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Model minority
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Model minority refers to a minority ethnic, racial, or religious group whose members achieve a higher degree of success than the population average. It is most commonly used to label one ethnic minority higher achieving than another ethnic minority. This success is typically measured in income, education, and related factors such as low crime rate and high family stability. The term is often characterized as a myth
which amounts to racial stereotyping, and that its use may be a political tool and its implications incite jealousy and fighting among ethnic minorities, an example of leveraging majority power dynamics to provoke ill sentiments between minority groups.
In the United States, the term has usually been associated with East Asian Americans and Indian Americans.
A common misconception is that the affected communities usually hold pride in their labeling as the model minority.
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Encyclopedia
Model minority refers to a minority ethnic, racial, or religious group whose members achieve a higher degree of success than the population average. It is most commonly used to label one ethnic minority higher achieving than another ethnic minority. This success is typically measured in income, education, and related factors such as low crime rate and high family stability. The term is often characterized as a myth
which amounts to racial stereotyping, and that its use may be a political tool and its implications incite jealousy and fighting among ethnic minorities, an example of leveraging majority power dynamics to provoke ill sentiments between minority groups.
In the United States, the term has usually been associated with East Asian Americans and Indian Americans.
A common misconception is that the affected communities usually hold pride in their labeling as the model minority. Statistics are often cited to back up their model minority status such as high educational achievement, overrepresentation at Ivy League and other prestigious universities, and a high percentage of Asian Americans working in white collar professions (jobs such as medicine, investment banking, management consulting, finance, and law). Part of the myth is that the Asian American community embraces the model minority label as empowering to their image, implying that Asians are the "model" for other minority demographics to emulate. For example, second generation Chinese American, Frances Kai-Hwa Wang, notes that East Asians should not only accept the model minority stereotype, but embrace it because East Asian educational values are a special legacy of their heritages.
While some Asian Americans hold pride in the model minority image, the consensus in academia and the field of Asian American studies is that the Model Minority Myth is detrimental to the Asian Pacific American community, used to justify the exclusion of needy APA communities in the distribution of assistance programs, public and private, and understate or slight the achievements of APA individuals. Communities that are especially affected are South East Asian communities, e.g. Cambodian-American, and the Pacific Islander community, e.g. persons with origins in Guam and Micronesia; these communities have much lower education rates and higher poverty rates. Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Indian Americans are over twice as likely to attend college than members of other Asian-American groups. The Model Minority myth relies on the aggregation of success indicators, hiding the plight of recent first-generation immigrants under the high success rate of more established Asian communities.
Background
The term "model minority" was coined in the mid-1960s by William Petersen to describe Asian Americans as ethnic minorities who, despite marginalization, have achieved success in the United States.
The purpose was to provide a comparison of capitalist and socialist economies: as capitalism was equated with inequality, particularly in reference to poor African Americans, Asian Americans were chosen as an example of a minority group who could succeed by "merit" alone. writes: "While superficially complimentary to Asian Americans, the real purpose and effect of this portrayal is to celebrate the status quo in race relations. First, by over-emphasizing Asian American success, it de-emphasizes the problems Asian Americans continue to face from racial discrimination in all areas of public and private life. Second, by misrepresenting Asian American success as proof that the US provides equal opportunities for those who conform and work hard, it excuses US society from careful scrutiny on issues of race in general, and on the persistence of racism against Asian Americans in particular."
Asian Americans
Both South and East Asians have made substantial progress in American society. There has been a significant change in the perceptions of East Asian Americans. In as little as 100 years of American history, stereotypes of East Asian Americans have changed to portraying a hard working and educated minority. Asian Americans are spoken of as a 'model minority' group because the group has been argued to be more successful comparatively than other minority groups. In this context, the term Asian Americans (as a model minority) is used primarily to describe the "Big Three" groups of East Asian descent (Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans), although South Asian communities such as the Indian community hold some of the highest rates of educational attainment and economic success. According to the U.S. Census Bureau's Annual 2004 American Community Survey Report, the median household income of Asian Americans is $56,161, higher than the total population's $44,684.
Median Household Income: 2004 . | Ethnicity | Household Income |
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| Asian Indian | $68,771 | | Filipino | $65,700 | | Chinese | $57,433 | | Japanese | $53,763 | | Vietnamese | $45,980 | | Korean | $43,195 | | White | $48,784 | | Total US Population | $44,684 |
Asian Americans make up large portions of many students who have graduated from an elite university (elite university being roughly defined as a school in the Top 40 according to US News and World Report.) According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation's 2003 report Crime in the United States, Asian Americans have the lowest total arrest rates despite a younger average age, and high family stability. Asian Americans have achieved higher Math SAT and higher IQ scores than other groupings even when more socioeconomically deprived.
