The Model Minority Myth, Anti-Asian Racism, and Black Solidarity in the Age of COVID-19
May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, and as it rolls around every year, I ask myself: How do you want to celebrate? In a month where the works and words of Asian American & Pacific Islander (AAPI) people are spotlighted, what do you want to use this heightened platform to say?
The answer to this question remained elusive to me for a long time.
I grew up in a predominantly AAPI community in Los Angeles, where I felt seen and represented by others for the majority of my upbringing. Anyone who has ever been to San Gabriel Valley, endearingly known as the 626, knows that to be Asian is to be part of the culture.
After college, I moved to the deep South to work in education, specifically to be part of a movement for educational equity. I was grateful for my own access to educational opportunity, but I also knew this was not the norm. If it were, then it was only for those who grew up in higher-income neighborhoods. Many schools in low-income neighborhoods are under-resourced. These schools grapple with the high pressure on districts with limited resources to meet the vast educational needs of their students. Because of the intricacies of how race and class are designed to intersect in our country, the majority of students at these schools are often black and brown children. I cannot say I had a firm understanding of the racist mechanisms of our society back then, but I knew the inequitable access to educational opportunity that fell along racial and income lines was wrong.
I mention this experience in a story about APAHM because it fundamentally transformed the way I viewed and understood race in our country, including my own. I am very grateful to my school district and community for allowing me to call the Mississippi Delta my home for those two years. Going from a predominantly Asian area in one of the largest US cities to a rural town of primarily white and black communities was an adjustment, and I am sure there were moments where my new colleagues and friends spent emotional capital educating me. I did learn a lot though. Teaching predominantly black students, I found myself noticing and following social issues in a way I had not before. I saw how underfunded schools were concentrated in neighborhoods of color with fewer tax dollars. I saw how neighborhoods of color were perpetually denied opportunities to narrow the wealth gap in any sort of meaningful way due to economic stagnation and slow job growth in the community. I saw how mass incarceration, the War on Drugs, and realities of police brutality shaped the fabric of communities of color. It became ever clearer to me that America still has yet to reckon with its systematic oppression of black and brown people.
At the same time that I was learning to see the racist structures at play against the black community with increasing clarity, I also lost my understanding of where I fit into the racial constructs of our society. Growing up as an upper-class Asian American, I fit the model minority stereotype. I was not oppressed, I thought. On the contrary, I believed I actually held a lot of privilege. And yet…in spaces where Asian Americans were not the norm, I also experienced quite a bit of “othering.” I knew I did not fully belong through the side glances or the communist spy jokes directed at me. I grew familiar with having to answer where I was from (California), when I learned to speak English (probably as soon as I learned to talk), and when I came to this country (again, born in California). There were other, sometimes more physical interactions I encountered that I will not recall here, but all in all, I felt relatively privileged…tinged with the occasional run-in with racism. So…what did I need to say about my Asian heritage, really? If I was marginalized as a person of color, why did so much of my life point to a picture of “model minority” and general well-being? If I was instead privileged though, why did living in spaces where Asian Americans did not have cultural or political capital make me feel so ashamed of my racial identity? Why did I feel like I was constantly speaking for my people, trying to dispel incorrect notions about who I was based on a cultural stereotype, and operating in ways that would help me avoid attracting attention or being singled out?
Fast forward a few years — I eventually moved to New York City to answer some of those questions about my identity. For the first couple years back in a major metropolitan area with a significant AAPI population, I relished being back in an environment where I could engage with the world in a way that felt culturally significant and connected to my AAPI identity. Eating dim sum in Chinatown every weekend, having access to supermarkets that carried bok choy and handmade dumplings, living with other Asian women who I realized were combatting similar stereotypes of being “submissive” or feeling invisible — those years healed me. I challenged the notions of shame and internalized racism that I had developed while I was living as the “only one.” I instead dove headfirst into becoming an advocate for AAPI communities. I researched the sexual and domestic violence against Asian women who are hypersexualized or assigned a role of submissivity, I saw the lack of AAPI representation in narrow media narratives that only perpetuated stereotypes about our people, I dug deeper into what I identified with as the beauty of neighborhoods like Chinatown — and realized that my sense of pride and perception of beauty stemmed from the resilience of communities that experienced high rates of poverty.
Oh, I could write volumes about AAPI issues and experiences, all right.
And yet…I still struggled to put into words what exactly it was that I wanted people to understand about AAPI identity — at least what it means to me, personally. I felt like I was constantly toggling back and forth between different worlds. Back home in LA, I had a lot of AAPI friends who never talked about race or equity. I probably would have been part of that group, had I never moved to such a different environment after college. In the educational equity and social justice spaces, the majority of my close friends did not identify as AAPI. They were also committed to social justice, but most of our conversations centered around black and white binaries. In New York, I had close AAPI friends who did share similar experiences of marginalization and understood the struggle. I did not have to say the things because they already knew.
