Andrew Sullivan has a post where he argues that the economic success of Asians in the United States suggests that the lack of financial success of other groups cannot be chalked up to racism. One response to this kind of argument is that, as a historical matter, anti-Asian racism did hold Asians back and Asians only began to succeed when that racism receded for a number of badly motivated reasons (see Ellen Wu). In addition to that point, I think it is useful to note that Asian economic success also varies a lot by group.

Analysis on Asian subgroups is often hard to come by because they are such a small share of the overall population that it is difficult to get good sample sizes. However, if you use the five-year American Community Survey (ACS) files, you can get enough responses to focus in on Asian subgroups. This is what I have done for this post, using the 2011–15 ACS data.