The Souls of Yellow Folk | Glenn Loury & Wesley Yang [The Glenn Show]

hello there Wesley how are you hi I'm well thanks for having me you're welcome this is Glenn Loury and this is the Glenn show at blogging it's that TV I am a professor of these social sciences and of International and public affairs at Brown University and I'm speaking with Wesley yang the writer award winning writer American magazine Award winner who's been published in the New York Times Magazine in the New York Review of Books in tablet and in other venues it was of Korean extraction I believe I'm correct in saying so and who has written a new book that we are discussing here which I displayed before you now the souls of yellow folks so thanks very much for joining me at the Glenn show Wesley yeah thanks for having me I'm excited about talking about your book which is a collection of essays by an Asian American writer who is exploring some very interesting very interesting terrain but I have to start as an African American writer by asking you about the title of your book which very obviously borrows from the great w eb du bois book of some I don't know 120 years ago or whatever the souls of black folk that can't be an accident not an accident but a kind of you know look it's uh it's a it's a bit of a prankish title right and so it's invoking something that obviously is you know it's not really inappropriate that uh it's not really an appropriate comparison right the condition of black folk at the turn of the 20th century versus those of Asian folk in the 21st century but but what both of those conditions have in common is a kind of a particular kind of double consciousness you know which is the sort of sense of always looking at one selves through the eyes of others and being situated in the case of the an American in a place that sort of results in a kind of dual erasure of the asian-american right as a kind of as an over-performing sort of like as an over-performing sort of market dominant minority in the United States on the one hand you know but at the same time one you know seeing that many of my essay is sort of talked about the Asian American as a kind of culturally and socially annulled category identity category so in some ways the most invisible and yet the sort of least directly stigmatized of all minority groups and and it's that kind of dual erasure and that kind of liminal condition where the Asian American of course is turning by average demographic group in America and so Asian Americans are the groups that are least likely to be incarcerated and most likely to graduate from high school in college and so why all of the sort of all of the standard metrics ryu asian-americans are a very successful group and they are and yet when it comes to sort of you know recognition within the popular culture which is one sort of metric for discussing the conditions of the asian-american which is but that's just a proxy for something larger it's it's for a kind of expectation that the asian-american is a kind of tricia airy figure right or a secondary figure or someone who exists in a kind of cultural obscurity or shadow just in the politics of everyday life right and so it's that kind of duality that i think makes it interesting to explore the psychological dimension of sort of Asian identity versus that of sort of identity it's it's a contrast but they're things that they have in common at the same time clearly you know we're talking about how radically historical conditions between what Dubois erased and what date american-based and so it's kind of referencing that let me mention one thing that occurred to me right away when I saw the title of the souls of yellow folk and I thought about the boys and then I began reading your introduction and your articulation of the point of view that you just got through giving voice to about duality and marginality invisibility and so on I thought of this line in Du Bois about Tunis it's very famous you know whenever feels this duality I can't quote it exactly from memory but the african-american who is a Negro and an American at one in the same time whose soul is being measured by the tape of a world that looks on with amused contempt and pity that men have got just right a self conscious awareness of how one fits in the vision of the largest society that is looking on at one of course the african-american and the Asian American experiences are not the same you've met you've underscored that excuse me something just popped up here I'm closing it but but the the the notion that there could be some similarity or sort of conceptual parallel in this search for hunt for recognition this hunger to be seen as an individual not to be seen as a representative of a class the the the sense of low social Worth that this this is a very striking striking and I think valid parallel yeah I mean there was a period after the New York Magazine as they came out where I was you know contracted to write a book about Asian Americans and it was supposed to be reported book and it was supposed to and it didn't come up because I wasn't able to produce it because I had had some personal problems in my life that prevented it but be also because it's very hard to conceive of the asian-american but there's a few I would tell people you know I'm writing a book and and they you know they they would say well what's the book about and of course it's about Asian Americans and you know they would sort of look at you and there's a kind of charity right in the world that's that's interesting right there is a kind of gentleness to the content right with with the discussion of the subject that and it was the gentleness of course that was the real sort of the really sort of galling aspect of it right because what will you say about that right that's the question and but you being asian-american of course we can understand that you might need to write this book and yet we can't really believe that there's anything interesting to report essentially right I mean that's the that's the sort of unstated assumption right behind that response and it would reveal itself in a certain way and of course like what we're describing is a kind of what we're describing is a kind of micro aggression right