Читать книгу Asian America - Pawan Dhingra - Страница 50

The seeming opposite of the “yellow peril” threat is the “model minority,” the other dominant stereotype of Asian Americans. When not seen as threatening to the nation, Asian Americans are upheld as “out-whiting whites” with their high scholastic achievements, low incarceration rates, residential integration, entrepreneurship, and emphasis on family unity.

This apparently positive portrayal has more going on than a representation of imagined social trends. This stereotype has gained currency because, like all stereotypes, it fits various preconceptions and racialized ideologies. First, it works to denigrate Asian Americans, even as it purports to praise them. The “model minority” is cast as subservient and obedient. While the “model minority” appears highly valorized, s/he remains a foreigner. According to the stereotype, their Asian, often Confucian, upbringing enables their success, rather than other sociological factors often cited for influencing children’s mobility, such as parents’ education level, networks of support, and so on. For this reason, Asian Americans can be successful but not considered assimilated enough to be seen as everyday citizens, much less civic or corporate leaders.

The “model minority” myth works not only to limit Asian Americans but also to uphold dominant ideologies of the United States race relations discussed above. The fact that a minority can achieve in the United States supports the American liberal notion of an open, meritocratic society that does not discriminate against minorities or have imperial ambitions (Bascara 2006). The United States instead is enlightened and color-blind. The stereotype also contributes to a laissez-faire racism, whereby groups have strong cultural proclivities that, rather than structural conditions, shape their place in the racial and economic hierarchies (Bobo and Smith 1998). Within this logic, the fact that Asian Americans as a minority can achieve means that any group can, even African Americans. The “model minority” stereotype gives the credit for a group’s success or failure to its culture, not to its structural conditions (e.g. family income level, degree of forced segregation, historical disfranchisement, etc.). So African Americans and most Latinxs presumably deserve blame for their relative lack of mobility. A quote from a December 1966 issue of US News and World Report illustrates this point: “At a time when Americans are awash in worry over the plight of racial minorities, one such minority is winning wealth and respect by dint of its own hard work . . . not a welfare check” (1966: 6). It is not a coincidence that the “model minority” stereotype became popular during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. At a time when African Americans called out the United States as a racist nation, a counter-discourse of the United States as supportive of minorities was marshaled. The “model minority” demonstrated to the nation and the world that the United States was not racist. The stereotype, in effect, divides minorities, pitting one “good” group against another “bad” group.