本帖最后由 满仓 于 2014-11-6 09:19 编辑
【中文标题】多元化与亚裔美国人
【原文标题】The Real Problem When It Comes to Diversity and Asian-Americans
【登载媒体】时代周刊
【原文作者】Jack Linshi
【原文链接】http://time.com/3475962/asian-american-diversity/
科技领域中缺少亚裔领导者，似乎彰显了一个巨大的问题——亚洲人被排除在多元化范围之外。
“多年前，他们觉得你的名字应该是Fu Manchu，或者Charlie Chan。后来，他们以为你一定有一家洗衣店，或者一家餐馆。现在，他们觉得我们只会坐在电脑前搞定一切。”
这是现年55岁纽约唐人街的一位高中教师Virginia Kee说过的一句话。她在1987年受邀发表针对自己种族的看法，这番话被收入《时代周刊》的封面故事《那些亚裔美国天才儿童》。这篇报道或许会引发亚洲人对这份杂志小规模的抵制，因为有些人会觉得夹着教科书和戴着大眼镜的形象令人不快。在他们看来，这些形象固化了人们心目中的亚洲人和亚裔美国人的单一性——他们都是成功的机器人、字母表的崇拜者、长着标志性眼睛、只知道念书的驴子。
如今，Kee已经82岁。距离她不愿意去公共卫生间——“因为那里不是白色就是彩色的”——的日子已经有70多年，距离他与别人合创中美规划委员会——在当时为亚裔美国人提供不大可能的社会服务，而人们普遍认为这些人已经足够独立，不需要这样的服务——已经有将近20年。Kee依然记得她在30年前对《时代周刊》说的这些话，她认为其实一切的变化并不大。
Kee说：“如果你从人情世故的角度来看，作为黄种人，我们的陈腐形象依然存在于很多人的头脑中。我们没有机会突破这个形象，美国人给自己的同胞强加了一些限制。”
“[亚裔美国人]坐在电脑前搞定一切”这种挥之不去的观念，最近再一次引起了人们的关注，几家顶级科技公司发布了它们有史以来的第一份多元化报告。报告的内容和媒体的讨论集中在一个显而易见的问题上——女性、黑人、西班牙人和美国本土居民所占比例很小。但是对于亚裔技术员工所占的大比例，和亚裔领导人相对极少的这种反差现象，很少有人探讨。似乎亚裔领导人占比的柱状图也就几个像素那么高，让人们失去了深入研究的动力。
技术人员和管理人员的种族多元化示意图。
耶鲁大学亚裔美国人研究教授Mary Lui说：“我们需要了解，究竟有多少人有接受全面教育和经济发展的机会。但同时，想想人们看到这个图表之后，会怎么看这些亚裔美国人。”
意思就是说，亚洲人和亚裔美国人都很聪明、很成功，所以雇用和提升他们算不上是提升多元化的举措。也就是说，根本没有亚洲人和亚裔美国人占比过低这个概念。历史学家和支持者认为，这种说法所带来的问题，不但会模糊亚洲人和亚裔美国人群内部的巨大差异，而且会把他们排除在多样化、管理岗位和非技术岗位问题的讨论之外。
这种排斥行为并不是一个新的现象。历史学家会发现，自从1965年《移民法案》以来，多元化进程就一直对亚洲人和亚裔美国人关闭了大门。二战结束之后，很多前殖民地亚洲国家——比如菲律宾、韩国和印度——纷纷加强技术能力的教育，以便让他们新兴的经济体尽快地实现现代化和工业化。《移民法案》允许那些受过高等教育的亚洲人移民美国，作为在冷战时期加强国内科学、技术和工程整体水平的解决方案。
半个多世纪以来，美国境内的亚裔美国人口增长处于停滞状态，起初是因为具有种族歧视动机的排外法案禁止亚洲移民，后来又有年度名额的限制。但是在1965年法案生效之后，移民数量猛增。到70年代和80年代，亚裔美国移民已经不再是那些在淘金潮年代冲洗加利福尼亚河岸的外来入侵者，也不是铺设横跨美洲大陆铁轨的那些姓名不详的劳工，更不是侵犯土地和抢占工作岗位的外来者。新一代亚裔美国人都是科学家、医生、编程人员和工程师，他们的工作前途一片光明。
到80年代中晚期，所有人都觉得亚裔美国人非常成功，大型新闻机构高调称呼他们为“少数民族的典范”——这句话最早出现在1966年，《纽约时报》、《美国新闻》和《世界报道》先后发表报道，说亚裔美国人通过他们严格的职业道德理念和坚强的隐忍性格，在充满歧视和敌意的环境中无一例外地取得了重大的成就。这个观点引发了一些反对的声音，主要来自于那些隐藏在整体成就之后的亚裔美国群体：越南战争中流离失所的老挝人和柬埔寨难民，以及因为担心失去廉价家庭旅馆而反对城区改造的老年菲律宾人。
《时代周刊》也是少数民族典范队伍中的狂欢者之一。在那篇富有争议的封面故事两年之前的1985年，《时代周刊》发表了一篇名为《一技傍身闯美国：来自远东的移民大潮丰富了我国的人才储备》的文章。文章描述了大批亚裔美国人进入高收入就业岗位和名校，丝毫没有提及贫穷的中国洗衣工、无助的越南难民和收入微薄的东南亚出租车司机等边缘人群。
“亚洲人与其它种族移民的真正区别是，他们取得了辉煌的成就。亚洲人在几乎每一所排名靠前的大学学生中的占比，远超过他们在这个国家的人口占比：哈佛大学新生中亚洲人的比例从1976年的3.6％上升到现在的10.9％……部分原因是他们的学术成就。亚洲人以不可想象的速度攀向经济高峰。”
