coaches, paid debate research assistants and so on. They sometimes flew to out-of-town tourneys, we piled into an old school bus. They were the Mercedes of high schools and charged as much. I took great pleasure in beating them, just like when Berkeley creams Stanford in the Big Game for the fourth time in a row. So to hear that some parents are paying for Bellarmine because the public schools are too good, oooh, delicious schadenfreude, I’m all verklempt!
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p>The counterarguments in this story are pretty weak:
Monta Vista graduate Mark Seto says he wouldn’t send his kids to his alma mater [Monta Vista High]. “It was a sheltered little world that didn’t bear a whole lot of resemblance to what the rest of the country is like,” says Mr. Seto, a Chinese-American who recently graduated from Yale University. As a result, he says, “college wasn’t an academic adjustment. It was a cultural adjustment…” [Link]
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p>This similar to the argument for diversity in college admissions, and I buy it, but only without severely compromising academics. And unless you grew up in a college town, it’s always a cultural adjustment.
Hung Wei, a Chinese-American living in Cupertino, has become an active campaigner in the community, encouraging Asian parents to be more aware of their children’s emotional development… life in Cupertino and at Monta Vista didn’t prepare [her daughter] for life at New York University. Diana moved there in 2004 and jumped to her death from a Manhattan building two months later. [Link]
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p>I agree with this. East Asian and desi cultures need a reformation, less emphasis on predefined social roles and greater interest in people as individuals. But that’s pretty independent of the ethnic makeup of the city into which you choose to move. Besides, give it a couple more generations, and we’ll be just as slackerly.
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p>‘Well-roundedness’ is how Hah-vad first tried to lock out Jews. The New Yorker reports that the original reason for the Ivy League’s ‘well-roundedness’ admissions criteria was to exclude first Jews and later East Asian Americans. Ideally, they wanted future elites: good-looking jocks who ended up on Wall Street and donated lots of money to their endowment:
It was difficult keeping Jews out because they were academically superior. The solution was to change the definition of meritThe enrollment of Jews began to rise dramatically. By 1922, they made up more than a fifth of Harvard’s freshman class. The administration and alumni were up in arms. Jews were thought to be sickly and grasping, grade-grubbing and insular. They displaced the sons of wealthy Wasp alumni, which did not bode well for fund-raising. A. Lawrence Lowell, Harvard’s president in the nineteen-twenties, stated flatly that too many Jews would destroy the school: “The summer hotel that is ruined by admitting Jews meets its fate . . . because they drive away the Gentiles, and then after the Gentiles have left, they leave also…”The difficult part, however, was coming up with a way of keeping Jews out, because as a group they were academically superior to everyone else. Lowell’s first idea–a quota limiting Jews to fifteen per cent of the student body–was roundly criticized. Lowell tried restricting the number of scholarships given to Jewish students, and made an effort to bring in students from public schools in the West, where there were fewer Jews. Neither strategy worked. Finally, Lowell–and his counterparts at Yale and Princeton–realized that if a definition of merit based on academic prowess was leading to the wrong kind of student, the solution was to change the definition of merit…
Bender, Karabel tells us, believed that if Harvard continued to suffer on the football field it would contribute to the school’s reputation as a place with “no college spirit, few good fellows, and no vigorous, healthy social life,” not to mention a “surfeit of ‘pansies,’ ‘decadent esthetes’ and ‘precious sophisticates.’ ” Bender concentrated on improving Harvard’s techniques for evaluating “intangibles” and, in particular, its “ability to detect homosexual tendencies and serious psychiatric problems…”
One application–and at this point you can almost hear it going to the bottom of the pile–was notated, “Short with big ears…”
Élite schools, like any luxury brand, are an aesthetic experience–an exquisitely constructed fantasy of what it means to belong to an élite –and they have always been mindful of what must be done to maintain that experience. In the nineteen-eighties, when Harvard was accused of enforcing a secret quota on Asian admissions, its defense was that once you adjusted for the preferences given to the children of alumni and for the preferences given to athletes, Asians really weren’t being discriminated against. But you could sense Harvard’s exasperation that the issue was being raised at all. If Harvard had too many Asians, it wouldn’t be Harvard, just as Harvard wouldn’t be Harvard with too many Jews or pansies or parlor pinks or shy types or short people with big ears. [Link]
I envy people who grew up wealthy in their ethnic homeland, their certainty about their place in society. I mean that both of whites in America and desis in India. The new reality in Cupertino:
“Kids who are white feel themselves a distinct minority against a majority culture.” [Link]
Everyone is an immigrant now. Welcome.
