Success Won't Save Us

Pawan Dhingra is Aliki Perroti and Seth Frank '55 Professor of US Immigration Studies at Amherst College. He is the author of Hyper Education: Why Good Schools, Good Grades, and Good Behavior Are Not Enough and Life Behind the Lobby: Indian American Motel Owners and the American Dream.

"How can we understand the modern Asian American? Pawan Dhingra explores the seemingly invisible paradigms of racial and cultural status hierarchies. By naming the knotty problems which limit the full humanity of Asian American lives, Dhingra poses a formidable and necessary challenge for our collective growth. Success Won't Save Us bravely charts new territory for intellectual and cultural liberation."--Min Jin Lee, author of, American Hagwon "Anyone who believes that Asian American achievement protects them from the poison of white supremacy must read this book. Pawan Dhingra has written an honest, provocative, and surprisingly personal account of how racial capitalism is at the core of the model minority myth. More importantly, he offers a way out of systems of racial domination and into our collective liberation."--Moustafa Bayoumi, author of, How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America "Urgent, overdue and eminently readable, Success Won't Save Us takes a provocative approach to exploring the racial location of Asians in US society and the American imagination, by making the point--with compelling evidence, historical context and personal insight--that Asian Americans have benefited from and enabled white supremacy, even as we have suffered from it. In doing so, Pawan Dhingra frames a timely argument for a vision of Americanness rooted not in (white) nationalism but in a racial, ethnic and economically inclusive shared identity from which Asian Americans cannot be readily excluded and expelled."--Jeff Yang, cultural critic and author of, RISE: A Pop History of Asian America from the 90s to Now "With meticulous research and incisive analysis, Pawan Dhingra boldly calls for a paradigm shift to disrupt the conundrum of Asian Americans who decry overt racism while seduced by the toxic siren of 'model minority success.' His rational, clear, and accessible argument should be required reading to help move uninformed students, family, friends and community away from complicity and towards a united, beloved community capable of dismantling white supremacy."--Helen Zia, author of, Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People