like micro aggression being when a person sort of reveals what their attitude is about something like in the process of trying to sort of be nice about it right and like I tweeted something today where I talked about the fact that like I went to a state university right so I went to Rutgers and I know that I'm talking to someone who is very obsessed with kind of hierarchy of University quality when I tell them that because what they'll immediately do is they'll immediately like affirm Rutgers like they'll say something positive about Rutgers yeah you don't have anything to apologize about in a way that sort of makes clear that they're attempting to hide the fact that they have this disappointment on my behalf yeah but reveals it in the process and so like that form of kind of fraud encounter like is is you know the way sort of like at some level like sort of hierarchy is reproduced like invisible hierarchies reproduce in the world and if the asian-american is not sort of regarded with overt hostility but he is regarded with things that you take away that you get the sense that you're not really regarded as being on the same grounds or having the same worth as everyone else and and of course you know later I say where I talked about Aaron Schwartz there's a passage where I describe I describe his he writes a diary when he's at Stanford and he discusses like being in a concert with a computer science classroom and he describes seeing being in a room where they're mostly asian-americans right like he's surrounded by Asian people do you want to tell people who Aaron Schwartz is yeah so Aaron choice was the subject of a piece that I wrote about in New York Magazine he was a hacker he was a coder he was a sort of young tech whiz kid who was involved in sort of like working on certain building out certain parts of the internet when he was an early teenager and and while still in his teens he founded the he founded Reddit left a couple of years later he went back to Stanford and while he was and and then and then eventually sort of became involved in a form of activism where he would liberate academic papers right and as a result he came under the scrutiny of the FBI was facing charges and and a demand that he do a certain amount of jail time and in advance of his trial he killed himself so but entirely apart from that there was I I wrote another essay because I did a lot of research on him where I read everything that he had sort of posted on the internet and he posted a lot on the internet I think he did a diary where he described but in being racist right like he described to being sort of racist against Asians but he described in a way that I thought was very right and there in a way that was passive and and so Asians are kind of recipients to the kind of passive you know rather than an active disdain where he described sort of yeah I was in a stream full of Asian people and they all that like they they didn't really seem to matter right like they just were kind of around me and I didn't notice them I noticed the white faces I noticed the black faces and so he's putting something on the record that one suspects may or may not have not be out there right here he is confessing to it he says that there was an Asian guy that was sitting next to me and he said something to me and even though he had no accent I perceived him as having an accent and I brushed him off and so you know I posed the question of like how do you how do you quantify the effect of things that don't happen to you right because you know Aaron Schwartz was a remarkable individual and if he had talked to that Asian American man how would that Asian American man's life have been different it might have been altered or he might had a role in founding Brett I'm not saying that he would have farore but like it's certainly and and it's and it's that kind of passive thing for which we have invented the concept of micro aggression to name it and then to try to use it as a way of ferreting out that that dementia that kind of buried psychological dimension of kind of passive aversion right and and so I don't know let me ask you a question because I can imagine someone listening to you might say yes life is hard and I'm sure it's hard to be an asian-american it's hard to be a trans woman it's hard to be a Latino immigrant in the southwest it's hard to be a black person an inner-city Philadelphia life is right life is hard people don't always see you as you wish that you were seen and someone however highest educational attainment highest income occupational penetration taken over to tech thing I just went to the engineering department all I saw was Asian faces blah blah blah what the heck are you talking about grow up I mean get up spine or backbone no one said life was going to be easy but I tell you what mastery over a professional method and technique and economic security and so on and so forth makes it a lot easier to deal with the inescapable exigency of the human condition give me a break well notice both of those things are true and of course that's the sort of duality that I try to write about in the book like both of those things are true and so like even in the midst of economic security that there can be this kind of tremendous wound that people carry with them and so and and so like that's what I'm trying to get at and of course this was all written sort of in what I referred to as the kind of before kinds right the forth sort of the media was taken over by this kind of psychological accounts of of the way these hierarchy these invisible hierarchies do exist in the world and so my point is to try to say yeah these things do exist right they are real they're part of our experience and the reason why discourses of micro aggression and other discourse is an attempt to describe this but you know my objection though is that you know when we attempt to kind of I think it's fine to describe it and I think it's fine to try to evoke the pain that is involved with it but then like you know there there is this effort to turn this to like actually do something about it that would go beyond sort of like creating awareness among people to like actually police them or to police their utterances and to police