You look at the people saying interesting things about race these days, they\u2019re pushing other possibilities, each with their three-letter acronyms. The left-racebloggers pushing \u201cPoC\u201d, \u201cPersons of Color\u201d, the idea that there\u2019ll be white on one side and on the other this black-hispanic-asian-amerindian coalitional nation. The right-racebloggers \u201cNAM\u201d, \u201cNon-Asian Minorities\u201d, 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\u2019s continuing Californialization. And yeah, that anti-homeless \u201cMontavilla Initiative\u201d (w/ a bit more \u201cwe want what\u2019s best for them, the outreach-resistant bums\u201d figleaf than Orange County) is based along a stretch of 82nd that\u2019s a big center for Asian immigrant small businesses
(It\u2019s 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 \u201cPortland just lets antifa control the streets\u201d 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\u2019s plans to take NYC\u2019s 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-\u201965 Asian immigrant communities (you don\u2019t really see this in previously established Japanese-Americans, for example) are taking on the role previously held by the \u201cwhite ethnics\u201d who i.e. backed Frank Rizzo and Rudy Giuliani \u2013 urban but outer-borough, tight-knit communities organized around small businessowners, in rough enough neighborhoods and on narrow enough margins that they don\u2019t 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\u2019d pull up their bootstraps and do some treading themselves)
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