Even narratives that seem beneficial can actually be harmful.
Take the “model minority” stereotype often applied to Asian Americans. This image hurts everyone. For instance, some white (and other) people have used it to justify their discrimination against other non-white groups. The idea is that if Asians have succeeded in America, why haven’t other racial minorities? There must be something wrong with those other groups, the thinking goes. Because (in some limited ways) they hold Asians up, these groups feel emboldened to keep other minorities down. Weaponizing racial difference in this way is one way of limiting solidarity among non-white groups. But it’s a cheap, fraudulent strategy.
Just one reason it’s fraudulent is that it ignores the United States’ history of preferential, unequal immigration and social policies. It’s simply not true that different groups of Asians, Latinos, Africans, and Europeans started off in America on a level playing field.
To take a recent example of this, diversity immigrant visas were created in the 1980s less for the sake of genuine “diversity,” and more to usher in additional Irish immigrants. This reflected concern that Irish immigrants, who in the course of a century had gone from being scorned to being welcomed, were being overwhelmed by Mexican immigrants. Now, when the Irish are migrating in fewer numbers, there’s talk of ending the diversity immigrant visa program for anti-terrorism reasons.
At different times in American history, different non-white groups have experienced different benefits or harms. To pit one group of recent immigrants against another, and argue that they should all be at the same economic level, is deeply ahistorical.
The “model minority” narrative also assumes that Asian Americans are the same in their level of educational and economic success. But this papers over major differences between, say, Taiwanese Americans and Cambodian Americans. Of the former, about 75% have college degrees. Of the latter, fewer than 15% do. A pan-Asian stereotype is unhelpful here.
History also shows that the model minority stereotype can be easily snatched away. Early news articles about Chinese immigrants to California were positive, commenting favorably on their quiet and orderly behavior. The white masses were happy to see the Chinese as model immigrants as long as the jobs of the Chinese, for instance in laundries, were largely separate. But this changed once Chinese immigrants (along with Latin Americans) started competing with the American-born in the lucrative gold and railroad building trades. This led to race-specific legislation like the 1850 Foreign Miners Tax, along with laws on miscegenation, immigration, and citizenship rights.
The model minority myth, like other racially derived stereotypes, only exists as long as it’s convenient for the group in power. The US saw this with the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, and to some extent in current battles over Asian overrepresentation in universities. It’s also possible that as China becomes a likelier contender for the title of the world’s greatest superpower, this will translate into revisions of the model minority narrative in the US to reflect some Americans’ feeling that this is a threat.
Students protest to keep affirmative action at the University of California at Berkeley. (Photo by ... [+]
Another apparently positive narrative is the “noble savage” view of Native Americans as more heroic and more attuned to nature, which developed in the mid-19th century. It was positive on the surface, but ultimately dehumanizing. The “noble savage” narrative, far from being the brainchild of well-meaning folks, was started by racist British anthropologists in a propagandistic attempt to justify slavery and genocide. In later forms, this stereotype rested on a bizarrely romantic notion of the picturesque “primitivism” of indigenous Americans. It didn’t recognize differences between native American tribes, just as the “model minority” idea doesn’t recognize differences between Asian ethnicities.
These ideas also discount individual achievement and spread an idea of “natural” racial difference that’s both dangerous and false. Asians aren’t inherently hard-working any more than Native Americans are intrinsically gullible.
The single story of race erases class, caste, ethnic, gender, sexuality, ability, and other differences between people of the same non-white racial group. It also doesn’t allow for the complexity of multiple identities, including being multiracial.
Interestingly, positive stereotypes can also be linked to negative stereotypes, in an exhaustingly vicious circle. Duke University psychologist Aaron Kay, who studies stereotyping, has explained that the common trope that Black people are inherently good at sports, which seems straightforwardly complimentary, also implies that physicality, and not intellect, is the natural preserve of a Black person. Besides, certain seemingly positive stereotypes allows those in power to justify their own complacency. For instance, praising a supposedly prototypical “strong black woman” might mean that public officials allocate resources unfairly, if they assume that black women don’t need any support.
Disaggregating data helps to explode myths, such as the familiar one about Asians as the model minority. Peeking beneath the hood at stats for particular ethnicities shows that some are sorely underrepresented in college admissions (and that this is just one reason the story of Asian American success can’t be used as a cudgel in the hysteria over race-based affirmative action). Unsophisticated data also means missing out on fast-growing populations like Tongans in Portland, Oregon. On census forms, some Pacific Islander/Native Hawaiian individuals have been checking “some other race” because they don’t feel represented by “Asian” or other large racial groupings. But knowing the identities of growing groups matters for allocations of federally funded services, for instance.
Separating out groups of African and Caribbean heritage also shows the diversity that exists within the black population in the US, for instance in the dramatic difference between college education levels of Haitian and Nigerian ancestry groups. Stories that treat all Asian Americans or black Americans as simple, monolithic groups are clearly lacking in important nuances.
Characteristics of Selected Sub-Saharan African and Caribbean Ancestry Groups
