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 ✊🏾.

Thank you all for your contributions. To support our work, you can give one-time on our website, PayPal or Venmo (@nicoleacardoza), or subscribe for $5/mo on our Patreon.

Nicole

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.

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By Jami Nakamura Lin

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.

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Nicole Cardoza 9/1/20 Nicole Cardoza 9/1/20

Learn the legacy of Japanese American incarceration.

It's Tuesday and a new month. And here's hoping it brings some ease, grace, and collective healing.

I didn't learn about the Japanese American "internment" in school. Perhaps you didn't either. Yet this narrative isn't surprising considering our country's relationship with exclusion and inequitable criminal justice system. I'm grateful to have Jami's article – laced with heartbreaking personal narratives – carry us through history for today's Anti-Racism Daily. You can read more stories on incarceration on our updated archives page (long overdue for a facelift).

Thank you for all who make this work possible. If you're inspired by this work, you can give one-time on our website, PayPal, or via Venmo (@nicoleacardoza). Or, subscribe monthly to our Patreon.

Nicole

TAKE ACTION

Investigate how your state or local school district teaches Japanese American incarceration. If it’s inadequate, contact them. (Feel free to share this newsletter).
Read more about the history of Japanese America on Densho’s Core Story.
Follow Japanese American activist organizations on Instagram like @tsuruforsolidarity, @jasforjustice, and @nikkeiresisters.

GET EDUCATED

By Jami Nakamura Lin

“I was wondering how will they ever put all of us in a place that small. What surprised me most was why did the soldiers have to stand guard with guns...and to tell you the truth the way some people stared at us, it chilled me a bit.”

My grandfather, then sixteen, reflecting in 1944 on his arrival at Amache (Granada) Relocation Camp two years earlier.

Often when we talk about it amongst ourselves, we call it camp. To others, the benign-sounding word could recall sleepaway summers, pitched tents, sing-alongs around a campfire. But when I ask other yonsei (fourth-generation Japanese Americans) if their grandparents were also in camp, what I mean is: was your family also forcibly removed from their homes, from their lives? Were they also labeled the enemy and locked up for years? We call it camp, but what we mean is incarceration. What we mean is that we are just one link in the long American tradition of locking up people of color for no other reason than we are here. The effects of such incarceration linger within us, years and years after the inhabitants are set “free.”

On February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which commanded the forcible evacuation of Japanese Americans living on the West Coast. As a result, 120,000 Japanese Americans (and some Canadians and Latin Americans of Japanese descent) were incarcerated (National Archives). He passed this order despite a report commissioned by Congress that showed that Japanese Americans posed no threat. The army general in charge of the West Coast summed up the general government feeling when he stated, “They are a dangerous element, whether loyal or not,” (Smithsonian).

In school— if you learned about this event at all— you probably learned about it under the name internment. But this is inaccurate, as the Japanese American-led organization Densho explains: “‘Internment’ refers to the legally permissible, though morally questionable, detention of ‘enemy aliens’ in time of war. There were approximately 8,000 Issei (“first generation”) arrested as enemy aliens and subjected to what could be described as “internment” in a separate set of camps… This term becomes a misleading, othering euphemism when applied to American citizens detained by their own government.” Today, we choose to call this event what it was: incarceration.

It was incarceration based (like much mass incarceration) not on facts or danger, but on racism and economics. After Japan’s government bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, anti-Japanese American rhetoric was pervasive. At the same time, lobbyists representing “competing economic interests or nativist groups” pressured the federal government to remove Japanese Americans from the West Coast (Our Documents/National Archives). Incarceration also functioned as a land grab, as many white farmers were resentful of Japanese American farmers’ increasing presence. The Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians estimated that Japanese Americans lost what in 2020 would be $3.38 billion in property and $7 billion in income as a result of incarceration (Personal Justice Denied via National Archives).

After the order was passed, Japanese Americans were given only a few days to evacuate, only allowed to pack what they could carry. “Many of the neighbors came to offer us ridiculously low prices for our possessions,” my grandfather recalls. Their refrigerator went for a dollar; the $700 car all the family had saved up for went for $100. They were taken to Merced, California, where they spent six months in one of fifteen euphemistically titled “assembly centers,” while the Army built permanent incarceration camps (Densho). In September, my grandfather and his family were evacuated again to Amache (Granada), a camp in the middle of the Colorado desert, where they would spend the next three years in a 20x25 barracks (Amache.org).

Not one Japanese American was ever found guilty of espionage or any other war crime.