out of the existence this kind of mindset and I think that that is charged with as I say later in the essay it's charged with the kind of authoritarian potential and so like I pose that and at the same time that's what wellness really is about it's speaking to the fact that despite the despite the fact that we've attained a kind of formal equality right and that we and despite the fact that we have sort of a ousted overt expressions of racism from the public square and rightly so there does still remain this other layer and and and there and there is a question of like how how do we think about making changes in this and of course the way that it's happening right now is through you know through the the tactics that have been adopted by university administrators so on measures that I think ultimately are you know are counterproductive and destructive and yet at the same time there's there's a there's a real energy that's behind them that has to do there's a real energy behind them that has to do with people's actual experiences and and I think like it's important to both they acknowledge the basis of that energy right but also like say that we shouldn't allow this too we shouldn't allow this to impinge upon our freedoms to the extent that like it makes it makes the world a worse place and and I think that we're sort of we're sort of it added we're sold at a point where these things are being fought out right and so my book is a kind of prehistory in a way from one particular sort of neglected and yet like liminal perspective that of the asian american person that that eventually i you know sort of i make this argument in that piece i don't know if you saw the piece but i wrote a piece about andrew yang right and you know i say that like in a period that has sort of saving the book it's not in the book the book it came out you know a few months ago you know i talk about his rise and i say that you know sort of in in a period that has made sort of whiteness invisible right because this was a project that able to make whiteness visible the the sort of the invisibility of the asian person precisely because they are sort of orthogonal right to the identity politics coalition and they are well you know orthogonal they're not to this sort of the white male coalition becomes the new center of the country right it becomes the court of the Invisible Man becomes the new universal man and so do I see Andrew yang is a kind of 1.0 sort of version of what that could eventually be because we're in the process of moving to becoming a plurality non-white non black country right I guess I I think we're already there right where and if the assailant left non-white leadership is going to be something distinct from the rest Nate something that doesn't belong to any of these categories what Hispanics and Asian's are not black and they're not white so that's just what I mean it's it's a non black non-white identity that has not we still have a kind of model we have a picture of the country that's based upon this idea of like a white super majority and then a black minority and and the whole notion of the POC right the person of color is an attempt to kind of expand that concept to encompass like all Hispanics and all Asians and and there's like an anti-violence about that right there's an ambivalence about that about whether whether that's one thing right now of course it isn't one thing there is there's a like blacks Hispanics and Asians all have very distinct interests that can be kind of bundled or that can be bundled together or disaggregated along different dimensions and along with different set of interests Asian Americans have an interest with regard to meritocracy and testing that puts them quite at odds with other groups including white Americans because the sort of the testing gap between whites and Asians has continued to grow to the point where it's now a hundred points and so like I don't think it's a I don't think it's a coincidence that at that point when that happens right there's there's a there's an increasing erosion of support for testing where now they're talking about ending SATs in a requirement at the University of California so this older form of meritocracy that was sort of part of the there was a kind of there was a kind of racial barking right where the meritocratic testing was important but we would also provide a affirmative action in pursuit of diversity begins to break down just arithmetic aliy when you have a small minority asian-americans that over perform on test based measures of achievement to the extent that they do well I've just observed that I don't think American society has the luxury to cast the side meritocratic modalities of selection and resource allocation because whites are lagging behind Asians we don't have that luxury because we live in a competitive global environment where the objective capacity to perform an technical work is going to determine the bottom line for the economy and a future of prosperity and so on so we're gonna have to find a way to get over feeling bad about losing out in the academic competition to people who's disinformation populations since there really isn't any other way forward you know we may persuade ourselves with affirmative action that we can move the musical chairs around and keep ethnic balances alright but we're not going to be able to persuade people who are writing code developing products and competing effectively in technology and so forth in the South Asia or in East Asia to the same effect all throughout Silicon Valley right now there is a move there's a you know I'm not saying that the post mirror there's this thing called the post meritocratic manifesto that sort of argues that meritocracy was always just kind of you know fig leaf for you know the domination of white males yeah but there's a movement throughout there's a there's a you know Ellen Powell right she's the woman that she sued what did she do she sued kleiner perkins he worked for the VC as a VC and she sued them and she was defeated so badly in court that she had to pay all of kleiner perkins legal fees right she sued them on the basis of like sex discrimination and you know for Part II for female partners of kleiner perkins