亚裔美国活动人士、记者、历史学家Helen Zia说：“我认为这是一个双头蛇：一边是陈旧的邪恶入侵者形象，另一边是少数民族的典范。结论都是一样。亚裔美国人在外部属于异类、入侵者；在内部则是毫无个性、极为优秀。”
亚裔美国人有目共睹的成就，意味着他们似乎应当被排除在一些包容性的政策之外，比如反歧视行动。更严重的问题是，亚裔美国人被视为多元化进程的障碍。有一个例子，高中学生Yat-Pang Au和他来自香港的父母正式向美国司法部投诉，说加利福尼亚大学的录取政策歧视亚裔美国人。Au的案件被若干媒体报道，包括《时代周刊》1987年的封面故事《天才儿童》：
“18岁的Yat-Pang成绩优异，精通多国文学，曾被选举为校内最高法院法官，去年6月毕业于圣何塞的甘德森高中。伯克利拒绝了他的入学申请。主管学生事务的副校长Watson M. Laetsch说，Yat-Pang被拒绝的原因仅仅是因为在一个‘极富竞争性的’工程项目中表现不佳。”
Au今年45岁，他依然记得父母鼓励他“为权利而抗争”，抗争以校长的道歉告终。他在旧金山海湾地区一所社区大学丹沙学院学习了两年之后，在1989年转入加利福尼亚大学伯克利分校。如今，他是Veritas投资公司的CEO的创始人之一。尽管Au克服困难取得了成功——这也是典型的少数民族故事情节，但他说自己选择一条企业家的职业道路，说明在一个普遍认为成功是亚洲人种族副产品的体制中，他有能力做一个领导者。
Au说：“坦率地讲，不能完全融入社会，天真地以为我们生活在一个色盲的社会中，这让我很尴尬。”
今天，亚洲人和亚裔美国人对多元化进程似乎依然是一个威胁，甚至他们自己也这样认为了。2012年，《纽约时报》一篇评论员文章的题目是《亚洲人：聪明反被聪明误》，文章说亚裔美国大学生感觉像是“千人一面的怪胎和艺术大师”。一年前，美联社的一篇文章说，很多亚裔美国人在填写入学申请表格时，不在“亚洲人”一栏打钩，目的是规避顶级高校的潜规则招生名额限制。他们所造成的威胁越来越明显，以至于亚洲人和亚裔美国人开始采取一种不由自主道歉的姿态。
正如公众对科技行业多元化报告所产生的反应，亚洲人和亚裔美国人的强大实力让占比较小这个事实不值一提：尽管亚洲管理者的占比与亚洲技术人员的占比有巨大的差距，但从未有人关注这个问题。公众对此睁一只眼闭一只眼的态度，仅仅是其背后隐藏的巨大问题的冰山一角，专业人士认为这其中存在着历史原因。这并不是简单的抱怨和中高产阶级的问题，而是蕴含着令人深思的后果。
Zia说：“作为少数民族的典范，所有人都认为你就应该做得更好，不应该有任何问题。”
对亚裔美国人的陈腐观念极为根深蒂固，任何偏离这种印象的行为都会被当作异类。实际上在今天，亚裔人群展示了丰富的多样化色彩：有影视明星赵约翰、笨拙的孔庆祥、搞笑的Mindy Kaling、严肃的卢英德、喋喋不休的洗衣店主、冷酷的坏蛋、已经被洗白的美籍华人和永远无法融入社会的外国人。可是表现出这些多元化的人都被当作是例外，标准很简单——少数民族的典范，这让整个种族陷入一种陈腐的定式观点，尤其是在科技领域。
Zia继续说：“如果企业的高管都觉得亚裔美国员工就是少数民族的典范，那么他们就应该是优秀的数码苦力，埋头做事情，不眠不休地写代码。这些人根本不会考虑把他们提升到管理岗位上。”
但是近年来，一些有关推动亚洲人和亚裔美国人进入多元化运动的努力均以失败告终。两名白人男性在1982年因杀害美籍华人陈果仁被起诉，最终逃脱法律制裁。历史学家认为，这次事件之后，亚裔美国人的活动达到了一个高峰。像“美国正义公民”和“联合抵制反亚洲暴力”等羽翼未丰的组织，都要求在法律和社会层面平等对待亚裔美国人。为亚裔美国人平等权利的抗争在今天或许不那么激烈，但依然存在。
韩裔美国人、领导力咨询专家Jane Hyun在《冲破竹天棚：亚洲人的职业规划》一书中，探讨了亚裔美国人在企业架构中年资封顶的问题。她说：“我想要谈的是有关亚洲人的问题，尽管他们已经开始逐渐进入公司的管理层，但从未站在金字塔的顶端。我觉得各类组织没有充分关注这类问题。”
Hyun说，这并不仅仅是社会和企业的责任，也有亚裔美国人自身的问题。他们必须摆脱制约他们前进的文化、历史和社会因素，尤其是在管理岗位上和需要展示亚裔美国人多元化色彩的领域，比如电影、电视和政治。全国非营利组织“亚太教育领导者”前主席J.D. Hokoyama说：“问题不仅在上面，我们的群体内部也有安于现状的心态。”
具有讽刺意味的是，很多亚洲人和亚裔美国人的文化是，在他们获得自己应得的物质和精神地位之前，不会安顿下来，而且他们以此为荣。这些应得之物包括学术成就、财务稳定和幸福感。很难想象会有人没有得到自己的应得之物，尤其当亚洲人和亚裔美国人的多元化被视为古板的100分学生和懒惰的99分学生之间的区别。依然有一些人在面临深层次问题的挑战，但他们被忽略了。让这些问题暴露出来的简单方法是要明白，有些完美的事情并不是真实的。
Zia说：“我们善良，但也会邪恶，也会丑陋。我们不是典范，我们具有所有人类的特点。就我的经验来看，所有人都有这样的期望。”
原文：
The lack of Asian leadership in tech sheds light on a larger issue: Asians are excluded from the idea of diversity
