“Why Can’t You Be More Like Them?”
Asian-Americans, Black Americans, and the “Model Minority Myth”
Eugene Volokh wrote an interesting piece in the Washington Post titled “How Asians Became White.” In the article he responds to critics of Google’s latest employment stats, which reveal that the company is, to absolutely no one’s surprise, predominantly white and male. But, Volokh, argues, these complaints are unfair. First of all, Google’s doing better than average, with only 61% of employees white, in contrast to a national average of 67%. Way to be ahead of the curve Google! He explains that Asians are demographically over-represented at companies like Google and that if people really wanted the tech company to better resemble the nation demographically, it would have to fire many Asians, which of course it would never do. Volokh then explains that critiques like the one made of Google are part of a recent trend of counting Asians as white.
Writes Volokh:
It’s not just that Asians are being treated like whites for purposes of race preferences, with some institutions deliberately setting lower standards (or creating a “plus factor,” which is the same thing) for black and Hispanic applicants than for Asian and white applicants — instead, people sometimes actually call Asians white (mostly unconsciously, I suspect).
To be clear, I agree with many of Mr. Volokh’s points. I also think that as he explains, “calling Asians non-minorities or “even ‘white’ is an error and “a denial to their heritage,” and while he does not say so specifically in this article (though he has written prolifically about it in other places), I also think that current affirmative action policies are discriminatory to people of Asian descent and need to be scrapped (with the caveat that we probably have very different ideas of what a revision would look like). But it’s with the rest of Volokh’s article that I begin to really, vehemently, disagree. According to Volokh, the biggest problem with calling Asians white is that
“Asians have succeeded even though they are a racial minority—this fact deserves to be acknowledged. It redounds to the credit of the many Asians who worked terribly hard against often overwhelming odds. And it’s evidence of the essential fairness of the American capitalist system, which has rewarded this hard work even though many people, including many government officials, tried to penalize it.”
Here Mr. Volokh relies on that old tale that will never die: the model minority myth. The subtext of what Volokh is saying is this: We need to remember that Asians are not white so that anytime someone complains about systemic racism in our country, we can point to Asians as a shining example of how to do it right.
White America looks at Asian success in the States and says exasperatedly to the black and brown, “They suffered racism too and they’re fine! Why can’t you be like them?” Lest you think I exaggerate, examine this quote from a story by U.S. News & World Report in 1966:
“At a time when it is being proposed that hundreds of billions be spent to uplift Negroes and other minorities, the nation’s 300,000 Chinese Americans are moving ahead on their own, with no help from anyone else.”
That many Asians and Asian-Americans have achieved great success by all the conventional measures is undoubtedly true. But to tout the success of many Asians in America as proof of the “essential fairness of the American capitalist system,” is a questionable assertion. The model minority myth is a noxious, persistent lie that is damaging to the Asian-American community, the black American community, and to the American community at large.
1. The Model Minority Myth Focuses on A Group of Asians that Is Very Self-Selecting
There were Asians in America before the Declaration of Independence was signed, but for most of the United States’ history Asian immigration has been tightly controlled by racist and xenophobic immigration and naturalization policies. Most of these policies were finally rescinded by the Immigration Act of 1965, which, among other things, got rid of the ‘National Origins Formula’ that had basically banned Asians from entering the country. The effects of the 1965 Immigration Act cannot be overstated. In 1960, the US Census counted 980, 337 Asians (defined as those of Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Hawaiian or part-Hawaiian heritage), and Asians accounted for just 5% of the foreign-born living in the United States. Now (or at least as of 2010) there are 14.7 million Asians living in America, and over three-quarters of Asian adults are foreign-born.
That over three-quarters of Asian adults in this country are foreign-born is absolutely vital to understanding Asian success in America vis-a-vis other ethnic minorities. As an immigrant group, foreign-born Asians come to America with more education and English proficiency than most other immigrant groups, and are more likely to immigrate with visas from employers in highly specialized fields like engineering and technology. The vast majority of Asians in America today did not have any family in the US before 1965, thus many Asian-Americans families did not grow up with the kind of systemic, government-enforced exclusion that Chinese railroad workers saw in the 1870s or the interned Japanese-Americans saw in the 1940s.
Furthermore, of the foreign-born Asian population, almost half come from just three countries: China, India and the Philippines. Many of the barometers used to tout Asian-American success heavily focus on folks of Chinese and Indian descent. So let’s stop for a minute and think about what it takes to get to America from a place like India or China. These two nations have a combined population of over two billion people! The United States knows this, and subsequently makes legal immigration to the United States from those two countries supremely difficult without advanced skills and/or lots of money. Waitlists to get a visa to the US from China are literally years-long. People of Indian or Chinese descent, the two countries of origin to which much of Asian-American success is contributed, by virtue of simply being in the United States, are coming to America from positions of privilege relative to their counterparts still in India or China.
