Stacy J. Lee - Unraveling the Model Minority Stereotype: Listening to Asian American Youth

Almost thirty years ago I spent eight weeks in Japan. Prior to that time I had not given much thought to my own perceptions of Asians; I probably assumed I had none. I recall that when I stepped out of the airplane in Tokyo International Airport, I had a vivid impression that the airport was filled with people who looked exactly alike. I seemed to see hundreds of people who were small in stature, had black hair, and wore white shirts and navy blue skirts or pants. While I probably would have denied holding stereotypes of Asians before that experience, I did indeed filter the complex and multifaceted reality around me through a very simplified stereotype. Over the next eight weeks I came to know many Japanese people, some quite well. By the time I left, I realized that I had to work to recall stereotypes I had arrived with, since none of themphysical, psychological, intellectual, or attitudinalfit the highly varied individuals I had come to know. It was an effort to bring the stereotypes to mind, they bore so little relationship to people I had come to know and care about.

When I returned to the United States and arrived in San Francisco International Airport, I experienced another surprise: for the first few minutes, the airport seemed to be filled with white Americans who looked alike! As I recall, I saw an image of good-looking Caucasian people around the age of 25, slender of build, and sporting red and blond hair. Apparently the people of color in the airport were invisible to me at that point; I seemed to see Americans as white. Having grown up with white people and never having considered white people to have any defining characteristics, the experience of seeing a homogeneous mass of white people was a shock. It was also short-lived; my eyes quickly adjusted to the variation among the people who were actually around me.

I learned from this experience that perceptions of people are mediated by categories, images, and words that do not necessarily bear resemblance to real human beings. I have often reflected on this experience and wondered where the images in my head came from (magazines and movies come to mind), and why I was unaware I was carrying them until contact with people in particular contexts triggered them. In both airports, I did not focus on other phenomena around me nearly to the degrees that I focused on people. And I saw but did not see actual people; the people around me triggered images in my head, and it was the images that I saw. In the San Francisco airport, the stereotyped imagery dissipated quickly, but in Japan it took much longer to dissolve.

One direction an analysis of stereotypes can take is to ask the questions: How true is the stereotype, and how can we learn to perceive people more accurately? Generally one can find some individuals who fit the stereotype, although the stereotype greatly distorts and oversimplifies even those individuals. Further, it excludes many, many more people who do not fit the stereotype, rendering them invisible or silent. Such an analysis suggests the stereotype can be combated by getting to know various individual people who are members of the group under consideration. As I got to know people in Japan, stereotyped images did indeed recede.

Another direction for analysis, the one taken in Unraveling the Model Minority Stereotype, is to scrutinize the construction of the stereotype itself: what it means to people, where it comes from, how it is used, and conditions under which it is clung to most tenaciously. David Theo Goldberg (1993) argues that the questions surrounding racial discourse should focus not so much on how true stereotypes are, but on how the truth-claims they offer are a part of a larger worldview, and what forms of action that worldview authorizes.

In a field of discourse like the racial what is generally circulated and exchanged is not simply truth but truth-claims or representations; these representations draw their efficacy from traditions, conventions, institutions, and tacit modes of mutual comprehension. (p. 46)

Racial truth-claims draw their authority from contexts of human power struggles and exclusion. Such truth-claims, projected through various forms of language and media, authorize and normalize forms of domination and control.

Stereotypes of Asians in the United States shift in substance as the vectors of race relations shift. Once labeled by non-Asians as inscrutable and wily, Asians are now termed the model minority. Although different in character, both stereotypes, like the image I saw when I arrived in Japan, characterize Asians as homogeneous and Other. The image of the model minority on the surface, strikes many people as complimentary. What forms of action could that image authorize that might need to be questioned critically? E. San Juan, Jr. (1992) situates that image in a global context in which the expansion of Western capitalism has resulted in a transfer of wealth from across the globe to an elite, mostly white, minority.

What the liberal state and the corporate mass media have accomplished is this: a highly selective and distorted privileging of a few successful individuals reduces the diverse Asian population to a monolithic yellow-skinned mass, ignores the large number of disadvantaged underclass , and thus legitimizes the prevailing system of racially based economic inequality underpinning the powerlessness of peoples of color. (p. 135)

The model minority image authorizes flat denial of racism and structures of racial dominance, and silences those who are not economically successful. It also denies and silences Asian Americas tradition of militancy and liberation, and a tradition of building solidarity with other oppressed racial groups (Omatsu, 1994).

In this book Stacey Lee examines how young people incorporate, interpret, and make meaning of the model minority stereotype in the context of their lived experience in school and community. This book presents a fascinating ethnographic study of a high school in which Lee examines the identities of Asian American students, and the filters through which students of diverse racial groups see and interpret each other. In so doing, Lee examines how the model minority stereotype silences many Asian American students, fractures racial groups in the school, and deflects attention away from white racism. Lee also presents a long-overdue portrait of very diverse identities Asian American students construct for themselves.