Review of The Asian American Achievement Paradox by Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou (original) (raw)

The Model Minority Stereotype: Demystifying Asian American Success

2013

When looking at race-based research, typically you are presented with literature that examines the inequalities and inequities that exist when comparing African Americans and Whites. The Black-White binary is so frequently presented in social scientific research that it is selflimiting insofar as it does not adequately consider the experiences of Asian Americans. It is critical that research moves beyond the BlackWhite binary and includes the experiences of Asian Americans. Fortunately, within the academy and beyond, debates and conversations have emerged regarding what a group of people comprise “the model minority.” Recently a New York Post report identified eight superior “cultural” groups in the United States: Jewish, Chinese, Iranian, Lebanese, Nigerian, Cuban, and Mormon. Many Asian Americans viewed Amy Chua’s report with suspicion because it was interpreted as perpetuating the “model minority” myth. In the Model Minority Stereotype: Demystifying Asian American Success Hartlep...

The Color of Success: Asian Americans and The Origins of the Model Minority

2013

"The Color of Success tells of the astonishing transformation of Asians in the United States from the “yellow peril” to “model minorities”—peoples distinct from the white majority but lauded as well-assimilated, upwardly mobile, and exemplars of traditional family values--in the middle decades of the twentieth century. As Ellen Wu shows, liberals argued for the acceptance of these immigrant communities into the national fold, charging that the failure of America to live in accordance with its democratic ideals endangered the country¹s aspirations to world leadership. Weaving together myriad perspectives, Wu provides an unprecedented view of racial reform and the contradictions of national belonging in the Civil Rights era. She highlights the contests for power and authority within Japanese and Chinese America alongside the designs of those external to these populations, including government officials, social scientists, journalists, and others. And she demonstrates that the invention of the model minority took place in multiple arenas, such as battles over zoot suiters leaving wartime internment camps, the juvenile delinquency panic of the 1950s, Hawai‘i statehood, and the African American freedom movement. Together, these illuminate the impact of foreign relations on the domestic racial order and how the nation accepted Asians as legitimate citizens while continuing to perceive them as indelible outsiders. By charting the emergence of the model minority stereotype, The Color of Success reveals that this far-reaching, politically charged process continues to have profound implications for how Americans understand race, opportunity, and nationhood. "

The Myth of the Model Minority Myth

Sociological Spectrum, 2012

With continued cost increases as well as demands for charitable donations and economic subsidies, universities are concerned with public relations and political legitimacy. The latter are fostered by the Model Minority Myth which implicitly asserts the moral superiority of universities and their graduates by condemning American society in general and the white working class in particular as being racist. Despite its intellectual and empirical limitations, the Model Minority Myth persists because it promotes the political power of universities in the current era of increasing inequality and the rising exploitation of the working class that are fostered by educational credentialism.

Model Minorities and Overcoming the Dominance of Whiteness

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education, 2021

Stereotyping Asian Americans as successful or model minorities is not positive. Instead, it is a form of racist love that reinforces White supremacy. How can a positive stereotype reinforce White supremacy? Because the process of revering Asian Americans as model minorities leads to other groups of people, such as people of color and Indigenous people, being reviled. But if the model minority characterization of Asian Americans is inaccurate, what should curriculum studies scholars do? Disproving a “stereotype” is impossible. Curriculum studies scholars and theorists should not attempt to disconfirm something that is untrue, or something that is racist, but instead should narrate the reality of being Asian American. The model minority stereotype of Asian Americans has been studied and contested over 50 years within the context of the United States. Over these 50 plus years, the model minority stereotype has taken on a transcendent meaning. Overcoming the dominance of Whiteness requires Asian Americans to transcend “positive” stereotypes via critical storytelling. This will require curriculum studies as a field to continue to interrogate: What are the realities of living in racist Amerika for Asian Americans?

Model Minority: Normative Exception and/or Example

Since the 1960s, Asian Americans have been hailed as the model minority of American society. Seen as the exceptional group of immigrants and the example of successful assimilation, they are presumed to have achieved the American Dream and to be free from racialization. This chapter disrupts the idealization of the myth by analyzing the ways it contributes to maintaining social injustice. Grounded in Michel Foucault's (1977) notion of the norm, this analysis demonstrates how an affirmative stereotype that reflects exceptionality and exemplariness fosters and reproduces relations of discrimination and alienation. Butler's (2004) work on vulnerability is used to illuminate how this paradoxical effect of the norm takes place through the structuring of relations between Asian Americans and White mainstream Americans, between Asian Americans and other minorities, as well as among Asian Americans. This chapter challenges the reader to reexamine the myth and to explore ways to transform societal relations.

Questioning the model minority: Studies of Asian American academic performance

The current paper reviews literature on the academic performance of Asian Americans with a critical eye toward understanding the influence of discrimination on this process. Specifically, this study seeks to understand the extent to which researchers have gathered sufficient knowledge to dispel "conventional knowledge" of Asian Americans as model minorities. We questioned the extent to which studies explicitly measured student performance as a product of individual effort and Asian cultural influences, while simultaneously measuring the impact of exposure to discrimination. We present a review of studies on Asian American academic performance published 1990 -2008. Our analysis suggests that social science research has continued to perpetuate the stereotype of Asian Americans as a "model minority." The majority of the reviewed studies did not differentiate among Asian American ethnic and generational groups. These studies also tended to infer culture as an explanation for the high achievement of Asian Americans without examining the impact of sociopolitical factors, such as racial discrimination. In fact, many of the reviewed studies reported that Asian Americans were deficient relative to Whites on attributes thought to be related to culture (e.g., personality characteristics, parenting behaviors) while finding that they achieved academically at levels similar to or higher than Whites. Finally, the majority of these studies have not used culturally appropriate methods to test their hypotheses and research questions. Thus, we recommend that studies embrace emic/population-specific and sociopolitical approaches to understand and explore factors that contribute to academic achievement in this group.