College of San Mateo Week 4 Asian Americans The Model Minority Discussion

  

Description

1. Watch the following video:

2. Read the following article: the file

3. Then, write a discussion board post based on the video and article.

Part 1) write 3-5 sentences explaining, in your own words, the key ideas from the video and article.

Part 2) share an opinion or a personal life experience that relates to the reading, lecture, or video, OR pose a relevant question to your classmate.

When making reference to an idea in the article, or directly quoting the article, make sure to use APA format.

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You’re Asian. How
Could You Fail Math?
CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO
Unmasking the Myth of the
Model Minority
By Benji Chang and Wayne Au
Have you ever sat next to an Asian student in class and
wondered how she managed to consistently get straight A’s
while you struggled to maintain a B-minus average?
—from Top of the Class: How Asian Parents
Raise High Achievers—and How You Can Too
I
Jordin Isip
n January 1966, William Petersen penned an article for The
New York Times Magazine entitled, “Success Story: Japanese
American Style.” In it, he praised the Japanese American community for its apparent ability to successfully assimilate into mainstream American culture, and literally dubbed Japanese Americans
a “model minority”—the first popular usage of the term.
207
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Rethinking Multicultural Education
By the 1980s, Newsweek, The New Republic, Fortune, Parade,
U.S. News and World Report, and Time all had run articles on the
subject of Asian American success in schools and society, and the
Myth of the Model Minority was born. The Myth of the Model
Minority asserts that, due to their adherence to traditional, Asian
cultural values, Asian American students are supposed to be
devoted, obedient to authority, respectful of teachers, smart, good
at math and science, diligent, hard workers, cooperative, wellbehaved, docile, college-bound, quiet, and opportunistic.
Top of the Class (quoted above) is a perfect modern example.
Published in 2005, the authors claim to offer readers 17 “secrets”
that Asian parents supposedly use to develop high school graduates who earn A-pluses and head to Ivy League colleges. It’s a marketing concept built purely on the popular belief in the Myth of
the Model Minority.
However, in both of our experiences as public school teachers
and education activists, we’ve seen our share of Asian American
students do poorly in school, get actively involved in gangs, drop
out, or exhibit any number of other indicators of school failure not
usually associated with “model minorities.”
A critical unmasking of this racist myth is needed because it
both negatively affects the classroom lives of Asian American students and contributes to the justification of race and class inequality in schools and society.
On the most basic level,
the Myth of the Model
Minority masks the
diversity that exists
within the Asian
American community.
Masking Diversity
On the most basic level, the Myth of the Model Minority masks
the diversity that exists within the Asian American community.
The racial category of “Asian” is itself emblematic of the problem.
Asia contains nearly four billion people and over 50 countries,
including those as diverse as Turkey, Japan, India, the Philippines,
and Indonesia.
The racial category of “Asian” is also historically problematic.
Similar to those categories used to name peoples from Africa and
the Americas, the definition of Asia as a continent (and race) and
division of Asians into various nations was developed to serve the
needs of European and U.S. colonialism and imperialism.
The category of Asian gets even fuzzier in the context of the
United States, since there are over 50 ways to officially qualify as an
Asian American according to government standards. Pacific
Islanders and “mixed race” Asians are also regularly squished together
under the banner of Asian or Asian Pacific Islander (which, out of
respect for the sovereignty of Pacific peoples, we refuse to do here).
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Chapter 22: You’re Asian. How Could You Fail Math?
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Masking the Class Divide
The Myth of the Model Minority, however, masks another form
of diversity—that of economic class division. As Jamie Lew
explains in her 2007 book, Asian Americans in Class, there are
increasing numbers of working-class Korean American students
in New York City performing more poorly in schools than their
middle-class counterparts.
Similarly, Vivian Louie found class-based differences in her
study of Chinese American students. Her research indicated that
middle-class Chinese American mothers tended to have more
time, resources, and educational experience to help their children through school and into college than mothers from working-class Chinese American families, who had longer work
hours, lower-paying jobs, and lower levels of education.
These class differences are sometimes rooted in specific
immigrant histories and are connected to the 1965 Immigration
Act. The Act not only opened up the United States to large numbers of Asian immigrants, but, among a handful of other criteria,
it granted preference to educated professionals and those committing to invest at least $40,000 in a business once they arrived.
As a consequence, some Asian immigrants, even those
within the same ethnic community, enter the United States with
