Whether positive or negative in content, stereotypes are hard to erase once they have been etched in our collective memories.
Another dimension of the Zhou and Lee study using data from the IIMMLA survey was the comparison they were able to make between the outcomes of Chinese and Vietnamese immigrants and their 1.5- and second-generation children and the outcomes of Mexicans and their 1.5- and second-generation children. Perhaps not surprisingly, they found that the Chinese children of immigrants exhibited the highest levels of education—as with native-born families, the strongest predictor of a child’s level of education is the parent’s level of education. But they found that Mexican children of immigrants had made the greatest educational advances relative to their parents.
Though more than 55 percent of Mexican immigrant parents did not graduate from high school, this figure dropped to 14 percent within one generation. In essence, the 1.5 and second generation nearly doubled the high school graduation rates of their parents. Moreover the college graduation rate of 1.5 and second-generation Mexicans (18 percent) is far lower than the rate for the Chinese (63 percent), but it is more than double that of their Mexican immigrant fathers (7 percent) and triple that of their immigrant mothers (5 percent). Thus, when we measure attainment intergenerationally rather than cross-sectionally, the children of Mexican immigrants exhibit the greatest educational gains of the three second-generation groups. In this respect, the children of Mexican immigrants are successfully assimilating and doing so rapidly.174
In terms of intergroup relations, the myth of the model minority has served to pit Asian Americans against other groups targeted by racism. The accusing message of the dominant society to Blacks, Latinxs, and Native Americans is, “They overcame discrimination—why can’t you?” Of course, as the research of Zhou and Lee makes clear, any group comparisons that don’t take into account differential starting points are inherently flawed.
In addition, uncritical acceptance of the stereotype has concealed the needs and problems of those Asian ethnic groups in America that have not experienced uniformly high levels of success. While the Asian high school dropout rate is very low overall (2 percent), there are some Asian subgroups that have much higher dropout rates: Bhutanese (37 percent), Burmese (21 percent), Nepalese (11 percent), and Cambodian (6 percent). In general, the high school dropout rate among Southeast Asians (5 percent) is more than double that of the total Asian rate.175 Among eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds, college-going rates also vary across Asian ethnic groups, ranging from 20 percent for Bhutanese young adults to 84 percent for other Southeast Asian (e.g., Indonesian and Malaysian) young adults. In 2013, the total college enrollment rate for Asian eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds was 67 percent.176
Do teachers sometimes overlook the learning needs of Asian students because they assume they don’t need help? For individual students, the stereotype of success may have negative consequences for the quality of instruction they receive. For example, educator Lisa Delpit reports her observation of a five-year-old Asian American girl in a Montessori kindergarten class dutifully engaged in the task the teacher had assigned, placing a number of objects next to the various numerals printed on a cloth. The child worked quietly without any help from the teacher, and when the time was up, she put her work away. Delpit writes, “The only problem was that at the end of the session no numeral had the correct number of objects next to it. The teacher later told me that Cathy, like Asian-American students she had taught previously, was one of the best students in the class.” In this case, the stereotype of good Asian students meant Cathy had not received the instruction she needed.177
Vinh, a Vietnamese student, noted the feedback he gets from his teachers is not always as helpful as he would like, perhaps because it is too positive.
Sometimes, the English teachers, they don’t understand about us. Because something we not do good… like my English is not good. And she say, “Oh, your English is great!” But that’s the way American culture is. But my culture is not like that. If my English is not good, [the teacher] has to say, “Your English is not good. So you have to go home and study.” And she tell me what to study and how to study to get better. But some Americans, you know, they don’t understand about myself. So they just say, “Oh! You’re doing a good job! You’re doing great! Everything is great!” Teachers talk like that, but my culture is different. They say, “You have to do better.” So, sometimes when I do something not good, and my teachers say, “Oh, you did great!” I don’t like it. I want the truth better.178
Asian students in America know that their teachers expect them to excel in math and science, and they may be encouraged to pursue those fields at the expense of other academic interests. Educators Pang, Kiang, and Pak report that Asian Pacific American students often suffer from communication anxiety, feeling inadequate about their writing and speaking ability. This anxiety may contribute to a student’s choice to pursue subject areas, such as math, that require less verbal fluency. In this case, the model-minority stereotype actually serves to restrict their academic options.179
Finding a Voice
Another dimension of the model-minority stereotype is the notion that Asian Pacific Americans are quiet and content with the status quo. Mitsuye Yamada challenges that stereotype in her classic essay, “Invisibility Is an Unnatural Disaster: Reflections of an Asian American Woman.”180 She recounts her experiences teaching the Asian segment of an ethnic American literature course and discovering that her White students were offended by the angry tone of the Asian American writers. Yamada was puzzled by this response, since her students had not been offended by the Black, Chicanx, or Native American writings. When she pressed them for an explanation, they said they understood the anger of Blacks and Chicanxs and empathized with the frustrations and sorrows of the American Indians. But the anger of the Asian Americans took them by surprise. As one student said, “It made me angry. Their anger made me angry, because I didn’t even know the Asian Americans felt oppressed. I didn’t expect their anger.”181
The myth of the model minority obscures the reality of racism in the lives of Asian Pacific Americans and encourages their silence about it. One of my Korean American students wrote about this silence: “When racial comments were said around me I would somehow ignore it and pretend that nothing was said. By ignoring comments such as these, I was protecting myself. It became sort of a defense mechanism.” While denial is a common coping strategy for dealing with racism, when the experiences are too numerous or too painful to be ignored, the silence is broken. Unfortunately, the voices of Asian Pacific American students often fall on deaf ears.
