What is model minority

Campus Location. Toggle navigation. The Model Minority stereotype is the cultural expectation placed on Asian Americans as a group that each individual will be: smart i. Common experiences of Asian Americans If you are Asian American, you may have experienced one or more of the following: Others e. Professors and classmates assume that you study all the time and that you are doing just fine without additional help. Those same studies, however, reveal that other Asian ethnic groups have vastly different results.

For example, Southeast Asian and Pacific Islander students in particular often underperform when compared with all other racial and ethnic groups. As an educator, it is important to understand the different histories and experiences of Asian American and Pacific Islander students and communities. Some of these communities arrived in America as refugees escaping war or genocide, and some were imported as sharecroppers to replace enslaved people of African descent after the Civil War.

Still other communities, particularly those native to various Pacific Islands, were here long before white settler colonialism. As educators, we must unlearn the biased, simplistic beliefs that we might hold about what it means to be Asian American or Pacific Islander in order to better attend to the real needs of our students and communities.

One of the commonly felt experiences of Asian Americans is that of being invisible or erased. The model minority myth means that neither our historical struggles nor activism tend to be covered in schools and classrooms. The significant underrepresentation of Asian American educators furthers this problem. Asian American and Pacific Islander history has been a part of American history for centuries. Use this as a starting point, but do not limit your conscious inclusion of AAPI people and experiences to a single month.

Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders comprise the fastest-growing ethnic group in the United States. We must make a conscious effort to represent these stories and people in our classrooms, regardless of our own identities and those of our students. There may be names and examples in this piece with which you were unfamiliar. Say the name of Vincent Chin. Teach your students about Ela Bhatt.

Research Supreme Court cases like U. Bhagat Singh Thind and Lum v. Dive into data to help understand the collective and individual experiences of various AAPI groups. Check your own biases and assumptions. Do not let a student like me slip through the cracks because you expect her to be smarter or more studious than her classmates. Our work has evolved in the last 30 years, from reducing prejudice to tackling systemic injustice. It does real damage. Sarah-SoonLing Blackburn.

March 21, Like all stereotypes, the model minority myth erases the differences among individuals. To acknowledge this reality is far too disturbing for many Americans, who resort to blaming Asians as a simpler answer.

Asian Americans have not forgotten this anti-Asian history, and yet many have hoped that it was behind them.

And is there anything more American than joining the police? Did Tou Thao think he was proving his belonging by becoming a cop? None of these efforts have prevented the stubborn persistence of anti-Asian racism.

Calling for more sacrifices simply reiterates the sense that Asian Americans are not American and must constantly prove an Americanness that should not need to be proven. Japanese Americans had to prove their Americanness during World War II by fighting against Germans and Japanese while their families were incarcerated, but German and Italian Americans never had to prove their Americanness to the same extent.

German and Italian Americans were selectively imprisoned for suspected or actual disloyalty, while Japanese Americans were incarcerated en masse, their race marking them as un-American. Asian Americans are caught between the perception that we are inevitably foreign and the temptation that we can be allied with white people in a country built on white supremacy. As a result, anti-Black and anti-brown and anti-Native racism runs deep in Asian-American communities.

Immigrants and refugees, including Asian ones, know that we usually have to start low on the ladder of American success.

But no matter how low down we are, we know that America allows us to stand on the shoulders of Black, brown and Native people. Throughout Asian-American history, Asian immigrants and their descendants have been offered the opportunity by both Black people and white people to choose sides in the Black-white racial divide, and we have far too often chosen the white side. Asian Americans, while actively critical of anti-Asian racism, have not always stood up against anti-Black racism.

Frequently, we have gone along with the status quo and affiliated with white people. And yet there have been vocal Asian Americans who have called for solidarity with Black people and other people of color, from the activist Yuri Kochiyama, who cradled a dying Malcolm X, to the activist Grace Lee Boggs, who settled in Detroit and engaged in serious, radical organizing and theorizing with her Black husband James Boggs.

Kochiyama and Lee Boggs were far from the only Asian Americans who argued that Asian Americans should not stand alone or stand only for themselves. The very term Asian American, coined in the s by Yuji Ichioka and Emma Gee and adopted by college student activists, was brought to national consciousness by a movement that was about more than just defending Asian Americans against racism and promoting an Asian-American identity.

