Ross Douthatis, New York Times Op-Ed columnist/BDnews24
This past week the Trump Justice Department threw its weight behind a high-profile lawsuit against Harvard University, in which a group of Asian-American plaintiffs claim — with a great deal of evidence — that the famous Ivy school discriminates against them as it once discriminated against Jews. This happened in the same moment that the No. 1 movie in America is “Crazy Rich Asians,” a guilty-pleasure romantic comedy about a young female Chinese-American economist in love with a Singaporean heir.
The convergence illustrates an underrated reality about Trump-era America. Our polarising immigration debate revolves around the Wall and the border because we’ve just experienced a long wave of immigration from our southern neighbours. But that surge is diminishing, and for almost a decade the United States has taken more Asian than Hispanic immigration. So after the Trumpian moment passes, our ethno-political fights will be gradually reshaped by how Asians relate to American culture, how American politics relates to them, and how they (because “Asian” contains multitudes) relate to one another.In my lifetime there have been two stories about where Asian-Americans fit in our domestic coalitions. In the Reagan ‘80s they were seen as the most Republican-friendly immigrant group — more educated and prosperous than other immigrants, often anti-communist (in the case of the Vietnamese and Taiwanese especially), bearing Confucian or Christian values that aligned with a traditional-values GOP.
But then from the Clinton era on Asian voters swung toward the Democratic Party — a shift that probably reflected changes in immigrant composition (more South Asians relative to East Asians, more non-Christians relative to Christians), the declining salience of anti-communism, and a reaction to the GOP’s continued rightward shift and white-Southern-Christian brand.This, in turn, led to a new story that cast Asian-Americans as a natural constituency in an emerging Democratic majority — one tributary among many in the multicultural river washing white hegemony away.
The term “model minority” often gets thrown around (and deplored) in discussions about Asian-Americans, and what’s interesting is that both narratives I’ve just described traffic in versions of that trope. The older narrative portrays Asians as the hardworking, industrious natural conservatives who don’t need handouts (in contrast with other immigrants, other minorities). The newer narrative casts them as the liberal coalition’s noblest group — willing to put solidarity with fellow minorities above the economic concerns that might tempt them rightward, and willing to accept, for the greater good, a system of racial preferences that benefits others more than them.This idea informs a lot of liberal arguments about the Harvard lawsuit, which tend to portray conservative critics of affirmative action as tempters invading the multicultural Eden, and urge Asian-Americans to maintain their model-minority purity and resist the lure of mere meritocratic self-interest.