Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about Bobby and Annie, two of my high school classmates from 30 years ago. They used these American names instead of their given names. Bobby, whose given name I never knew, is of Japanese descent. Annie, whose given name I always knew, is the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants. By any names, they are both Americans, born and bred.
Opinion How the myth of a ‘model minority’ works to divide Americans
July 11, 2023 at 6:30 a.m. EDT
It was the early 1990s, and I wondered why so many Asian American students picked new names. We grew up in North Carolina at a time when elementary school teachers wheeled out big TVs on steel media carts so we could watch college basketball in our classrooms. We could pronounce the name of Duke University’s former coach — Mike Krzyzewski — before we could tie our shoes. If we could say all those consonants, then we could say Annie’s given name. Meanwhile, Black Americans were becoming more creative with their names, and, let me tell you, Ka’Taydreeyah wasn’t changing her name to Kate for anyone.
In this roundabout way, Bobby and Annie taught me about the model-minority myth. Bobby was the smartest kid in physics class, and he’d applied to some of the nation’s most prestigious universities. One of our jealous classmates taunted him ruthlessly about it, especially anytime Bobby didn’t get the highest grade on an assignment. The two bickered constantly, but whenever Bobby started to get the best of him, the other kid would flatly reply: “Hiroshima. Nagasaki.”
Annie sat behind me in French class, and we became fast friends. It wasn’t long before she noticed the college admissions process was stressing me out, and she made it her mission to lift my spirits. We celebrated the good news whenever it arrived, and she took the sting out of the bad when it showed up in a thin standard envelope. After I showed her a rejection letter one morning, she waved it off, saying, “In the Chinese zodiac, you were born in the Year of the Rabbit — the luckiest sign. Something better is coming.” Annie and I reconnected a while back on social media. A few months later, her elderly father was beaten while out for a walk, the victim of a hate crime.
They’ve been on my mind after the Supreme Court’s ruling last week that effectively ended race- and ethnicity-based affirmative action in college admissions. The suit was filed on behalf of Asian American students who claimed such programs discriminated against them. The term “model minority” does not show up in the court’s opinion — but the myth helps in understanding why affirmative action was destined to pit Asian and Black Americans against one another. It was always going to end this way.
The model minority myth is the idea that Asian Americans, relative to other people of color in the United States, have a stronger commitment to hard work and determination that has resulted in economic and academic success. It says they acculturate better and with more intention. The myth suggests that Bobby and Annie felt compelled to choose familiar American names to ease their acculturation into White American society. But what of the taunting and beating? If this is how the nation treats its model minorities, what hope is there for the rest of us?
This myth is a recent invention. Asian Americans — admittedly an inaccurate catchall group name — were long subjected to discriminatory policies in the United States. Historian Ellen Wu describes the characterization of Asian Americans and immigrants — specifically from Japan and China — through the 1940s and 1950s as definitively not-White. But as the geopolitical interests of the nation evolved after World War II and the civil rights movement domestically took center stage, she says, a narrative emerged that painted Asian Americans as “the model minority — a racial group distinct from the white majority, but lauded as well assimilated, upwardly mobile, politically nonthreatening, and definitively not-Black.”
Perceptions of Asian Americans changed just as the concept of colorblindness was redefined in American discourse. When Asian people were “definitively not-White,” the idea of a colorblind society was the antithesis of the hierarchical society structured with White people at the top. As the civil rights movement began racking up policy wins, Asian Americans were redefined as model minorities and “colorblind” came to mean race is no longer a factor; as such, race-conscious remedies are the new racism.
By the late 1960s, many White politicians were using the model-minority concept in two primary ways. The first was as proof that the government had sufficiently addressed racism in our laws and that the playing field was now level. What else could explain how Asian Americans, after decades of overt discrimination and oppression, achieved such success? The second was an explicit counterargument to civil rights leaders who insisted tailored, race-conscious policies were necessary to address the lingering effects of slavery and Jim Crow. It made Black people the polar opposite of the model minority, shifting the onus for racial disparities almost completely onto Black people and their supposed lack of initiative and ingenuity.
Following this thinking through to its logical conclusion, the Supreme Court’s affirmative action ruling is not surprising. Its portrayal of Asian Americans as model assimilators is not a compliment, nor is it proof that structural racism is an artifact of the past. This portrayal serves only to exploit one minority group, to condemn others and to argue against accounting for a people’s history.
The legal arguments for and against affirmative action in higher education will continue. Universities will try new ways of diversifying their populations, and begrudged people will sue. The model-minority myth is sure to be a weapon in these battles.
But policy aside, the myth cannot escape the particularly ugly set of assumptions that results when American exceptionalism meets racial hierarchy: If you are Black in America, you can become an exceptional person; if you are Asian in America, you are an exceptional people; and if you are White in America, you are the prototype. We’ve been working ourselves away from that America for some time, but we risk returning to it if we trade one set of racialized myths for another.