Critical Race Theory often justifies Asian discrimination because Asian Americans are often on the wrong side of the “groups who need to be helped” debate.
One of today’s most vexing Supreme Court cases is Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which has brought anti-Asian discrimination to the forefront of the current cultural discourse. SFFA (Students for Fair Admissions) contends that Harvard’s “race-conscious” admissions process violates the Constitution by disadvantaging Asian American applicants based upon their race, while Harvard argues that campus diversity goals justify their race-based process.
Most of the reasoning behind Harvard’s admissions process comes from critical race theory (CRT), a theory of race which originated with Harvard University. Another hot topic recently, critical race theory teaches that America is divided into privilege and oppressed groups based on race. Negative aspects of modern society follow from that dichotomy, and the only way to fix it is to revolutionize the way we think about race, culture, and society.
Under the critical race framework, “white supremacy” covers a lot of different phenomena. Everything from blatant discrimination, to the existence of English grammar, to choosing not to riot are included under the term. And in the words of social justice activist and author Ibram X. Kendi, “The only remedy to racist discrimination is anti-racist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” In order to combat white supremacy (however broadly defined), critical race theorists view “antiracist” discrimination as the only legitimate response.
However, with the emergence of several racial groups that have come to be just as successful as whites, Critical Race Theorists came up with the term “white adjacency.” Robin DiAngelo, author of the now infamous book “White Fragility,” defines it this way: “The closer you are to whiteness—the term often used is white-adjacent—you’re still going to experience racism, but there are going to be some benefits due to your perceived proximity to whiteness. The further away you are, the more intense the oppression’s going to be.”
According to critical theorists, Asian Americans are the most white adjacent minority. They go so far as to say that Asians don’t count as “people of color,” and even invented the term “BIPOC: (Black and Indigenous people of color) specifically to exclude Asian and other “white adjacent” minorities,
What does this mean? In my new book, An Inconvenient Minority, I tell the story of the many Asian Americans who are harmed by an ideology that penalizes their success. Progressives “call out Asians for either trying to be like white people or benefitting from systems that prop up white dominance.” Under critical race theory, it also means they are complicit in upholding white supremacy. To be white adjacent is to benefit from the systems of oppression that America was allegedly founded upon.
Applying the words of Kendi, then, means that Asians are a privileged group in which discrimination is justified, to make room for the “truly” oppressed.
But is the concept of white adjacency actually valid? In fact, white adjacency is simply a rhetorical tool to discriminate against Asian Americans. It’s also an implicitly racist concept that devalues other races, meritocracy, and Asian culture.
The idea of white adjacency hinges on the overwhelming success of Asian Americans in this country. It emerges from the fact that Asian Americans have the highest per capita income, lowest per capita crime rates, and highest rates of college education. In fact, Asian Americans score better on average than whites on all of these variables.
The problem is that critical race theory implicitly defines every good societal outcome as white. Even if your family came from China or India, being educated and achieving a high degree of personal success is deemed “white” behavior. This is racist in multiple ways. Obviously, it puts Asian Americans into a white adjacent box that completely ignores their unique cultures and struggles. Furthermore, it implies by default that other races aren’t successful, talented, or educated. If being rich and successful are “white” characteristics, then doesn’t the logic follow that being poor and lazy are Black characteristics? Despite pretending to care about diversity and inclusion, critical race theory is actually racist in the way it implicitly categorizes groups of people.
Asians are harmed from multiple directions by the white adjacency myth. Asian Americans have struggled in this country as well – let us not forget the Chinese Exclusion Act or Japanese Internment. Yet, the concept is frequently used to silence Asian Americans when they attempt to explain their own struggles as a minority in America. It also gives universities such as Harvard the required justification to discriminate against Asian American applicants to their schools, who blow every other race out of the water academically. Asians are an inconvenient minority because their high performance is a threat to both prevailing woke narratives surrounding diversity, and to continued, largely white, ruling class hegemony in the Ivy League schools. As the coastal elite continue to double down on critical race theory, Asian Americans will continue to be the thorn in their side.