Update: Interesting, mid-’90s essay in Slate about how Asian-Americans are the new Jews:
Remember the scene in Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint where the newly teen-aged Alex Portnoy goes to a frozen pond in his hometown of Newark to gaze upon gentile girls ice-skating?
So: dusk on the frozen lake of a city park, skating behind the puffy red earmuffs and the fluttering yellow ringlets of a strange shikse teaches me the meaning of the word longing…For Alex Portnoy, athleticism was something alien. It was part of a total package that included not only the golden shiksas but their brothers (“engaging, good-natured, confident, clean, swift, and powerful halfbacks”), their fathers (“men with white hair and deep voicesWhites were ‘engaging, good-natured, confident, clean, swift, and powerful halfbacks… men with white hair and deep voices’“), their mothers who never whined or hectored, their curtained, fireplaced houses, their small noses, their lack of constant nagging worry–in short, the normalcy and confidence that go along with belonging, with being on the inside…
Jews know all too well what the alternate form of merit that we didn’t have used to be: a certain ease, refinement, and grace. This may be what has led today’s generation of Jewish parents to athleticize our children. We want them to have what Alex Portnoy longed for: a deeper sort of American comfort and success than SAT scores and music lessons can provide… meritocracy ends on graduation day, and that afterward, Asians start to fall behind because they don’t have quite the right cultural style for getting ahead: too passive, not hail-fellow-well-met enough…
In my many hours standing next to hockey rinks last winter, I sometimes engaged in one of the Jews’ secret vices: Jew-counting. All over the ice were little Cohens, little Levys… What all the hockey-playing Jewish kids in America are not doing, during their hundreds of hours hustling to, on, and from the ice rink, is studying… At the front end of the American meritocratic machine, Asians are replacing Jews as the No. 1 group… as Asians become America’s new Jews, Jews are becoming … Episcopalians.
… academic commitment… is no longer a defining cultural characteristic of the group. What has replaced it is a cultural insider’s sort of academic preoccupation… mainly, college admission. Jews are now successful people who want to move the levers of the system (levers whose location we’re quite familiar with) so as to ensure that our children will be as successful as we are…
Asians are replacing Jews as the No. 1 groupJust at the moment when Harvard, Yale, and Princeton have presidents named Rudenstine, Levin, and Shapiro, those institutions are widely suspected of having informal ceilings on Asian admissions, of the kind that were imposed on Jews two generations ago…
Asian achievement is highest in areas like science and classical music, where there is no advantage from familiarity with the culture. This also once was true of Jews (why do you think my grandfather become a doctor?) but isn’t any more. Several years ago, Asian-American groups in California successfully lobbied to keep an essay section out of the Scholastic Aptitude Test. It’s impossible to imagine organized Jewry caring…
Asian-Americans today have two advantages over Jews. They have a lower average income, and so are more motivated. And most back-home Asian cultures rival or surpass Jewish culture in their reverence for study. Therefore Jews are going to have to get used to being No. 2…
The final irony is that golf and tennis are perceived by the Asian-Americans not as aspects of an ethos adapted from the British landowning classes (which is the way Jews used to perceive them), but as stuff that Jews know how to do… The wheel of assimilation turns inexorably: Scratching out an existence is phase one, maniacal studying is phase two, sports is phase three. Watch out for Asian-American hockey players in about 20 years. [Link]
Amen, brother. I grew up in the Bay Area also. I remember in fifth grade our Korean War veteran drill seargent teacher let the girls in out class organinze “the Newleywed Game.” I was a contestant who was married to a white girl in our class. When the question was asked “who would you have married if you didn’t marry your wife,” everyone, including my “spouse” thought it was the other Indian girl at our school in the same grade level. I was upset the whole day. Luckily the school bell rang before I had to reveal who I really picked. 🙂
Yes, but as I recall, Bellarmine’s, mascot was a bell. Right? Can you imagine going to a competition and being introduced as “the bells.” That’s got to suck.
It must be like having an abstract mascot such as the Cardinal or the Crimson. Hey, you know what would be really scary? A tree 😉
Bears can easily uproot shrubby trees, of course. 😉
I must add that I got this link from another blog, which I’ve mentioned a few times here—Rhinocrisy. I emailed you the article from the WSJ because I wanted to make sure you’d be able to read it, what with their subscription policy.
