Asian Americans as Model Minorities? A Look at Their Academic Performance

1995 ◽  
Vol 103 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Grace Kao

PMLA ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 123 (5) ◽  
pp. 1752-1756 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louisa Schein ◽  
Ya-Megn Thoj

When the murders at Virginia Tech in spring of 2007 began to be processed, by mainstream media and Asian American commentators alike, in tenuously racial terms as the un/intelligible acts of a Korean American student, Seung-hui Cho, some observers of media racialization recalled the spectacularizations of Chai Soua Vang, the Hmong hunter who killed six white hunters in the woods of Wisconsin in 2004. Were these events likely to be discursively linked, and if so what effect would they produce? Would they destabilize tropes of Asian American men as studious, reserved, effeminate model minorities? Would we see the rise, or the return, of a racial menace in the form of gun-toting, ruthless, killer Asian males, and what would be the fallout? What difference would it make to discursive homogenization that one of the killers was Hmong, a member of a group that has articulated awkwardly if at all with prevailing images of Asian Americans?



2006 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 477-492 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alvin N. Alvarez ◽  
Linda Juang ◽  
Christopher T. H. Liang


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Wong

This thesis investigates the appropriation of Black masculinity by Asian American basketball player Jeremy Lin. Subjecting media coverage to a combination of content analysis and critical discourse analysis uncovers the presence of four appropriative themes of Asianness: (a) the supraethnic viability of Asianness; (b) the necessary defeat of Blackness; (c) the disallowance of anti-Asian sentiment; and (d) the presence of a helpful Black cohort. These themes are themselves given meaning by five racially magnetized frames that position Asian Americans in opposition to Blackness across multiple dimensions: (a) Asian Americans as model minorities; (b) Asian American men as emasculated; (c) Asian Americans as invisible; (d) Asian Americans as forever foreign; and (e) Asian and Black Americans as enemies. The results of this study suggest that Asian American men benefit from the appropriation of Blackness, but that this benefit is contingent upon their ability to uphold heterosexist, white supremacist ideologies. Keywords: Jeremy Lin, basketball, race



2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Wong

This thesis investigates the appropriation of Black masculinity by Asian American basketball player Jeremy Lin. Subjecting media coverage to a combination of content analysis and critical discourse analysis uncovers the presence of four appropriative themes of Asianness: (a) the supraethnic viability of Asianness; (b) the necessary defeat of Blackness; (c) the disallowance of anti-Asian sentiment; and (d) the presence of a helpful Black cohort. These themes are themselves given meaning by five racially magnetized frames that position Asian Americans in opposition to Blackness across multiple dimensions: (a) Asian Americans as model minorities; (b) Asian American men as emasculated; (c) Asian Americans as invisible; (d) Asian Americans as forever foreign; and (e) Asian and Black Americans as enemies. The results of this study suggest that Asian American men benefit from the appropriation of Blackness, but that this benefit is contingent upon their ability to uphold heterosexist, white supremacist ideologies. Keywords: Jeremy Lin, basketball, race



2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Genie Chartier ◽  
Barbara A. Fritzsche


Author(s):  
Nicholas D. Hartlep

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?



Author(s):  
Dany Chheang ◽  
Eric J. Connolly

The collective view of Asian Americans as model minorities is evident with the extensive amount of statistical data showing support for the academic and socioeconomic success of Asian Americans in the United States. This perception, however, often presents an inaccurate portrayal of Asian Americans, in general, as it overlooks many of the difficulties and hardships experienced by Asian American ethnic groups such as Southeast Asians. Within this group, Cambodian Americans are at the highest risk for experiencing socioeconomic hardships, behavioral health problems, substance use disorders, and contact with the criminal justice system, with deportation also being a prevailing issue. Unfortunately, research in this area is scant and contemporary research on Cambodian Americans has several limitations. To begin to address this issue, the present article merges information from existing research on this population from a sociohistorical, criminological, and theoretical standpoint to call for more comprehensive research on Cambodian Americans.



Author(s):  
Madeline Y. Hsu

“Imperialism, immigration, and capitalism” considers the Southeast Asians who entered the United States between 1975 and 1994, mostly as refugees resulting from theVietnam War. It goes on to review the “model minorities”—the Asians whose outstanding educational and economic performance exceeds that of native-born whites. Greater integration, however, has not protected Asian Americans from continued racialization as foreigners, and struggles for greater equality and acceptance continued long after legal discriminations had been lifted. The threat of Asian immigrants has largely dissipated because immigration laws and bureaucracy maintain their numbers at acceptable levels, and those who immigrate mostly convey sufficient economic or political advantages for Americans to feel their admission and settlement are justifiable.



2020 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 368-375
Author(s):  
Grace MyHyun Kim

Scholars have examined the myth of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) as model minorities in education and specifically within mathematics education, yet less is known about how this myth reveals an intersection of race and language that shapes the experiences of AAPIs in the literacy field. In this article, I argue that a monolingual model rooted in nativist ideologies of English is part and parcel of AAPIs’ racialization as model minorities and forever foreigners. Drawing from AAPI and literacy studies as well as autoethnographic insights, I further argue that the positioning of AAPIs in literacy research illustrates its Eurocentric legacy. This Insights article seeks to raise awareness of a racialized native speaker ethos of literacy research and education, and to call for more literacy research on AAPIs—an invisible minority within the field. Implications include expanding notions of literacy with varied and global perspectives through more research with and from multilingual nondominant communities.



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