According to the 2000 U.S. Census, 44% of Asian Americans held Bachelor's degrees or higher, compared to 24% of the general population.http://www.census.gov/prod/2004pubs/censr-17.pdf
Bachelor's Degree or Higher Educational Attainment
| Ethnicity | Percent of Population |
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| Asian Indian | 67.9% | | Chinese | 50.2% | | Korean | 50.8% | | Filipino | 47.9% | | Japanese | 43.7% | | Vietnamese | 23.5% | | Non-Hispanic White | 27.0% | | Cambodian | 9.2% | | Hmong | 7.5% | | Laotian | 7.7% | | Black | 14.3% | | General US Population | 24.4% |
Math SAT scores of relatively poor Asian Americans compare favorably to affluent European Americans, though there are also a high number of very low scores. In the Seattle area, one study published in National Review by Arthur Hu showed that Asian Americans tended to score as well as Whites in the next better suburb. Studies have shown Asian Americans to be, on average, about two years ahead in math ability compared to average, which is also about the same gap observed between nations such as China and Japan compared to the United States. This is despite the fact that Asian Americans have the same school year, and often go to the same urban school systems that serve other minorities. Nationally, Asian Americans tend to get higher grades and have a higher completion rate than whites, and lower rates of discipline, along with lower rates of drug use and premarital sex, entirely inconsistent with the common wisdom that minority status necessarily results in poorer outcomes. Asian Americans still lag on verbal scores because of the predominance of recent immigrants.
South Asian Americans
The model minority label has also included South Asian communities, in particular, Indian Americans, drawn from their disproportionate socioeconomic success. For example, according to the census report on Asian Americans issued in 2004 by the U.S. census bureau, 64% of Indian Americans had a Bachelor's degree or higher, the highest for all national origin groups. In the same census, 60% of Indian-Americans had management or professional jobs, compared with a national average of 33%. Indian Americans, along with Japanese and Filipino Americans, have some of the lowest poverty rates for all communities, as well as one of the lowest rates of single parent households (7% versus the national average of 15%). Indian Americans also earn the highest average income out of all national origin groups. This has resulted in several stereotypes such as that of the "Indian Doctor".
History of discrimination
The success of Asian Americans as a group has occurred despite severe discrimination in the previous century, such as, prior to the 1950s, being stereotyped as cheap, uneducated laborers. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, some Americans feared that the western part of the US would be overrun by the "Yellow Peril," prompting initiatives to reduce immigration from Asia, and during World War II, anti-Japanese paranoia led to thousands of Japanese Americans being held in "internment camps" in the USA. In addition, numerous Asian Americans were recent immigrants or their offspring, since immigration laws had limited Asian immigration prior to the mid 1960s. In the mid 1900s, the Yellow Peril stereotype began to give way to recognition of the racial group's socioeconomic accomplishments.
In addition to East Asians, South Asians have also experienced discrimination while achieving socioeconomic success. The "Yellow Peril" stereotype towards East Asians soon broadened to include new South Asian immigrant groups under the terms Turban Tide and Hindoo Invasion, the first being a reference to the Sikh community and the latter being an archaic spelling of "Hindu", the religion of many South Asians. Although not widespread in modern society, isolated instances of racism have occurred throughout the country, a notable example being the well-known "macaca moment" involving George Allen.
Media coverage
Media coverage of the increasing success of Asian Americans as a group began in the 1960s, reporting high average test scores and marks in school, winning national spelling bees, and high levels of university attendance. One such example is the University of California system. For instance, at the University of California, Berkeley, Asian Americans account for 41% of the undergraduate student body as of 2003, almost four times the proportion of Asian Americans in California (11%). At the University of California, Irvine, the Asian American population is 44% as of 2004. At top high schools, Asian Americans constitute even larger proportions of the student body; over half at Stuyvesant High School and Hunter College High School.
Percent with High School Only and Less than High School Education Attainment by Ethnicity* | Ethnicity | Less than High School Graduate | High School Graduate |
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| Non-Hispanic White | 14.5% | 30.1% | | Black | 27.7% | 29.8% | | Asian | 15.8% | 19.6% | | Chinese | 19.2% | 13.2% | | Vietnamese | 30.0% | 19.1% | | Cambodian | 60.3% | 18.8% | | Hmong | 59.6% | 16.1% | | Laotian | 49.6% | 24.4% | | *of the population age 25 and older |
Possible Causes of Model Minority status
Self-selective immigration hypothesis
One possible cause of the good performance of Asian Americans as a group is that they represent a small self-selected group of Asians because the difficulty of emigrating filtered out many of those not possessing more resources, motivation, or ability.
