American Dreaming: Hidden Hierarchies and the Model Minority

Part II of APASA’s American Dreaming, an essay series by APASA intern Yusuf Rahman

Downtown Sunnyvale, California, where large communities of undocumented Asian immigrants have settled. Photo taken by Vadim Manuylov, Wikimedia Commons.

It was always interesting to me how many assumptions people would make about me based just off of my race. After I moved between states and began attending a predominantly white high school, I quickly learned that I was one of the few South Asian students around. In this, I often found myself in a position of having to correct the perceptions my peers had of me. For instance, I had to explain to my classmates that I was not, in fact, a foreign exchange student from India that didn’t know English. Many students would be shocked when I couldn’t figure out a geometry problem. Other times, though, I had to defend myself from jokes about being a terrorist.

But one conversation stuck out to me the most. I was talking to a classmate about positive stereotypes of the Asian community, and he raised an immediate question.

“Is that even a bad thing?”

What made this difficult to answer was that, in a way, I wondered whether I or many of my Asian peers had indeed benefited from certain narratives. But then on the other hand, I recalled all the instances of being pointed out as the other, as a threat.

Amidst this confusion, I came across the phrase “Model Minority Myth,” and that’s when everything started to click. A narrative that has existed for years, it touts the inherent success that Asian Americans experience in this country. With much of the Asian community living in suburban parts of the country in upper-middle-class professions, it isn’t an entirely far fetched idea. And yet, the trope misses key aspects of the Asian American experience. It turns our community into a monolith, lumping a continent of over 40 countries into one group.

It’s a topic of conversation that has rightfully received much traffic in recent times. With such diverse experiences among Asian Americans, it is crucial that we don’t generalize with reductive narratives.

This is something that many of my Asian peers—and myself, too—have begun to more strongly acknowledge in recent times. And yet, I often feel the discussion around this trope of model-minority status is framed in the wrong ways. After one year at that high school, I moved schools again, this time to one that was more affluent and located in the suburbs. There, I encountered a far larger, though still small, Asian community. Where I expected to find solidarity, however, I found myself even more out of place. I couldn’t relate to their jokes about their doctor parents, or their experiences of having a Lexus instead of a Mercedes, or their lifestyles of having a nice big house in a gated community. 

I felt more isolated than ever by my very own community. Where I had originally thought that the Model Minority was something furthered by the white majority, I started to question whether we ourselves had become complicit in the trope.

Of course, it is no secret that this myth has contributed to the erasure of Asian experiences. What we miss in these discussions, however, is that amidst assimilation, class status, and internalized racism, we have consequently played into the same white supremacist origins that Model Minority was born out of.

But what is this history in the first place? Pioneered by William Peterson, a professor of sociology at UC Berkeley in the 20th century, the model minority narrative arose at the peak of the Civil Rights Movement as a criticism of other minority groups. His article, titled “Success Story, Japanese American Style,” circulated in the New York Times in January of 1966. In it, he argues, among other things, that Japanese Americans were able to succeed in America because of their quiet obedience of the law.

His words said it all. He wrote, “in such a slum environment, even though surrounded by ethnic groups with high crime rates, [Japanese Americans] have been exceptionally law-abiding.” Especially in reference to Black American, his sentiments forced a wedge between racial groups and placed them into two categories: those who followed the rules, and those who caused problems. In his eyes, Japanese Americans quietly worked hard and adapted to American styles of democracy and education. Consequently, this would erase much of the atrocities that Japanese Americans in particular faced, and also cover up the tragedies that many other Asian ethnic groups would continue to encounter as refugees and exploited workers. 

In one fell swoop, in fact, he declared that such work ethic was “not true … of such ‘nonwhites’ as [Black people], Indians, Mexicans, Chinese and Filipinos.” For William Peterson, there were minorities that could adjust to the proper American way, and those who could not. This idea of assimilation was something I myself was often taught growing up. Our economic survival, we are told, can only come through morphing ourselves into the systems of power around us, whether that means not learning our parents’ languages or spending hours on schoolwork.

