Arjun Pandava is an Indian American living in the San Francisco Bay Area. He works as a control systems engineer, and maintains the blogs Kurukshetra and Jnana Yuddha. He is active in movements around environmental/climate justice and labor organizing.
The “model minority” myth surrounding Asian America continues to be one of the defining battlegrounds of modern ethnic politics. Asian Americans appear to be largely well-off socio-economically. We tend to work in lucrative, high-skill, high-wage professions in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math). This gives ammunition to racist arguments: if Asians can succeed socially and economically as a minority group, why can’t Blacks and Latinos? Why do the latter complain about racism, white supremacy, and oppression, and remain disproportionately poor?