Model Minority: The myth that refuses to fade away

NBC

I don't know where this graduation took  place or how much larger the class was, but it  was used to illustrate an NVC editorial.

I ENCOUNTER this question a lot from non-Asian friends, "What's so wrong about being the model minority?  Sigh!

I remember a time in my second-grade class, the teacher was asking a series of questions and I raised my hand to answer every one of them. I don't know how I knew the answers. I read a lot. I hung out at the library reading all the sci-fi  and the Bobbsey Twins series I could get my hands on. 

I was also curious.

But by the time I had reached 5th grade, I had learned to hold back to let other classmates have an opportunity to answer the questions. The need to "fit-in" clashed with the need to meet with my parents' and teachers' expectations.

The most recent discussion  about the "model-minority myth" started with an Oct. 10 article by New York Times oped columnist Nicholas Kristoff titled "The Asian Advantage." He sums up the model-minority stereotype pretty well.

"It's no secret that Asian-Americans are disproportionately stars in American schools, and even in American society as a whole. Census data show that Americans of Asian heritage earn more than other groups, including whites," Kristoff wrote. "Asian-Americans also have higher educational attainment than any other group."

He cites Confucianism and its emphasis on education that created a culture in which parents are willing to make extraordinary sacrifices to ensure the success of their children in schools.

Not surprisingly, his column got some strong reactions.

"Mr. Kristof heaps praise and wonder on Asian American achievement with little awareness of the damage he does to the community," wrote Khin Mai Aung and Russell Chun in Salon. "While he thinks he cleverly argues against critics who claim that racism is no longer an issue, Mr. Kristof naively reinforces the tired and long debunked noxious notion of the model minority."

It's always dangerous to make sweeping generalizations about a large segment of the human race, when you consider what we describe as "Asian/American" in the United States is actually a lumping together of scores of countries and as many different cultures and dozens of languages.


First off, "Asian American" is more of a political construct to help us navigate through this American social, economic and political environment. It is not a race. A Montagnard from the mountains of Vietnam has little in common with a resident of Bombay, and a Malay fisherman has no connection at all with a Tokyo businessman or a university student from Beijing. A report entitled, "A Community of Contrasts" issued last week by the Asian Americans Advancing Justice Coalition describes how disparate we are.

Another explanation for the apparent success of Asian Americans was made for NBC by Janelle S. Wong is Director of the Asian American Studies Program and Professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park":

"Too many people assume the community's educational and economic success is due to the cultural traits of Asian Americans," wrote Wong. "Like Kristof, they believe Asian Americans care more about education than the average American."

 She points out that prior to 1965, from the early 1900s to mid-century, the stereotype of Asians in America were of stooped labor and as domestic servants. What happened to change that perception? Wong argues that the 1965 Immigration reform act is perhaps a better explanation why Asians stand out academically.

"After 1965, the U.S. started to recruit high-skilled immigrants from Asia. More than half of the Asian-American population immigrated after 1990, when these efforts were ramped up even further. Today, fully 72 percent of all high-skilled visas are allocated to immigrants from Asia. And the majority of international student visas go to Asian immigrants." she writes. 

As this graph indicates, the majority of Asian/Pacific Islanders
do not have higher education.

"This mode of selective recruitment challenges the idea that Asian success in the U.S. is due to Asian values. That is too simple. If Asian cultural values were the explanation, why don't we see the same kind of educational achievement in Asia as in the U.S.? We don't. As Jennifer Lee points out, more than 50% of Chinese immigrants in the U.S. have a bachelor's degree. In China, the rate is about 5%. About 70% of Indian immigrants have a bachelor's degree, while in India, less than 15% of Indians of college-age enroll in college. (India, by the way, has never been a stronghold of Confucian values.)"

This selective recruitment of the "best and brightest" from Asia has may be a strong argument for immigration but like Kristoff, Wong's explanation also reinforces the myth of the model minority.

"U.S. immigration policy creates a highly educated Asian-American class and this group sponsors highly educated family members. And the model minority stereotype is given life. As Kristof states so compellingly, this stereotype takes on a remarkable life of its own," concludes Wong.

"If Asian cultural values were the explanation, why don't we see the same kind of educational achievement in Asia as in the U.S.? We don't. As Jennifer Lee points out, more than 50% of Chinese immigrants in the U.S. have a bachelor's degree. In China, the rate is about 5%. About 70% of Indian immigrants have a bachelor's degree, while in India, less than 15% of Indians of college-age enroll in college. (India, by the way, has never been a stronghold of Confucian values.)"

(I might throw in Filipino-Americans - the vast majority of whom are Roman Catholic - don't fall into this paradigm, either.)

Christopher Kang, national director of  National Council of Asian Pacific Americans (NCAPA), wrote in response. "Our challenges may be different from those faced by other communities of color, but it would be a mistake to assume that even for AAPIs, the age of discrimination is behind us."

Studies by other academics show that Latinos and African/Americans value education as a route to success just as much - if not more - than Asian/Americans.

And -- if you accept the mantle of the "model-minority stereotype," and that Asian/Americans have overcome racism, that raises another interesting discussion why this pool of  talent is not more represented in leadership roles.

Data gathered by the Leadership Education of Asian Pacifics seems to indicate that the "bamboo ceiling" is real. It seems to indicate any "advantage" we have seems to disappear the higher we go in the leadership structure.

Yes, it can be argued that hard work is part of the reason for what some perceive as success, but to conclude that Asian/Americans and Pacific Islanders have overcome the racism embedded in our American culture is a far reach.

By perpetuating the model minority myth by singling out Asian/American successes, we get separatee from other people of color, as if the discrimination they face is something that we don't face - as if BlackLivesMatter doesn't affect the Asian/American Pacific Islander communities.