So…what did I really want to say? And who did I want to say it to?
Fast forward a few more years. This year, in the age of heightened anti-Asian sentiment as the country grapples with coronavirus, as horrifying videos continue to surface online about the mistreatment of black men while many of us with the flexibility to work remotely see them through the computer screens in our homes, as coronavirus stats are disproportionately and staggeringly high for black communities, I finally know what it is I want to say.
This is a call to my AAPI friends, wherever you are and however much you think or do not think about your own AAPI identity. In honor of APAHM, I want to say this: WE. MUST. STAND. IN. SOLIDARITY. WITH. OUR. BLACK. BROTHERS. AND. SISTERS.
If you are experiencing or seeing any amount of anti-Asian racism in recent months that has you re-thinking the privilege of your AAPI identity, I implore you to lean into this exploration but also do so through the macro lens of the broader racial dynamics in our nation. If you have been accustomed to being the “model minority” prior to this increase in anti-Asian racism, it is because your experiences have been shaped by a myth developed in the 1960s by a sociologist to divide the Civil Rights Movement. That model minority myth was also reinforced through recent changes in American immigration policy that did not repeal the Chinese Exclusion Act until the 1940s, when the US began allowing immigrants of Chinese ethnicity to enter the country up to a highly restrictive quota. In the 1950s, immigration laws shifted again to a points-based system that met quotas using a system of preferences, in part based on skill sets. This 1952 Immigration Act also finally ended the exclusion of other Asian immigrants. Quotas were then loosened further in 1965.
Let that sink in for a moment. For some of you second generation Asian Americans reading this, this country was still barring forms of Asian immigration when your parents were young children, soon to be dreaming about coming to America. Within roughly two decades, Asian and Pacific Islander immigrants transitioned from being seen as dangerous foreigners to your model minority, just as immigration policy began allowing Asian immigrants of particular skill sets. These tactics reinforced the perception of Asian Americans truly being the “model minority” and fueled racism against black people by asking the question, “if Asian Americans could ‘pull themselves up by the bootstraps,’ why couldn’t other communities of color?”
We became conditionally privileged, but that privilege only extended so far as our people could still be checked by the perpetual foreigner narrative. If there is anything we have seen in the past few months, it is that, just as we were given this conditional privilege, we can also have it revoked using the perpetual foreigner tropes that hang over us.
What do I believe about AAPI identity then? At the end of the day, it is a complicated and nuanced answer. Yes, we do experience very real and harmful acts of racism. We endure the othering, we navigate the tightrope of stereotypes in our personal and professional lives, we fear the hate crimes and acts of violence targeting our communities not only in the current COVID-19 climate but also in times of “normalcy.” And simultaneously, yes, we do see many of the conditional privileges that come with the model minority stereotype. For many of us, we generally do not fear the police (I am speaking primarily to an East Asian experience here though), and we may experience the income privileges from having a job that supports this socioeconomic status…as a result of our educational opportunities that stemmed from our access to higher-income communities…or as a result of these predisposed immigration criteria. And yes, we can take joy and pride in our cultural heritage, which can also include the grind of our immigrant generations who have worked hard to give us the lives we hold.
All of those things can be true simultaneously and probably work in conjunction with one another. What is also true is that our entire racial construct is fabricated in the oppression and division of communities of color. While we were being perceived as “hard-working” and being offered economic opportunities, black communities were being perceived as the opposite and having the myth of laziness deny them such. While AAPI communities were less impacted by job or housing access because we were perceived as the “well-behaved” and “successful” model minority, black communities were being labeled as “dangerous,” a trait that was applied as some static, irredeemable character flaw.
The result is that many of us do not have to fear the police, while black people do. We generally do not have fear for our personal safety when walking down the street (sans COVID-19, again speaking primarily to an East Asian experience in many but not all parts of the country), while black people do. We generally do not need to worry about being denied a job offer based on the idea that we are lazy or incompetent, while black people do. When we do enter a workplace, we generally do not need to be wary of whispers about affirmative action, while black people do. And then, for many of us AAPI folks, we can continue on our merry way and continue leading our lives of conditional privilege, living in higher-income neighborhoods with the greater-resourced schools to which we send our children, while the oppression of black people continues.
That is, until xenophobic speech during a pandemic makes us stop and re-think whether we are really as privileged after all. So, to my AAPI people, if you are thinking about COVID-19 and anti-Asian racism, I am calling on us to remember that our racial “privilege” is given to us by others and can be taken away by others. Trying to meet a standard for acceptance and privilege does not work when this standard is a moving target designed to serve the needs of white supremacy.
Instead, we must stand in solidarity with black communities. The privilege and oppression of our groups are intricately linked; as a result, so, too, is our liberation.
