From 'Problem' to 'Model' Minority

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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again everyone. With me now is our own Arun Venugopal who you know is a WNYC news reporter and sometimes host focusing on issues of race and immigration. Well, we can now say Arun Venugopal from WNYC, the guy who wrote about is also the guy who wrote one of the first stories of 2021 that a lot of people are talking about. It's about his own life story and the story of the whole country at the same time. It's in the January/February 2021 issue of The Atlantic already available online. It's called The Making of A Model Minority or The Truth Behind Indian-American exceptionalism.

Arun is here to lay some of it out for us and we'll take calls if this seems relevant to you, which it will if you're Indian, or other Asian American, or if you're white, or if you're Black, and others as well so just about everybody. Hi, Arun thanks for coming on the show.

Arun Venugopal: Hi, Brian, great to be here.

Brian: The article begins with the story of your parents coming to the United States with little to their names in 1969. Where did they come from? and why?

Arun: They were born and brought up in Kerala in South India. They first moved in the late '60s to Scotland briefly, and then they moved to the US and eventually settled down in Houston and that's where I was mostly raised.

As I described in the article, we were, within a few years in moving to Houston, able to move from a solidly middle-class neighborhood to a very, very nice neighborhood, which is something I've been reflecting on a lot in the last few years, the fact that we were able to move without much consequence, or pushback or resistance into this nice neighborhood,

at the same time that we know, wasn't the case with say, middle-class Black families, moving into say, Rosedale here in Queens, or experiences that we know a lot more about around the country.

Their experiences relatively consequential, they were able to take on all the trappings of upper-middle-class life. My dad is a retired physician. At the time, he was practicing allergy and got a job at a great clinic in the medical center, Houston, and my mom had been a nurse before we moved to Houston, and we were raised there. It was a good life. I think it wasn't something that I reflected on for a long time, the fact that we did not have Black neighbors or Latino neighbors. It was basically a segregated white neighborhood prior to our living there.

Around that same time, we started to see a few other families of Indian descent, Asian Americans trying to move in there, but even to this day, the percentage of Asian Americans in that neighborhood is now 12%, it's very high. It's a neighborhood called Piney Point in Houston. The percentage of Black residents is minuscule, it's 0.6%. This is an opportunity to reflect on the very different trajectories we've been on the last 40, 50 years.

Brian: You said the neighborhood is called Piney Point. I don't usually think of Houston and pine trees in the same thought, so there is that.

Arun: It's very forested. It was a very nice neighborhood. I was lucky to grow up there.

Brian: Let's explore the central idea of your article, which as you write it, and for people who haven't read it, is that your childhood world was filled with Indian doctors and engineers, who never stopped to ask why their entrance into American society and neighborhoods like that had been so rapid. They simply accepted that their success was a combination of immigrant pluck and the right values.

Indians were family-oriented, education-oriented, and work-oriented a model minority, all that from your article, but forgotten, you say, is the extent to which the US engineered the conditions that allowed certain nonwhite groups to thrive. Quotes from your article. What do you have in mind, saying the US engineered the conditions?

Arun: In the earlier part of the 20th century, there was a wave of Indian influences, it goes back to actually the late 1800s, mostly laborers, people who actually came to, say, California as farmers, loggers. Those earlier waves were met with a lot of resistance and xenophobia and hate by other residents of those areas, white residents, even elected officials who saw them as dirty and beneath them. Even the people who represented them in Congress spoken that way.

As you know, 100 years ago, there were these incredibly xenophobic laws that were passed, and essentially, immigration from much of Asia was shut out for-- If you go back to the 1800s, the Chinese Exclusion Act really initiated that wave of exclusionary laws, but it really culminated in the 1920s with those laws that kept out people from India, from other parts of Asia, as well as Supreme Court decisions that essentially negated the citizenship of people who had obtained citizenship. We entered this very dark phase.

The reason it pivots is starting in the late '30s, with the onset of the Second World War, the US decides that is really interested in using the war to further its foreign policy goals primarily in Asia. You see the passage of laws that allow for Chinese Americans to be naturalized in 1943, Filipino Americans and Indian Americans to be naturalized in the following years. We know very well that what happened with Japanese Americans with the mass internment.

