Posted on May 18, 2023

Oppressed Passing: The New Asian-American Experience

Scott Greer, Highly Respected, May 17, 2023

Florida students will now be required to learn about “Asian American and Pacific Islander” history, thanks to Ron DeSantis. A few conservatives saw this as a good thing. These types believe the AAPI program will teach Asians as an assimilation success story. This is a foolish hope.

Asians don’t want to depict themselves as a model minority that adapted Anglo-Protestant virtues. Just like every other minority group, they want to present themselves as victims of the white majority. That’s how you gain status and power in American society. There are few incentives to proclaiming themselves as a well-assimilated minority. That may lump them in with the detested whites. It’s more advantageous to insist Asians are just as oppressed as blacks.

Asians want to loudly proclaim that they are oppressed. This phenomenon is best described as “Oppressed Passing.” Passing, in the old America, referred to non-whites, usually blacks, who would pass themselves off as white. Back then, there were significant advantages to doing so. Now there are disadvantages to pretending you’re white. You don’t get into the good schools by marking the white box. Minorities are incentivized to pass themselves off as victims. Every group has to create a mythology of persecution to assert moral superiority over the white majority. Asians are no different.

This mythology is presented in the AAPI courses available in other states. Shockingly, they don’t present a vision of the model minority. California mandates AAPI lessons as part of its ethnic studies requirement (whites don’t get their own ethnic studies course, by the way). The course, as mandated by the state, explicitly aims to dispel the model minority myth. The state’s guide even offers a course example dedicated to this goal. The lesson outline states:

This course will provide for students the implications that result when lumping all Asian groups together and labeling them the model minority. For example, marginalized groups (e.g., Pacific Islanders, Southeast Asians) suffer from being cut out of programs and resources. It presents a false narrative that Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) have overcome racism and prejudice. It glosses over the violence, harm, and legalized racism that AAPIs have endured, for example, the 1871 Chinese massacre in Los Angeles, the annexation of Hawaii, shooting of Southeast Asian schoolchildren in Stockton. Furthermore, students will understand how this label for AAPIs becomes a hindrance to expanding democratic structures and support, and, worse, how it creates a division among the AAPI community and places a wedge between them and other oppressed groups, including, but not limited to, African American, Latinx, and American Indian communities.

Other lessons that could be used for the AAPI section include teaching about xenophobia, Japanese internment camps, colonialism, and imperialism.

This doesn’t seem like an idea for a state where woke goes to die.

In any case, this is AAPI identity. It’s fundamentally hostile to the historic American nation and based on grievances against the historic American nation. Of course, many Asians do not subscribe to this mindset. But this is how the group identity operates.

It must be stated that it’s completely artificial. Indians, Koreans, and Samoans have literally nothing in common, but they are all lumped into one group. What unites them is grievance against the white man.

This mentality has had an effect. A new study found that Asians say they don’t belong in America, despite being the most prosperous race in America. Only 22 percent say they feel that sense of belonging. That’s the lowest percentage of any racial group. (Whites were the only group where a majority feels they belong in America.) Half of this demographic claims they don’t feel safe because of their ethnicity. Another survey found that roughly one in five Asians hide their ethnicity to avoid racism. (How Asians hide their ethnicity is left unanswered.) It was more common among Asians who are young and born in the US to say they’ve hidden their “culture.” A different study found that three-fourth of Chinese-Americans claim they’ve experienced racial discrimination over the last year. Asians learned this alleged alienation from other non-whites. “We’ve learned this year other groups like Hispanic Americans and Black Americans share that deep sense of lack of belonging,” Norman Chen, CEO of The Asian American Fund, told Axios.

This is an odd claim for a group that makes more money than oppressive white people. In fact, eight different Asian ethnicities make more money, on average, than whites. Asians are found throughout America’s elite institutions, particularly in our universities. If the Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in higher education, Asians will make up an even greater percentage of students at America’s best colleges. The only “discrimination” Asians can point to is people mispronouncing their names or schoolyard teasing. There are real threats against some Asians who live near blacks. But the violence inflicted upon innocent Asians doesn’t come from Klansmen driven by white supremacy. The perpetrators of anti-Asian violence are typically black.

This is a particularly dangerous trend considering the overrepresentation of Asians in positions of power and wealth. These are people who feel they’re oppressed victims while wielding tremendous resources and influence. These are people who’ve imbibed anti-white resentment in education and media–and they’re in place to act on these grievances. Just imagine a ruling caste that believes a certain race did all these terrible things to them and  it’s justified to do wrong against these oppressors.

That could very well be America’s grim future. It’s why we should never aid Asian attempts to pass themselves off as oppressed. AAPI lessons in public education only serve to advance this nefarious end. The victimization is not true and it encourages racial resentment within a privileged class’s racial resentment.

Ron DeSantis holds the dubious honor of being the first Republican to mandate this woke indoctrination. No other Republican should follow his lead. Instead of crying over the Chinese Exclusion Act, our schools should teach more about the people who made this country great. And that’s the one group that doesn’t get its own ethnic studies course.