Kontextmaschine

16th October 2018

Post with 90 notes

You look at the people saying interesting things about race these days, they’re pushing other possibilities, each with their three-letter acronyms. The left-racebloggers pushing “PoC”, “Persons of Color”, the idea that there’ll be white on one side and on the other this black-hispanic-asian-amerindian coalitional nation. The right-racebloggers “NAM”, “Non-Asian Minorities”, suggesting a white/asian against black/brown split.

- 12/2/14

Yesterday in replying to my post about new conservative energy in Portland poipoipoi mentioned clean-up-the-streets Asians as something to look for in Oregon’s continuing Californialization. And yeah, that anti-homeless “Montavilla Initiative” (w/ a bit more “we want what’s best for them, the outreach-resistant bums” figleaf than Orange County) is based along a stretch of 82nd that’s a big center for Asian immigrant small businesses

(It’s also where the county Republican committee meets in an Asian banquet hall, and where that civic parade was cancelled last year when leftists threatened it over the inclusion of Republicans)

And more than anyone, the journalist who got “Portland just lets antifa control the streets” into the national media last week was Andy Ngo, a local son of Vietnamese immigrants who came up through the confrontational conservative scene at Portland State University.

And on the other coast you have the current lawsuit against Harvard aiming to strike down affirmative action as anti-Asian discrimination, and the Asian community putting up fierce resistance to De Blasio’s plans to take NYC’s elite high schools away from pure test-score admissions as a way to get more blacks and hispanics in.

In a lot of ways it seems that the post-’65 Asian immigrant communities (you don’t really see this in previously established Japanese-Americans, for example) are taking on the role previously held by the “white ethnics” who i.e. backed Frank Rizzo and Rudy Giuliani – urban but outer-borough, tight-knit communities organized around small businessowners, in rough enough neighborhoods and on narrow enough margins that they don’t feel they can afford to yield anything in the name of uplifting the downtrodden (& who feel that if the downtrodden really wanted any better they’d pull up their bootstraps and do some treading themselves)

Tagged: 2018 race