all got on the stand and said you know this person was a toxic presence and she the only reason she wasn't promoted was because she couldn't perform right that was they said that on the stand the jury said you've you know you've you've lost kleiner perkins wins and you have to pay their legal fees which is an outcome that almost never happens however how is you know she wrote a book about sexism in Silicon Valley and that book was then sold to to Netflix it's going to be turned into a television show and sort of a narrative of sexism is coming out on the basis of it and she is the founder of a nonprofit that sort of is going around saying that everybody has to sign a pledge to have X percentage you know more or less of every identity category including sort of a gendered and non-binary people in accordance with their they're sort of you know their demographic in the general population as a whole right and that that's a move that that's it's a move that's happening and and so you're saying that we're not going to do this but I think we're in the process of doing it right like the companies are under enormous pressure from sort of non like an NGO and media you know sort of conglomerate mostly to and if you look at the numbers the problem is always from the perspective of representation that there are too many asian-americans like that's the actual problem because they'll all have a structure where there will be there's like seventy percent of whites in the general population there'll be like 70 percent of whites working at the tech company but like Asians will be over-represented by a factor of five or six and other minorities will be underrepresented proportionate to that and so this is an example where let me just observe something Wesley this has been true about Jews for a long time yes representation outsized performance and various kinds of specialized and technical pursuits law medicine mathematics physics economics etc that's right and somehow the over-representation of Jews has not led either to a backlash against meritocracy or to a marginalization of Jews and in Society and I say that with trepidation because I understand that anti-semitism is a real thing but still why is it such a a prognosis also reliable than the case of Asian Americans well I mean the Asians are a volatile reagent in the midst of this right because there was a period in the 70s where Jews were counted right when it came to Ivy League Admissions and and they were seen as a distinct group and the sense of their over representation was clear but they they're not counted anymore right they're just like you know they're they're they're a large percentage of the white people right that are that are enrolled in the ovule gigs you know Asians are 18 percent or so and since the lawsuit their numbers have upwards right over 20 percent so the low last I think the 2019 Harvard Business in the Ivy League that you're referring to in the Ivy League right there you know there's sort of 16 to 20 percent so relative to their share of the population where Asian Americans are like 6% of the 67% of the population you know they are over-represented numerically by a factor of five or you know four or five but of course they're over representative relative to what right relative to their share of the population or relative the share of those who are qualified right by by the by academic standards of measurement if those are the standards that ought to obtain and of course asian-americans are suing despite the facts they're suing Harvard despite the fact that they are over represented by a share of five or six relative to their share of the population because they feel themselves to be dramatically underrepresented on the basis of what they take to be discrimination relative to where they would be if Harvard only used strictly academic standards to measure and of course they had their Harvard had their sort of quantitative guy run the numbers and he said if only grades and SATs were considered it would be a 43% asian-american population rather than a 20% Asian American population and so that you know the question the question that we have to ask is are asian-americans over-represented and there's like well relative to what right and let me let me interrupt you just for a minute I want to make a couple of points one is and I think this is subtle and interesting Jews are not counted Asians are that's what I heard you say in part in response to my observation that Jews are over represented and yet it's okay why not age and she say well they're not counting the Jews and they're not although they used to I mean counting the Jews today would be overt anti-semitism to talk about the Jewish over representation would be a political faux pas at the very least Asian minority status maybe is not blessing maybe it's a burden being included among people of color although you know there is of course historical warrant might at the end of the day be unfit status for Asian Americans in 21st century America maybe but maybe becoming white this is what I'm really headed with this maybe becoming white is look at the end of marriage rates and I know you know all about this last I looked it's been some years it was forty percent of young Asian American women were married to Anglo men I mean that's you sustain that for a few generations and you've got a completely different you know ethnic kind of morphologically of people's looks their eyes their face their how you know if things have got a change in in a couple of generations etc so that's that's what locus is all about right it's about making a claim that there are people of color and that people of color will eventually sort of overall the the white minority but and but the whole purpose of that is to kind of preempt a kind of reconstitution of Hawaii majority through intermarriage between not just Asians but by Hispanics and Hispanics do intermarry at very high rates as we you know it's true that us horn agen Americans and the vast majority of Asians are still foreign-born like 70% of Asian American or people of Asian descent living in America are foreign-born second-generation in the u.s. matiz of both men and women even though they're more women than men are out marrying