According to the WSJ Asian-Americans are now the country's
best-educated, highest-earning and fastest-growing racial group. They share
with American Jews both the distinction and the occasional burden of immigrant
success.
Last March, an interviewer archly asked President Barack
Obama whether he was aware that he had been "surpassed" by basketball
phenomenon Jeremy Lin "as the most famous Harvard graduate." The
question was misformulated. If there was any surpassing going on, it was that
Mr. Lin had become, briefly, more famous than Mr. Obama as the country's most
exemplary figure from a hitherto marginalized minority.
Mr. Lin's triumph on the basketball court is a living
metaphor for the social group he comes from. No one would dispute the opening
paragraph of the Pew Research Center's massive study of Asian-Americans, released
over the summer: "Asian-Americans are the highest-income, best-educated
and fastest-growing racial group in the United States. They are more satisfied
than the general public with their lives, finances and the direction of the
country, and they place more value than other Americans do on marriage,
parenthood, hard work and career success." Or as Mr. Lin put it in a video
of congratulation he made last spring for the overwhelmingly Asian-American
graduates of New York City's famed Stuyvesant High School: "Never let
anyone tell you what you can't do……."
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