White privilege. What about Asian privilege?

During one of the tutorial discussion, there was a student who raised a question of “ can you think of any privilege that you have in your race?” This has got me thinking.

As in the reading of Peggy McIntosh’s article of “White privilege”, whereas she has listed 26 things which she thinks of the some daily effects of white privilege in her life. I cannot make a judgment based on agree or disagree with the things that Peggy has listed out, because I guess you will need to be a white person to be able to make that judgment.

However, for me been a Chinese, the only privilege that I could think of is that as an Asian, we might be more smarter? In saying of been smarter, I specifically referrer it to school subjects such as mathematics or sciences. As I remember, when I first came to New Zealand 9 years ago. During my first math class at intermediate school, everyone had a calculator on their desk. I was also surprised that not only you can use calculators during class, but also you allowed using calculators during tests and examinations!

I remember one of my classmate asked me, why I am not using the calculator to do the questions. I told him that because in China we are not allowed using calculators and instead, we were all been taught to calculating through our head. He was surprised and amazed how you can calculate a math question without using a calculator.  This was 9 years ago, but recently, one day during my work, my manager asked me a simple math question of something like 16 plus 8 equals what. After I told him the answer. He immediately reacted with “Thanks, ah that’s right.  All you Asians are good at math!”   It is interesting how when people referred you to something, they all seem like to use the word “all”. It gives you a sense of each individual are been included within the norms of “Asian are smart” no matter which part of the Asia you are coming from.

Now, through these two examples that I had experienced before, we could argue that all race has been privileged in different ways. According to McIntosh, she described that:” Thinking through unacknowledged male privilege as a phenomenon, I realised that since hierarchies in our society are interlocking, there was most likely a phenomenon of white privilege”. In this case, we could argue that people can be privileged not only by which race group they belong to, but also by gender. 

McIntosh, Peggy (1988). White Privileged: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.