Abhi, that game sounds totally ludicrous. How on earth does it even work?
Not too well obviously since it has scarred me for life.
as an aside… i was in the final batch of doctoral candidates at my school who sat in for a qualifying exam across five subject areas. the requirements were relaxed to four subjects after that semester. rumour has it that the only people who thought it was worth the effort were the foreigners from india, china and iran – so the univ decided to ease up.
i can see the sense tho’ – when the economy was booming not many people went into advanced studies – the schools werent churning out enough phd’s who could get security clearances for labs and defence – all the smart people who could go make a gazillion putting up http://www.mynutsaregreen.com went out and did so.
Not too well obviously since it has scarred me for life.
That was probably the purpose. You did say your teacher was a drill sergeant. 🙂 So I guess it worked perfectly. 😉
my point probably didnt come across above – i was having a soliloquy on if and how universities should justify tooling with university qualifications criteria
Oliver Wang at Poplicks blogged about this a few days ago with some interesting commentary about the validity of the article.
Oh, and I so don’t feel bad for either Abhi or Manish about the dating thing. Growing up in the middle of nowhere in the Northeast meant that phenomenon was par for the course, all through high school, and extending well into university years. 🙂 Maybe we’re all scarred!
I’ve commented before on this trend:
Abhi,
I feel your pain. We also had to play the same game in 6th grade music class of all places. Me and Neeraj got paired together. There was no way we would actually EVER EVER consider marriage in real life – he was a jock and pompous ass who couldn’t handle that I was a faster runner than him and everyone else (sadly, the best moment in my life to this day)…. Anyways, I felt like the teacher was teaching us and our peers that THESE were our options. Needless to say, we weren’t happy with such limited options.
K, this has got to be the dumbest quote from the wsj article:
A couple of things:
Odd, the people who I debated against from Bellermine were AA or Latino. And us city kids always felt as though we were getting less resources than the suburban kids, whether they were in public or private school.
Oh, and to pick apart the WSJ-article a little bit more, the circumstances of the NYU student’s suicide were related to relationship issues, not performance issues, or being sheltered from the outside world. I don’t see how attending a more integrated high school could have prevented this death (though I do agree that emotionally responsive would likely help).
Yale, which was established on colonial bounty from India, is almost despicable in my view (after reading the above and Yale’s past).
This is beautifully described. (More beautiful because describes my view 🙂 )
Great read !! Huray for MCEAA’s ..
all this stanford bashing… oi. why does it seem to be one way? an inferiority complex perhaps? i kid… 😉
anyway, getting back to the topic of the article, i think the situation in cupertino/saratoga is interesting. i experienced this to some extent in my classes in a wealthy suburb of seattle. “model minority” parents generally push their children harder, so they’re going to occupy a disproportionate number of seats in the tougher classes. to avoid these schools because of the racial imbalance seems pretty weak-willed. maybe white america (at least in south bay) is finally getting a taste of minority pressures in this situation as manish points out.
i think the more interesting aspect of this is the socio-economic implications or results of increased wealth among asian americans. will this lead to more schools in the upper tier? or will there still be a lot of contention for the few good schools?
A somewhat related parallel of this situation occurs in colleges that have engineering schools. Some universities were finding that engineers enrolled in Freshman chemistry were throwing off the curve for all the inferio..err, I mean other majors. Therefore some have started to have a separate Chemistry 101 class for all non-engineering majors, and have thus stigmatized the poor engineers even more. At the University of Michigan there is a Central Campus and a North Campus separated by a 10 minute bus ride. All Music, Art, and Engineering majors have to leave their dorms and hop on the bus to North Campus to go to class. Do you see what has happened? They have separated all the freaks and geeks from the mainstream population. What if that eventually happens to these schools?
I’m Desi who grew up near Cupertino and I’d have second thoughts about sending my kids to school in Cupertino. High School should be a chance for students to explore the learning and culture instead of concentrating on scoring high on placement exams. There’s much more to life than just medicine/engineering/law.
That’s what college is 🙂
Yeah, there’s always i-banking 🙂
I recall hearing about math and science “magnet” schools. We didn’t have these in Washington, but I’ve heard of them in SoCal and NY from my college friends. Looks like it is already happening to some extent.
wow. i don’t think i really even need to say anything in response to this, but what an ignorant comment. i hope the staff bans you.
The staff is away on holiday but the intern just took care of it.