What's interesting, what a lot of people don't realize is that in the post-war era, there was this attempt to pivot away from the explicit racism that we all are familiar with, from the era and try to assimilate certain nonwhite groups and create this class of citizens who would be neither white nor really Black. It was this in-between category that hadn't really existed and that was primarily something that benefited Asian Americans.

This is something that was reflected in the culture. There were movies made about the heroism and patriotism of Japanese American soldiers. One was called Go for Broke, it was put out in 1951 by MGM. We're talking about just a few years after the mass internment. We saw these really interesting stories of Asian Americans who were trying to integrate neighborhoods in the West Coast, who were told they couldn't, but then saw their cause really being taken up by the national press. This real question of, "Why are we fighting the Korean War? Why are we over there, if not to elevate the idea of democracy?

Asians were not-- there weren't a lot of us in this country then, but symbolically there was a lot of power to this category of Asian Americans. That really culminated during the Civil Rights Movement, when these xenophobic laws were struck down and many more of us were allowed to enter the country, such as my parents and their peers who started flooding into this country in the late '60s and early '70s.

Brian: You put your father's immigration story from India into the context of what you call many of India's best and brightest leaving the country between 1966 and 1977, 20,000 scientists and 40,000 engineers and 25,000 physicians moved from India to the United States. Why that kind of mass immigration?

Arun: Well, first of all, you had a lot of people who were getting exceptional levels of education in India. There were socialized education systems imparted, created in part by the first Prime Minister of India, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. He created the systems of great medical schools, engineering colleges, but they didn't have jobs when they left school. They were underemployed and they started seeking employment abroad in the UK and then in the US. The US needed these people. The economy was expanding, you had Medicare, Medicaid, all these new systems that needed medical professionals. They needed nurses from places like India, from the Philippines.

In the case of Indians, there hadn't been many of us in the '60s. It was a tiny population. What partly attributes what we see as this democratic singularity of Indian Americans who have this very high level of median income is because there were so few prior to these laws. Then what happened is the first waves who were coming after 1965, these highly educated, highly qualified people, they started bringing over people like them, their family members, other educated people, and least in that first wave. These laws called family reunification or these provisions allowed for them to bring more of-- It was a multiplier effect.

Certainly, that first wave of people who came over were, in a sense an anomaly. They were extraordinarily well educated, but they were also given opportunity, allowed to move into the suburbs, into certain networks and, you could say, spread opportunity to others who they're related to. Which is why we see that that's part of the story of this model minority myth, if you will, that includes people like my parents.

Brian: You shared with us a Facebook post from a reader in response to your article who identifies herself as a Black baby boomer and tells some of her family story in the context of the story that you tell about yours. What was important to you about that post that you want more people to know about?

Arun: I was just very grateful to get this email from someone who, like me, lives here in Queens. We'd never met, but she'd read the piece and she identified herself as a Black woman who grew up here. The article in some sense, or at least the themes that resonated with her, she wrote to me saying-- First of all, just to let you know a little better, she didn't want to share her name but she does have a graduate degree in education and she said, I can refer to her as TG, her initials.

She said, "As I'm not a model minority, I can't say with assurance that your community really 'gets it', but I can say from mine, yes, 'the problem minority', that there is a constant underlying anger that nonwhite people from other countries can benefit from the struggles of people who've been here for centuries and yes, provided 100 of years of free labor and still end up on the bottom of the ladder."

She went on to talk about things like what you were just talking about prior to the segment about specialized high schools, the resentment about people who are Black being shut out of those and then seeing people who are, say, Asian getting more access, then at least in her experience Black students becoming this dwindling minority in some of these schools and then receiving racist taunts or whatnot from people who were Asian and who looked down on them.

This sort of hierarchy that she said was especially frustrating given that these were people who might've only come a generation or two ago and had seemingly or very willfully forgotten how the Civil Rights Movement benefited people like my parents and all the subsequent immigrants who've come into this country.

Brian: You're right, that this is a reality to which Indian Americans themselves often seem blind and blind to what they have in common with other nonwhite Americans. Understanding and looking at your own family's history not just in the context of whatever they may have done successfully as individuals, but the whole racial history of the United States, what responsibility do you feel that that leaves "successful model minority" Asian Americans?