so there isn't really you know and their children for the most part based upon what they look like we'll have like you know like distinct experiences well they'll be raised in in other ways there's some of us I want to say I want people to know that I actually signed on as a outside economists expert to the brief that was produced by Peter hacia de Cano in the Harvard Asian affirmative action case in support of the Asian side of that case I don't want that to go unsaid I did do that and I'm happy to talk about it if anybody is interested including you but that's not my main point my main point is about the personality rating yeah which was a part of that case I just want to explain to people who don't know so Wesley just stated this he said that Peter Arcia de Connell he was the economic expert helping Harvard did a regression analysis and controlling for academic characteristics was able to assert that the Asian representation amongst Harvard undergraduates would be more than twice as great as it actually is now if only academic characteristics were used to admit students Harvard must be discriminating to which Harvard's response and this argument was largely accepted by the district court was that no no no it's not only academic characteristics that we're looking for when we make decisions about admitting students we're also interested in their personalities and we're starting to have to report that the agents don't do nearly as well on their personality scores as they do on their academic scores and therefore this is the outcome that we've received but we've achieved but we're not discriminating now I personally Glenn Lowry view that argument with some escapes that is I want to see an asian-american student with low test scores but with a good personality admitted to Harvard and an african-american student with high scores but a quote-unquote bad personality rejected from Harvard and then I'll believe that Harvard is really colorblind and only emphasizing academics and personality traits without regard to ethnicity when it does its admissions practices I frankly don't believe that but that's just me but but what I want to ask you is about the personality rating itself because I detect it in your book and correct me if I'm wrong a certain amount of almost self deprecation I mean you say at one point Harvard would he be Harvard if they just admitted to the highest scoring people because there'd be to be a you don't say those words but that's what I read you is saying there'd be so many Asians hanging around there that they no longer be able to pass themselves off as you know the the entryway into the American establishment because the American establishment can't be you know as Asian in its personality as as these students are something like they'll do I rate you correctly Harvard has always tried to hold three different commitments that are in some tension with one another but can be made to work together in balance and and sort of the aspects are that of social justice but of course but also academic excellence right but also they are beholden to a whole class of incumbents including the sort of the descendants of their founders and so they're bringing together the smartest people with like the most privileged people in the country so that they can involve so they can engage in a kind of exchange with one another and so that they can maximize the amount of bleakness right they have at their disposal and it on the basis of that you know they've grown their endowment to the point where you know there are there are only a handful of hedge funds that control more resources then then Harvard's endowment controls it's something like 40 billion I think at this point and so they've been excellent stewards of their legacy and of their and a primary instrument of that legacy is there is there is there their admissions procedure right and it's it's about minting and elite and it's about being as exclusive you as you can be as an organization and so narrowly optimizing for you know for a single metric ie academic performance is not going to maximize the thing that the admissions officers are there to maximize so they maximize the other thing and that necessarily entails right that necessarily entails the pursuit of a certain kind of you know a certain mix of personalities that is not going to be as I said you know overwhelmingly Asia so you know that's that's what they do whereas a California Institute of Technology they do things another way right like they're simply focused on getting the brightest engineers in the country together and for that reason I think they are mature like more than 50% age and so like you know if you want to sort of take an apologetic sort of response to it yes of course there's a reason why certain colleges that have a certain set of priorities do things one way and there's a reason why another set of colleges that have another set of priorities do things the other way however Wesley okay Wesley that's Harvard what about the New York City public school system what about Stuyvesant Brooklyn Tech High School of Science 100 College High School they use these are these are not grooming houses for the elite with multibillion-dollar endowments these are working-class immigrant populations from all over the world scrambling their way up the ladder of American society exhibiting excellence in extraordinary ways and giving testimony to what's possible for people with modest economic backgrounds and very little toehold in American society what's possible for them to achieve it's a completely different story than the Harvard story it seems to me I agree completely it's it's um you know to get into one of the specialized high schools which includes Stuyvesant and Bronx Science you take a single exam and and then the grade you wanna hire or a single hierarchy everybody takes the same exam and in one sense like that is the very definition of both meritocracy and equality but the outcome is going to be determined ultimately by the cultural baseline of certain groups right when you parachute into a system that grates people in that way from societies that have been determining their fate of their young people for a thousand years on the basis of cramming