I guess a more apt scenario is this: You're a partner at such and such accounting/banking/consulting/law firm. You've made it. As an Asian American. Now, who do you hire? Who do you groom? Who do you promote? I think that's more important than, "You've opened a restaurant. Who do you hire as your waitstaff?"

Because the problem I see is that, when we rise, we rise alone - not like a tide, but like a wave. In fact, we feel compelled to hold other Asian Americans to even higher standards, because we do not even want to give the appearance of preferential treatment. So even when we make it, nothing changes for Asian Americans.

I feel like I understand why it happens, too. Mind you, take everything I say with a grain of salt, but I have a few hypotheses. I think the most successful of us in these traditional settings are good at assimilating. I won't belabor the record about the feelings most of us have had at one point or another about distancing ourself from our "Asian-ness," as I'm sure you've heard it all before. But those feelings are hardly rare in the young urban professional Asian American setting. And with that comes a lot of baggage, including the persistent need to prove that we are mainstreamers, not outsiders. So there's a pronounced fear among professional Asian Americans that it shouldn't be a part of our professional identity. It affects how we choose our friends, our dating partners, and so on - and the pinnacle of that is how we choose our subordinates, isn't it?

You just don't see it as often among other ethnicities and races who acknowledge the places to which society has relegated them - even rather prosperous ethnicities.

So would I demonstrate a bias toward Asian Americans in my hiring and my mentoring? I don't know. I think I may not be able to help myself, rendering moot how I might feel about such a practice from a philosophical standpoint. But at the very least I know I will make a conscious effort not to undermine an otherwise-qualified Asian American just because I feel like I have something to prove about my racial impartiality, and I know I will fight every involuntary impulse to do otherwise.