Peterson, to his credit, didn’t seem particularly interested in Yang’s identity. He was interested in drawing a line between Yang and “establishment” politicians. Yang is an entrepreneur who grew up in a model immigrant household before graduating from Phillips Exeter Academy and Brown University, but for supporters he remains an outsider. This is partly because he is not a politician and because the central idea of his long-shot candidacy, a universal basic income, isn’t exactly mainstream. But for a disillusioned voter who can’t stomach the Democratic field, Yang evades other key signifiers, too. He is not “woke” in any exhausting way. He avoids negative messaging. And he is not a woman, nor is he white, black or Latino. He manages to be, as Hua Hsu pointed out in a recent New Yorker article, an “Asian Everyman” who plays down “identity politics” and opts for an almost anachronistic message about everyone coming together — one that, in its rosy vagueness, contrasts with the rest of the field’s willingness to dive, however emptily, into thorny questions about busing, reparations or gender equality.

For Asian-Americans, Hsu points out, guys like this are familiar, and they are seen as insiders, for the ease with which they can blend into white culture. Yang grew up as one of the only Asians in his hometown, enduring racial abuse and bullying, and you can still spot defense mechanisms in the pragmatic, almost dismissive way he talks about identity today. When Asians like this enter elite workplaces, where they are again surrounded by white people, they tend to use such mechanisms to great effect: They are the so-called model-minority Asians who are “like everyone else,” who don’t “play the race card,” who know how to assure others that they belong. When Yang talks about his immigrant parents, it’s in economic terms, describing the patents his father generated for GE and IBM as “a pretty good deal for the United States.” He has a habit of making light ethnic jokes about himself, like a kid trying to ingratiate himself at a new school: “I’m Asian, so I know a lot of doctors,” or “The opposite of Donald Trump is an Asian man who likes math.” Yang even offered public absolution to Shane Gillis, the comedian who was fired from “S.N.L.” for, among other things, calling Yang a “Jew chink.” His approach to race is the conciliatory style a nonwhite candidate might have adopted years ago — the one Barack Obama took when he talked about being “a skinny kid with a funny name.” It acknowledges racial difference but asks us — self-deprecatingly, a little humiliatingly — to get over it.