for a single exam you will arrive at lopsided outcomes such as the ones that we have where at Stuyvesant the percentage who are Asian sometimes it's eighty sometimes it's seventy sometimes it's somewhere between 70 and 80 because you have a lot of kids who are coming from mainland China which is happens to be one of those societies that has been determining the life chances of their children on the basis of the single test for a thousand years and thus it's deep in the cultural mores and footways of that group that test preparation and paying X of your family's income whatever that income happens to be and if the income is very small if that percentage is something like twenty to forty percent of your income you pay it right like that was a culturally determined fact that manifests itself at the level of the results that we see where Asian Americans are something like fifteen percent of the New York City population there are 50 percent of those who make it into the specialized high school but this is something that I think is very important to underscore if you look at a Brooklyn Tech which is one of the specialized high school it's an exam school as recently as 1989 Brooklyn Tech was you know majority black and Hispanic right and and that figure has gone down a lot in subsequent decades and if we want to know what happened there we have to we have to get this right and so there's a couple of things that happened one of them was they got rid of a lot of gifted and talented programs right and they got rid of those gifted and talented programs as are the kind of egalitarian measure because it was mostly White's that were getting into them at the time but in the process of getting rid of all those gifted and talented programs they left many black and Hispanic kids without access to them a now let me just explain to the listener that these are programs at the elementary school level and would have cultivated black and Hispanic students to more effectively compete for admission to the exam high school the other thing is is that there are since 1990 since 1989 there has been a growth of programs like prep for prep that use sort of private money to send promising young black and Hispanic kids to to Dalton to sort of private you know major private schools it's true where they're taking like 1,200 kids out of the system those are the same kids who had no idea it was so many yeah well there's there's multiple different scholarship programs now and prep rep is not the only one and so those are the kids who would have been cramming for those the black Hispanic kids who would have passed the SAT in the past they don't have to do that anymore and so as a result they have a different set of options and so when there were and also there are charter schools and and if you there are they're a huge sort of protests against de Blasio who really you know charter school hundreds of sort of like mostly West Indian and African parents like you know like so like then black families that really care about the education of their kids they have these options that I've just described yeah focusing on whereas white families that care about their the education the children and want to have it happen in the public school system they have their own set of options and those are the screened schools that do more sort of holistic evaluation of their entrance and those schools are more black and Hispanic than the test schools but they are much more white than the test schools because Asians would have to like do a portfolio there they're evaluated on not a single metric so they're not focusing on that there have their there are options available for everyone that cares about their education it's a kind of false there's there's a kind of false crisis there that is being manufactured on the basis of oh there's such an over-representation and in many cases when sort of even sort of New York Times reporters will write about this and they'll try to say that oh there's so few black and Hispanics in the the SH SAT but you know in the exam schools without mentioning the fact that Asians are the preponderance of those who are in the program they're acting as if it's a white dominated system it's not a white dominated system it's a system that whites actually have given up for the most part attempting to compete for because it happens to align with the cultural baseline of a particular group of people and yet to sort of admit that there was such a thing as a cultural base line that is inexorably going to result in certain kinds of outcomes like the ones that we're seeing is it admissible into the discourse for you know for a lot of different reason because of what that implies about other people but it doesn't actually have to imply anything about anyone other than the fact that people who really put a lot of emphasis on test taking tend to do well on tests and okay it doesn't mean that they're working any harder it doesn't mean that they know more algebra when they get ready to get to math or a nice little emphasis means that they're working harder part of the emphasis means that they are putting 20% of their family income of all their family income well my point is it's not only a capacity to take test that's being cultivated but it's also the objective mastery of difficult to acquire and Meishan that is extremely valuable later in life yeah I was so productive in the economy they are learning skills that's what I'm saying and those skills matter Hill skills matter a great deal those skills matter a great deal but there now now there is enormous pressure on Silicon Valley to to diversify and so there's a there was a there was actually a directive that went out at YouTube at a certain point where they said of course this is not legal but no they said we're gonna not bill there's a moratorium for the next year or so on Asian and white male highest right and there are lawsuits that that have they have emails overtly stating this effect but you know litigation as we know civil rights litigation right that there's a long time takes a long time takes a lot of costs you are utterly vilified in the media and so it's it's um is something that you don't actually that you can't actually obtain any justice from and