Arun: I think that what you see in terms of the narrative within, say, communities like the Indian American community that has prevailed for a while, is that in some ways we're exempt from the tougher questions about the racial discourse and the most insidious systems that we have in this country that allow for people to be kept in mass incarceration that allow for racial segregation to continue generation after generation.

There is this internal narrative about Asian-American certainly amongst Indian Americans that we've just got the right attitude and we have family values and all these kinds of euphemisms and that's why we succeeded. If that were the case, of course, India would be homogenously thriving and flourishing, but it is a very specific class of people who came here and then were enabled because the US really wanted to elevate these stories for its self-interest to broadcast that it was a racially harmonious society and in some ways, to deflect from all that was happening in '50s, '60s, '70s. It's a very convenient story and in some ways, we bought into it.

You can maybe excuse that for a while. We've been here as a community in the post-65 era for a long time now. I think the fact that we have arisen politically and otherwise, the way we have a vice president-elect whose mom is from South India, she's biracial, of course, but you can't ignore the fact that she, in some ways represents Indian Americans to some extent. Nikki Haley on the other side and other party, a lot of other people who have a lot of power. That power comes with a certain series of tough questions we have to ask ourselves about who we are and the policies that we support and the extent to which we have renewed ourselves, distanced ourselves from other communities of color

Brian: Listeners if you're just joining us, my guest is our own WNYC News reporter, Arun Venugopal, who now has a story in the January/February 2021 issue of The Atlantic called The Making of A Model Minority or The Truth Behind Indian-American Exceptionalism, as he tells some of his own story, his own family's story in the context of race in America broadly and American history broadly. Listeners, we welcome your calls with your own family's story. Are there Indian immigrants or descendants of Indian immigrants? How much are you relating to Arun here? Do you want to ask him any questions?

Black listeners also, of course, welcome as he's telling his family story in the context of American anti-Black racism or anyone else at 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280. Arun, I'm curious what the reaction has been like to your articles since it's been out there for a few days already online from other Indian Americans. You described the reaction from a Black listener who seemed to encapsulate a lot of ideas through her experience and her view of the world that's relevant to your article. What about other Indian Americans? Are they relating to this? Are they saying, "No, you're too dismissive of our accomplishments."? What are you hearing?

Arun: I have been surprised at the extent to which it seems to have resonated. It seems to have made the WhatsApp rounds and other forms of social media in a way that's really caught me by surprise, a lot of the historical details for a lot of people or things they just didn't know about. Readers, in general, were surprised at the engineering as we were discussing, the way in which the US really-- It wasn't just an organic development. It was very much something that the US intended, it was by design.

Some people who read it to the extent they were critical, either they felt like it was-- It was in some ways they didn't like this kind of thing being aired. It might challenge a certain narrative that they find a little more palatable. Others want to extend the conversation and the analysis to people who are not doctors or engineers who came in that first wave who are maybe more working class or middle class. I think those are serious questions as well because they also are in some ways, benefiting from the model minority trope, but in other ways, not at all. I think that those are really interesting and complicated questions.

Brian: Let's take a phone call. Here Rick in Queens, your own WNYC. Hi Rick.

Rick: Hi, Brian. Your guest, I enjoyed him over the years. I can't remember his name. I wanted to ask-

Brian: Arun Venugopal.

Arun: Oh, thank you. I just wanted to ask if you think it may be possible that in America, as it is today, people integrate at the level of the upper-middle-class period, and in other classes from their South, they soared out ethically. That there was nothing more to it. I have Black friends who live on West End Avenue and here in New York and Indian friends who live in Great Neck and Hispanic friends who live on the Upper West Side or Riverside Drive. If you make it into the upper-middle-class, you integrate, if you don't, you don't, period.

Arun: Thanks, Brian. I think that there are definitely double standards here and it's not simply being able to have enough money to get into the right neighborhoods. That is something that I really understood after looking back on that neighborhood where I spent as a child in Houston and looking at the census numbers and seeing that there are so many more Asian-Americans despite being relatively a smaller part of the American population than there are Black Americans, so disproportionate, we're talking about 15 times percentage-wise, perhaps, that it cannot be attributed simply to how many people have the wealth.