In 1980, Congress organized a federal commission to investigate the impact of Executive Order 9066. Its 467-page report (fittingly titled Personal Justice Denied) called the camps a “grave injustice, motivated by racial prejudice, war hysteria, and the failure of political leadership” (Personal Justice Denied via National Archive). Later, the Sanseis (third-generation Japanese Americans) fought for reparations for their parents and grandparents (Densho). This decades-long battle, fraught with dissent even within our community, led to the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, also called H.R. 442 in honor of the highly decorated Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat Team (Go For Broke). The act stipulated that the $20,000 in compensation would only be paid out to survivors themselves, not descendants of any incarcerees who had died, because the government did not want to set a precedent or framework for reparations for “the descendants of slaves, [Indigenous people] forced onto reservations, Mexicans who lost land, and other historical victims of racism,” (Densho).

Today there are many Japanese American activist groups that utilize our past to work in solidarity with other people of color. We try to use the legacy of Japanese American incarceration as an opening to speak to our elders and our community. Japanese American-led activist groups are using our history to mobilize our community to protest detention sites (Tsuru for Solidarity), combat anti-Blackness (Japanese Americans Citizens League on Facebook), and fight against mass incarceration (Nikkei Uprising on Facebook). At a recent protest at Cook County Jail, young Japanese Americans lay origami cranes to honor those killed by police and who died in prison now, and our ancestors who died inside the World War II camps (NPR).

Densho’s mission – “to preserve and share history of the WWII incarceration of Japanese Americans to promote equity and justice today” – succinctly summarizes why it’s so important to remember these historical events: because the past links to the present and the future. Today, Japanese Americans as a group are no longer treated the same way we were back then (though anti-Asian sentiment during the coronavirus hearkens back to those tropes, as I write elsewhere). But incarceration and its related trauma have profoundly shaped our community and our culture.

Last week, my grandfather turned 92. He still can remember the names of all the people he knew at Amache. He remembers what cell block they lived in, what hometowns they left behind. It happened eighty years ago, and it still affects him — and us, his children and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren — to this day. The racist actions our government is taking today — the border camps, the mass incarceration, the police brutality — are going to reverberate in communities of color for decades to come.

key takeaways

During World War II, over 120,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated because of the American government’s racist, unfounded fears.
President Roosevelt signed this executive order despite Congress finding no evidence to support it.
No Japanese American was ever found guilty of espionage or any war crime.
After a long battle, Japanese American camp survivors received monetary reparations—yet our government still refuses to discuss reparations for slavery or for Indigenous people.

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Nicole Cardoza 7/27/20 Nicole Cardoza 7/27/20

Support Asian Americans through COVID-19.

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Happy Monday! Thank you for all your kind requests to support the process of consolidating our content – I'll be going through them and following up this week!

We're back to our weekly series on COVID-19 (usually published on Sundays) and looking at the spike in anti-Asian racism that's growing at the pace of the virus. Thank you to Katie for sharing her story here with us today, and sending love to everyone in this community that's dealing with this violence. Full COVID-19 reporting here >

Many of you have mentioned that Gmail keeps hiding this newsletter in your Promotions tab. Apparently, that's happening to a lot of BLM content (h/t to Jason for sending this along). But it's a 5-second fix on a desktop computer. Here's how to do it.

Contributions to this project are always appreciated. Give one-time on our website, through Venmo @nicoleacardoza, or pledge $5/month on our Patreon to keep this work growing.

Nicole

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TAKE ACTION

1. Ensure your company has implemented anti-discrimination policies that protect Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders using this PDF.

2. In your next few interactions with people who are different from you, bring awareness and acknowledge the prejudice or disregard you might initially have about this person based on their surface categorical group (their race, sexual orientation, or gender)...then move beyond that. What else do you notice about this person’s character?

3. Don't refer to COVID-19 using the racist terminology mentioned in this newsletter.

GET EDUCATED

The onset of COVID-19 in early March set off a dramatic spike in anti-Asian racism. The Stop AAPI Hate Reporting Center, organized by the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council, has tracked over 1,900 self-reported acts of anti-Asian incidents from March 13 – June, and hundreds more from California and Texas since (A3PCON). 58% of Asian Americans feel it’s more common to experience racism now than it was before COVID-19, and 31% have been subject to slurs or jokes because of their race or ethnicity (Pew Research). A recent Pew Study reports that since COVID-19 about 40% of U.S. adults believe “it has become more common for people to express racist views toward Asians since the pandemic began” (Pew Research).

Our president has played a role in this, applying his divisive approach to conversations around COVID-19, choosing to refer to it as “Chinese virus,” or “kung flu,” consistently. Press noted he used “Chinese virus” over 20 times between March 16 and March 30 (NBC News). I found a source where he agreed to stop using the term in late March to “protect our Asian American community in the United States,” but keeps using it, most recently in late July when he finally encouraged citizens to wear a mask (Bloomberg, CNN). These terms have also been perpetuated by the media and the general population.

