It’s a white privilege that stems from a deep sense of Asian inferiority when it comes to the realm of ideas.

By Linda Lim Wall Street Journal Asia July 27, 2017

About 25 years ago, my university received a grant to offer executive-education programs in Southeast Asian countries. An Indian colleague and I, both experienced professors in our Top 10-ranked MBA program, were selected to teach. But we had a hard time selling the program in Singapore, despite our school’s reputation.

Potential clients told our local partner, “Why should I pay American prices for one Chinese and one Indian?” Many of them expected an American professor to be a white male.

So to open each session we trotted out my husband, a white American who looked like (and was) a professor. We later learned that other North American business schools also did this.

White privilege has many manifestations, causes and consequences, which vary by situation. I focus here on the tendency to equate white with expertise at higher levels of education and the labor force, in the West as well as in Asia.

In American universities, studies have shown that female and ethnic-minority instructors are given lower performance ratings by male and female students of all races. In Singapore’s multicultural universities, even white male faculty acknowledge that a white premium exists, with white professors, especially men, receiving higher teaching evaluations from Asian students.

Asian executive-education participants at major U.S. business schools are sometimes overtly racist in response to teaching faculty, many of whom are Chinese, Indian or Korean. Asian executives and students want to be taught by whites, and to study with whites in class. They express disappointment when they perceive there are too many Asians in both faculty and student ranks.

My Asian students tell me that undergraduate applicants from their home countries avoid certain U.S. private universities on the East and West Coasts for this reason. Some prefer Midwestern public universities like mine that have a preponderance of whites. So where does this cult of white-male superiority originate? Dismissing it as a mere colonial hangover is too simplistic. Western colonialism disappeared from Asia more than a half-century ago, and some Asian countries that exhibit these values and behaviors—for instance China, Japan and Korea—were not colonized by whites.

Asia’s much-vaunted economic success also didn’t derive from Western sources, but was led by Asian governments and business.

I speculate that this adulation reflects a continued deep-seated Asian sense of inferiority to the West in one area where Western hegemony remains unchallenged—the realm of ideas. This explains why elite Asian students prefer to attend second- and third-tier Western universities, or their satellite campuses in Asia, even as Asian universities climb the global rankings.

In executive-education programs, Chinese and Indian companies and executives increasingly accept their own nationals as expert instructors—if senior and male. But this is because these individuals have been anointed by their Western-university experience. This creates a halo effect and may diminish the modesty and lack of assertiveness that cause East Asians to be underestimated in Western-leaning contexts.

Experimental psychological research by my colleague Fiona Lee at the University of Michigan shows that, all else being equal, both whites and Asians will choose a white person over an Asian for a leadership position in different U.S. occupational contexts, including universities and corporations. Interestingly, this anti-Asian bias disappears if the Asian in question is not stereotypically Asian and behaves like a prototypical Westerner in being gregarious, extroverted and articulate.

One of my Singaporean colleagues is a recognized international expert in her field who is regularly invited to speak at top universities and international organizations. She was specifically asked by a senior executive at a major Singaporean institution to recommend non-Singaporean “Westerner experts” to advise them in her field of expertise.

Unlike many of my nonwhite and female colleagues, I personally have not suffered more than superficial slights in my career for not being a white male. I am very used to white males both as peers (faculty colleagues) and as subordinates (students), and to being consulted as an expert by those in the media, business, think tanks and universities. To me they are no different than any other demographic. So it is disconcerting to find white privilege still pervasive, both in the U.S. and Asia.

Singapore is one of the most advanced Asian economies, with plenty of international markers of its success—from secondary-school test scores to university rankings. It should lead the way in overturning this economically irrational, socially inequitable and psychologically discomfiting notion that whites are experts and experts are white.

More attention to a wider array of experts, including our own native talent, will lead to better advice and greater self-confidence, as befits an independent, accomplished and meritocratic nation in this supposed “Asian century.”

Ms. Lim is a Singaporean business professor at the University of Michigan.

Appeared in the July 28, 2017, print edition.