Asian Americans are not deficient white people or “white adjacent.” They are unique individuals from distinct cultures, each with our own struggles and backgrounds. Their individual successes are theirs alone, and defining those successes as “white” is racist in myriad ways. Asian Americans cannot simply be designated by Critical Race Theory as a prop for white supremacy; we are the inconvenient minority.
24 comments
I want to star by saying that I think CRT is a crap theory, but I can see where one might “find evidence” for it.
I’m White. I grew up in a blue collar household. My parents didn’t go to college. Other than encouraging me to do well in high school, they didn’t know how to prepare me to get into a good college.
I had White classmates whose parents went to college. Some were even doctors and lawyers. They knew how to help their kids prepare to get into good schools. Those kids grew up hearing about their parents professions. Some may have even worked in their parents’ office as a summer job. They had exposure that I didn’t.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this. I don’t think it’s “White privilege.” Elites will have advantages and will use them. As long as they don’t deliberately sabotage other people’s progress, I think it’s fine.
Actually, if the child of a doctor or lawyer wanted to get into the building trades, I’d have had an advantage over them. My parents discouraged me from going into the building trades, but if they didn’t and if I wanted it at the time, my father could have gotten me into the union. And I helped him on weekend side jobs as a kid, so I already knew quite a bit about doing the work.
Someone who has not been exposed to part of a system, who wants to get into that area, may see the difficulty they’re having entering it as “the system being against them,” rather than “they’re in unfamiliar territory and need to work hard to get ahead.”
You can scoff all you want. You can frame this whole situation however you want. You can deny and you can strawman and you can accuse Blk Americans of whatever you want. It won’t change the data or the facts. Asians are antiblack american.they have a racist culture and have disrespected America and Black Americans too much..
Asians came to this country with antiblack views, Asians had no business messing with any of the civil rights laws. Since blk Americans don’t benefit from AA we are going to watch the carnage dispassionately. Asians came after black ppl not the legacy admitions. Asians said blk Americans needed to deal with the violence in our community. Stop Asian hate slandered blk Americans and has nothing to say about white ppl attacking them and the fact that hate crimes against Asians in Cali went down. And that trash hate crime bill has collected dust for over two years. Never ever used not even once..explain that ! You explain why you are exploiting blk Americans? WW and Asians benefited from affirmative action. Not us. Lol Chinese, south Korean, japanese you took advantage of what was meant to help ppl from laos, Vietnam and Cambodia. The government is going to claw back those grants. Stop abusing ppl and programs. Then claiming you’re being abused. Blk Americans do not hate. YOU DO.
A little while back, a Japanese satellite in lunar orbit captured pictures of one of the Apollo landing sites. It was one of the last three landings, as the tracks left by the lunar rover were evident. When moon landing conspiracy theorists were confronted by this evidence, what did they do? Simple; they just made the Japanese involved, part of the conspiracy. By expanding the circle of conspiracy, they were able to keep their belief system intact.
Something equivalent seems to be going on in regard to the concept of white adjacency.
When confronted with the inconvenient to the theory academic and economic success of Asian American’s (or Asians in Western countries, more generally), the just-in-time invention of the white adjacency concept involved the same means of rationalization; expand the scope of the concept – in this case, whiteness – to eliminate all contradictions between theory and data.
I suspect the woke mentality and the extreme conspiracy theory mentality to be functionally quite similar.
It is Dec 10th, 2022. They removed Ben Carson’s name from a High School that was named after him out of their woke cancel culture.
The irony of promoting blacks getting education and better life, yet canceling the perfect guy who is the ideals realized.
Back to Asians though (cuz as an Asian I dgaf about asian discrimination cuz it only makes us stronger)…
I’m no longer color person according to liberal Democrat voting NPCs so…..
I’m officially a whitie! WOOOO!!!!!
But seriously, how loud are these woke Democrat Americans trying to be to boast how racist they are? Their very existence is systemic racism!
There’s this argument that the average income of Asians are equal or higher than white Americans, you are no longer discriminated. That’s a false argument.
