Reject the model minority myth.
Happy Tuesday, everyone! In today's Anti-Racism Daily, Jami unpacks the "model minority myth" and its lasting impact on the racism and discrimination marginalized groups experience.
And remember, this is a work in protest. Especially when everything feels overwhelming and hopeless. Each action we take brings us one step further to the equitable future we all deserve. Keep going ✊🏾.
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TAKE ACTION
Unpack who you consider “Asian American.” If you think things like “there are so many Asian Americans at this college,” what kinds of Asian Americans are you actually talking about?
Take time to learn more about the history of Asian Americans in your community, particularly refugees and the recently immigrated.
Resist media rhetoric that portrays recent protests as destructive and violent, instead of as actions in response to the destructive, violent anti-Black practices in our policing and government.
GET EDUCATED
After our recent article on affirmative action (Anti-Racism Daily), several readers were curious about the myth of the model minority. As an Asian American, this myth has followed me all my life; I was exposed to its pervasive narrative long before I ever heard the term. As a child, I heard flippant “of course you did well on this test— you’re Asian!” comments from friends at school, and dismissive comments about other people of color from elderly relatives at home, who believed that since we had made it, everyone else should have, too.
But these types of remarks reflect just the surface of the myth. The core of the model minority myth is the idea that Asian Americans were “able to rise to ‘honorary white’ status through assimilation, hard work and intelligence… [the myth is used] to put down and dismiss other communities of color; especially Black folks and Black political resistance,” explains the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance (APALA). The term “model minority” was coined by white journalist William Pettersen in a 1966 article called “Success Story, Japanese-American Style” (New York Times Magazine). He praised Japanese Americans for their triumph over adversity while explicitly comparing them with what he called the “problem minorities,” by which he meant first and foremost Black Americans.
Pettersen’s article did not appear out of a vacuum, but amidst major events that were shaping the face of America. In 1965 Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act, which replaced a restrictive national-origins quota with one that prioritized family members and the highly educated (House of Representatives Archive). This act replaced the immigration laws of 1917 and 1924, which had banned virtually all immigration from Asia (Densho). An unintended outcome of the 1965 law was a dramatic increase in immigration from non-European countries—especially Asian ones (History). (I can see how these laws have shaped my own family’s journey: my Japanese and Okinawan great-grandparents moved to America during the decades prior to the laws’ implementation, while my Taiwanese father and his family came in 1971, six years after the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act).
Secondly, the model minority myth appeared during the 1960s civil rights movement. “Numerous politicians and academics and the mainstream media contrasted Chinese with African Americans,” writes historian Ellen D. Wu (LA Times). “They found it expedient to invoke Chinese “culture” to counter the demands of civil rights and black power activists for substantive change.” These people believed that East Asians’ success meant that it should be possible for Black Americans to achieve success without dismantling the system. There’s no racism, the myth tries to sweetly convince: anyone can succeed in America, as long as you’re compliant and hard-working. It elides the differences in the experiences in communities of color, and particularly the trauma, disenfranchisement, and dehumanization that Black people have faced in this country since 1619 when the first slave ship arrived (The 1619 Project).
Another problematic outcome of the myth is that it also presents Asian America as a homogenous monolith, ignoring the wide diversity within. In 2017, the poverty rate among Japanese Americans (the group Pettersen originally called the “model minority”) was 3.8%, the lowest of all Asian ethnicities, while the rate among Burmese Americans was 28.4% (AAPI Data). But the model minority myth centers East Asians and the wealthiest Asian Americans, while rendering the rest—North, West, South, and Southeast Asians, struggling Asian Americans—invisible. We ignore the communities and the cultures that were colonized and that were most affected by our interference in the Vietnam War and the Secret War (LA Times).
The myth can be hard to denounce, partially because some Asian Americans (particularly wealthy East Asians, who benefit the most) wholeheartedly buy into it. And why not? The myth presents us as being responsible for our own success, as being people who fought against adversity and won. This can ring true to us, for as descendants of recent immigrants (or immigrants ourselves), we often do remember the struggle and discrimination we’ve faced. But we cannot allow ourselves to have tunnel vision at our own experience while ignoring the differences between our own experiences and those of Black Americans. The myth can be seductive, making us feel like we earned everything, deserve everything, which leads to us aligning ourselves with whiteness instead of being in solidarity with other people of color. Today, this is most visible in wealthy East Asians’ lawsuits against affirmative action, steps that align them with whiteness instead of in solidarity with other people of color (as Allen Chang outlines in his thorough article at Vox).
While most people today don’t throw around the terms “model minority” or “problem minority,” the stereotypes behind the myth are still pervasive today, seeping into our culture in insidious ways. When the media decries the recent “violent protests,” besides ignoring the role of the police as instigators (NY Times), they further the narrative that if Black people just protested in the right way, they would achieve their goals. History has proven otherwise. We cannot believe this rhetoric. We cannot use the supposed success of Asian Americans to lay blame at the feet of Black Americans instead of at the towering, crushing heel of systemic racism.
key takeaways
Critical race theory is a school of thought that analyzes how racism persists in social and political systems
The Trump administration aims to remove diversity trainings that use critical race theory, which impacts the federal government and conversations on race as a whole
Trump has fueled racism and divisiveness to maintain and gain power.
RELATED ISSUES
Sep 1, 2020 | Learn the legacy of Japanese American incarceration.
Aug 17, 2020 | Fight for equity in remote learning.
Aug 10, 2020 | Respect the relationship between name and identity.
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