of course there's another way as well I want to talk about something else while I have you here because we're gonna run out of time soon enough a remarkable essay opens your collection it is about seung-hui Cho the Korean student at Virginia Tech who went on a shooting rampage that I think it still stands as the largest mass killing in American in American history am I right in saying that it was at the time but I think it's been eclipsed in any case will you try to summarize if you can in a few minutes what motivated you to write this essay this is a taking us inside of the twisted and tortured mind of of this poor troubled and you know disastrously misguided individual he took many lives he destroyed many lives and it is it's it's it's very revealing in many ways and I and I want the listeners here to get a sense of what your they should read this essay they should definitely read this essay what you're after and what your motivations were in writing it well so the thing happened and the guy did some stuff that other people have sort of subsequently done but that was new at the time which is write a manifesto and send it to you know the media in advance of his killing spree and you know create online videos and so on you know now this is kind of formulaic but at the time you know he could have conceived of this first of all like he was interested in he was taking creative writing class he took a creative writing class Nikki Giovanni yes with Nikki Giovanni who was from the 60s and 70s of the fabled woman of color poet writer who was a award-winning and someone that you could say more but surprised to see the angry radical black nationalist who you know within the within the framework of poetic license you know ropes sort of wrote essays calling on black people to commit murder saying why are we just murdering ourselves why aren't we murdering white people and that was it has to be contextualized within within the politics of it and and so she ended up having this disturbed person in her classroom and she gave some comments about it and there was a whole question of like well to what extent does this person's discontents fit within the framework of identity politics right because he was and of course he's you know he was totally indigestible to it and I said I asked well what kind of sucker would this person perhaps have found within identity politics rather than to be this kind of pure lost individual on his own who begins to fantasize of a kind of war of the loser of Jermel right against the rest of society and at the time I was suggesting that this kind of war of the looser male a person denied recognition particularly in the form of the recognition of women right could be a volatile could eventually grow to become a volatile element within our society especially as it finds expression right on the internet and you know I think that ended up being like a correct kind of surmise because because we're creating we're sure that we're generating this population of surplus males right like a kind of a free market right like a free market in in sexual choice and this of course was you know back then you know sort of well Beck's book came out where he was talking about the the the application of neoliberal free market dynamics of palma sexual marketplace will create two classes of people it creates classes of sexual oligarchs right and a clade creates the class of the sexually emissaries and of course and and so you know that's a book that i had recently read and of course i'd recently read a book called the game which was about sort of being from the class of the sexually in is rated attempting to reinvent herself to become a sexual or dark and all of these things fit together with this event that for the most part has like gone into the the memory hole right like yes seung-hui Cho has been replaced by elliot rodger who was a much later version of him elliot rodger oh like a 200 page manifesto of the that is kind of seen as foundational of what then became in cell ideology and we now have sort of the the texas sort of police issuing a statement saying that you know this is actually like a terroristic threat to the country right and so to go back to like some we chow you know average frustrated chumps who can't get any women to pay attention to them turn within themselves with it with rage and then act out our according to Texas authorities potentially a terroristic threat disorder because they're going on to message boards where they're they're sort of grievances there have have have been articulated into a kind of pseudo political ideology right so there is talk of a beta revolution right so like there was the sort of the promise of the POA was as you as an individual can empower yourself by learning these skills and you can upgrade yourself from the upgraded Trump to the pickup artist but that was a that was a that was a kind of it was first of all it was a like a grift and it was a way to make money and and it turned out to be that you had a group of people who are not able to improve themselves in this way through through through the mastery of skills and they sort of found an echo chamber for themselves on certain message boards where they elaborated a sense of themselves as being aggrieved and seeking violent redress it's not so different structurally fundamentally from online recruiting of jihadists right it's like you have some lonely person who is searching for meaning in their life who has a great grievance against certain categories of people he finds others who then affirm him in his resentment referring him in his rage and and and so that this process is happening across the board right where we're sort of certain kind of discourses of kind of you know white privilege and so on are being articulated these are not being articulated on on underground message boards they're being articulated within the mainstream press right where people's kind of frustration about the way their lives are limited there are theorists right who are there to tell them that like the the sort of like the world is is turned against you and new forms of identity are being sort of created and manufactured all the time to sort of to sort of like take a new echo chambers are