Kristoff may have written his oped with the best of intentions - to show that despite our academic and economic success, we Asian/Americans still face prejudice and bigotry - but he simply reopened the debate a debate that Asian/Americans and Pacific Islanders may be tired of hearing. Nevertheless, it's an interesting topic that needs further examination. Join in if you want.

RELATED: Educational Success of Some Masks Struggles of Many


RELATED: Report Highlights Higher Education Disparities Within Asian America

Former militant Richard Aoki informed FBI on the Sixties' Asian American activists

The sunglasses became a trademark for the militant Richard Aoki.

IF YOU WERE an Asian American college student in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s, it was difficult not to be affected by what was happening in the area of civil rights that bubbled over to impact all communities of color. 

Out of that cauldron of discontent arose one young man, who was able to bridge the African American civil rights struggle with the then-fledgling Asian American civil rights movement.

Newly released FBI documents obtained by investigative journalist Seth Rosenfeld indicate that Aoki was more active as an informant than initially thought. Read the full story here. 

As the new documents show, Aoki informed on his fellow Asian American activists as well as Black Panther leaders Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, who were his friends. He also gave the FBI information on the Third World Strike and its principle leaders on the UC Berkeley campus.

Aoki met Huey Newton and Bobby Seale at Oakland's community college, Merritt College. Rosenfeld wrote how Aoki  supplied arms and weapons training for the militant Oakland-based Black Panthers. He eventually was named the organization's Field Marshall.

A young Richard Aoki in a confrontation
with police in a demonstration 

According to Rosenfeld's report, besides the Black Panther Party; Aoki provided info to the FBI about the Asian-American Political Alliance; the Young Socialist Alliance; the Socialist Workers Party; the Red Guard, a radical group in San Francisco's Chinatown; and the 1969 Third World Liberation Front strike and several other campus political groups at Cal.

The University of California Berkeley, the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement and the cradle of the students' anti-war movement, may have looked like the center of a pending revolution to our country's intelligence and local law enforcement agencies. At least that's how then Gov. Ronald Reagan viewed them when he sent in the National Guard to restore order on campus.

Coupling the campus unrest with what was happening the streets of Oakland, the FBI's long-time director, J. Edgar Hoover, declared in 1968 that the Panthers, who by now had chapters across the nation, posed “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” 

Based on the new documents, Rosenfeld writes:

"Three of the newly released reports concern the Asian American Political Alliance, a nonviolent civil rights group founded at UC Berkeley in 1968 to oppose racism, the Vietnam War and U.S. “imperialistic policies.”

"The group aimed to break the silence of what its members saw as all-too-conformist Asian American communities. It supported the Black Panthers and other minority 'liberation' groups. The FBI investigated the group as a potential threat to internal security."

Aoki spent his formative years in one of the infamous internment camps for Japanese Americans during WWII, earned his street cred in the streets of Oakland as a gang member and studied at Berkeley. He committed suicide in 2009 by shooting himself in his Berkeley home.

Since his suicide, Aoki's story grew in stature. In a 2009 feature-length documentary film, "Aoki," and a 2012 biography, "Samurai Among Panthers," he is portrayed as a militant radical leader.

It was a surprise - nay, a shock to his friends - when it was revealed in 2012 that Richard Aoki, who was part of the inner circle of the Black Panthers and a leader in the Third World Strike, was an FBI informant.

Hyphen Magazine wrote a four-part series on Aoki after Rosenfeld's 2012 expose. Many of his fellow Asian American activists couldn't believe that the man who was a leader in their organizations  was an informant and came out strongly in defense of a man they considered a friend. One of the reasons he was held in high esteem was because he was one of the few who could link the discrimination faced by Asian Americans with that of the Civil Rights struggle led principally by African Americans.

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George Takei at Fred Korematsu Day Celebration

January 30 is Fred Korematsu Day

IF YOU'RE in the San Francisco Bay Area this Jan. 30, here's an event you might want to attend.

George Takei, best know for his role in the Star Trek television series as Mr. Sulu, is the keynote speaker at a fundraising event for the Fred Korematsu Insititute. Besides being an actor, Takei is a social justice activist in his own right, so its fitting that he speak at an event honoring the civil rights hero.

Many recent immigrants from Asia often forget that many of the rights that they enjoy today are due to the struggles of minorities who were the United States before them. Korematsu is one of those heroes barely known outside of the Asian American community. He saw the injustice of Executive Order 9066, which allowed the internment of 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry during WWII.

Fred Korematsu

From the website of the Fred Korematsu Institute:

Fred T. Korematsu was a national civil rights hero. In 1942, at the age of 23, he refused to go to the government’s incarceration camps for Japanese Americans. After he was arrested and convicted of defying the government’s order, he appealed his case all the way to the Supreme Court. In 1944, the Supreme Court ruled against him, arguing that the incarceration was justified due to military necessity. 

In 1983, Prof. Peter Irons, a legal historian, together with researcher Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga, discovered key documents that government intelligence agencies had hidden from the Supreme Court in 1944. The documents consistently showed that Japanese Americans had committed no acts of treason to justify mass incarceration. With this new evidence, a pro-bono legal team that included the Asian Law Caucus re-opened Korematsu’s 40-year-old case on the basis of government misconduct. On November 10, 1983, Korematsu’s conviction was overturned in a federal court in San Francisco. It was a pivotal moment in civil rights history. 

Korematsu remained an activist throughout his life. In 1998, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, from President Bill Clinton. In 2010, the state of California passed the Fred Korematsu Day bill, making January 30 the first day in the US named after an Asian American. Korematsu’s growing legacy continues to inspire people of all backgrounds and demonstrates the importance of speaking up to fight injustice.

In October last year, MSNBC's Melissa Harris Perry discussed the landmark case:

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