Harvard Student: I am not a “Model Minority”
Bernadette N. Lim, a Harvard student working on degrees in human evolutionary biology and women/gender/sexuality studies, pens a fascinating editorial on being an Asian-American at an Ivy League school.
I am a third generation Asian-American woman at Harvard, and I despise living under the impression that I belong to the “model minority.” For a label that sounds so positive in tone, living under this stereotype has been anything but ideal.
In high school and at Harvard, I have encountered the consequences of living under the model minority myth constantly. My personal and academic achievements are the result of simply “being Asian.” My interests in biology and physics in high school were “typical,” and being stereotyped as “too smart” garnered unwarranted envy and competition from classmates and friends. My achievements weren’t considered the byproduct of hard work; they were simply expected and representative of the Asian-American model minority stereotype.
Many believe that the model minority label allows me to ride on the coattails of my ethnicity, giving me a “one-up boost” ahead of others. Yet to me, the model minority myth has done nothing but strip me of my humanity.
….Perhaps the most poignant repercussion of the model minority label is the assumption that being “Asian” is an automatic guarantor of success, a mark of coming from a “privileged” racial group that has “achieved more and struggled less” than other minority groups. The model minority myth has thus undermined the formation of positive relationships among minority groups by preventing the recognition of the intersection among racial histories. It is more than simple chance that the appearance of the “model minority” term coincided with the rise of the African-American Civil Rights Movement and Chicano Civil Rights Movement. Why don’t we acknowledge this? The model minority myth is a wedge that impedes solidarity, emphasizing differences in socioeconomic outcomes rather than commonality in the historic struggle for civil rights.
By being part of the model minority, I am expected to feel nothing less than gratitude and honor for being labeled through a “positive stereotype.” Yet focus on the upper echelons of the Asian-American population has rendered everyone else invisible. In grouping all Asian Americans as high achievers, avid students, and career climbers, society fails to acknowledge the nuance and disparity. “Asian American” encompasses a diverse range of dialects and ethnicities (and of course, a diverse umbrella of individual, personal, human experiences within those subgroups).
I am not a model minority and never will be. No such thing exists.
Comments
She’s right. You live and work in Asia and you soon learn this because you realize nit everybody is interested in education or schooling.
What is called the “model minority” is actually something like some of the cream rising to the top because of factors such as: personal ambition and hard work, parental ambition pushing the child into hard work, parental money buying the way to good grades and success, parental involvement in education, family view of education as the key to success, love of learning, and so forth.
Most of these are found in homeschooling families. The trend in the rest of America is away from these values. Just look at the parents who complain about too much homework or who are non-participants in their kids’ education unless sports is involved, and sometimes not even then.
Resurrect the value for education in America and watch the “model minority” be just another “minority”.
“Third generation Asian-American”.
I wonder how long it takes to become “American”. Three generations is a long time.
On reflection, I realize that I’m only a third generation American myself. But I’d never thought that anyone was counting; I certainly wasn’t.
So. Are Asians part of the Affirmative Action gravy train? I was under the impression that officialdom had squeezed them out somehow. But they couldn’t very well be models, then.
Of course women are on it, so “Asian-American” women would be, too.
Racism against certain groups is always permitted by the progressive liberals.
The Ivies and many other top schools limit the number of Asian students in order to promote “diversity”. It is to her credit that she did not use this as evidence of racism.
We all know that certain minorities would never pass up the chance to make a claim of racism. Those seem to be the same minorities who regularly assault Asian students solely because they are Asian. Not a front page story?
As I said, racism against certain groups is always permitted by the progressive liberals and the mainstream media promotes it any way they can.