high levels of education and/or with economic capital attained in
their countries of origin. Others enter the United States with little or no education or money at all. These educational and financial heritages make an important difference in how well children
gain access to educational resources in the United States.
In other words, whether we are talking about African American, white, Latina/o, indigenous, or “model minority” Asian
American students, the first rule of educational inequality still
applies: Class matters.
Masking Ethnic Inequity
To add to the complexity of Asian American diversity, many of
the class differences amongst Asian Americans also correlate with
ethnic differences. According to the 2000 census, 53.3 percent of
Cambodians, 59.6 percent of Hmong, 49.6 percent of Laotians,
and 38.1 percent of Vietnamese over 25 years of age have less
than a high school education. In contrast, 13.3 percent of Asian
Indians, 12.7 percent of Filipinos, 8.9 percent of Japanese, and
13.7 percent of Koreans over 25 years of age have less than a high
school education.
The Myth of the Model
Minority, however, masks
another form of
diversity—that of
economic class division.
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Rethinking Multicultural Education
These educational disparities are particularly striking considering that, for instance, 37.8 percent of Hmong, almost 30 percent
of Cambodians, and 18.5 percent of Laotians have incomes below
the poverty line (compared to 12.4 percent of the total U.S. population). Indeed, the 2000 census reveals relatively consistent high
education rates and income amongst South Asian, Korean, and
Chinese Americans, and relatively low education rates and low
income amongst Cambodian, Lao, and Hmong Americans. Hence,
the Myth of the Model Minority serves to obscure the struggles of
poor or “undereducated” families working to gain a decent education for their children.
Masking Economic Circumstance
The myth is regularly
One of the most cited statistics proving the Myth of the Model
minority is that Asian Americans even out-earn whites in income.
What is obscured in this “fact” is that it is only true when we compare Asian American household income to white household
income, and the reality is that Asian Americans make less per person compared to whites. Statistically, the average household size
for Asian Americans is 3.3 people, while for whites it is 2.5 people.
Consequently, Asian American households are more likely
than white households to have more than one income earner, and
almost twice as likely to have three income earners. When we take
these issues into account, Asian American individuals earn $2,000
on average less than white individuals.
The statistics on Asian American income are further skewed
upward when we look at the economies of the states where the
majority live. The three states with the highest proportion of Asian
Americans, Hawai’i, California, and New York, all have median
income levels in the top third of states. This means that, regardless
of statistically higher household incomes, the high cost of living in
states with large Asian American populations guarantees that
Asian Americans, on average, are more likely to have less disposable income and lower living standards than whites.
used as a social and
Masking Racism
political wedge against
While the above statistics may be remarkable in the face of the
Myth of the Model Minority, they also point to another serious
problem: The myth is regularly used as a social and political
wedge against blacks, Latina/os, and other racial groups in the
United States.
The racist logic of the model minority wedge is simple. If,
according to the myth, Asian Americans are academically and
blacks, Latina/os, and
other racial groups in the
United States.
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socially successful due to particular cultural or racial strengths,
then lower test scores, lower GPAs, and lower graduation rates of
other groups like African Americans and Latina/os can be attributed to their cultural or racial weaknesses.
Or, as one high school guidance counselor in Stacey J. Lee’s
book, Unraveling the Model Minority Stereotype, puts it, “Asians
like … M.I.T., Princeton. They tend to go to good schools … I
wish our blacks would take advantage of things instead of sticking to sports and entertainment.”
The Myth of the Model Minority also causes Asian American
students to struggle with the racist expectations the myth
imposes upon them. An Asian American high school student in
Lee’s book explains, “When you get bad grades, people look at
you really strangely because you are sort of distorting the way
they see an Asian.”
Unfortunately, some East and South Asian Americans uphold
the myth because it allows them to justify their own relative educational and social success in terms of individual or cultural drive,
while simultaneously allowing them to distance themselves from
what they see as African American, Latina/o, indigenous, and
Southeast Asian American educational failure.
As Jamie Lew observes, the Myth of the Model Minority
“attributes academic success and failure to individual merit and
cultural orientation, while underestimating important structural
and institutional resources that all children need in order to
achieve academically.” In doing so, the Myth of the Model
Minority upholds notions of racial and cultural inferiority of
other lower achieving groups, as it masks the existence of racism
and class exploitation in this country.
The Challenge of Educating Asian America
One of the difficulties of unmasking the Myth of the Model