I have two master degrees, one is Statistics and another in MBA in Operations Research. In my 40 years career, I got paid maybe better than those with only Bachelor degrees or with only high school degrees, but I will not have the opportunity they have. The biggest reason is I was never accepted in the big boys club, I can never find a mentor that will help me moving up.
I can always make a project or assignment happen in a way no other can even imagine, but once the project is over, it got transferred over to someone else, and the other person got promoted. The way I overcome that was as soon as I saw something like that, I will move on to another company with better pay and position. I know I can do it, I know there are market for someone like me. Eventually I moved up. My principle is, loyalty is two way. Don’t expect my loyalty to you if I don’t get the loyalty from you.
I worked as Chief Information Officers and Program Managers retired from white companies, currently living in a retired community. There are over 500 Chinese retirees in our community. Almost all of them worked in the technical fields, not in management. In my career moving up the management ladder, I hardly find any Chinese I can align with. When I ask my Chinese neighbors in the community why they didn’t get in the management route but stayed in the technical side, they said they enjoy to be on the technical side. Now that they are in an all Chinese club, a few of them are fighting to be on the club Board, not to help other Chinese, just want to be on the board to show they are a leader. However, when working in a white company, they are content to be a technical, and won’t challenge the management position. This is a problem with the “white adjacent” minority. Some of them dare not to challenge the white culture and can’t get in the big boy club, but because they worked in white companies, speak fluent English, they feel they should be the leader among Chinese groups. Even though they have absolutely no management experience. Many good Chinese that want to serve the Chinese society leave these clubs because they felt they are discriminated by these Chinese. These Chinese think immigrant issue is a sensitive issue and refuse to discuss it. They believe they are in the “main stream”, but don’t actively participate in American’s clubs, play mahjong with other Chinese and eat Chinese food. They are White Chinese, not Chinese Chinese.
We should start an new critical theory. Let’s call it critical Asian Theory. The basic idea would be that everyone supporting the Chinese government just wants to keep the biggest population of the Asian world systemically suppressed to benefit from cheap labor and keep them down. Because those brilliant minds would overtake the west in no time if they were left to be free.
“[W]ith the emergence of several racial groups that have come to be just as successful as whites” …??? This is such a confused article. It prima facie rejects the racist bull that all people of a skin colour and ethnicity share the same social characteristics and success rates etc,. and acknowledges the diversity of outcomes within these concocted racial categories, but then plays the same racial stereotype card right into DiAngelo’s game of White supremacy- supplanting it with the notion that all ‘asians’ (whatever that actually means) are defined by the successful members. “We’re not ‘white adjacent because we are asian and overwhelmingly successful”?? There’s a disturbing lack of consistency there.
People should be seeing each other as other than their skin colour or ethnic group, but in fact according to this article there’s one type of person doing better than all others, which type indicates superior intellect, income, and civic participation?? In reality, the article is selling a book, so the author may be pandering to the members of ‘Asian’ who might read it. But as we know, there are highly intelligent and successful and civic-minded people of all skin colours and ethnicities on God’s great green Earth, and to try to play the ‘asians are victims too ‘ game is no better than the Chinese Communist a-historical ‘century of humiliation’ rubbish.
No it is not. This article is applying the **BLMCRT bullcr#p standards of the likes of di Angelo, Wekker, and their ilk** to “that inconvenient minority” group to provide a counterexample to **their** narrative of only being succesfull in life because of white skin color of caucasian heritage, take your pick, instead of academic and disciplinary prowess, exposing one of the major flaws//discrepancies in the CRT narrative. If anything, “white adjacency” comes across as a dirty ad hoc add-on to CRT to cover up that a blatant hole in the theory. I’m kinda eerily reminded of similar accuations leveled at Slavic people being deemed “too white” by the BLMCRT crowd, despite their apalling treatment by Hitler and his Nazi crew (they were sent to Auswitz just like the Jews (another fan-favourite love-to-hate-on group of the BLMCRT crowd), Blacks, Gipsies, basically anyone not Aryan enough), and then the communists after that. You might wanna have a talk with the elder generations of e.g. the Poles for some extra insight.