being created where people's sense of aggrievement are then articulated into pseudo political and in some places actual political platforms and let me ask you this what do you see there couple of things going on here we were talking about Asian over representation amongst academically successful people and competitive venues like Harvard or in New York exam schools we were talking about Asian invisibility in terms of people not recognizing not taking seriously and so on the complex you know sort of existential reality of a person just because they look a certain way and now we're talking about average frustrated chumps and pickup artists and you know the losers in the sexual marketplace and the frustrations that those give rise to connection between the the Asian identity aspect of this and the frustrated male loser in the sexual marketplace exposed to this what what connection is might you I think it overlap between those things I think that sort of the rebuttable presumption right as the Asian American male is that you're not really a part of the you're not really a part of the game right and so then we know that that was done by one of the freakanomics guys he did a study where he's looking at online dating and he reached the conclusion and of course I'm not in a position to check his numbers but he says that the Asian American male in order to have the same likelihood as to receive a response from his otherwise identical white counterpart yeah of course uncle what does that mean but like based on the stats you'd have to earn three hundred sixty thousand dollars more it's not funny and you know like he also he had figures for like blacks and Hispanics and they were quite large but the largest alpha was between the asian-american and the white male and so that was just you know what I don't know what that means in exactly the opposite is true for Asian females yes well you know they didn't have a they didn't talk about sort of income and so on but there are all kinds of sort of analytics that have come from very different from OkCupid and so on OkCupid used to put out like very sort of politically incorrect blog posts looking at they're looking at their metrics and what anymore right because of what they what they reveal and but ya know of course the Asian American woman is sort of I think that basically the the metrics show that they're the most likely to get responses and and but there was also like a very like there was a finding that the gap the gap between likelihood of getting response for an Asian American male and of course those who are on these platforms are a self-selected group and they're not represented a very powerful group but um he was the he was more the Asian American male was least likely to get a response from the Asian American woman right the Asian American the white male was most advantaged relative to the Asian American woman and relative to the Asian American male and of course like I I definitely steer clear of this there's a there is an online there's an ongoing kind of online war between Asian American feminists and Asian American males that I want no part of but I'm just existing I'm just I'm describing that this is a fact right that there is there that there are Asian American men who say that Asian America you know Asian women are betraying the race by you know sort of pandering to white men and and going with them but you know it's a counter part of a discourse you know among black men and black women you know sort of in Thomas Chatterton Williams book yeah note the fact that I think black males are three times as likely to marry to out marry as black females and so I think that's at least the number I could be greater than that yes and so this produces these very aggrieved discontented populations black women and Asian males but sort of in the popular discourse one of those groups sort of grievances right is seen as important and you know I don't know if you know who Roxane gay is but it's seen as kind of like one of those groups sexual sexualized frustration relative to their race is seen as like it's valorized it's an important issue like but black women that you're talking about yes right whereas you know the sort of the grievances of the Asian American male there other will always be sort of denounced as misogyny and so on because the Asian American a male who is upset about his sort of ranking on the hierarchy of sexual attractiveness for no other purpose then then his race that person ultimately his grievance is with women right because it's women who are choosing and and of course the issue actually only gets more intense when you involve like gay Asian males in that sexual marketplace as well but the reality is is that like you know sir the Asian American male who who feels his sort of masculine masculinity assailed exist within a context when masculinity itself is seen as this inherently problematic thing so to want it to aspire towards it or to see its unit or to observe that is something that has been taken from you is already a kind of complicity with many later patriarchy and oppression so I just kind of I don't want to kind of get wrapped up in it and yet I want it to like find an opportunity to just like push right through it and for whatever reason he the the Jo the Cho Tory ended up being that vehicle and and so I wrote it and you know the essay really sort of like it changed my life in the sense that like it made me it put me on the map among writers after that I sort of heard from New York magazine and other places and on the basis to that like I was able to have a career as a freelance writer well it's very much deserved because the essay is extraordinary as our other of the essays in Wesley's book which I commend to your attention out there in blogging Hansel and this is Glenn Lowry I'm gonna sign us off with your permission Wesley okay but I really enjoyed the book and I'm very much enjoying meeting you virtually and sharing this conversation platform with you okay thanks so much so thank you and good luck to you okay

Channel: Nonzero

Views: 12,535

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Id: Tkh7OLvb324

Length: 58min 7sec (3487 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 31 2020