Years ago… they used to think you were Fu Manchu or Charlie Chan. Then they thought you must own a laundry or restaurant. Now they think all we know how to do is sit in front of a computer.
It was 1987 when Virginia Kee, then a 55-year-old a high school teacher in New York’s Chinatown, said the above words. She was one of several Asian-Americans who discussed the perception of their race for TIME’s cover story, “Those Asian-American Whiz Kids.” The cover story would elicit small-scale Asian boycotts of the magazine from those who found offensive the portrait of textbook-clutching, big-glasses brainiacs. To them, the images codified hurtful beliefs that Asians and Asian-Americans were one-dimensional: that they were robots of success, worshippers of the alphabet’s first letter, study mules branded with their signature eyes.
Today, Kee is 82. It has been nearly 70 years since the days when she avoided the public restroom “because it was white or colored”; nearly 20 years since she co-founded the Chinese-American Planning Council, then an unlikely social service for Asian-Americans, who were perceived to be sufficiently independent not to need it. And yet Kee, who still recalls the words she told TIME nearly 30 years ago, maintains that not much has changed.
“If you try to navigate the human part of it, we are seeing, as yellow people, our stereotypes still existing in the heads of many people. We don’t get the chance to really go through and break the glass ceiling,” Kee says. “We are putting limitations on our people.”
The longevity of the idea that “all [Asian Americans] know how to do is sit in front of a computer” was highlighted recently when several top technology firms released their first-ever diversity reports. Those reports and media discussion of their findings centered on the obvious, important problem: an under-representation of women, blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans. Very little was said of the discrepancy between the high percentage of Asian tech employees and the disproportionately low percentage of Asian leaders. The fact that Asians’ presence charted in bars more than a few pixels tall, it seemed, disqualified them from scrutiny.