People on the left with only a superficial understanding of CRT always refer to the issue of slavery But Asians in America never owned slaves (that I’m aware) so that shoots a big hole in the theory right there. So, then you’re left simply with “if you are successful relative to members of the BIPOC community, you oppress that community” Success is oppression. Anyway, I’m glad to see a fresh perspective on the whole argument, and “white adjacent” is truly a frightening term. Guilt by association. Classic in its Marxist approach to life.
Mr. Xu, thank you so much for this commentary….I will be getting your book.
Keep in mind that Jews are often tagged as “white adjacent”. And briefly put, both Jews and Asians in the US are renown for intellectual prowess and out-performance (I realize that paints with a mighty wide brush, but translating what I hear and read).
It was the “adjacency” concept that led me to see that in intersectionality, oppressor maps to competence, and oppressed to its opposite. But existentially, it also means that oppressors are the responsible ones, whereas the oppressed are accorded little to no agency.
“Wokeness” itself is an attack on intellectual competence and distinction.
Does anyone know of a historic society that has held to such a schema and been viable?
Does that mean that being a Jew is a race as a definition. National Socialists made that very point. Definitions can be lethal.
I’m getting that being white is being successful and CRT considers it bad or criminal. The skin colour is not a point of CRT, success is. You fail, you are a victim and that makes you entitled to any possible kind of reparation you can think of, you are automatically superior to any successful person.
It doesn’t stop a black billionaire like Oprah Winfrey to declare she is oppressed. That should have been a joke. It is not.
It’s pure envy. The more hardworking you are, the more you are hated. People envy not just your success, but your energy and self-discipline. They resent you not just for having more, but for manifestly being better according to a value system that they, apparently, secretly share.
I agree – it’s as simple as that – rationalisation of envy.
I have been wondering about this for a few years and thought that this explanation might be too simple and primitive, but as time goes on and the agitation and events unfold, I come to the conclusion that most of the movement can be accommodated in this simple analysis .
I agree with you. I am on an HOA Board, and other Board members resent me when I propose a best practice like strategic plan, project management, and associate my experience with my past experience working as Chief Information Officer or Program Manager or with KPMG, etc., these white Board members told me clearly they don’t like when I mention my past experience. Why? I asked, they said it makes them look stupid when they don’t have any experience supporting what they talk about. Jealousy is when you show you can elaborate but they can’t, entitlement is when they want the respect, when you showed them the bar is much higher than they can reach, but they want it just anyway, and won’t give you the respect.
You’ve met one Asian-American…you’ve met one Asian-American.
And similarly:
You’ve met one white guy…you’ve met one white guy…
etc….
Exactly!
You’re too successful, boy. Go to the back of the bus. Go back to laundering or your own country.
That’s what the new racism is all about.
The author is incorrect when he says the ruling hegemony in the Ivy League is largely white. The Ivy League administration is presently dominated by the Chosen People, and discriminating against Asian Americans is just a side effect of an admissions process which nepotistically favors applicants with a Holocaust granny in their application essay.
In 2004 Mr Marriott (at the new Marriott DFW) that Asians will take over the entire west coast kicking out all others by 2050, Hispanics will occupy the south along with conservative whites, leftist whites will occupy the east coast, in total 5 states will be created to manage the situation after the years of destruction- completion date of 2050 when all is somewhat settled. He blamed cognitive demographics, the decades long migration of like minds to specific areas trigging the problem. He’s not a prophet, but it was prophetic.
What about the Intermountain West? We’ve got Indian tribes, ranchers, Mormons, a very high Mexican-American population, and lots of lefties from the coasts who are attracted by the national parks and other natural beauty, and who come to adventure camp and build log cabin mansions. It’s an interesting and cosmopolitan region, but it’s hard to imagine how it could be carved up into political affiliation regions. I have the same worry about the rest of the country. Nearly everyone here in the West has relatives elsewhere.
It may end up being a region that is fought over after the dust has settled elsewhere. Politically it actually may get carved up along geographical lines, though, with low lying, fertile plains along rivers becoming more Mexican American dominated, while the more upland and mountainous regions remain white.
White Adjacent is the new Kulak Henchmen.