By Hannah Lui, Editor-in-Chief
Historical Context
The California Gold Rush began in the mid-1800s, inviting the first major wave of Asian immigrants to America. Lured by the promise of fortune in the mines, many Chinese men settled near gold reserves and hoped they’d strike rich.
Their success would not be for nearly a century. Heavy discrimination characterized the first decades of Asian America, a hostility toward unknown, alien languages, foods, and history. Asians were subject to segregation and racialized violence, leading to the creation of Chinatowns and Koreatowns throughout the U.S. They became restaurant owners, mechanics, and laundry retailers. But eventually, the low-wage, blue-collar worker stereotype gave way to the most educated, highest-earning race in America.
Asian prosperity led to the term “model minority.” Respectful, accommodating, and hard-working, they were the ideal citizen. Asian Americans, scholars argued, deserved the financial stability and status of the middle class because they had taken the hand dealt to them and made the most of it. A common explanation for the “model minority” is the (supposedly) superior cultural values of certain minority groups. For example, if you were taught from a young age not to question elders, you might acclimate more quickly to a workforce environment where authority figures demanded your submission.
However, the skills Americans cite as “good work ethic,” like respect and productivity, are fundamental traits needed to simply survive. Most, if not all modern-day cultures advocate for similar behaviors. Therefore, society doesn’t necessarily distinguish cultures by unique values or ideals, but rather in the way those traits are communicated within a community and interpreted by members of others.
That interpretation is our metric of comparison – how the dominant inhabitants of the host country believe its customs and beliefs relate to those of foreigners. So, the White American, dominant not only in population size, but cultural and economic wealth, dictates the acceptance of each minority into our country. And he wants whichever foreign culture he believes approximates his own.
Soon after the term “model minority” debuted, criticism of its stereotyping and statistical inaccuracy arose in magazines, journals, and reports. Under the stereotype, Asian Americans were considered on equal, if not higher footing than White Americans. But White men murdered Vincent Chin as though he were responsible for the decline in the U.S. auto industry. The Ku Klux Klan attacked and forced Vietnamese refugees out of their homes after territory disputes over fishing waters. Clearly, White Americans would not accept Asians into their territory as willingly as they claimed.
Even though the term “model minority” claimed success for Asians as a whole, it could not accommodate the vastly different experiences of the various ethnicities that fell under it. In 1996, 43% of Cambodians lived below the poverty line. Asian Americans also have the largest income inequality gap, with Indian Americans earning nearly three times the average income as Burmese Americans. Today, the Asian community is the most economically divided racial group in the country, with the richest 10% cited as “earning more than 10 times the amount of the poorest 10%.” This evidence led to a new phrase – the “model minority myth” – recognizing the limitations of such generalizations about one race.
The earliest instances of the “model minority” indicate that scholarly reasoning behind the term is inconsistent. My analysis will show how this inconsistency is White America’s rejection of its foundations in systemic oppression.
So-Called “Success Story”
In 1966, sociologist William Petersen published his article “Success Story, Japanese American Style,” in the New York Times, originating the term “model minority.” Petersen analyzes America 20 years post-World War II, where the same Japanese Americans that had suffered forced displacement and extreme involuntary labor in internment camps now enjoyed economic stability.
Japanese American citizens recovered quickly, Petersen argues, for they had proven their military capability and allegiance to the U.S. during the war by serving in the renowned 100th Battalion. They gained the right to naturalization through the Immigration Act of 1952, and by 1960, they had the single highest median number of years of schooling for students aged 14 and over. In Petersen’s words, “Every attempt to hamper their progress resulted only in enhancing their determination to succeed.”
Petersen outwardly rejects the notion that a minority’s success is derived from the immigrant culture’s direct similarity to “the general American culture.” Instead, he justifies their success by Japanese Americans’ ability to retain aspects of Japan’s culture when faced with hardship. Supposedly, when Japanese Americans faced racial discrimination, they bounced back because the culture of their homeland compelled them to. Japanese immigrants could distance themselves from racist attacks and hardship – American hostility was the behavior of a country they belonged to only corporally.
In comparison, African American culture is engrained so deeply in the roots of America, that it is “general American culture.” Without Black Americans, our language, entertainment, arts, and environment would not exist as they do now. Most importantly, it was African American slaves who built America built from the ground up. And so, “A Negro who knows no other homeland, who is as thoroughly American as any Daughter of the American Revolution, has no refuge when the United States rejects him.”
While this interpretation of American history does acknowledge the significant differences between the experiences of Asian and African Americans, it inaccurately considers assimilation as a closed circuit between the minority group and their surroundings. Petersen’s explanation omits historical context that reframes the America in which the “model minority” was born. He does not question why Japanese culture supposedly allows Japanese Americans to thrive in America, nor why African Americans lack the same ties to Africa.
The answer is that White people created the laws and practices responsible for the U.S.’s treatment of minorities – including through its international sphere of influence.
International Relations and Assimilation
If we intend to fully contextualize Petersen’s America, we must also consider its role on the international stage. In pursuit of global power, the United States began its imperial conquests of South America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. Its cultural, political, and economic influence in these territories is responsible for the foreign behaviors referenced in “Success Story.”