In his essay “We Could Shape It: Organizing for Asian Pacific American Student Empowerment,” Peter Nien-chu Kiang cites examples from urban and suburban schools in Massachusetts in which Asian Pacific American students were frequent victims of racial harassment.182 For example, Thuy, a Vietnamese immigrant, recalled, “When we pass by them they give you some kind of like a dirty look.… They say, ‘Look at that Chinese girl,’ and they call like, ‘Chinks, go back where you belong.’”183
Yet in each case cited by Kiang, school administrators seemed unresponsive. Responding to this indifference, one young Asian American woman said: “It made me realize even more that… no one listens to [Asians]. Like if the African Americans came out and said something, probably the people in the school would have done something, but when the Asians come out, no one really does anything.”184
Out of this context grew a regional youth conference organized by an ad hoc group of adults and teens who initially gathered to discuss how community resources could support Asian Pacific American students confronting racial harassment at school. The result was the Conference for Asian Pacific American Youth, attended by seven hundred students from fifty area high schools. The conference brought together many Asian Pacific American students who had been isolated in their own schools and created a place for them to see themselves reflected in each other and to explore
their identities as Asian Pacific Americans. The power of this process is reflected in Amy’s comments. She recalls her first meeting:
When I first walked in, I swear, I just wanted to turn around and walk right out, I was so intimidated. I’ve never really been in a room with so many Asian students in my age group. I was like, what am I doing here? And then I started coming to the meetings, and I got more involved in it, and I was like, oh my god, you know this is really cool! Asians are cool! [laughs]185
Planning for the conference sessions and workshops introduced the student organizers to older generations of Asian Pacific American activists. The topics they discussed ranged from gangs and media stereotypes to interracial dating, civil rights strategies, and curriculum reform. The opportunity to work with Asian adults was very meaningful because there were no Asian Pacific American teachers in most of the schools they represented. For Amy and others, the conference planning process was a transformative experience not unlike Paul Ongtooguk’s discovery of his Inupiaq history. Said Amy, “I’ve become really proud of who I am and where I come from, and I know that I’ve become stronger. I’m no longer that silent anymore.… I have really found myself.”186
The process of finding oneself in the face of invisibility, silence, and stereotypes is not an easy one. In her analysis of thirty-nine autobiographical narratives written by Asian American adults, Lucy Tse uncovered their struggle to face and name their oppression, then to affirm a positive sense of their identity as Asian Americans.187 Documentary filmmaker Eunice Lau has captured that struggle in a forthcoming (2017) film about Asian American gang members in Atlanta called A-Town Boyz. Lau describes confusion about identity as the common thread in the stories of the young people she encountered in the process of making the documentary.
There’s the big question of this myth of the model minority: we all go to school, we get our straight A’s, and we take a certain path and end up as law-abiding Ivy League college graduates who get white collar jobs.… But the truth is that the majority of our community did not take that path. What happened to those guys who didn’t take the ‘prescribed’ route to success?188
Hoping that her film will broaden the conversation about Asian American identity, Lau is joined in the project by her producer Grace Jung. Jung recalls her own growing-up experience,
Being of a lower middle-class household, both of my parents worked full-time during the week and on Saturdays.… I was often lonely, and in my social circles, I never once felt completely accepted for who I was. I thought I was the only one but as it turns out, feelings of instability and insecurity are typical for many Asian-American kids growing up in the U.S., and the subjects of this film illustrate it for us, along with the choices they’ve made in reaction to that pain.189
Racial Formation and Racial Identity
Asian Pacific Americans, Latinxs, and Native Americans are disparate groups, but they all share with people of African descent the struggle for identity where European heritage—or Whiteness—is defined as the American norm. As social scientists Chan and Hune remind us, the racialization of America has never been simply Black and White. Early European settlers used race-based policies toward Native Americans long before Africans were introduced to this continent. The US government applied race-based discriminatory and exclusionary policies to Mexican residents and Chinese settlers in the Western territories immediately upon contact. The social categories we now use are the legacy of those racial formations.190 Cultural identities are not solely determined in response to racial ideologies, but racism increases the need for a positive self-defined identity in order to survive psychologically.