Minority is that the diversity of the Asian American experience
poses substantial challenges, particularly in relation to how race,
culture, and ethnicity are typically considered by educators.
For instance, Asian American students challenge the categories commonly associated with the black-brown-white spectrum of race. Many Asian American students follow educational
pathways usually attributed to white, middle-class, suburban students, while many others follow pathways usually attributed to
black and Latina/o, working-class, urban students.
Other Asian American groups challenge typical racial categories in their own identities. Pilipinos,1 for instance, don’t quite
211
The Myth of the Model
Minority also causes
Asian American students
to struggle with the
racist expectations the
myth imposes upon
them.
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Asian American students
also challenge typical
notions of immigration
and language by blurring
the typical dichotomies
of native language vs.
English and immigrant
vs. American-born.
fit into the typical categories of South, East, or Southeast Asian,
nor do they quite fit the category of Pacific Islander. Further,
some argue that Pilipinos have a lineage that is more closely
related to Latina/os because they were in fact colonized by Spain.
Consequently, because of their particular circumstances, many
Pilipinos more strongly identify with being brown than anything
else. As another example, many high-achieving, middle-class
South Asians consider themselves “brown,” especially after the
discrimination endured after 9/11.
Asian American students also challenge typical notions of
immigration and language by blurring the typical dichotomies of
native language vs. English and immigrant vs. American-born.
Some Southeast Asian refugees, like those from Laos, may develop
fluency in multiple languages and attend universities, even as their
parents are low-income and do not speak English. On the other
hand, there are groups of Pilipinos who grow up highly Americanized, who have been taught English their whole lives, but who have
some of the highest dropout and suicide rates.
Asian American students also challenge popularly accepted
multicultural teaching strategies because they are often a numerical minority in classrooms, and multicultural teaching strategies
designed to meet the needs of classroom majorities can leave out
the culturally specific needs of Asian American students. These
can include the language acquisition needs of students who come
from character-based languages (e.g., Chinese, Japanese), social
and ideological differences of students from majority Muslim
nations (e.g., Pakistan, Indonesia), and psychological issues that
emerge from student families traumatized by U.S. intervention/war policies (e.g., Korea, Vietnam, Thailand).
From the Fukienese Chinese student in an urban Philadelphia classroom with mostly black or Latino/a students, to the
Hmong student who sits with two or three peers in a mostly
white school in rural Wisconsin, to the Pilipino student in a San
Diego suburb with predominantly Pilipino classmates and some
white peers, Asian American youth do not fit neatly into the typical boxes of our educational system.
Unmasking the Myth in Our Classrooms
Despite the diversity and complexity inherent in working with
Asian American populations, there are many things that educators can do to challenge the Myth of the Model Minority. Similar to other communities of color, effective steps include
recruiting more educators from Asian American backgrounds,
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promoting multilingual communication in instruction and parent involvement, and developing relationships between parents,
community groups, and schools.
Within the classroom, teachers can make use of several strategies to counter the Myth of the Model Minority in their own classrooms. The following list offers a starting point to address the
realities of Asian American students’ lives.
Don’t automatically assume that your Asian American
students are “good” students (or “bad,” for that matter),
and get to know them.
Personally get to know students and their family’s practices,
which widely vary from home to home, despite their “membership” in specific ethnic or linguistic groups. Start by researching
the specific histories and cultures of the students in your classroom to better understand the historical and political contexts of
their communities. Also, bring the lives of all of your students,
Asian Americans included, into your classroom. Have them consider, reflect, and write about how their home lives and experiences intersect with their school lives and experiences.
Develop strategies to personally engage with students and
their communities, whether through lunchtime interactions or
visits to their homes, community centers, and cultural or political
events. While we recognize the limited resources of all teachers,
learning about your Asian American students and their communities takes the same energy and commitment as learning to work
with any specific group of students.
Rethink how you interpret and act upon the silence of Asian
American students in your classroom.
Asian American student silence can mean many things, from
resistance to teachers, to disengagement from work, to a lack of
understanding of concepts, to thoughtful engagement and consideration, to insecurity speaking English, to insecurity in their grasp
of classroom content. Rather than assume that Asian American
student silence means any one thing, assess the meaning of silence