I have an Asian friend who recently moved to Palo Alto rather than Cupertino b/c (in large part) she didn’t want to send her children to school in an Asian enclave. I accused her of trying to find a school with an easier curve 🙂 The cultural arguments have some currency, even amongst asians.
I sense that posters feel browns have a one-track education. I don’t agree. I can’t speak for the States, but in my own experience, growing up in Canada, me and my siblings had a very well-rounded education. We were in just about every sport; soccer, track, basketball, hockey, swimming, younameit, as well as enjoying art, music and school. Our parents really encouraged this. We were not an exception, since my classmate and temporary husband, Neeraj, had parents who were gung-ho on the sports, too, which explains his psychotic tendencies and inability to accept losses… but I digress.
Hmmm…. the one thing we didn’t do was spelling bees, but then again, Canadian schools didn’t offer national spelling bee competitions (I don’t think), thanggod. That could be the missing factor! (Just teasin – I have no objection to spelling bees. 😉
Is anyone else reaching for their violin? Awww…surrounded by members of a race you’re not familiar with? Forced to adjust? POOR BABIES.
Great post – really made me think…I was fascinated by the “well-rounded” story. I’ve always believed that the well-roundedness thing was a college’s attempt to bring in diversity, who would have ever guess that it’s possible the opposite is true?
I have been a Cupertino area teacher for 7 years. It is a widespread opinion that the competition at area high schools has grown to unhealthy proportions. It is also well-known that the football teams rarely win a game. These two facts don’t tell a story though.
The most disturbing aspect to me and (and one that Asian Americans in this area tend to ignore) is that high level of self-segregation among students and parents. Building a volcano for class, on the volleyball team, and in woodshop class, there is a high level of collaboration among all students but outside of school, students having different ethnicities rarely mix it up.
If there is widespread resentment in the white population of Cupertino, this self-segregation is a factor. You know how it is, Asian families always have resources. I can remember getting a flat tire as a kid in Baton Rouge LA. My aunt looked in the phonebook, found a brown by last name, and scored us a hot meal and place to stay. All on the house of course. People take care of their own. For many Asian Americans, this network includes people of other ethnicities as well. For others, though, there is conscious exclusion of people of other races.
I’m not saying that life should be like a prime-time sitcom– instead of throwing in the token brown and black, invite the token Hispanic and white to the next puja. It’s not about grand gestures.
I’ve seen families that rarely show genuine regard for people of other races. I grew up as a desi in the South and have known what being an “Other” is. If you’re not white or black, you just don’t count. In Cupertino, Other, in the eyes of a growing population of desis, is being white or hispanic. They might not be rude but children can read between the lines and they, then, adopt the same outlook in viewing the world.
Ask those that are feeling like an Other some leading questions and you get the WSJ article.
There was another article about white flight this week, this time in suburban Atlanta — Gwinnett County. Here the new inhabitants are not just Asians, but blacks and Latinos. (There are stats at the end of the article that show the real complexity of race/ethnicity patterns in Atlanta)
This article is more about the old kind of white flight than the WSJ article in Manish’s post. But it did have one interesting passage worth considering:
Bellarmine is at http://www.bcp.org, not at the link you sited. JUG for you, Manish!
fixed
After reading the Gwinnet County article, my impression was yes, the article seemed innocent enough, but I don’t feel it’s forced segregation at all. When I read the caption below the photo, I thought to myself, “hey, what’s this article about anyway?”
So, is the conclusion from both examples, that alot of whites feel threatened by both non-whites bring the curve up as well as non-whites bringing the curve down? These are reasons to get up and move?
Yes, I agree this happens pretty much everywhere, but the reasons behind it are complex and not seemingly intentional. The division happens at an early age. I don’t know about these days, but when I was growing up there was alot of racism hurled at you if you were not white (right from kindergarten), so if there was a brown girl in the class, I would assume she wouldn’t be “mean to me” and naturally gravitate towards her. Usually, I didn’t have this luxury, but it was very comforting to know you weren’t alone. I wish this would change. Maybe it starts with educating the parents, who likely didn’t have very good education on the matter to begin with.
At the University of Illionis, the campus isn’t really seperated by 10 minutes, though a major road intersects the two, Green St. So what you get is “other side of the tracks” thing. North of Green were the enginerds, south of Green the ‘cool’ folk.
Splits among students were also highlighted when the Graduate students of the school went on strike, but Engineering grad students didn’t participate since they actually got paid well. From an economics standpoint, engineering studnets got ‘paid’ well because the departments brought in research money which funded it.