Around the same time Europe and the U.S. began scrambling for Africa, Japan entered an era of modernization inspired by American industry and commerciality. A new emperor assumed the throne, marking the start of the Meiji Restoration. Most reforms during this period focused on developing the economy and assuming American pedagogy. Traditional Japanese literature and poetry were replaced with American textbooks. Japanese diplomats met with American politicians to negotiate trade.
One of the first Meiji-era documents shows the level of influence America had on Japanese ideology. Titled “Datsu-A-Ron (On Leaving Asia),” it declared that worldwide Westernization was as contagious as a measles outbreak. Japan, therefore, should accept the inevitable. And it did.
American imperialism in Japan aimed to secure trading ports and boost the United States’ economy; in the process, it completely modernized Japanese practices and turned the country into its own imperial power. This is the Japan that Petersen writes of: a capitalist society whose native culture has been infiltrated and molded by American values. His explanation for the “model minority” becomes transparent: it is easy for an American to credit the cultural integrity of a nation that has been Americanizing for a century.
Petersen claims when Japanese Americans were met with hostility, they acted in accordance with the ways of their homeland. History shows us that Japan believed there was no other way to survive than to accept the onslaught of American influence, so Japanese Americans endured their mistreatment by assimilating further and hoping it would be enough to deflect discrimination.
Petersen does not acknowledge that American imperialism created the closeness between Japanese and American behaviors. If he did, there would be no denying America’s hypocrisy: while assisting Japanese development, America simultaneously occupied, exploited, and colonized Africa.
The White American’s Role in Minority Treatment
In a country labeled the “melting pot” of culture, the existence of a good minority implies that of a bad one.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan served as Assistant Secretary of Labor under President Lyndon B. Johnson. In 1965, he wrote “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” also known as “The Moynihan Report,” which was published by the U.S. Department of Labor, and is widely regarded as one of the most controversial documents of the Civil Rights Movement era.
The report assesses the failure of African Americans to assimilate into a fully American lifestyle. According to Moynihan, the Black family structure differed too greatly from the patriarchal, nuclear, middle-class American family to achieve unassisted success. He claimed that high rates of illegitimacy and divorce, as well as the number of households headed by women, drove Black families into further exclusion and welfare dependency. These “unstable” childhoods then prompted the next generation’s problematic behavioral patterns when they start families – a cycle Moynihan calls a “tangle of pathology.”
The Moynihan Report has been scrutinized by Black activists and liberals for its “victim blaming” and stereotyping of Black families. Yet, again, White Americans are in part responsible for the familial conditions that Moynihan argues prevented Black assimilation.
For example, during the Jim Crow era, Black women were not seen as serious threats to American society, in contrast to Black males, who were the most frequent victims of racially motivated attacks. So, Black females assumed the role of head of the family to support their children – not because of any innate difference between Black and White family dynamics, but because there was a necessity to fill a gap that did not exist in White families.
Sociologist Alphonzo Pinkney’s 1969 essay “The Assimilation of Afro-Americans” details the different forms of assimilation required for the societal integration of a minority. For example, cultural behavior assimilation measures the extent to which minorities change their traditional practices to mimic those of the larger society. “To reduce their human property to a state of total dependence,” slave owners did not allow slaves to practice any form of African culture. However, even though slaves censored the remnants of their native practices, they were never truly allowed to imitate Whiteness. A Black man exerting the same decisive, independent qualities attributed to Whites would be accused of presumption or hostility. Identificational assimilation is achieved through a sense of peoplehood a minority develops with the host society. Pinkney asserts that due to continued oppression, Black people were forced into the role of a “self-conscious minority,” most aware of their Blackness above all other identities. Finally, physical segregation destroyed any opportunity for African American assimilation –Black people did not have any chance of societal desegregation when they were forcibly alienated from Whiteness.
Conclusion
It is not the inherent family structure or culture of each race that causes the difference in their treatment. Instead, it is the White superiority that feeds off inequality to maintain the American power structure.
White scholars fabricate conflicting explanations for the “model minority,” but they cannot have it both ways. Supposedly, assimilation is successful if a minority group retains a cultural connection to their home country. But not too much — minorities should also make sure their culture is suitable to American ideals. Otherwise, who else can they blame but themselves when America receives their Otherness with hostility?
Whites have made it impossible for Black people to meet either of those standards in this country. To induce the complete subordination of Africans, they mass displaced slaves, exploited the continent’s economic dependency, and beat traditional practices out of Black Americans. The subculture that arose out of slavery, distinctly African American, belonged to our country and shaped our existence, but even still, White scholars blamed it for the failed assimilation of Black Americans.
With such a dominant history in America, it makes sense that White people control the narrative – how certain minorities are treated and why. When Whites praise the success of the Asian race, it is not always an innocent appreciation for hard work. Historically, it has been a tool used to shame Black Americans, to say they must not have done enough to avoid being mistreated, and today, it is argued in the Supreme Court as a case against affirmative action. How convenient an excuse it is to draw attention away from the perpetrator of the mistreatment.
Held against a standard of Whiteness, there is no inherently good or bad minority, only those oppressed and those used to justify the oppression. And there is no one left to question the oppressors. Thus, the mercurial, picky, modern American society created the “model minority” myth to conceal its responsibility for black suppression. Every attempt to claim otherwise is a refusal of accountability.