The data's out there about the double standards when it comes to, say, a Black American who has the wealth and their ability to get housing in a neighborhood that they want to, versus someone who is, say, white or perhaps Asian who doesn't have the same obstacles. This is exactly the double standards and systemic discrimination that really plays out, not just in terms of where you want to live, but where your kids can go to school, your health outcomes, your exposure to environmental toxins, your networks, your higher education, your partner for life, so many ways. I think that this is exactly the systems that are put in place because of what I've been trying to describe that had benefited some groups much more than others.

Brian: Robert in Westchester, you're on WNYC with Arun Venugopal, Hi Robert.

Robert: Hi. My name is Robert. I'm calling from Westchester, New York, I'll give a little bit of background of my heritage, it's Jamaican. It's a mixture actually of Black, white, and an actual Indian. As many people may or may not know, Jamaican is a pretty diverse country. I'm a first-generation immigrant, if you will. I was born here, with my older brother, his father and mother were all born in Jamaica. I have a lot of friends who are African-American, who were here forever, also friends of Indian descent.

Just to give my perspective on it, a lot of my African American friends who were born here and were here for generations back until African-American slavery and antebellum period, there is a huge amount of discontent among the community, even towards, excuse me, people of African or African descent, people from Jamaica, Africans from Cuba, if you will, African descent people from Cuba, and obviously Africans from Africa in terms of immigrants being able to immigrate here and being put to the front of the line and being afforded opportunities that they can't see for themselves.

I was just wondering what your take was on that African-American perspective, if you will, as contradicted by people of African descent from other countries on their perspective of being put to the back of the line relative to people of African descent and other countries.

Arun: Thanks for the call, Robert. I think that's something I have to spend more time really reporting on. I've certainly seen the tensions play out. You see it here in the five boroughs, as much as elsewhere the divisions between people who are immigrants and who are not, but who are all Black and you could say the way in which I've interacted with Black immigrants who've bought into some of those stereotypes. In a way, I think it's something I can't speak to with great nuance. It's not something that I definitely looked out for with this particular article, so yes, I'll just leave it at that.

Brian: It's something that we've discussed on this show certainly many times, the perception in white America that gives an advantaged look to Black immigrants from the Caribbean or from Africa if they're known to be immigrants or have an accent, which presents them as being from various places in Africa or the Caribbean which may certainly come with some anti-Black racism that they get presented with, but also a little leg up compared to African Americans born here, descendants of slaves. Then their children though, who grow up speaking like anybody else who was born in Brooklyn or Manhattan or the Bronx then get treated like an African American. The children of them get more discrimination than the immigrants themselves. Robert, I'm curious if you were getting at anything like that or if your own family has had that experience.

Robert: Yes, I've definitely seen that. Usually, what happens, I've seen it definitely in the workplace. I have a pretty diverse set of good friends actually, Republican friends who voted for Trump and they would oftentimes utilize the idea known of Caribbean descent, if you will, and they'll send me articles. I don't recall the one on your show, Mr. Lehrer. There was an article in the New York Times about Caribbean immigrants from Cuba, I think Jamaica, and it was another country that was profiled. They all sent me that article as if to say, "Why can you guys do it if African Americans can't?"

I was thinking about that article because from my perspective, it is very illogic when you say obviously you get the cream of the crop from all these countries who come here, and you echoed this earlier in your show, the cream of the crop from all these countries who come here but if you go back and look at the countries whether it's Jamaica or India or China or Korea, there's a lot of people there who are living in abject poverty and are quite uneducated. Which is exactly what I told you, Brian, it's unfair to compare the small minority of minorities who come from well-off countries who are usually educated, who usually have come here.

My mother came here as a nurse in the late '60s who I'm sure, it was a program to help immigrants come over, who had certain degrees that they were desirable to be allowed to immigrate to this country. I went to law school and all my brothers went to graduate school, doctors and lawyers and MBAs, who had that opportunity of having parents who were quite educated. To compare, me to someone who's living in abject poverty in Jamaica, or in Alabama, or in Louisiana is completely unfair.