English or sociology departments simply didn’t have the money. Obviously the Asian/South Asian engineering grad students were blamed for not playing as part of the ‘team’.
My aunt is an active participant in the local PTA in Fremont. The only brown in the group, rest are white, I think maybe one Asian. The traditionalists (Whites) complain that the other parents (Asians) aren’t involved, aren’t communicating.
People are polite, kids study well, but it’s this lack of engaging other people is what this issue is all about. It is a two way street. Traditionalists need to understand Asians are ‘Grades first, everything else second’ and come from places where cut throat competition was the norm, but Asians if they actually care about the community as a whole, simply need to talk and express their viewpoints and also listen to what others in forums like PTA meetings, local community events, school functions, etc. have to say.
How is sending your kids to a private school any less white? Presentation (Bellarmine’s neighboring girls’ school where I went) had tons of Indians and I’m sure that number has more than quadrupled now.
The way things are going in the US industrywise, I doubt they will have to worry about those career directions anyway…
Ang wrote:
growing up in Canada, me and my siblings had a very well-rounded education
Ran across a desi hockey mom a few weeks ago. I pity the kid…
Most of these “white flight” / asian invasion issues are being worked through in the Toronto area. Andrew Duffy’s prizewinning series of Toronto Star articles on immigrant education mentioned white flight in Markham (now 56% Indian and Chinese).
Bismilla says she has talked to parents in the mostly white neighbourhoods of Stouffville, for instance, who do not mask their reasons for moving. “In Stouffville,” Bismilla says, “when we even try to talk about race relations, we’ve had people openly say to us: ’We ran away from Markham because of multiculturalism. Don’t come here and talk to us about multiculturalism.’
Haven’t heard of the same issues arising in Brampton or Mississauga. But white flight seems to be real — take a look at how fast all white Barrie is growing.
On the other hand, the data is not so clear. If you’re interested in the Canadian angle on white flight, its worth reading the statcan report by Feng and Hou entitled “Recent immigration and the formation of visible minority neighbourhoods in Canada’s large cities”. It’s finding were generally positive — white flight is happening, but its not the main factor in the formation of all Indian and al Chinese neighbourhoods. And recent immigratns are not as concentrated as Italians were in the post war years.
(I’m basically lifting my comment from my comment at Rhinocrisy.)
So, first of all, about this tension between math and liberal arts–argh. There people go again, with their miscalibrated ideas of “balance.” Math and Science are a big part of a liberal arts education–see Plato & the Quadrivium. Never mind that it is a bit unseemly to violently turn up one’s nose in favor of an eduational philosophy that is named after thinking fit for a master–as opposed to thinking fit for a slave. (We’ll not even contemplate why it is that an educational philosophy thusly named took particular root in a young Republic which built atop revived and enlarged customs of slavery.) Those who champion liberal education must ground their measure of its standards in some sort of principle. If that principle is tradition, then they should be acquainted with tradition enough to know the importance of mathematics and also the importance of competition. If that principle is functional (skills needed for good citizenship) they should acknowledge the inadequacy of our civic math skills. Without any standards, it sounds very much like they’re simply moving the goalposts to suit themselves.
I’m willing to acknowledge that averaged over the whole group, Asian Americans might be more focused on core academics and less inclined towards extracurricular activities than Whites–and even to acknowledge that it might be excessively so. If demographic of changes of any kind (say, an increase in geeky parents, regardless of race, in Silicon Valley) is rapidly changing the educational philosophy of a given school, then naturally it behooves constituencies (determined by educational philosophy, not race) to argue in favor of their own preferences. You could probably rewrite that whole article in terms of competing Silicon Valley subcultures without ever referencing race. The Ivies are historically adept at having this whole conversation in public without making it seem to be about race. But as soon as the argument is framed in terms of the dominant races or ethnic groups of each side, it easily verges into racist territory. Indeed, the fact that so many parents couldn’t hide their feelings about Asians from a reporter who appears to be Asian makes it seems like this is much more about racism and much less about any kind of real, principled disagreement about education.(Indeed, after your intro, I was shocked when reading the article to see that the sources were not so anonymous.)