Asian-American activists saw their movement as also being antiwar, anti-imperialism and anticapitalism. Taking inspiration from the Bandung Conference, a gathering of nonaligned African and Asian nations, and from Mao, they located themselves in an international struggle against colonialism with other colonized peoples. Mao also inspired radical African Americans, and the late s in the U. The legacy of the Third World and Asian-American movements continues today among Asian-American activists and scholars, who have long argued that Asian Americans, because of their history of experiencing racism and labor exploitation, offer a radical potential for contesting the worst aspects of American society.

As a result, we often have divergent political viewpoints. While Asian Americans increasingly trend Democratic, we are far from all being radical. What usually unifies Asian Americans and enrages us is anti-Asian racism and murder, beginning with the anti-Chinese violence and virulence of the 19th century and continuing through incidents like a white gunman killing five Vietnamese and Cambodian refugee children in a Stockton, Calif.

The murder of Vincent Chin, killed in by white Detroit autoworkers who mistook him for Japanese, remains a rallying cry. Korean-American merchants suffered about half of the economic damage. Two Asian Americans were killed in the violence. All of this is cause for mourning, remembrance and outrage, but so is something else: the 61 other people who died were not Asian, and the majority of them were Black or brown.

Most of the more than 12, people who were arrested were also Black or brown. In short, Korean Americans suffered economic losses, as well as emotional and psychic damage, that would continue for years afterward.

But they had property to lose, and they did not pay the price of their tenuous Americanness through the same loss of life or liberty as experienced by their Black and brown customers and neighbors. In the aftermath, Koreatown was rebuilt, although not all of the shopkeepers recovered their livelihoods.

Some of the money that rebuilt Koreatown came, ironically, from South Korea, which had enjoyed a decades-long transformation into an economic powerhouse. South Korean capital, and eventually South Korean pop culture, especially cinema and K-pop, became cooler and more fashionable than the Korean immigrants who had left South Korea for the American Dream.

Even if economic struggle still defined a good deal of Korean immigrant life, it was overshadowed by the overall American perception of Asian-American success, and by the new factor of Asian capital and competition. This is what it means to be a model minority: to be invisible in most circumstances because we are doing what we are supposed to be doing, like my parents, until we become hypervisible because we are doing what we do too well, like the Korean shopkeepers.

Then the model minority becomes the Asian invasion, and the Asian-American model minority, which had served to prove the success of capitalism, bears the blame when capitalism fails. Not to say that we bear the brunt of capitalism. While some of us do die from police abuse, it does not happen on the same scale as that directed against Black, brown or Indigenous peoples.

While we do experience segregation and racism and hostility, we are also more likely to live in integrated neighborhoods than Black or Indigenous people. To the extent that we experience advantage because of our race, we are also complicit in holding up a system that disadvantages Black, brown and Indigenous people because of their race. The elite multiculturalism of colored faces in high places is a genteel politics of representation that focuses on assimilation. So long excluded from American life, marked as inassimilable aliens and perpetual foreigners, asked where we come from and complimented on our English, Asian immigrants and their descendants have sought passionately to make this country our own.

But from the perspective of many Black, brown and Indigenous people, this country was built on their enslavement, their dispossession, their erasure, their forced migration, their imprisonment, their segregation, their abuse, their exploited labor and their colonization.

For many if not all Black, brown and Indigenous people, the American Dream is a farce as much as a tragedy. Multiculturalism may make us feel good, but it will not save the American Dream; reparations, economic redistribution, and defunding or abolishing the police might.

When critics use the term model minority myth , they often point out these kinds of disparities as evidence of the range of differences among Asian Americans—disparities and differences that are ignored or obscured through the use of the term model minority and what it implies.

The term model minority is often used in a critical way to reject such stereotypes and other implications of the term. It is especially associated with Asian Americans.

A lot of people call us the model minority, they don't realize that there's many Asians who live below the poverty line," Debra Wong Yang says. This is not meant to be a formal definition of model minority like most terms we define on Dictionary. Feedback We've Added New Words! Word of the Day.