To compare representation across companies, and in tech versus leadership roles, use the drop-down menu.
Tech and Leadership Racial Diversity
Percentages of racial groups in various tech firms, in tech positions and in leadership positions
“There is an important conversation to be had in terms of who actually has full access to education and economic opportunities,” says Mary Lui, a professor of American and Asian-American Studies at Yale University. “But at the same time, think about what [not talking about Asian representation] might be saying in terms of Asian-Americans in the U.S.”
What it says is this: Asians and Asian-Americans are smart and successful, so hiring or promoting them does not count as encouraging diversity. It says: there is no such thing as underrepresentation of Asians and Asian-Americans. The problem with this belief, historians and advocates assert, is that it not only obscures the sheer range of experiences within Asian and Asian-American populations, but also excludes them from conversations about diversity and inclusion in leadership and non-tech sectors.
Not that this exclusion is a new phenomenon. Historians agree that diversity has turned a blind eye to Asians and Asian-Americans ever since the 1965 Immigration Act. With the conclusion of World War II, many ex-colonial Asian countries like the Philippines, South Korea and India had emphasized technical education to modernize and industrialize their new national economies. The Immigration Act permitted the migration of those highly educated Asians as a means of recruiting science, technology or engineering experts to the U.S. during the Cold War era.
For over half a century, the growth of the Asian-American population in the U.S. had been stunted, first by racially-motivated exclusionary laws that banned Asian immigration and later by annual quotas. But within years of the 1965 act, that population boomed. By the 1970s and 1980s, the image of Asian-Americans was no longer of the alien invaders washing ashore in California during the Gold Rush, the faceless bachelors laying the cold steel of the Transcontinental Railroad, or the land-grabbing and job-stealing migrants. The new Asian-Americans were scientists, doctors, programmers and engineers. They were thriving.
By the mid- to late-1980s, the notion of Asian-Americans as universally successful was everywhere. Major news organizations lauded them as the “model minority” — a term first coined in 1966 when first the New York Times and then U.S. News and World Report published stories that suggested Asian-Americans, through their steely work ethic and quiet perseverance, were uniformly triumphant despite prejudice. The idea elicited criticism, particularly from Asian-American groups whose problems were made invisible behind the guise of universal success: the displaced Laotian and Cambodian refugees of the Vietnam War, or the elderly Filipinos fighting to save their low-cost I-Hotel housing complex from urban renewal.
TIME was not immune to the model minority craze. In 1985, two years before its controversial cover story, TIME published an article called “To America With Skills: A Wave of Arrivals From the Far East Enriches the Country’s Talent Pool.” The piece documented the flood of Asian-Americans into high-paying careers and elite universities with decidedly less focus on marginalized groups like poor Chinese launderers, unassisted Vietnamese refugees or underpaid South Asian cab drivers:
What really distinguishes the Asians is that, of all the new immigrants, they are compiling an astonishing record of achievement. Asians are represented far beyond their population share at virtually every top-ranking university: their contingent in Harvard’s freshman class has risen from 3.6% to 10.9% since 1976 … Partly as a result of their academic accomplishments, Asians are climbing the economic ladder with remarkable speed.
“I consider it a two-headed hydra: the stereotype of being the evil invader, or the model minority,” says Helen Zia, an Asian-American activist, journalist and historian. “The conclusion of both is the same. Asian-Americans are too foreign — from the outside, being an invader, or on the inside, being so bland and so good.”
Asian-Americans’ visible success, with numbers to prove it, began to mean they should be excluded from inclusionary practices like affirmative action. More severely, Asian-Americans were seen as a hindrance to diversity. In one case, high school senior Yat-Pang Au and his Hong Kong-born parents filed a formal complaint to the U.S. Department of Justice that the University of California admissions system discriminated against Asian-Americans. Au’s case was profiled in several media organizations, including TIME’s 1987 “Whiz Kids” cover:
A straight-A student, Yat-Pang, 18, lettered in cross-country, was elected a justice on the school supreme court and last June graduated first in his class at San Jose’s Gunderson High School. Berkeley turned him down. Watson M. Laetsch, Berkeley’s vice chancellor for undergraduate affairs, insists that Yat-Pang was rejected only for a ”highly competitive” engineering program.