I’m also habitually disturbed by how arbitrarily normative media/establishment/majoritarian assements of “well-roundedness” are. I can’t speak about the East Asian American experience, but in my experience South Asian American children often have a rich cultural life that is sometimes invisible to their peers and evaluators. If you’ll forgive me for quoting my own inaugural guestblog at Sepia Mutiny: “If I had to describe the culture of the South-Asian American community in a single sentence, I might very well hit on this: WeÂ’re very supportive—perhaps too supportive—of our childrenÂ’s performance-related self-esteem. It only takes two or three Diwali shows with a hundred klutzy butterballs bouncing around the stage, adorably off-beat, to realize that we start drinking in theater with our mothersÂ’ milk.” Yet Bharat Natyam performances and tabla ensembles don’t always mesh well with an American PTA’s preconceived notions of what “participating in the arts” means.
Actually I find it ironic that I’m even jumping into this discussion, especially as framed. I went to a private school–a performing arts powerhouse that was explicitly focused on developing “the whole person”–and not one that was particularly white. (If anything, it was significantly less white than my post-209 Berkeley experience. I’m guessing the Asian balance was approximately the same at each.) I was the kid who started the school “newspaper”*, the garden, the literary club, etc. etc.. I also happened to be one of the labrats who took calculus. These things were not seen as mutually exclusive. I’m also a big proponent of Asian-Americans accessing the full spectrum of occupations and interests, not just geeky ones, and I do have to agree that I wouldn’t be happy sending my kids to schools that were overwhelmingly Asian–or overwhelmingly anything else, really. (How many of these fleeing parents would truly mind sending their kids to overwhelmingly white schools?!?) So I find this whole dichotomy a bit strange from the get-go. There are some valid cultural criticisms to be made, but it is tacky at best to get them from fleeing white parents.
Ennis wrote:
The cultural arguments have some currency, even amongst asians.
Sure. But tarring all Asians with the same brush and reacting so strongly as to leave or whisper or discourage others from moving to town is really kind of inappropriate.
Is anyone else reaching for their violin? Awww…surrounded by members of a race you’re not familiar with? Forced to adjust? POOR BABIES.
Exactly, Salil. Exactly.
GujuDude wrote:
My aunt is an active participant in the local PTA in Fremont. The only brown in the group, rest are white, I think maybe one Asian. The traditionalists (Whites) complain that the other parents (Asians) aren’t involved, aren’t communicating.
Now THIS is some biting criticism. In FREMONT? That’s a problem. That needs to be rectified. If our community is really that nonparticipatory, that’s not cool. Somehow, I doubt that’s the case everywhere—if you don’t participate, you don’t get to dictate changes to the curriculum.
That’s right, Saheli. I don’t get the in-group criticism of ourselves, either….. Browns can and do participate. I didn’t want to speak for the U.S, but isolating isn’t my experience. I’m glad to hear that someone from the U.S. has verified the same.
Let’s tell it like it is, people. It’s racism when they’re pissed that an ethnic group is doing well. Let’s not defend their “justified” reasons – ha. I don’t think there is any reason to feel it’s “our fault”.
ps. I also feel that if you don’t include at least some math and science, that’s equally, if not more so, an imbalanced education.
Different communities have different experiences. But from my own, I have seen rampant apathy among our community when it comes to school participation. Others may have different viewpoints and experiences that would say otherwise.
This, in no way, is an excuse for other people’s racist opinions. But all are not racist, most are simply ignorant. That’s why I said it was a two way street.
Too many people stick their head in the sand and say,”Well its not our fault they are leaving, who cares?” It isn’t our fault, but we can sure as hell voice our opinions to those who may feel unwelcome through the lack of cross communication and say, “Hey, is there something we can do to help?”
This way, the racist folk can still move along (I don’t think their opinions will change), but those who were ignorant/misguided just may stay back, keeping the school and community diverse. This would make racists position even weaker, further delegitimzing their cause.
This may not work either, but atleast we can say we tried. Thats all.
Fascinating articles.
It’s ironic that the elite universities’ focus on “diversity” and “well-roundedness” is rooted in anti-Semitism and racism generally. But I think such admissions policies long ago transcended these roots, and now help expose students to the variety of American society, and of life generally.
As Mark Seto in the WSJ article says, it’s a disserrvice to educate kids in a “sheltered little world,” that’s racially cloistered, OR where the idea of success tends to exclude the arts, the humanities, public service… [and at the risk of making a cultural generalization, I think first gen. Asian parents often undervalue the arts, etc., as legitimate career choices. Cultural shows notwithstanding.]
However, like others here, I suspect that the white families fleeing that California high school are afraid of diversity, not searching for it.
