Racism sinks all ships

My race grants me a lot of privilege. I am East Asian, grew up in an affluent neighborhood, speak fluent English, and fit a lot of model minority stereotypes. I was good at school. I was quiet. I respected authorities.

When I started college applications and encountered the idea of affirmative action, that was the first time I felt that my privilege was at risk. Affirmative action, I was told, is unfair to Asians. It makes the high bar set by top ranking schools even higher for people like me. Black and brown people, I was told, don't need to be "as good" to get in. This line of thinking directed pitted my tribe (educated, affluent, and Asian) directly against the "other" (African American, Latino, and Native American, I guess?).

It doesn't help that for most of my childhood, I lived in a community that was 95% white. A high school of 4000 kids had only a handful of black students. Without the opportunity to interact with, and understand, black communities, they only existed as a stereotype in my mind. And that stereotype was culturally on the opposite end of the spectrum of my own. It made those cultures unfamiliar, unrelatable, and uncomfortable.

And so it was easy to imagine them as the opponent in college admissions. (Why were white Americans never the opponent in the affirmative action stories?)

It didn't matter that a university had an admission rate of 5% as long as I was in that 5%. If you're going to win in life you have to play the game, and the only way to play the game is to take every advantage you can. Screw affirmative action. Screw everyone else.

This is still a difficult mindset for me to shake free of. After all, isn't this what "pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps" means? Isn't this the American ideal? The "self-made man"?

But even as my model minority box grants privilege, it's restrictive too. What would happen if I stepped out of my smart, polite, non-threatening box? Could I become a politician, a jazz musician, or a CEO, if I wanted to? Can I be Muslim, LGBTQ+, outspoken, poor? Can I have complexity? Yes, we have privileges, but at a price.

This week, people are protesting racism and the death of George Floyd all over the world. There have been peaceful protests and violent protests. Looting of stores after curfew. Police marching with protesters and police spraying tear gas and shooting rubber bullets. There is complexity.

Fellow Asians, don't think that this is not our problem. The privilege we have is not granted to us, it is granted to that polite, non-threatening cage. Other races have been caged too, just not in as pleasant a cage as ours. We may not be fighting for our lives, but if you need a reason other than fighting for others' lives, fight for the right to complexity. To be seen as multi-dimensional and human. To be seen as yourself.