Thus the comparisons between Asian-Americans, African-Americans, and Hispanic-Americans obscures important truths. The education and socioeconomic status of the majority of Asians who immigrated to the US after 1965 is very different from that of the majority of Latin American immigrants, who tend to come here poorer and less educated, and absolutely and utterly different to the circumstances under which many African-Americans found themselves in the US, who as we all know, did not come here voluntarily at all.
2. The model minority myth obscures current issues (and racism!) the Asian community in America still faces
The model minority myth renders invisible the Asians in America who are not doing so hot. Conservative politicians love to tout lower poverty rates in some Asian communities as examples of success, and it is true that when looked at as a whole, Asian-Americans have lower poverty rates. The story changes when you look at the Asian-American population by national breakdown. While almost seven in ten Indian-Americans ages 25 or older have a college degree, for example, only one quarter of Vietnamese-Americans do. There are still significant levels of poverty among people of Cambodian, Vietnamese, and Hmong descent, many of whom came to the US as a result of conflict in their home countries rather than because of their advanced skills in technology or science. Additionally, many Asian immigrants who might be financially eligible to partake in state or federal welfare programs cannot, because their access to welfare is severely restricted due to their immigrant status.
And even for the successful Asian-American groups, there are still significant barriers and issues that cannot be adequately addressed until this myth dies. Though many Asians in America enjoy considerable success in the business, engineering, and financial services fields, they are still very underrepresented in executive positions, politics and media. Other studies show that when Asian-Americans are perceived to deviate from the traits culturally expected of them, by being assertive or loud, for example, they are more disliked in the workplace. ”Blatantly racist comments and acts against Asian-Americans from the stupid to the tragic and awful are either defended or woefully underreported. Incidents of racial discrimination at work experienced by Asian-Americans are less likely to be reported. Racism against Asians and Asian-Americans is taken less seriously because of this myth.
3. The model minority myth perpetuates white supremacy
In her book, The Color of Success: Asian-Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority, Indiana University Professor Ellen Wu traces the history of this specific myth. She argues that its ascent to dominance occurred at a very particular time in US history, in the 1950s and 60s, when “the failure of the nation to live in accordance with its professed democratic ideals endangered the country’s aspirations to world leadership.” Whereas in the past, it had been politically expedient to enforce blatantly discriminatory law and policy that excluded Asian and black Americans, now it no longer was. In the radical racial restructuring that occurred in the twenty years following the end of World War II, Wu explains, many Chinese and Japanese Americans elites, excluded and Other-ed for so long, jumped at the chance to demonstrate values that would make them “good Americans” and “good citizens,” and that neatly matched the cultural conservatism of White America at the time—reverence for family and education, industriousness, and a “predisposition for harmony and accommodation.”
The more radical elements of the Asian-American community, much like the more radical elements of the black American community, were either outnumbered or co-opted, and this careful and deliberate “re-branding” of Asian-Americans, some of whom only twenty years ago had been held in internment camps and seen as enemies to the state, emerged as the perfect way for (white) America to demonstrate the removal of all structural barriers to success and to situate Asian-Americans as the “model” to emulate. As Wu describes it, Asian-Americans were now “—…a racial group distinct from the white majority, but lauded as well-assimilated, upwardly mobile, politically non-threatening, and definitively not-black.”
I get why the model-minority myth can be so seductive. As a Nigerian-American, I too have been a recipient of certain model-minority tropes. African immigrants, much like Asian immigrants, also tend to come to the US with more education and higher socioeconomic status in comparison to their counterparts still on the continent. And like Asian-Americans, we directly benefit from distinguishing ourselves as much as possible from African-Americans, dominating the black population at private colleges and universities, and reaching prominence in fields like law, engineering, and medicine. It feels good to be seen as accomplished and deserving. Who does not want to be the role model, the perfect kid, the one the parent proudly boasts of to all the other parents?
But ultimately, the model minority myth perpetuates just one thing: white supremacy. We still live in a culture where the vast majority of people calling the shots, the people with the power and the influence—are white. White supremacy, or the confluence of ideas and institutions that safeguard the racial hierarchy, is why even though Asian-Americans exceed whites by many of their own barometers of success, they remain shut out of many positions of power and influence. It explains why private colleges and universities will consistently reduce the number of admitted Asian applicants rather than examine the number of admitted white applicants. It is why many white Americans seriously believe that they are now the primary victims of racial discrimination in the United States.
Those of us who benefit from model minority myths have got to realize the benefits come with very real strings attached. They are not worth it. They silence truth and distort reality. We have got to destroy them.
