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They were constructing industrial robots in factories in the Midwest.

They were building the legal and technical pathways of overseas supply chains. They were pricing out credit default swaps and bundling mortgage-backed securities. What were all those spreadsheet jockeys, data modelers, computer programmers, lawyers, consultants and investment bankers doing in the 1990s and 2000s? They were optimizing American capitalism. That’s the role in which we are most habituated to seeing Americans of Asian descent: hyper-competent but deferential, best suited for those essential but essentially subordinate roles – and no other. Yang is a stand-in - and hero - for all the people who have acquired a deep understanding of how things actually work while toiling away in the obscurity where others are content to keep them confined, running the technical infrastructure. It’s fitting that such an unexpected political movement would have an Asian American man as its underdog figurehead. Yang is casting himself as a proverbial spreadsheet jockey who is going off script and demanding to be put in charge immediately, because the alphas and apple-polishers who call the shots are failing. The symbolism of his messaging – at once joyous, ironic, weirdly earnest, self-deprecating and proud – should be instantly clear to anyone who has labored in a white-collar workplace. They chant “PowerPoint,” and they pumped $10 million into Yang’s coffers in the third quarter of this year, putting a once-unknown candidate who’s never held elective office ahead of multiple governors and members of Congress in fundraising, and he’s tied for sixth place with 3 percent support among those planning to vote in the 2020 primaries and caucuses, according to the most recent Economist-YouGov poll. Members of the #YangGang, as his admirers are known, are among the most energized factions supporting any presidential candidate on social media: They wear blue hats and shirts emblazoned with “MATH” – an acronym for the slogan Make America Think Harder. The line is now shouted in unison by the boisterous crowds he draws to his rallies. By leaning into the stereotype, Yang effectively said: Remind me – why should I be on the defensive about this? For the crowd, the joke was cathartic, releasing a tension most would not have quite known they were feeling before he dispelled it. We were in the warehouse of a newspaper in rural New Hampshire in February, and, in front of several dozen white folks, he delivered his now-familiar refrain: “The opposite of Donald Trump is an Asian man who likes math!”Īs a wave of laughter rolled through the room, lingering a few beats longer than the joke probably deserved, I watched the faces in the crowd exude relief, even gratitude, over the permission they’d just been granted to treat the good-at-math-Asian-guy stereotype as benign, even funny. I winced - just a bit - the first time I heard Andrew Yang deploy what would become his most reliable applause line.