That Atlanta Journal Constitution article linked by Amardeep, Post # 27, is shocking in that the reporter didnÂ’t interview a single black or hispanic who had moved into that neighborhood. (I read it fast, did I miss any?) I wonder if, given the chance, these newcomers would have described the whites as being cliquish and unfriendly, just as the whites describe them.
ItÂ’s natural for there to be barriers of unfamiliarity and suspicion between different ethnic groups. The choice is whether to challenge and negotiate these barriers, or go searching for homogenous comfort. And it is a two-way street, as GujuDude says.
And to think…Little Kabul is only a few miles down the 880 from Cuppertino. While the problem is often the South Asian community’s self-segregation (in high schools), this seems to happen more often with first- and second-generation kids. As an Indian teen who actually made an effort to hang out with people who weren’t desi(I only had 2 or 3 Indian friends), I think it’s just an undeserved sense of cultural superiority OR fear that “the other kids might not like me.” Of course, I don’t blame some of these kids in certain situations. Quite a few white teens can be fairly racist(especially the “preps” and “jocks”), but there’s no reason to disregard the ones that aren’t racist, nor those of other races.
Personally, I never really liked the South Asian cliques since they always seemed like a bunch of stuck-up assholes who’d insist on speaking Hindi/Punjabi just to show how much better they were than everyone else. Of course, they’d then proceed to act gangsta and bump annoying Indian remixes to rap music from the subs in their 350z’s. It may have been because I was South Indian and could only speak English and Spanish, but nonetheless, I think I’d still prefer a more multiracial set of friends than the commonly ethnocentric Indian/Afghan/Pakistani cliques in CA high schools.
I don’t disagree with you in essence, BUT, historically and even to the present day, race relations have hardly been a two-way street. It’s the priveledged that really have access to the best streets, both literally and metaphorically.
As far as immigrant brown parents who may feel the need to live in a sheltered community – give them a break! – immigrant communities do this everywhere and in every country because it’s hard to be away from home, and get used to a completely new and foreign place. It’s comforting to know there are others like you who share a history and culture. I don’t see it as huge problem, it’s not as if the kids adhere to this cloistering custom. And when they do, it’s often because they’ve experienced overt racism from their peers. Usually, this becomes less of a problem with 2nd gen as they get older and all groups mature a little. By the 3rd gen, I doubt this will be a huge issue in most areas.
Just because the brown community encourages alot of emphasis on science-related careers, does not mean that the individuals that choose those careers aren’t well-versed in poetry, or can’t paint, dance, play sports, etc, etc. The most renaissance-like people I’ve ever seen are from the desi community: Talk about wonderwomen and supermen!
Give it another generation, and I assure you that even the career paths will change.
Most medical/law schools and even a few engineering schools ( if Im not mistaken) require a good solid supplemnetary application demonstrating ‘leadership’ qualities and extensive extra curricular participation.
Just being a nerd will not be sufficient to get you in. So even if there is a focus on science/math with the desi population, the argument of well roundedness seems quite silly given this criteria for admissions.
I have to agree with Ang on this one. The whole idea of “self segregation” is loaded with “blame the victim” rhetoric. Not only does it assume that people CAN leave a residential area (historically near difficult to impossible given histories of racism in city planning, zoning and credit access), it also puts the responsibility of inclusion on the shoulders of non-whites.
As a kid who grew up in Richmond (not too far from Cupertino, all things considered) and had parents who were super active in the PTA, I can tell you white parents didn’t consistently harass my siblings and my parents because we were apathetic or self-segregating.
We’re (Asian Americans) an easy community to blame, especially post-209. In the California context, pre-1996 the rhetoric was that whites weren’t getting into public higher ed institutions because of affirmative action, and more specifically because of “undeserving” and “unqualified” blacks and Latinos. Now, as the argument shifts towards a redefinition of “merit” folks are making the same racist claims of entitlement as they did before, but now they blame it on the monolithic Asian American, who is “too qualified,” “too driven” and “too competitive.” You see the same rhetoric at UC Berkeley today. [side note: for folks who thought it was interesting that anti-Semitism was a root cause for “diversity admissions” at elite universities check out The Chosen]
And finally, who’s to say that these students aren’t “balanced” in their academic and extracurricular lives? The assumption of model minority success totally eclipses the experiences and contexts of so many desis and East Asian Americans who AREN’T the children of the brain drain generation.
