The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority

"‘Yellow peril’ is the idea that Asian people, particularly Chinese people, but other East Asian people too, are a threat to America. This threat could be political, racial, epidemiological or religious. But, in general, ‘yellow peril’ is the idea that Asian people are a threat to America’s prosperity and wellbeing. You see this idea in the exclusionist discourses in the 19th century and early 20th century, and especially during periods when there are efforts to show Asia as a competitor to the United States, during World War II, for example, and during the 1980s when American automakers were competing with Japanese automakers. Asians were seen as a threat in the early 20th century but, by the end of the 20th century, they were seen as the good racial minority. This is, of course, crafted in distinction to other racial minorities. This ‘model minority’ status is problematic because it pits Black people against Asian people and it obscures real hardships within Asian America. The reality is that Asian Americans are very bifurcated. There are some very successful, well-to-do Asian Americans and there are a lot of poor Asian Americans, who don’t have education or resources and who are not thriving. The idea that Asian Americans are all successful is a myth and it’s problematic for a wide variety of reasons. Within the category of Asian Americans we have the group that has the highest annual income and the lowest. And we have groups that have really high levels of education and groups that have among the lowest level of education. The language of bifurcation is useful because it helps us remember that people might enter the United States from different entry points. Some people might enter the United States as immigrants from Taiwan who’re seeking a PhD. At the same time, you might have war refugees coming from Laos, with little-to-no formal education. Those are very different migration stories, very different pre-migration experiences and very different entry points into American life, but they are both Asian American stories. STOP AAPI HATE reporting center began collecting data on self-reported incidents in March 2020. Over the past year, they received over 3,800 incidents of anti-Asian, racism, violence, harassment, and discrimination a month. I also work with a team at the University of Michigan that has been tracking incidents, and also Asian Americans’ resistance to racism. What we found is that some of these COVID- related incidents took place as early as January, 2020. So what we’re seeing is Asian-American being scapegoated for the coronavirus. This is not a surprising development. Historically, Asian Americans have been scapegoated during disease outbreaks. During the early 20th century bubonic plague outbreak in San Francisco and LA , Asian Americans experienced racist backlash. During World War II, Japanese Americans were incarcerated. And racist backlash during the 1980s, when the American auto industry was crumbling while Japanese imports were growing, resulted in the killing of Vincent Chin. Consciousness of these reference points continues to make Asian Americans a little bit nervous every time there is some sort of crisis that is associated with Asia. “We’re a country of religious freedom and religious pluralism, but we don’t have a great record of upholding our commitment to those principles in practice” STOP AAPI HATE is doing more than just stamping out hate. It’s seeking to build communities that are safe and inclusive. It’s pursuing a wide array of policy changes that improve the understanding of Asian Americans and their experiences. It’s also a group that is working very much in solidarity with other communities of color. So, there is a lot of effort to promote solidarity with Black Americans, for example, in the context of community problems related to all sorts of things that affect people, violence, poverty, and so on. Every time we think about immigration law, we need an immigration history. We need to think not only about how the United States has been a destination for many people, but how the United States government has made a decision to not allow people in from particular groups. So, those years are critical moments in the history of America becoming a gatekeeping nation. 1882 is the year of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which created an administrative bureaucratic apparatus for excluding and deporting immigrants deemed to be undesirable. It is the year America became, as Erika Lee wrote, a gatekeeping nation. In 1924 we see the explicit creation of racist national quotas that make it almost impossible, with exceptions, for people from Asia to migrate to the United States. It makes most Asians racially ineligible for citizenship. We see the United States engaged in the Second World War and the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans. Many of them were citizens. We see the end of the racist national origins quotas, but the creation of a system that opens up doors to only particular immigrants. At the same time, it imposes numerical restrictions on immigrants from the Western hemisphere. So that has its own set of consequences, including creating increased illegal immigration. 1898, the year the US annexed the Philippines. The colonization of the Philippines and America’s imperial presence is key to understanding Asian American history and culture. Here is one small example: an Asian American women’s group that I’m a part of had a gathering and the food we made together was a dish called ‘spam musubi.’ Spam is a canned American meat associated with American empire. It’s beloved by people in Hawaii, Korea and the Philippines. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter If you look at the broad scope of the 20th century and the imperial presence of the United States in Asia, you see the construction of the idea that the United States is powerful and Asia is submissive. You see lots of American soldiers in places like Korea, Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines having relations with women in those countries. We see the idea of Asian women being submissive, sexual playthings for white men developing in popular culture, in musicals like South Pacific and in films like Full Metal Jacket. You see this idea—that Asia should be submissive to the United States and that Asian women are submissive to white American men—reproduced over and over again. This history endures and shapes how we see Asian American women and what happened in Atlanta."