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The myth of the Model Minority (discrimination a

"The Myth of the 'Model Minority'"
Excerpted from _STRANGERS FROM A DIFFERENT SHORE_
by Ronald Takaki
pg 474-476

Today Asian Americans are celebrated as America's "model minority."
In 1986, NBC Nightly News and the McNeil/Lehrer Report aired
special news segments on Asian Americans and their success, and a
year later, CBS's 60 Minutes presented a glowing report on their
stunning achievements in the academy. "Why are Asian Americans
doing so exceptionally well in school?" Mike Wallace asked, and
quickly added, "They must be doing something right. Let's bottle
it." Meanwhile, U.S. News & World Report featured Asian-American
advances in a cover story, and Time devoted an entire section on
this meteoric minority in its special immigrants issue, "The
Changing Face of America." Not to be outdone by its competitors,
Newsweek titled the cover story of its college-campus magazine
"Asian-Americans: The Drive to Excel" and a lead article of its
weekly edition "Asian Americans: A 'Model Minority.'" Fortune
went even further, applauding them as "America's Super Minority,"
and the New Republic extolled "The Triumph of Asian-Americans" as
"America's greatest success story."
The celebration of Asian-American achievements in the press
has been echoed in the political realm. Congratulations have come
even from the White House. In a speech presented to Asian and
Pacific Americans in the chief executive's mansion in 1984,
President Ronald Reagan explained the significance of their
success. America has a rich and diverse heritage, Reagan declared,
and Americans are all descendants of immigrants in search of the
"American dream." He praised Asian and Pacific Americans for
helping to "preserve that dream by living up to the bedrock values"
of America -- the principles of "the sacred worth of human life,
religious faith, community spirit and the responsibility of parents
and schools to be teachers of tolerance, hard work, fiscal
responsibility, cooperations, and love." "It's no wonder," Reagan
emphatically noted, "that the median incomes of Asian and Pacific-
American families are much higher than the total American average."
Hailing Asian and Pacific Americans as an example for all
Americans, Reagan conveyed his gratitude to them: we need "your
values, your hard work" expressed within "our political system."
But in their celebration of this "model minority," the pundits
and the politicians have exaggerated Asian-American "success" and
have created a new myth. Their comparisons of incomes between
Asians and whites fail to recognize the regional location of the
Asian-American population. Concentrated in California, Hawaii, and
New York, Asian Americans reside largely in states with higher
incomes but also higher costs of living than the national average:
59 percent of all Asian Americans lived in these three states in
1980, compared to only 19 percent of the general population. The
use of "family incomes" by Reagan and others has been very
misleading, for Asian American families have more persons working
per family than white families. In 1980, white nuclear families in
California had only 1.6 workers per family, compared to 2.1 for
Japanese, 2.0 for immigrant Chinese, 2.2 for immigrant Filipino,
and 1.8 for immigrant Korean(this last figure is actually higher,
for many Korean women are unpaid family workers.) Thus the family
incomes of Asian Americans indicate the presence of more workers in
each family, rather than higher incomes.
Actually, in terms of personal incomes, Asian Americans have
not reached equality. In 1980 the mean personal income for white
men in California was $23,400. While Japanese men earned a
comparable income, they did so only by acquiring more
education(17.7 years compared to 16.8 years for white men twenty-
five to forty-four years old) and by working more hours(2,160 hours
compared to 2,120 hours for white men in the same age category).
In reality, then, Japanese men were still behind Caucasian men.
Income inequalities for other men were more evident: Korean men
earned only $19,200, or 82 percent of the income of white men,
Chinese men only $15,900 or 68 percent, and Filipino men only
$14,500 or 62 percent. In New York the mean personal income for
white men was $21,600, compared to only $18,900 or 88 percent for
Korean men, $16,500 or 76 percent for Filipino men, and only
$11,200 or 52 percent for Chinese men. In the San Francisco Bay
Area, Chinese-immigrant men earned only 72 percent of what their
white counterparts earned, Filipino-immigrant men 68 percent,
Korean-immigrant men 69 percent, and Vietnamese-immigrant menu 52
percent. The incomes of Asian American men were close to and
sometimes even below those of black men(68 percent) and Mexican-
American men(71 percent).
The patterns of income inequality for Asian men reflect a
structural problem: Asians tend to be located in the labor
market's secondary sector, where wages are low and promotional
prospects minimal. Asian men are clustered as janitors,
machinists, postal clerks, technicians, waiters, cooks, gardeners,
and computer programmers; they can also be found in the primary
sector, but here they are found mostly in the lower-tier levels as
architects, engineers, computer-systems analysts, pharmacists, and
schoolteachers, rather than in upper-tier levels of management and
decision making. "Labor market segmentation and restricted
mobility between sectors," observed social scientists Amado Cabezas
and Gary Kawaguchi, "help promote the economic interest and
privilege of those with capital or those in the primary sector, who
mostly are white men."
This pattern of Asian absence from the higher levels of
administration is characterized as "a glass ceiling" -- a barrier
through which top management positions can only be seen, but not
reached, by Asian Americans. While they are increasing in numbers
on university campuses as students, they are virtually nonexistent
as administrators: at Berkeley's University of California campus
where 25 percent of the students were Asian in 1987, only one out
of 102 top-level administrators was an Asian. In the United States
as a whole, only 8 percent of Asian Americans in 1988 were
"officials" and "managers," as compared to 12 percent for all
groups. Asian Americans are even more scarce in the upper strata
of the corporate hierarchy: they constituted less than half of one
percent of the 29,000 officers and directors of the nation's
thousand largest companies. Though they are highly educated, Asian
Americans are generally not present in positions of executive
leadership and decision making. "Many Asian Americans hoping to
climb the corporate ladder face an arduous ascent," the Wall Street
Journal observed. "Ironically, the same companies that pursue them
for technical jobs often shun them when filling managerial and
executive positions."

