Model Minority? No, Thanks [Op-ed]

RaceWire
The ColorLines Blog
Guest Columnist

A Response to February 24th Forbes.com Commentary on Indian Americans: The New Model Minority
by Deepa Iyer

In his February 24th commentary, Jason Richwine presents the “revelation” that Indian American immigrants are the “new model minority” (see “Indian Americans: The New Model Minority”) Using this flawed frame, he then proposes unworkable and divisive immigration policy changes. As a national non-profit organization that works to foster the full civic and political participation of the South Asian community, we find these characterizations to be quite troubling.
Richwine points to the educational and income levels of many Indian Americans (as well as their flair for winning spelling bees) as signs that this ethnic group has reached the highest echelons of success. Such benchmarks belie the truth about the challenges that many Indian Americans face, and create a wedge between Indian Americans and people of color communities.
In reality, Indian Americans, much like other immigrants, have diverse experiences and backgrounds. Indian Americans are doctors, engineers and lawyers, as well as small business owners, domestic workers, taxi drivers and convenience store employees. Community members hold a range of immigration statuses and include naturalized citizens and H-1B visa holders, guest workers and students, undocumented workers and green card holders. Some have access to higher education while others struggle to learn English in a new country. As with all communities, Indian Americans do not come in the same shape and form, and cannot be treated as a monolith.
Another danger with the model minority label is that it creates divisions between Indian Americans and other immigrant communities. Beneath the seemingly positive use of the “model minority” label is a pernicious racist undertone: the purpose, after all, is to compare one set of people with another, and the result is to pit people of color against one another.

Full Editorial: http://www.racewire.org/archives/2009/02/model_minority_no_thanks_oped.html#comments

‘The Myth of the Model Minority’

Inside Higher Ed
July 18, 2008

A new book — The Myth of the Model Minority: Asian Americans Facing Racism (Paradigm Publishers) — challenges the idea that most Asian Americans are relatively untouched by racism or focused on issues related to equity. Based on field interviews nationwide, the book describes the Asian American experience in schools, colleges, the workplace and public discourse. In the section on college, examples include students who have been the victim of ethnic profiling (as Muslims) and the barrage of allegedly harmless jokes (such as UCLA as the acronym for “University of Caucasians Lost among Asians") that students experience. The authors of the book are Rosalind S. Chou, a doctoral student in sociology at Texas A&M University, and Joe R. Feagin, a professor of sociology at Texas A&M. Chou recently responded to e-mail questions about the book’s findings about college students.
Q: Why do you think some college students, many of them self-professed liberals who might not tolerate racist jokes about some groups, not only tolerate but engage in jokes about Asian Americans?
A: There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, as we note in the book, there is a pervasive stereotype that Asian Americans are docile. The history of Asian American resistance to racism is largely left out of the history books and the news media. There is activism, especially concentrated on the West Coast and Northeast, but it’s forgotten or ignored. Secondly, many of our respondents talked how they received either explicit or implicit messages to “let things go” or to “not rock the boat,” further reinforcing that Asian Americans will tolerate racist teasing, whereas other minority groups have been unfairly stereotyped as violent or dangerous. The more visible activism of these other racial minority groups may deter a person from poking fun so publicly. Thirdly, Asian Americans appear to have “made it.” This illusion of being “model minorities” can make it seem “less offensive” to poke fun at a group that is seemingly free of racial oppression.
Q: The book’s section on college opens with examples related to California universities with large Asian populations. Does the treatment of Asian students differ significantly at institutions where they make up smaller shares of the student body?
A: Our respondents shared that they faced racial discrimination regardless of their geographic location. However, those students who attended schools with large Asian/ Asian American populations found that they had access to support. The Asian American students groups were very active on campus, this did not save them from mistreatment but they had a community to surround them The students attending schools with a smaller population of Asian American students did not have those resources so readily available. They still dealt with “model minority” stereotyping and, at times, very violent hate crimes, but the experiences were very similar. [To view the entire article, go to: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/07/18/asian ]

