> There are more factors to systemic racism than just worse economic outcomes, so it's naive to assert that only black people experience its negative effects.
In the US economic disparities drive pretty much everything else.
> Immigration comes to mind, where profiling is rampant in enforcement (but only really for people who look Mexican, not for people who look / sound Canadian).
As a brown guy with a beard, maybe I get screened more at TSA, or maybe I don’t. (I definitely do outside the US.) At most that’s just regular racism caused by the preconceptions of TSA officers. It doesn’t lead to some systemic or persistent disadvantage.
> Or even immigration quotas -- there's the same annual green card cap per country, whether it's India or China or Iceland, thereby implicitly biasing toward smaller countries.
I’m not sure I would even call this racism.
> Or, affirmative action being used as a wedge issue for Asian Americans especially.
This is backward. It proceeds from a false premise “non-white solidarity” that’s broke by the use of wedge issues. The opposite is true: Asians have distinct interests and people trying to get them to support affirmative action measures are trying to get them to vote against their own interests. Ibram Kendi-style “equity”—where races are represented in proportion to their share of the population—would be disastrous for Asians. We would go from 20-40% in top universities to 6%. We’d go from 35% in Silicon Valley to 6%-10%. And that’s not a hypothetical thing. I went to TJHSST, where progressives voted to eliminate the admissions test. That will cut Asians from 70% to 20%. NYC is trying to do the same thing.
Asians, and to a great extent Latinos, have very little self-interest in rocking the boat. While immigrants in Europe are seeing generational poverty, Asians and Latinos enjoy similar or even higher levels of income mobility as whites. Cubans and Vietnamese came over as refugees with nothing, and achieved economic parity with white Americans within a single generation. There’s only a handful of countries (UK, Canada, Australia) where that sort of thing happens. We have very little self interest in messing with the current system.
It’s fair to argue that we should give up some of our privilege to help reduce systemic disparities. But that’s a completely different argument. But telling us that these changes are in our own self interest, because the existing system is racist against us, is just gaslighting.
> And just because some Asian populations are doing well, doesn't mean that _all_ of them are.
Yes, virtually all of them are. When you see people incoming intra-Asian disparities it’s almost invariably based on pointing to Asian groups that are recent immigrants. That’s why you suddenly started seeing articles about the plight of “Bhutanese Americans.” Virtually all of them came here during the Obama administration, as refugees. They might be poor now, but that’s to be expected at this stage.
I’m Bangladeshi. Bangladeshi Americans are one of the poorer Asian groups. But Indian Americans are one of the richest. That’s not the product of “racism”—that would be absurd, even we can’t usually tell each other apart by sight. Instead it’s because Indians started immigrating in the 1960s and Bangladeshis only did so in significant numbers since the 2000s. But even Asian groups who come here in poverty quickly move up the ladder. In 1980, Vietnamese were among the poorest ethnic groups, having come here as refugees. Today, they have reached economic parity with whites.