pg 477-478
Asian-American "success" has emerged as the new stereotype for
this ethnic minority. While this image has led many teachers and
employers to view Asians as intelligent and hardworking and has
opened some opportunities, it has also been harmful. Asian
Americans find their diversity as individuals denied: many feel
forced to conform to the "model minority" model and want more
freedom to be their individual selves, to be "extravagant." Asian
university students are concentrated in the sciences and technical
fields, but many of them wish they had greater opportunities to
major in the social sciences and humanities. "We are educating a
generation of Asian technicians," observed an Asian-American
professor at Berkeley, "but the communities also need their
historians and poets." Asian Americans find themselves all lumped
together and their diversity as groups overlooked. Groups that are
not doing well, such as the unemployed Hmong, the Downtown Chinese,
the elderly Japanese, the old Filipino farm laborers, and others,
have been rendered invisible. To be out of sight is also to be
without social services. Thinking Asian Americans have succeeded,
government officials have sometimes denied funding for social
services programs designed to help Asian Americans learn English
and find employment. Failing to realize that there are poor Asian
families, college administrators have sometimes excluded Asian-
american students from Educational Opportunity Programs(EOP), which
are intended for _all_ students from low-income families. Asian
Americans also find themselves pitted against and resented by other
racial minorities and even whites. If Asian Americans can make it
on their own, pundits are asking, why can't poor blacks and whites
on welfare? Even middle-class whites, who are experiencing
economic difficulties because of plant closures in an
deindustrializing America and the expansion of low-wage service
employment, have been urged to emulate the Asian-American "model
minority" and to work harder.
Indeed, the story of Asian-American triumph offers ideological
affirmation of the American Dream in an era anxiously witnessing
the decline of the United States in the international economy(due
to its trade imbalance and its transformation from a creditor to a
debtor nation), the emergence of a new black underclass(the
percentage of black female-headed families having almost doubled
from 22 percent in 1960 to 40 percent in 1980), and the collapsing
white middle class(the percentage of households earning a "middle-
class" income falling from 28.7 percent in 1967 to 23.2 percent in
1983). Intellectually, it has been used to explain "losing ground"
-- why the situation of the poor has deteriorated during the last
two decades of expanded government social services. According to
this view, advanced by pundits like Charles Murray, the
interventionist federal state, operating on the "misguided wisdom"
of the 1960s, made matters worse: it created a web of welfare
dependency. But this analysis has overlooked the structural
problems in society and our economy, and it has led to easy
cultural explanations and quick-fix prescriptions. Our
difficulties, we are sternly told, stem from our waywardness:
Americans have strayed from the Puritan "errand into the
wilderness." They have abandoned the old American "habits of the
heart." Praise for Asian-American success is America's most recent
jeremiad -- a renewed commitment to make America number one again
and a call for rededication to the bedrock values of hard work,
thrift, and industry. Like many congratulations, this one may veil
a spirit of competition, even jealousy.


 
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