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GOLDSEA |
ASIAMS.NET |
ASIAN AMERICAN ISSUES
IS THE AA GENDER DIVIDE REAL?
(Updated
Wednesday, Jan 22, 2025, 06:38:55 AM)
sian American women are abandoning AA men by the millions. Young AA women seek out any race of men but their own. Women like Amy Tan write books and make movies that dump on AA men and glorify Asian women in relationships with white men.
That's the perception of many AA men.
On what do they blame this state of affairs? Brainwashing by media that play up white men while cutting Asian men off at the knees. Desire for payback by AA women who feel slighted by their families and Asian society. Large numbers of non-Asian men with blind fetishes for Asian women. Some even acknowledge that Asian men are often too fixed in their ideas of how a woman should look and behave, causing many AF to feel devalued.
Other Asian Americans see AF outmarriage rates as merely a natural state of affairs for a 4% minority population that includes many recent immigrants. The outmarriage gender gap will narrow as growing Asian population centers provide ready access to bigger pools of singles. Besides outmarriage is't the same as rejecting one's racial identity, they argue. Many AF who outmarry retain strong identification with their Asian identity.
Is there really an Asian American gender divide? Is so, what's behind it? If not, what's behind the perception?
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Discussions posted during the past year remain available for browsing.
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WHAT YOU SAY
[This page is closed to new input. --Ed.]
So "Roger" has again shown that his life is so pitiful that he must continue to post to an Asian American website. Again, he cannot reply to the actual issues, but continues to harp on Asian American demographics - about which he has no insight. Let’s continue to dismantle "Roger" on two levels; first, let’s show how "Roger" cannot seem to understand the reality of life as a minority in the US, then we can deconstruct "Roger" as a phenomenon.
"Roger" claims that "…you won’t find Cook County’s AA population spread evenly throughout Cook County’s neighborhoods. AAs cluster." Of course, as a WM his opinion is that Asian Americans are a homogeneous group. "Roger" does not understand that first generation Chinese do not ordinarily socialize with Koreans or Japanese; Filipinos and Thais do not mix with Hmong or Malaysians. Second generation AAs don’t often mix with first generation. But "Roger" views ALL Asian Americans as one category. After all, to "Roger" we are a monolithic bloc, right? Unfortunately for "Roger" and this ignorant viewpoint, the truth is much different. For example, where I grew up, there were occasional gatherings of Chinese-American families in the region. We were scattered throughout the metro area and I never saw any of the other kids or adults except at these gatherings. We did not get anywhere near the total number of Chinese Americans in the region because these folks, like my parents, were almost entirely Mainland origin Chinese who had emigrated from Taiwan. Hong Kong Chinese and Cantonese speakers had their own social gatherings. Recent Mainland immigrants had their own groups. Taiwanese did not want to deal with Mainlanders. Some Chinese Americans wanted nothing to do with ethnic gatherings at all. Second generation and beyond had little interest. And those are just ethnic Chinese subgroups; we never saw any Japanese, Korean, Filipino or Malaysian people at our gatherings. As a second generation individual, I went to school in a predominantly white school, my neighbors were white, and I never thought of the people who went to these gatherings as my friends; they were acquaintances whom I saw a few times a year. Furthermore, while I had Chinese and Korean acquaintances at school, I did not preferentially socialize with them. I hung out with some of my neighbor kids, who were white. So the "Asian American" demographic on the census chart is misleading. You can live in a "10% Asian" county, but in reality your own ethnic group is much less than 10% of the population and you may have little affinity for the others who have been conveniently labeled "Asian" by the US census.
AC dropout made an important point: when you are a small minority, it is pretty easy to avoid social relations with others of your own group almost entirely, even if you live in an area which contains a significant percentage of Asians. I have met black folks who had almost exclusively white friends and acquaintances. For Asians this is even easier since we evoke less automatic racist hostility from whites than blacks. These individuals who have little contact with others of their own ethnicity - comprising half of the Asian American population - are especially vulnerable to negative media portrayals of Asians and Asian Americans. I’ll count myself in that group. It is not unusual for me to go an entire week and not see another Asian face except my own in the mirror, and on TV. There is a danger that we can unconsciously "buy in" to that media portrayal. For me, the Wen Ho Lee affair was a real eye-opener. It didn’t matter that you were a loyal American, suddenly all the media portrayed Chinese Americans as spies. No matter that white males like Robert Hanssen were the real traitors selling our national security, or CIA director John Deutsch broke the same regulations as Wen Ho Lee but was never prosecuted.
"AAs cluster." A brief, condescending description of 10 million individuals. A final nail that confirms "Roger" as a WM. Several replies have noted how annoying "Roger" can be. Why is that? How can the words of someone who is obviously ignorant and obtuse be in any way annoying? The answer lies in the invisible social institution of white privilege. The drivel emanating from "Roger’s" keyboard is positively dripping with white privilege. It is not the words themselves; those are patently ridiculous. It is the underlying assumptions which are made by that person, consciously or unconsciously, and thrust into our collective face. Some of those assumptions include the following:
1. When compared to members of a minority group, a white male can have equal or greater insight into the social climate of minority group(s) in the United States, despite never having had the experience of being a minority.
2. The opinion of a white male should matter to a minority group, and should be posted repeatedly to a website dedicated to issues for that minority group.
3. Any minority member who disagrees with the white male is irrelevant.
There are a couple of famous essays on white privilege, written by a white male. It is unusual to see this kind of perspicacity, and I highly recommend reading the following:
http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/freelance/ whiteprivilege.htm
http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/freelance/ whitefolo.htm
Enough for now. Next post goes into the possible social dynamics driving people like "Roger".
Miscegenation is great
Sunday, February 10, 2002 at 07:22:04 (PST)
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