by personally checking in with the student individually.
Teach about unsung Asian American heroes.
Teachers might include the stories of real-life woman warriors Yuri
Kochiyama and Grace Lee Boggs, for instance. Kochiyama has
been involved in a range of efforts, from working closely with Malcolm X in Harlem, to Puerto Rican sovereignty, to freeing political
Bring the lives of all of
your students, Asian
Americans included, into
your classroom.
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prisoners like Mumia Abu Jamal. Boggs’ efforts have included
work with famed Marxist Humanist Raya Dunayevskaya, organized labor, and the Detroit Freedom Summer schools.
Or perhaps teach about Ehren Watada, the first commissioned officer to publicly refuse to go to war in Iraq because he
believes the war is illegal and would make him a party to war
crimes. Learning about heroes like these can help students
broaden the range of what it means to be Asian American.
Schools should challenge
racist caricatures of
Asians and Asian
Americans.
Highlight ways in which Asian Americans challenge racism
and stereotypes.
Schools should challenge racist caricatures of Asians and Asian
Americans, including viewing them as penny-pinching convenience store owners, religious terrorists, kung fu fighting mobsters, academic super-nerds, and exotic, submissive women.
One way to do this is to introduce students to stereotypedefying examples, such as Kochiyama, Boggs, and Watada. There
are also many youth and multi-generational organizations of
Asian Americans fighting for social justice in the U.S. These
include Khmer Girls in Action (KGA, Long Beach), and the
Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence/Organizing Asian Communities (CAAAV, New York).
These organizations are extremely important examples of
how youth can be proactive in challenging some of the issues that
affect our communities, and their work challenges the stereotypes of Asian Americans as silent and obedient.
Illustrate historical, political, and cultural intersections
between Asian Americans and other groups.
There are historical and current examples of shared experiences
between Asian Americans and other communities. For instance,
teachers could highlight the key role of Asian Americans in collective struggles for social justice in the United States. Possible examples include: Philip Veracruz and other Pilipino farm workers who
were the backbone and catalyst for the labor campaigns of Cesar
Chavez and the United Farm Workers in the late 1960s and early
1970s; Chinese students and families who challenged the racism of
public schools in the Lau v. Nichols case of the 1970s that provided
the legal basis for guaranteeing the rights of English language
learners and bilingual education; Asian American college students
who in 1967-69 organized with blacks, Latina/os, and Native
Americans at San Francisco State University in a multiethnic
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struggle to establish the first ethnic studies program in the nation,
united under the banner of “Third World Liberation.”
Weave the historical struggles, culture, and art of Asian
American communities into your classroom.
As part of a curriculum that is grounded in the lives of all of our
students, teachers can highlight Asian American history, culture,
and art in their classroom practices to help Asian American students develop not only positive self-identity, but also empathy
between Asian Americans and other racial, cultural, or ethnic
groups. Teachers might use novels by Carlos Bulosan, John
Okada, Nora Okja Keller, Lê Thi Diem Thúy, Jessica Hagedorn,
Jhumpa Lahiri, or Shawn Wong; poetry by Lawson Inada, LiYoung Li, Marilyn Chin, Nick Carbón, or Sesshu Foster; spoken
word by Reggie Cabico, Ishle Park, Beau Sia, or I Was Born With
Two Tongues; hip-hop music by Blue Scholars, Skim, Native
Guns, Himalayan Project, or Kuttin Kandi; and history texts by
Ron Takaki, Sucheng Chan, Peter Kwong, or Gary Okihiro.
When it comes to dealing with Asian Americans in education, it is all too common for people to ask, “What’s wrong with
the Myth of the Model Minority? Isn’t it a positive stereotype?”
What many miss is that there are no “positive” stereotypes,
because by believing in a “positive” stereotype, as, admittedly,
even many Asian Americans do, we ultimately give credence to
an entire way of thinking about race and culture, one that
upholds the stereotypic racial and cultural inferiority of African
Americans and Latina/os and maintains white supremacy.
The Myth of the Model Minority not only does a disservice
to Asian American diversity and identity, it serves to justify an
entire system of race and class inequality. It is perhaps for this
reason, above all else, that the Myth of the Model Minority needs
to be unmasked in our classrooms and used to challenge the
legacies of racism and other forms of inequality that exist in our
schools and society today.
Endnote:
1. Pilipino is a term used by some activists in the Pilipino American
community as means of challenging the way that Spanish and U.S.
colonization of the islands also colonized the language by renaming
them the Philippines after King Phillip, and introducing the
anglicized “f ” sound which did not exist in the indigenous
languages there.
By believing in a
“positive” stereotype we
ultimately give credence
to an entire way of
thinking about race and
culture, one that upholds
the stereotypic racial and
cultural inferiority of
African Americans and
Latina/os and maintains
white supremacy.

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