No one is a monolith. But on average, Asian Americans are richer than other American groups except for Jewish Americans, just as Black Americans are poorer than other American groups except for American Indians.
No one is a monolith. But on average, Asian Americans are richer than other American groups except for Jewish Americans, just as Black Americans are poorer than other American groups except for American Indians.
You make a good point (you always do! I've enjoyed your writing here and on the infernal Medium). But the gap is not a large one between white Americans and Asian Americans as a group. I just looked up data for 2019, so perhaps the gap has widened since then. But in that year, white American average household income was @ 80k. For all Asian Americans, it was 86k.
But if you break it down by ethnicity, only Chinese-, Japanese-, Flipino-, and Indian-Americans had incomes higher than whites. Burmese, Nepalese, Laotian, Vietnamese, Hmong, even Korean-Americans, several others, were all under 80k. When you look at the starkly varying circumstances - i.e. Chinese/Japanese/Korean immigrants are often well-positioned financially prior to immigration while many other ethnicities are not - I do think it is important to not look at "Asian Americans" as a cohesive group. Asian Americans are actually the most economically divided racial group. To quote one of the articles I've just read: "While Asians overall rank as the highest earning racial and ethnic group in the U.S., it is not a status shared by all Asians: From 1970 to 2016, the gains in income for lower-income Asians trailed well behind the gains for their counterparts in other groups."
I completely agree the picture skews when you go past race. ThatтАЩs true of every тАЬraceтАЭ. If I remember correctly, whites in Appalachia are poorer than the average black American. If you look at religion, white Baptists are much, much poorer than white Episcopalians and Jews. I find many measures more useful than race. Religious heritage is tells us much more about a personтАЩs class background than race does.
Unsurprising. Even just from Vietnam, where I've lived since 2010, there are people ranging from city dwellers who are university educated when even high school here is equivalent to an undergraduate degree in the USA ... to ethnicities like Hmong who are barely emerged from the Stone Age. Many of them have never seen a telephone while in the cities even young children have their own cell phones and are technically sophisticated in their use.
I once overheard a woman in a furniture store going off on Vietnamese, how they were, you know, taking our jobs and sponging off welfare, blah blah blah. Then she paused, you could hear it coming, "but they are the hardest-working little people you'll ever see."
There is one guy here who emigrated to the USA with nothing and came back a billionaire and built the foundation of what is now a titanic recycling industry that gives marginal employment to millions. If you leave aluminum near a road it's gone in minutes.
No one is a monolith. But on average, Asian Americans are richer than other American groups except for Jewish Americans, just as Black Americans are poorer than other American groups except for American Indians.
You make a good point (you always do! I've enjoyed your writing here and on the infernal Medium). But the gap is not a large one between white Americans and Asian Americans as a group. I just looked up data for 2019, so perhaps the gap has widened since then. But in that year, white American average household income was @ 80k. For all Asian Americans, it was 86k.
But if you break it down by ethnicity, only Chinese-, Japanese-, Flipino-, and Indian-Americans had incomes higher than whites. Burmese, Nepalese, Laotian, Vietnamese, Hmong, even Korean-Americans, several others, were all under 80k. When you look at the starkly varying circumstances - i.e. Chinese/Japanese/Korean immigrants are often well-positioned financially prior to immigration while many other ethnicities are not - I do think it is important to not look at "Asian Americans" as a cohesive group. Asian Americans are actually the most economically divided racial group. To quote one of the articles I've just read: "While Asians overall rank as the highest earning racial and ethnic group in the U.S., it is not a status shared by all Asians: From 1970 to 2016, the gains in income for lower-income Asians trailed well behind the gains for their counterparts in other groups."
I completely agree the picture skews when you go past race. ThatтАЩs true of every тАЬraceтАЭ. If I remember correctly, whites in Appalachia are poorer than the average black American. If you look at religion, white Baptists are much, much poorer than white Episcopalians and Jews. I find many measures more useful than race. Religious heritage is tells us much more about a personтАЩs class background than race does.
Unsurprising. Even just from Vietnam, where I've lived since 2010, there are people ranging from city dwellers who are university educated when even high school here is equivalent to an undergraduate degree in the USA ... to ethnicities like Hmong who are barely emerged from the Stone Age. Many of them have never seen a telephone while in the cities even young children have their own cell phones and are technically sophisticated in their use.
I once overheard a woman in a furniture store going off on Vietnamese, how they were, you know, taking our jobs and sponging off welfare, blah blah blah. Then she paused, you could hear it coming, "but they are the hardest-working little people you'll ever see."
There is one guy here who emigrated to the USA with nothing and came back a billionaire and built the foundation of what is now a titanic recycling industry that gives marginal employment to millions. If you leave aluminum near a road it's gone in minutes.