I was just thinking that. I went to such a crappy rural public high school (no honors classes, no AP classes, everyone went to community college; it was basically Varsity Blues in Southern Illinois) that when I was applying to college my guidance counselor told me to play up my so-called well-roundedness because it was pretty much all I had going for me. (And how ironic! That’s what got me IN, rather than kept me out.) But I fully agree that Leadership is as important as any book-larnin’. Everyone knows that. Your test scores will only get your application looked at, but your extracurriculars will make you stand out.
This post and the comments thread has been very informative for me. Many of my classmates (mostly Asian) are from wealthy Bay Area neighborhoods and went to very good, competitive high schools … and they’re actually intensely competitive and a little scary. V. interesting.
went to a crappy public high school as well.. me and another brownie gal in a class of 600..but of course you had to play up your well roundedness to get you into places..and the same goes with college.. need to do other things besides living in the library and keeping up the gpa and getting good mcat scores.. what makes you different.. when i interviewd folks for med school, all i looked for was (besides them already passing the number game), would i want to hang out with them or see them as an asset to the class in some way or another…..
irvine/university high is notoriously competitive.. i had friends out in oc who used to do homework until 2am…huh?!?! made fun of me and my ‘dumb’ school that i went to… wahtever… what the hell is that about? yeah, the competitiveness brewed in these schools is frightening…
thank god i’m out and about… whew….
and manish: yeah, the tree is a retarded mascot.. sorry… but a trojan trumps a tree any day :)..smelling those roses…
Let me try to phrase my argument in a slightly different manner. One has to move beyond the ‘blame game’ to achieve any progress.
Most of these arguments are loaded with emotion, hurt feelings, and conclusions (right or wrong). Responsibility of inclusion or cohesiveness falls on ALL people who consider themselves to be part of the community. Not the minority or majority.
I have no argument that children of Asian immigrants have potential of being ‘well rounded’. The bay area attracted immigrants of a certain background (tech), therefore it’s logical to assume that success acheived by parents in those fields will be emphasized on their kids. I also don’t see a problem in people of a similar background/culture clustering together for support. As time passes, things change, so will career choices and ideas.
One of the TV news magazine programs had an episode about a south Chicago suburb (Olymia Fields, Matteson, IL?) and how white flight from these middle and upper middle class neighborhoods was affecting race relations. The demographics in these communities had shifted to predominantly well off African American families.
Many African Americans felt hurt, why were the whites moving? The information was interesting: Some moved on ignorance, others along cultural lines, and a hand few seemed a bit racist (Can whites have a different unique culture and a desire to live among shared values too, just like immigrant minorities? or is it racist when whites move into their own ‘ghettos’) I am not making any conclusions here, I simply don’t know enough. In that program, a white family was featured that had lived alongside a black family for many years (from the time when demographic makeup was more balanced), grown close, very friendly, were just like family.
When the white family decided to move, the black neighbor felt very sad and hurt. Was the White family racist in their move? The time spent with their African American friends would say otherwise, then why move? I can’t conclude anything, I’m far too under informed for that.
From such a vantage point, the only logical course of action I can come up with is the community needs to develop platforms/venues to make sure everyone gets heard, and encourge folks who may be apathetic/initmidated/misunderstood… to voice their opinions. At least make a two way street (community powers that be), whoever decides to walk down it will do so at their own benefit. If you build it, they will come, atleast I hope so (Wishful thinking?)
If you try to quantify which community has to work harder in order to ‘balance’ things out, neither community will move forward.
There’s an interesting discussion on this topic here
When the whites compete with blacks and hispanics they are against Affirmative Action and insist that only grades and test scores should matter. When they compete against Asians they say that they should look at the whole person. All whites want is white privilege, and they will get it. Twenty years from now, the dumbed down and less qualified whites would still be supervising the better qualified and smarter Asians, and would be still complaining about affirmative action, outsourcing and “immigrants” (by this they would mean every person of Asian origin) taking away their jobs and the complainers would be the next genaration of Lou Dobbs.
I can see why people might get offended at white flight. But I mean, even us asians don’t stick together. For example, if you’re chinese and living in chinatown, but then desis start moving in to the point where it becomes a little delhi, do we expect the chinese family to stay there? Of course not, it would be chinese flight then. So idk, this phenomena is with all races.
Of course!
No more than any other groups doing the same.
WHO THE HELL CARES??????????? AZNS ROCK!!!!!!!!!!!! AZN PRIDE WORLDWIDE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!