Model Minority Myth
You are the perfect minority, the model minority, never eager to rock the boat.
You are Asian smart, Asian hardworking, not like the other minorities. Your proximity to whiteness grants you privileges. You are the gold standard minority, the example to other minorities on pulling yourself by the bootstraps.
Like Tou Thao, assisting to uphold the racial status quo you are the perfect minority. Until you are not.
Every so often there is a reminder that even proximity to whiteness does not exempt you from racial bias, toxic racial stereotypes, violence. You are the model minority, but first you are a minority.
What they see is your name, your skin color, your foreign features. You are an other, just like me, forced to do the dance of existing in this racial status quo.
The good minority, the bad minority. It is all tactics to keep us occupied; hating each other, scared of each other. Ensuring an inability to break the chains of this status quo.
But when you weep for your elders, harassed and assaulted in the streets, we weep with you. Reminded of our elders brutalized by the same treatment. When you are gunned down, we fear with you. Reminded of our brothers and sisters’ bullet riddled bodies. When they tell you to go back to your country, we are reminded that we have never been welcome here either.
Your pain is our pain. You are the model minority, but first you are a minority. Subjected to the same existence we experience when you are no longer serving the racial stratification.
The model minority, the label that forces you to bear your struggle alone and in silence. Unwilling to rock the boat, to upset whiteness, you suffer in solitude.
But together we can recognize our collective racial trauma. Your struggle is my struggle. Your pain is my pain. Our enemy is the same, a system built to thrive on our collective oppression.
The good minority, the bad minority, before anything else we are still minorities. Expendable when our purpose is no longer serving the racial stratification.