For example, there are only 3 million Chinese Americans in the United States, and worldwide the total number of overseas Chinese is about 34 million, whereas the total worldwide Chinese population is almost 1.4 billion. Emigration to the United States has always been strictly limited by factors such as the high cost of trans-Pacific transportation, language and cultural barriers, strong racial prejudice against Asians which did not wane until the early 1970s, historical state laws that once prohibited Chinese from working most jobs or owning land, and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which limited Chinese immigration to about 100 individuals per year from 1882 through 1943.
In addition, this self-selection occurs in countries which are themselves rising economically: countries such as Japan,South Korea, Taiwan, the People's Republic of China. Thus, Asian American immigrants generally had high social status in home countries which are themselves rich countries. South Korea and Taiwan count today as developed countries, roughly at the level of European and Japanese development and GDP per capita. However, a large number of Chinese and Japanese Americans are descended from laborers. This means that recent immigrants from countries such as South Korea tend to blend in quickly with the white upper middle class while descendants of earlier immigrants have a much different and more difficult history. The math/science IQs and test scores of those Northeast Asian countries are higher than those of Western European countries and the of the U.S. They tend to perform on par with East Asian Americans.
Whereas the East Asian Americans come from rich countries like Japan, the Asian Tigers, and more recently the People's Republic of China (mainland China), other successful immigrants in the U.S. coming from poor countries in Africa, the Caribbean, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands tend to come from a very small and selective handful of people from those countries.
Moreover, American immigration law holds preference for skilled workers and those with college degrees; as such, many Asian immigrants are well-educated before coming to America and are often in an upper-middle economic bracket. Traditionally and statistically children who have higher-educated parents are more likely to attend college; therefore more emphasis is typically placed on education; this trend is noticeable among White and Black populations as well. It should be noted that income and educational attainment are negatively impacted by affirmative actions for all persons broadly identified as "Asian".
This hypothesis is supported empirically. The sociologist Stephen Klineberg conducted a 1996 study of Asian Americans in Houston, and found that the Asian American population had little upward mobility. Most Chinese emigrated for educational opportunities, while most Indians and Filipinos emigrated for economic and work advantages.
- See also:
Other hypotheses
Cultural differences
Cultural factors are thought to be part of the reason why Asian Americans are successful in the United States. East Asian societies themselves, in general, will often place more resources and emphasis on education. For example, the Chinese culture places great value on work ethic and the pursuit of knowledge. In traditional Chinese social stratification, scholars were ranked at the top — well above businessmen and landowners. This view of knowledge is evident in the modern lifestyle of many Asian American families, where the whole family puts emphasis on education and parents will make it their priority to push their children to study and achieve high marks. Similar cultural tendencies and values are found in South and Southeast Asian families (such as Indian Americans and Filipino Americans, whose children similarly face extra pressure by parents to succeed in school and to achieve high-ranked jobs.
Effects of the stereotype
According to Gordon H. Chang: The reference to Asian Americans as model minorities has to do with the work ethic, respect for elders, and high valuation of family and elders present in their culture. Despite the fact that this concept seems to valorize Asian Americans, it comes with an underlying notion of their apoliticality. Moreover, such a label one-dimensionalizes Asian Americans as having those traits and no other human qualities, such as vocal leadership, negative emotions, or intolerance towards oppression. Asian Americans are labeled as model minorities because they have not been as much of a "threat" to the U.S. political establishment as blacks, due to a smaller population and less political advocacy. This label seeks to suppress potential political activism through euphemistic compliments. (Reference: Asian Americans and Politics: Perspective, Experiences, Prospects by Gordon H. Chang.)
Effects of Model Minority stereotyping
Asian Americans being an economically successful group in the US can create a stereotype as a side effect. Asian Americans may also be commonly stereotyped by the general public as being overly studious, smug, materialistic, arrogant about their academic and professional successes, elitist, brand name conscious, yet paradoxically passive. Recently, due to their cutthroat nature and emphasis on attending prestigious universities, Asians have also been labeled rather pejoratively as "prestige whores" who are more interested in attending elite universities for their brand name rather than their educational value -- which plays into the stereotype that Asians are too brand name conscious.