Yet it is through the emphasis on assimilation that model minority stories thrive. These stereotypes were more often than not pushed by my own Asian peers whenever it meant being accepted into the majority. At my second, richer high school, my South Asian peers would not hesitate to laugh along when someone called them a calculator or Baljeet. Even more saddeningly, it was these people that would join forces with white individuals to outcast Desi students with long, non-English names and detectable accents

Yes, high school students are not exactly the gold standard for maturity. But such behavior points to a concerning pattern that many of us learn to adopt; that is, being the so-called ‘good’ (read: whitest) minority. I know for me, living in Arizona during high school, this was a struggle I had in an effort to fit in and escape racial harassment. We learn to move into these narratives in order to get by scathe free in America, even at the expense of other members in our own community. 

It’s an uncomfortable reality, but one we must come to terms with, especially when we consider how our actions can further the same white supremacist ideals that gave way to model minority in the first place. The debates surrounding affirmative action from just a few years ago are perhaps some of the most egregious examples of this. Framed as disadvantageous for Asian and White students, such rationale furthered the exact same divides that arose in the 60s. Considering the prevalence of legacy admissions that overwhelmingly benefit white students above all other groups and the fact that Black and Latinx students are still largely underrepresented at elite universities, such conflicts highlight a tendency to distance ourselves from other minorities rather than stand in solidarity.

The truth is, we actively construct hierarchies both outside and inside Asian America. Many of the experiences we share about our community come from the same places of money. Movies like Crazy Rich Asians, for example, were celebrated for putting Asian actors at the center of the screen. And yet, these very stories all tell similar narratives of wealth, and are the ones we continuously choose to praise. Because when we look deeper, there exists a large taboo surrounding economic struggle that comes from our own community.

Take the participation rates in welfare among Asian Americans. Despite facing high poverty rates, it turns out that many Asian Americans do not actually access welfare. As the Urban institute finds, Malaysian Americans had a poverty rate of a whopping 25.1 percent, but only 3.2 percent enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Similarly, Vietnamese Americans received SNAP at a rate of only 3.8 percent, but experienced a poverty rate of 15.3 percent. The picture only gets bleaker from here; only 2.4 percent of Thai Americans received these food stamps despite facing a 16.7 percent poverty rate.   

Upon closer inspection, it appears that such disparities often stem from negative perceptions within the Asian community. In one 2020 study published in the American Journal of Health Promotion, researchers interviewed over 60 Asian American individuals in Los Angeles across 4 key ethnic groups: Tongan, Filipino, Vietnamese, and Chinese regarding their lack of participation in welfare programs they were eligible for. What they revealed was concerning; one participant explained that they felt “sensitive and embarrassed to use CalFresh,” and others shared experiences of being shamed for using benefits by members of their own community. 

Unfortunately, we have contributed to a stigma surrounding poverty, enabling a hierarchy in which many Asian Americans face prejudice and silencing by those with more economic resources. The situation of undocumented Asian immigrants sheds a saddening light on this, for example. Often lower-income and blue collar workers, these communities are among the many that the model minority myth as a whole erases. Though it is not often discussed or represented in media, Asians are actually the fastest growing undocumented population, and in cities like Sunnyvale, California, there are thousands living these quiet lives. Seeking a better life, undocumented Indian immigrants have created restaurants and stores, undertaking service jobs to make ends meet. In other parts of Sunnyvale, many Korean immigrants cram into small apartments after overstaying their visas, in hopes of finding financial stability.

Instead of receiving support in obtaining citizenship, undocumented immigrants are often met with criticisms from their own communities. In a study conducted by Johns Hopkins University, Asian Americans were found to have the lowest support among all groups for creating legal paths to citizenship. When broken down by age, younger Asian Americans are more likely to have a favorable opinion than older ones, but still significantly less likely than other groups.

This has a real impact on marginalized communities. For one, people like those in Sunnyvale feel a sense of shame for their status. In interviews by the New York Times, undocumented Korean Americans revealed that they would keep their immigration status a secret from their friends at church. In other ways, too, many undocumented Asians do not end up accessing key resources like DACA. Of those eligible, only 24 percent of Korean Americans applied, dropping down to 13 percent for Indian Americans and a startling one percent for Vietnamese people.

What we as a community need to recognize is that many of us could have been in these very same positions if we hadn’t had certain strokes of luck in coming here. As I attend a university with immense financial resources, I can’t help but notice the same patterns of superiority and privilege from high school repeating themselves here. What we must understand is that not only is the Asian community in America unique in its diversity, but that we have the chance to form a real coalition and achieve progress for all, not just those with financial privilege. Only by confronting our own biases, however, can we truly realize this.