It is little wonder why Asian-Americans are perceived by the wider higher education community to be paragons of scholarly success, despite their treatment by the U.S. government, historically, as political pariahs (as seen in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the lawful internment of innocent Japanese-Americans during the early 1940s).
The Asian-American student population supposedly scores off-the-charts on high-stakes college admission tests, such as the SAT. Public perception of Asian-American success is evidenced in the phrase “the Asian invasion” — the notion that Asian-Americans are overrepresented on college campuses. Still, Robert Teranishi, associate professor of higher education at New York University and author of the book Asians in the Ivory Tower: Dilemmas of Racial Inequality in American Higher Education, says, “Despite the perception that Asian-American Pacific Islander students are heavily concentrated in selective universities, the largest concentration of AAPI college enrollment is in community colleges.”
While some in the ivory tower (such as Arthur Sakamoto) endorse the claim that Asian-Americans are successful in higher education, Teranishi’s research under the auspices of the National Commission on Asian-American and Pacific Islander Research in Education (CARE) indicates that this “problem-free” façade is empirically inaccurate. Others who have objectively considered the data, such as Frank Wu, agree. Moreover, Asian-Americans are also believed to have superior mental health despite evidence to the contrary.
The model minority characterization of Asians began largely as a result of William Petersen’s 1966 New York Times Magazine article “Success, Japanese-American Style.” Despite the persistence of this myth nearly fifty years later, it is still not understood well by the higher education community, leaving a false narrative of the Asian-American experience intact.
What does research tell us?
Poring over five decades of research on the model minority stereotype (MMS) while myself conducting research for two forthcoming books, The Model Minority Stereotype: Demystifying Success (2013, Information Age Publishing) and The Model Minority Stereotype Reader: Critical and Challenging Readings For the 21st Century (Cognella Publishing, 2013), I have found that research conducted on the MMS is compelling and conclusive.
First, research reveals that Asian-Americans were intentionally selected to be model minorities. African-Americans could have been constructed to be model minorities, but it was not their fate. Petersen’s 1966 story came about, not because the Asian population was superior to other minorities, but because the U.S. government needed a way to shift negative international attention away from itself. Alison Reiko Loader, a Ph.D. candidate in communication studies at Concordia University in Montreal, wrote an illuminating article on this issue, “We’re Asian, More Expected of Us: Representation, The Model Minority & Whiteness on King of the Hill.” She comments that “the model minority stereotype is not as flattering as it may first appear. The expectation of overachievement diminishes individual accomplishment and diversity amongst people of Asian descent by making them all seem the same. By portraying Asians as successful, it also effectively silences them and conceals racism against them.”