Some East Asians justify and defend their overly competitive nature and emphasis on prestigious universities and professional jobs on the belief that due to the existence of white privilege, East Asians (as a minority) must overcompensate in order to attain equal to or higher status than whites. East Asians also point out that due to the bamboo ceiling, East Asians need to earn more impressive credentials in order to get managerial positions with higher pay and higher responsibilities. For example, a white person may need to only earn a bachelor's degree from a mediocre state university in order to get a six figure managerial position; for the East Asian, he likely needs to earn a degree from an Ivy League school. The higher expectations placed on East Asians as a result of the model minority stereotype carries over from academics to the workplace.
In some cases this may have the effect of those with learning disabilities being given less attention than they need. As well, the connotations of being a model minority mean that in school, Asian students are often labeled with the unpopular "nerd" or aforementioned "prestige whore" image. Many Asian Americans resent the label of model minority and see it as another attempt to stereotype a minority group.
Asian Americans as a group have a very low crime rate, but a side effect of their success may be a downplaying of the presence of Asian criminal behavior and gangs in several cities, including New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston, and Vancouver as well as in the state of Hawaii. Occasionally however, news of Asian American criminals receives widespread media coverage, such as the infamous Han Twins Murder Conspiracy in 1996, the shooting rampage by physics student Gang Lu at the University of Iowa, Esmie Tseng, an honor student, murdering her mother in 2005, the Virginia Tech Massacre in 2007 committed by Seung-Hui Cho who killed 32 people and wounded another 25 (total of around 57 people), and in 2008, six family members were killed in a murder-suicide by Karthik Rajaram, an unemployed businessman with an MBA in finance who was having financial problems due to the spreading economic crisis in the United States.
Model minority could be a euphemism for the definitive yuppie culture among young adult Asian Americans — particularly for those employed in typical white-collar occupations e.g. medical, law, investment banking, management consulting, and computer science. More recently, the Asian Americans who fit the typical model minority profile (Ivy League-educated, affluent white collar professional) have conscientiously tried to redefine the model minority image from the stereotype of being an emasculated nerd to a stylish, wealthy sugar daddy-type with plenty of money to burn who possesses the latest brand name materials and hangs out at the trendiest hot spots.
In the past few years, there has been a recent trend of highly educated East Asians deciding to forgo medical or graduate school to work for elite firms in Wall Street or Silicon Valley with the hopes of earning lots of fame and fortune at a relatively young age (before age 30). However, many East Asians working as professionals in elite Wall Street firms have been laid off in the aftermath of the recent credit crunch hitting America and the world.
However, despite — or perhaps because of — their success and yuppie mentality, there is a growing presence of Asian Americans (many of whom work at some of America's most prestigious firms and/or graduated from the most prestigious universities) committing white collar crimes. The most prominent example is that of Norman Hsu, a Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania) educated businessman and former campaign donor to Hillary Clinton who was captured after being a fugitive for sixteen years for failing to appear at a sentencing for a felony fraud conviction. Other Asian American white collar criminals who gained media attention include John Huang, Jay Kim, Ed Jew, Henry C. Yuen, and Kyung Joon Kim.
Furthermore, the model minority concept can even be emotionally damaging to Asian Americans, particularly since they are expected to live up to their peers who are part of the model minority. Studies have shown that Asian Americans suffer from higher rates of stress, depression, mental illnesses, and suicide attempts in comparison to other races. The pressures to achieve and live up to the model minority image have taken a mental and psychological toll on Asian Americans.
Arguably, the broad stereotype masks the underperformance of certain Asian communities such as the Vietnamese (including Vietnam born Chinese) and Cambodian communities who have arrived recently.
Asian American status in affirmative action
Because of their high degree of success as a group, some Asian Americans do not benefit from affirmative action policies the way other minority groups do. Some schools choose lower-scoring applicants from other racial groups over Asian Americans in an attempt to promote racial diversity and to maintain some proportion to the society's racial demographics.
Cultural references
- The film Better Luck Tomorrow plays on the model minority stereotype by depicting a group of East Asian American teenagers who use their academic achievements to cover up criminal activities they are involved with.
- In Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, Harold is faced with the stereotype of the intelligent, academically successful and "nerdy" Asian male. Kumar, of South Asian descent and whose father and brother are both medical doctors, denies himself the prospect of going to medical school in defiance of the "Indian doctor" stereotype despite his considerable intellect and knowledge.
Black Immigrants from Africa
According to the London Daily Times "Black Africans have emerged as the most highly educated members of British society, surpassing even the Chinese as the most academically successful ethnic minority." In a side-by-side comparison of 2000 census data by sociologists including John R. Logan at the Mumford Center, State University of New York at Albany, black immigrants from Africa averaged the highest educational attainment of any population group in the U.S., including whites and Asians.