Au is now 45. He still recalls his parents’ insistence that he “fight for his rights,” a struggle that concluded with an apology from the chancellor. He later transferred to UC Berkeley in 1989 for his junior year after two years at DeAnza College, a community college in the San Francisco Bay Area. Today, he is the CEO and co-founder of Veritas Investments. And though Au managed to find success despite obstacles — the classic model minority narrative — he says that the fact he chose entrepreneurship as a career meant he rose to leadership despite these systems that assume success for Asians is a byproduct of their race.
“I was, to be honest, embarrassed that I didn’t get in, embarrassed thinking and expecting that we lived in a relatively color blind society,” Au said.
Today, it appears that Asians and Asian-Americans still pose a threat to diversity. Only now even they believe the idea, too. In 2012, a popular New York Times op-ed titled “Asians: Too Smart for Their Own Good?” described Asian-American college students feeling like “a faceless bunch of geeks and virtuosos.” The previous year, an Associated Press article reported that many Asian-Americans were no longer checking off the “Asian” box on college applications, in order to circumvent unspoken quotas at top colleges. Their threat to diversity is so convincing that Asians and Asian-Americans have begun to offer what is, at its core, an inadvertent apology.
As the world’s response to the tech diversity reports shows, Asians and Asian-Americans remain invincible to underrepresentation: even though companies tend to have disproportionately low levels of Asian leaders compared to the number of Asians in technical jobs, this discrepancy is overlooked. That silence is only one part of a larger issue that experts insist has deep historical roots. It is not simply a first-world complaint or an upper-middle class problem. It is one with sobering consequences.
“Being the model minority, there’s the expectation that you’re going to do so well you shouldn’t have any problems,” Zia says.
The belief in a blanket Asian-American culture is so thick that it has resulted in confusion when Asian-Americans deviate from the model minority myth. Today, diversity is more visible than ever: There is the commanding John Cho, and there is the awkward William Hung; the funny Mindy Kaling and the serious Indra Nooyi; the talkative local launderer and the mum evil villain; the whitewashed American-born Chinese and the perpetual foreigner. And yet those who display that diversity are often perceived as exceptions. The rule is the single framework — the model minority myth — that persists as the dominant stereotype for the whole race, especially in the tech sector.
“If [executives] assume their Asian-American tech employees are the model minority,” Zia continues, “the baggage that that also brings is that they are good, high-tech coolies who will do their jobs, work like hell, stay up 24/7 grinding out code — and that [executives] can never think of promoting them into management or leadership positions.”
Yet the movement to push Asians and Asian-Americans into conversations of diversity and inclusion has fizzled out in recent years. Asian-American activism, historians believe, was at its peak following a national outcry after two white men escaped prosecution for their 1982 racially-charged murder of Chinese-American Vincent Chin. Nascent groups like American Citizens for Justice and the Coalition Against Anti-Asian Violence demanded equal treatment of Asian-Americans both under the law and in society. The fight for Asian-American equality may be less fierce today, but it is still there.
“I wanted to bring to the conversation that Asians, although they were starting to enter the ranks of these companies, were not moving to the top of these organizations. I think it’s still the case that organizations are still not focused on the issue,” says Korean-American leadership consultant Jane Hyun, whose book Breaking the Bamboo Ceiling: Career Strategies for Asians discusses caps on Asian-American seniority in corporate settings.
The onus, Hyun says, is not only on society and business, but also on Asian-Americans themselves. They must try to untangle how cultural, historical and social factors inhibit their progress, in leadership or in other areas where Asian-American diversity is needed, like film, TV and politics. J.D. Hokoyama, former president of the national nonprofit Leadership Education for Asian Pacifics (LEAP), adds that “[The problem] is not just from the top. Our own communities are also settling.”
The irony is that it is the pride of many Asian and Asian-American cultures not to settle for anything less than they deserve. Unless, that is, they or everyone else believe they’ve already gotten what they deserve, and more: academic success, financial stability, happiness. It is hard to imagine that some have not gotten what they deserve, especially in an age when diversity in Asians and Asian-Americans is seen as the difference between straight-laced, straight-A geniuses and lazy, A- slackers. There are still those facing deeper problems that are dismissed or overlooked. And what it takes to start unraveling these issues is simply to understand that some things are too good to be true.
“We have the good, the bad and the ugly. We’re not models,” Zia said. “We should we be seen in our full humanity. That is, in my experience, what everyone really aspires to.”
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