To find one’s racial or ethnic identity, one must deal with negative stereotypes, resist internalizing negative self-perceptions, and affirm the meaning of ethnicity for oneself.191 If educators and parents wish to foster these positive psychological outcomes for the children in our care, we must hear their voices and affirm their identities at school and at home. And we must interrupt the racism that places them at risk.
Middle Eastern and North Africans (MENAs)
Coming to terms with the social meaning of one’s racial-ethnic-cultural identity in the face of negative stereotyping is a challenging task for all members of marginalized groups, but it may be particularly complex for those who do not fit neatly into standard racial categories. The group of people whose families originate from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are among those who are not neatly categorized. In 2016, the federal government announced a proposal to add a new ethnic category to the US Census form specifically for people of MENA ancestry. Though the proposal must be approved by Congress and would not be in use until the 2020 census, the working MENA classification includes people with origins in Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, or Yemen, as well as those who identify as Amazigh, Berber, Arab, Assyrian, Bedouin, Chaldean, Copt, Druze, Kurdish, or Syriac. Groups that could be added in the future include Turks, Sudanese, Somalis, Afghans, Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Cypriots, Djiboutians, Georgians, Mauritanians, South Sudanese, and Turkish Cypriots.192
As this long list suggests, those whose country of origin is in the MENA region are a very heterogeneous group that is multicultural, multiracial, and multiethnic. Some have historically been identified as “White” in the US, an important designation during the era when US citizenship was for Whites only. Other darker-skinned peoples might have been classified as “Black” or self-identified as “Other.”193 As with the Asian Pacific Americans, there is a tendency to lump those from the MENA region under one umbrella category—Arabs or Muslims—but neither term can be applied across the region with accuracy. Some are Arabs and some are not. Some are Muslims and some are not. Although “Arab” and “Muslim” are often linked together in the popular culture, many Arabs are Christian, and many Muslims are not Arabs.
In fact, the first wave of MENA immigrants came to the United States between 1890 and 1940 from regions now known as Syria and Lebanon. Ninety percent were Christian, with limited education, seeking economic opportunity. These early immigrants seem to have assimilated in their new country with relative ease, recognized by others as White based on their physical appearance.194
The second wave of MENA immigrants began after World War II, following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and revolutions in Egypt and Iraq in the 1950s. Dominated by Palestinians and Muslims with an “Arab identity” from Egypt, Iraq, and Syria, this group consisted of highly educated elites.195 Following the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, the third wave of immigrants came to the US seeking family reunification, education, and employment opportunities and an escape from the war and violence in the MENA region. Many of this cohort of immigrants are Muslim. The growth of the MENA immigrant population has been steady, going from 223,000 in 1980 to slightly more than one million in 2013.196 Approximately 70 percent of the MENA population is from the Middle East and 30 percent from North Africa, and it is concentrated in California, Michigan, and New York.197 It is important to note that while the MENA population is only about one million people (not all of whom are Muslim), the Muslim population in the US is approximately 3.3 million, the majority of whom are US-born. Only a quarter of American Muslims are of Arab descent. Approximately one-third of the Muslim community is African American, one-third is of South Asian descent, and the rest are from all over the world, including a growing Latinx Muslim population.198
The MENA population, whether Arab or not, Muslim or not, has been increasingly impacted by anti-Arab sentiments and “terrorist” stereotyping in the US. For MENA youth, the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, forever known as “9/11,” marked a turning point in how others looked at them and how they looked at themselves in the United States. In his introduction to Growing Up Muslim: Muslim College Students in America Tell Their Life Stories (edited by Andrew Garrod and Robert Kilkenny), Eboo Patel writes: “On the evening
of September 10, 2001, these were sensitive, intelligent young people experiencing adolescent identity issues typical of the children of immigrants who practice a minority faith tradition. Twenty-four hours later, an important part of their identity had been marked as the source of absolute evil.”199
The 9/11 attacks brought a heightened salience to the Muslim aspect of their identities that has been hard for young people to carry. For Zahra, who describes herself as a “black Muslim Somali girl,” 9/11 brought her Muslim identity to the foreground. She was a sophomore in high school then. “We had never realized how vulnerable we were as minorities until 9/11. I always viewed myself as a racial minority, as my being black seemed most significant to others in American society. After the attacks, however, my being Muslim was the characteristic that was most openly challenged and discriminated against.”200
Aly, a Muslim student of Pakistani descent, described his college experience before and after 9/11.
I never felt particularly marginalized as a Muslim student. I had always been vocal on a range of political issues and prided myself on being a political liberal.… After 9/11, however, the comfort zone started to contract. Having an openly Muslim identity in an increasingly hostile public arena is a daunting experience. I have read virulent columns by tenured professors at elite universities attacking Islam as intrinsically violent and hateful. I have sat through lectures at Dartmouth at which my religion has been derided as a dangerous ideology.… I find myself being more and more on the defensive, having to explain why I can be both a part of North American society and a Muslim. It is draining to constantly feel that you have to be on the defensive and to justify who you are, which I am beginning to increasingly resent. These challenges seem relentless, and not always separate or impersonal.201
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