According to an analysis of Census Bureau data by The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, some 48.9 percent of all African immigrants hold a college diploma. This is slightly more than the percentage of Asian immigrants to the U.S., nearly double the rate for native-born white Americans, and nearly four times the rate for native-born African Americans. In an article by Clarence Page for the Chicago Tribune 43.8 percent of African immigrants had achieved a college degree, compared with 42.5 of Asian Americans, 28.9 percent for immigrants from Europe, Russia and Canada and 23.1 percent of the U.S. population. The article beginning with the lines "Do African immigrants make the smartest Americans?" was meant to call attention to the dubiousness of affirmative action.
Similar to the Asian American population, attainment rates vary widely between countries. While some African immigrants to the United States such as Nigerians, Egyptians, and Beninese each have around 59% with bachelors degrees, others come as refugees from places such as Sudan and Somalia have comparatively less stellar statistics 40% and 16% respectively. Out of sub-Saharan Africans, Nigerians have both the largest number of immigrants as well as the highest educational attainment and income statistics. For all African immigrants, their statistics are only slightly edged out by Egyptians.
| Areas | U.S. Population | All Immigrants | African Immigrants | Asian Americans | Europe, Russia & Canada | Latin, South America & Caribbean |
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| Not Fluent in English | 0.6% | 30.5% | 7.6% | 23.4% | 11.5% | 44.0% | | Less Than High School | 17.1% | 39.1% | 12.1% | 17.2% | 23.5% | 57.4% | | College Degree | 23.1% | 23.3 | 43.8% | 42.5% | 32.9% | 9.1% | | Advanced Degree | 2.6% | 4.2 | 8.2% | 6.8% | 5.8% | 1.9% |
SOURCE: 2000 US CENSUS
Other US "Model Minority" groups
Jewish Americans are in some interpretations considered a model minority, but those are the kind of Jewish stereotypes that are held to produce antisemitism or negative feelings about Jewish people. Also Mormons have also been identified as exhibiting model minority characteristics of strong family structure, a more puritanical work ethic and frugal prosperity.
Large numbers of Arab Americans and Iranian Americans are also considered a model minority, due to above average rates of academic and commercial success in the United States despite the wide cultural differences between mostly Islamic and western/non-Islamic countries.
In recent years, more white Americans assumed Native Americans are getting "rich" off Indian gaming operations on Indian reservations across the country, which itself is a new version of the stereotyping against Native Americans who fought for rights to run Indian gaming as part of tribal sovereignty guaranteed by the US government.
In southern Florida, many of the middle- and upper-class descendants of Cuban refugees that fled the Castro revolution are known for their high rates of business ownership and commercial dynamism in the region. Many U.S.-born and U.S-raised Cubans also have college degree attainment rates and income levels that are higher than the U.S. averages.
Other Countries
In the United Kingdom, the Irish, the Jewish, Chinese, Indian, and West African immigrants are often considered to be model minorities.
In some areas of Australia such as Sydney and Melbourne, East Asians, South Asians and Jews are considered a model minority. This is often illustrated by the representation of these groups in selective schools compared to population proportion.
Negatively viewed success
In certain countries, minority groups successful in economic and other measures have attracted the reverse sort of attention. In Indonesia, for instance, ethnic Chinese—a group which historically have achieved prominence in business and economics—have been the target of violence and measures aimed at reducing their share of the economy. In Indonesia, according to official figures the ethnic Chinese constitute only 3-4% of the population, yet according to some (controversial) studies control as much as three quarters of the wealth. In Thailand, the Chinese constitute about only 10% of the population, yet some studies suggest that they control most of that country's top business assets, banks, and conglomerates . Similar statistics have been found in the Philippines and Cambodia as well, despite the fact that they make up less than 5% of those country's populations. The British-descended minority in Zimbabwe and the Jewish community in Russia, often insular and disportionately wealthy as well, have also been the targets of violence and confiscations too, similar to the Chinese in Indonesia. The white, or criollo, descendants of Spanish colonialists in Central and South America also own virtually the entire regions' most lucrative enterprises, despite comprising only a very small percentage of the population (with the exception of the southernmost regions like Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay for instance) against a very large Indian- or African-descended demographic.
See also
External links
- , Stephen Klineberg's systematic survey of Houston's Asian community
- , by C.N. Le, Ph.D.
- , by Andrew Chin
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