Excerpt:

I winced — just a bit — the first time I heard Andrew Yang deploy what would become his most reliable applause line. 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!"

As 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. For the crowd, the joke was cathartic, releasing a tension most would not have quite known they were feeling before he dispelled it. By leaning into the stereotype, Yang effectively said: Remind me — why should I be on the defensive about this?

The line is now shouted in unison by the boisterous crowds he draws to his rallies. Members of the #YangGang, as his admirers are known, are among the most energized factions supporting any presidential candidate on social media [....]

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. 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.

It’s fitting that such an unexpected political movement would have an Asian American man as its underdog figurehead. 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. 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 [....]