It's completely illogical from my perspective. Among, to be honest, white people generally in America, there's a lot more discrimination against African-Americans than minorities from other countries. Sorry, I'd speak [unintelligible 00:27:45] from an African-American and sometimes they don't know, but once they find out I could see a shift and the dynamic, if you will, of our relationship [crosstalk]

Brian: More positive when they know you're an immigrant. Robert, thank you so much for your story. Deep stuff there. Sendhil in Westchester, you're on WNYC. I'm sorry, am I saying your name right?

Sendhil Ramamurthy: Can you hear me?

Brian: Yes hi, you're on.

Sendhil: Hi. Yes, it's Sendhil. I just want to say, I have a very similar background to Arun. Both my parents immigrated to the US in '66, they're both doctors, retired now, and my sister and I had everything that you could want growing up. We had private educations, we went to good schools and good colleges and had all these opportunities. I think the thing that gets overlooked a little bit is when you get that leg up, the options that are opened up to you.

I'm an actor and I had that opportunity only because my parents had the opportunities that this country afforded them to come here, practice medicine, make a good living, and give us access to things. Access and opportunity are things for your children and for your children's children, that gets overlooked. It's very much a knock-on effect.

I think that the other thing that I wanted to bring up was that I've seen a lot of-- I don't know if it's guilt, I don't know what the right term is here, but aunties and uncles as we call them supporting Trump because of this, "We are the model minority, we are the model immigrants." They want to support that, and I think there's a guilt because maybe deep they know that there was an unfair leg-up, compared to other minorities. I don't know that that gets discussed that often.

Arun: Sendhil, thank you so much. You said you're an actor, what's your last name? Should we be looking out for your work anywhere?

Sendhil: [chuckles] My last name is Ramamurthy.

Arun: So I thought. [laughs] Very cool to have you calling in. It's not every day that we get a famous actor calling in. Thanks. I think what you described, in terms of this political alignment is something that is really blowing up in the last year or two, in terms of the challenge to members of the community who align with, say, the Trump administration's policies.

One, I think very interesting phenomenon within the community as it gets bigger and more politically interesting, is you have people who are not necessarily coming from the same level of privilege. As I described in the article, caste privilege, who maybe came with not necessary a lot of money in hand from India, but came with other resources. First of all, they had connections to the West, they had good educations, they had family support, maybe had land, all those kinds of things that allowed them to make the leap over here.

That is a large part of the community who came here, especially in the first waves. Then you have other people who are, say, coming from what we call Dalit or not high caste positions, who find what you've described to be really problematic. These people, on the grassroots, are challenging those kinds of networks. The way that it's happening is playing out in political races. There are certain people who have been running for office who are getting really called out for taking money that they find tainted, or for aligning with the Trump administration.

I think what's interesting, even though we had this model minority story, is you have people within the community who are challenging these narratives and saying that, "We don't align with your story or with your political objectives." I think we're going to see more of that in the next coming years.

Sendhil: Absolutely. We saw that even in Florida with the Hispanic voting bloc, it's not a monolith. There are aggregations within. I think the same goes for Indian-Americans, and for every other ethnic minority in this country. There are different viewpoints and different outlooks in life that we tend to see minority groups as one, and that their thinking is one. That's just not the case.

Arun: Yes, absolutely.

Brian: For people who are thinking, "Oh, is he the guy from Heroes?" Yes. Yes, it is. Beauty and the Beast.

Sendhil: Yes, that's me.

Arun: Long time listener? First-time caller?

Sendhil: I'm a long time listener. My wife and I are sustaining members of WNYC. We encourage everybody else to please, give when you can. We listen to you pretty much all day, every day.

Arun: Fellow South Indian, let me just shout out for South Indians.

Sendhil: Absolutely. I represent.

[laughter]

Brian: Sendhil, thank you so much. We're going to leave it there with Arun Venugopal, who is now contributor to The Atlantic. Arun Venugopal, his story in the-- I don't know if they even have the glossy print edition anymore-

Arun: They do.

Brian: -I guess somebody still gets it somewhere, the January/February issue contains Arun's article, The Making of a Model Minority, or as it's titled online, The Truth behind Indian-American Exceptionalism. Arun, you've done it again. You've launched such a deep conversation, amazing callers as well as your own story.

Arun: Thank you, Brian.

Brian: Keep it up and keep coming on the show.

Arun: Thanks for having me on. Thanks to everybody who called in. I really appreciate it.

 

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