I know we’re probably all tired of talking about Trump. I sure am. But, as we’ve discussed in previous newsletters, language matters. And there’s a long history of North America and its leaders using false narratives to associate Asian Americans with diseases to "justify" racial discrimination and violence. In the late 19th century, many Chinese and Japanese people immigrated to the U.S. and Canada for the gold rush, along with immigrants from the UK and Europe. Their labor was indispensable for the growth of infrastructure alongside the West Coast, but they were also paid terribly compared to their white American counterparts (The Conversation).

As Chinese communities began to grow, white communities turned against them, fearing they would take their jobs and disrupt their quality of life. They ostracized them by blaming Chinese people for diseases – like syphilis, leprosy, and smallpox – growing in the region. This was entirely untrue; poverty, not race, is more accurately correlated with the spread of diseases. Despite that, Canada created a Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration and concluded that "Chinese quarters are the filthiest and most disgusting places in Victoria, overcrowded hotbeds of disease and vice, disseminating fever and polluting the air all around,” even though they knew themselves it wasn’t accurate (The Conversation). This spurred violence and hateful rhetoric, but political changes, too: the U.S. passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, and Canada followed with their own Chinese Immigration Act in 1885. These were the first law for both countries that excluded an entire ethnic group (AAPF).

“Viruses know no borders and they don’t care about your ethnicity or the colour of your skin or how much money you have in the bank.”

Dr. Mike Ryan, Executive Director of the World Health Organization, for Newsweek

We chatted with Katie Dean, an educator currently working in the tech space, for her perspective of the anti-Asian racism and our country’s history of violence against Asian Americans.

By Katie Dean

How has COVID-19 impacted you?
I was the first person I know to start self-isolating in early March. I was reading international publications, and I saw what was happening in other parts of the world. Out of respect for the suffering and loss Italy, Iran, and China endured, I decided the most responsible thing I could do was stay inside. In my life, I’ve chosen meaningful work over monetary success. I give up my seat on the bus for elderly people. I’m also funny, sharp-witted, and fanatically clean.

Why am I listing all of this? Because right now, who I actually am, doesn’t matter. When I walk out into the world, I am judged by my face. And currently the face of an Asian person, to some, is synonymous with COVID-19, the virus that has taken loved ones, the virus that’s brought the global economy to a crashing halt, the virus that has exacerbated every conceivable racial and socioeconomic disparity. And this hurts, on a profound level.

The last thing I’m eliciting is pity. This is what all BIPOC people endure. This is the same experience people resembling someone of Middle Eastern descent have endured since 9/11. This is what Black people have endured systemically since 1619. This paragraph is just for illustration.

And how has this racism shown up in your life before COVID-19?
On multiple occasions, while I was in high school, a lifelong white friend would look at me, really seeing ME for the first time, and after years of friendship, in a moment of reckoning say, “I finally see you as white.” At the time, my fourteen-year-old self felt a sense of pride and acceptance in those moments, a sense of belonging. As I’ve advanced in my understanding of race, and how my race has shaped my experiences, I look back and am horrified by what these statements in fact meant.

When my white friends said, “I finally see you as white,” what they meant is “I finally see you as human,” and what that translates to is that “white and only white people are able to be fully human, fully themselves, fully individual”. This construct also implies that all non-white people are all somehow “less than” until it’s decided by white people that they are acceptable. Well, BIPOC and other marginalized groups have no interest in our humanity being measured against the white measuring stick.

Where do you believe we need to go from here?
Dehumanizing others, throughout the entire course of human history, is what’s allowed the worst atrocities to take place. The psychology of seeing whole groups of people as less than human, is what allows and justifies egregious mistreatment, apathy towards suffering, and irreverence to the genocide of these other groups. This is currently happening on all fronts, against all BIPOC as well as the LGBTQ+ communities.

Breaking down systemic racism will be the greatest battle we face, spanning many lifetimes. But addressing who we assign and don’t assign individuality to, the basic respect of recognizing the unique human in others, is critical work we can all start immediately to dismantle racist behaviors within ourselves.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

The onset of COVID-19 in early March set off a dramatic spike in anti-Asian racism.
The U.S. and Canada have a history of accusing Asian Americans of disease as one of many ways to discriminate and incite violence against them.
Our country's practice of "othering" has caused significant harm to Asian Americans, which is exacerbated by the current racial discrimination during COVID-19.

ARCHIVES

Reject the model minority myth.

TAKE ACTION

GET EDUCATED

key takeaways

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Learn the legacy of Japanese American incarceration.

TAKE ACTION

GET EDUCATED

key takeaways

RELATED ISSUES

PLEDGE YOUR SUPPORT

Support Asian Americans through COVID-19.

TAKE ACTION

GET EDUCATED

KEY TAKEAWAYS

RELATED ISSUES

PLEDGE YOUR SUPPORT