Thanks for providing your insight, as per usual. That said, I do want to comment on it.
It's very common to see aggregate numbers for Asian Americans and see "Wow, Asians are doing
better than whites." Then the more unscrupulous among us make the conclusion "There must be some form of Asian privilege!" Saying either statement uncritically neglects a few things:
1. Asians are concentrated in high-COL areas like California or the Northeast, which makes certain statistics (e.g. Asians' higher than average incomes) seem more impressive than they really are. So be careful with stats like HDI* if they don't take into account COL.
2a. Raw economic numbers don't account for any cultural disadvantages Asians have in American society, e.g. the dearth of Asians in the American music, film, and TV industries, the troubles Asians have with dating, etc.
2b. In fact, a lot of economic difficulties are hidden by aggregate measures like HDI, e.g. the so-called "bamboo ceiling" Asians face as they try to work their way up into upper management (obstacles that stem from the cultural attitudes alluded to in 2a).
3. Treating Asians as a monolithic bloc, even if you know that they're clearly not one, is troublesome because...well...they are clearly not one. While certain groups like Indian-Americans are doing well, others (particularly Southeast Asians) have higher than average poverty rates and worse socioeconomic indicators.
Anyways, back on the thread topic...
Since I've already mentioned Asian Americans, and other people have mentioned rural poverty faced by other races, I may as well mention a "case study" involving Asians in rural America.
NPR did an interesting article on the so-called Mississippi Delta Chinese, a community of Chinese-Americans who live in the rural Mississippi Delta, a lifestyle in contrast to the urban and suburban lifestyles of most Asian Americans these days. Now the Delta is perhaps
the most deprived rural area in America, with socioeconomic indicators comparable to the developing world.** Because of this deprivation, the children of the Mississippi Delta Chinese, like children from rural areas across America, are leaving their hometowns for better pastures:
On top of the usual deprivation found in the Delta, the community has also faced virulent racism; not terribly surprising, unfortunately, but it's interesting to see how racism from the Jim Crow era (and beyond) is experienced by people outside of the black-white dichotomy. That said, the whole article can be a read as a case study of the problems of rural America that have already been mentioned in this thread.
*The measure that you're quoting is
not the HDI that people usuall talk about, which is always reported with three digits or decimal places. What you're using is the American Human Development Index, which was developed by
Measure of America to be an index similar to the actual HDI.
**If anyone wants to read about extreme deprevation in America, I recommend reading
$2 a Day by Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer. It talks about Americans literally living on less than two dollars a day, usually with no cash income at all, using case studies from both urban and rural America (including the Mississippi Delta, where the poverty and inequities are described quite vividly).