Report Takes Aim at ‘Model Minority’ Stereotype of Asian-American Students

The New York Times
June 10, 2008

By TAMAR LEWIN
The image of Asian-Americans as a homogeneous group of high achievers taking over the campuses of the nation’s most selective colleges came under assault in a report issued Monday.
The report, by New York University, the College Board and a commission of mostly Asian-American educators and community leaders, largely avoids the debates over both affirmative action and the heavy representation of Asian-Americans at the most selective colleges.
But it pokes holes in stereotypes about Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders, including the perception that they cluster in science, technology, engineering and math. And it points out that the term “Asian-American” is extraordinarily broad, embracing members of many ethnic groups.
“Certainly there’s a lot of Asians doing well, at the top of the curve, and that’s a point of pride, but there are just as many struggling at the bottom of the curve, and we wanted to draw attention to that,” said Robert T. Teranishi, the N.Y.U. education professor who wrote the report, “Facts, Not Fiction: Setting the Record Straight.”
“Our goal,” Professor Teranishi added, “is to have people understand that the population is very diverse.”
The report, based on federal education, immigration and census data, as well as statistics from the College Board, noted that the federally defined categories of Asian-American and Pacific Islander included dozens of groups, each with its own language and culture, as varied as the Hmong, Samoans, Bengalis and Sri Lankans.
Their educational backgrounds, the report said, vary widely: while most of the nation’s Hmong and Cambodian adults have never finished high school, most Pakistanis and Indians have at least a bachelor’s degree.
The SAT scores of Asian-Americans, it said, like those of other Americans, tend to correlate with the income and educational level of their parents.
“The notion of lumping all people into a single category and assuming they have no needs is wrong,” said Alma R. Clayton-Pederson, vice president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, who was a member of the commission the College Board financed to produce the report.
“Our backgrounds are very different,” added Dr. Clayton-Pederson, who is black, “but it’s almost like the reverse of what happened to African-Americans.”
The report found that contrary to stereotype, most of the bachelor’s degrees that Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders received in 2003 were in business, management, social sciences or humanities, not in the STEM fields: science, technology, engineering or math. And while Asians earned 32 percent of the nation’s STEM doctorates that year, within that 32 percent more than four of five degree recipients were international students from Asia, not Asian-Americans.
The report also said that more Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders were enrolled in community colleges than in either public or private four-year colleges. But the idea that Asian-American “model minority” students are edging out all others is so ubiquitous that quips like “U.C.L.A. really stands for United Caucasians Lost Among Asians” or “M.I.T. means Made in Taiwan” have become common, the report said.
Asian-Americans make up about 5 percent of the nation’s population but 10 percent or more — considerably more in California — of the undergraduates at many of the most selective colleges, according to data reported by colleges. But the new report suggested that some such statistics combined campus populations of Asian-Americans with those of international students from Asian countries.
The report quotes the opening to W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1903 classic “The Souls of Black Folk” — “How does it feel to be a problem?” — and says that for Asian-Americans, seen as the “good minority that seeks advancement through quiet diligence in study and work and by not making waves,” the question is, “How does it feel to be a solution?”
That question, too, is problematic, the report said, because it diverts attention from systemic failings of K-to-12 schools, shifting responsibility for educational success to individual students. In addition, it said, lumping together all Asian groups masks the poverty and academic difficulties of some subgroups.
The report said the model-minority perception pitted Asian-Americans against African-Americans. With the drop in black and Latino enrollment at selective public universities that are not allowed to consider race in admissions, Asian-Americans have been turned into buffers, the report said, “middlemen in the cost-benefit analysis of wins and losses.” [To read the entire article, go to: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/10/education/10asians.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin ]

For a copy of the report, go to: http://www.nyu.edu/projects/care/reports_pubs.html