From Allies and Aliens to Model Minority
From the book, "An American Legacy: Racism, Nativism, and White Supremacy," by David R. Morse
WORLD WAR II impacted different Asian communities in the United States in different ways. For Japanese Americans, lives were shattered when immigrants and those born in the United States were systematically rounded up and placed in internment centers, following the signing of Executive Order 90966 on February 19, 1942, just 74 days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. There was no dissenting vote in Congress. Koreans, classified by the Alien Registration Act of 1940 as subjects of Japan, though not incarcerated, were identified as “enemy aliens.”1
On the other hand, Chinese, Indians, and Filipinos fared much differently as a result of the war. China was an important ally, and in 1943, after decades of exclusion, immigration quotas, albeit small ones, were allotted to Chinese nationals, and Chinese immigrants were granted the right to become citizens. With the War Brides Act of 1946, Chinese wives of American citizens were allowed to immigrate on a non-quota basis. Additionally, in 1946, Congress passed a bill granting naturalization to Indians and Filipinos living in the U.S. and allowing a small but symbolic number to immigrate to the United States. At the same time, the “aliens ineligible to citizenship” category was retained for Korean and Japanese women, as well as all non-Chinese Southeast Asians.
There are few events in American history more shameful than the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War, an incident that evoked a formal apology from President Ronald Reagan in 1988, as well as a restitution payment of $20,000 to each survivor. At the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, there were about 300,000 people of Japanese origin living in the United States, though more than half resided in Hawaii, which had yet to become a state, and few from the islands were incarcerated. However, 120,000 people, most of whom lived in California, Washington, and Oregon, were forcibly relocated to what were formally called assembly centers, though Roosevelt himself called them “concentration camps.”2
As Takaki observes, evacuees were allowed to take to the assembly centers only what they could carry and had to sell most of their personal possessions. On arrival, each family was given a number and housed in stockyards, fairgrounds, and racetracks. Said one internee, “The assembly center was filthy, smelly, and dirty. There were roughly 2,000 people packed in one large building. No beds were provided, so they gave us gunny sacks to fill with straw; that was our bed.” Most of the camps were located in remote desert areas. Said actor George Takei years later, “I was too young to understand, but I remember soldiers carrying rifles, and I remember being afraid.”3
In 1943, the government required all internees to answer loyalty questionnaires, which asked if they would be willing to “swear unqualified allegiance to the United States,” and if they were Nisei, if they were “willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty, wherever ordered.” Ten thousand Nisei answered in the affirmative, of which 1,208 served. Those who answered in the negative were sentenced to prisons, such as Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary, where they served with hardened criminals. When the evacuation order was rescinded and the War Relocation Authority began to close the camps, Roosevelt ordered internees to be “scattered” throughout the country, though most boarded trains for Los Angeles, Seattle, and San Francisco, where they were met with signs reading “No Japs Allowed” and “No Japs Welcome.”4
While the malice directed toward Japanese-Americans seems beyond the pale of understanding today, it is important to keep in mind the national narrative which developed at the time, one which was encouraged by the Roosevelt Administration. Historian Emily S. Rosenberg argues that throughout the war, the cry of “Remember Pearl Harbor” instilled in Americans a sense of the “treacherous character of the enemy” and was used to “underscore the morality of the cause.” The war, she states, was justified “in terms of national character rather than national interest,” rooted in a “highly personalized and religiously tinged language of retribution.”5
Japanese-Americans, hardly responsible for the Pearl Harbor attack, faced the brunt of American hostility. As historian Scott Kurashige observes:
Whites – not just the longtime agitators but almost universally – developed a new level of repulsion toward Japanese-Americans. People who had for a generation shopped at Japanese-American markets and taken in stride the mark that Issei gardeners had left on the … landscape now feared that every yellow face was a potential enemy saboteur … Political leaders created a lethal combination by encouraging anti-Japanese racism as an expression of wartime patriotism.6
In stark contrast, when the U.S. declared war on Japan, the status of Chinese in the U.S. changed from vilified “heathens” and “mice eaters,” to friends and allies fighting a war against the dreaded Japanese. Two weeks after Pearl Harbor, on December 22, 1941, Time magazine explained “How to tell your friends [the Chinese] from the Japs”:
Virtually all Japanese are short. Japanese are likely to be stockier and broader-hipped than short Chinese. Japanese are seldom fat; they often dry up and grown lean as they age. Although both have the typical epicanthic fold of the upper eyelid, Japanese eyes are usually set closer together. The Chinese expression is likely to be more placid, kindly, open; the Japanese more positive, dogmatic, arrogant. Japanese are hesitant, nervous in conversation, laugh loudly at the wrong time. Japanese walk stiffly erect, hard heeled. Chinese, more relaxed, have an easy gait, sometimes shuffle.7
As early as 1937, Time named Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek and his wife, May-Ling Soong, as “Man and Wife of the Year.” During congressional hearings on repealing Chinese exclusion in 1943, a congressman from Missouri said, “All at once we discovered the saintly qualities of the Chinese people. If it had not been for December 7, I do not know if we would have ever found out how good they were.”8
Between 12,000 and 15,000 Chinese Americans, about 20 percent of the U.S. adult Chinese male population, enlisted in the armed forces during World War II, serving in both integrated and all-Chinese units, the most visible being the 14th Air Service Group (ASG), which consisted of nine units and accounted for about 10 percent of Chinese Americans in the military. Along the West Coast, shipyards and airplane factories hired Chinese at impressive rates; by 1943, about 5,000 Chinese were employed throughout Bay Area defense industries, making up about 15 percent of shipyard workers. Momentum grew for the elimination of Chinese exclusion, particularly because the Japanese were using it as propaganda in an effort to generate hostility of Chinese toward the United States, and in November 1943, the Magnuson Act was passed, which repealed all or part of 15 anti-Chinese statutes passed between 1882 and 1915.9 President Roosevelt threw the weight of his office behind the measure, writing in a letter to Congress that passing the bill was vital to correcting the “historic mistake” of Chinese exclusion, and he emphasized that the legislation was “important in the cause of winning the war and of establishing a secure peace.”10
The United States faced an analogous situation in India. Thousands of American troops were stationed there during the war, and Indians worried about American designs as they established air bases, supply depots, and outposts. Additionally, Indian demands for independence from Great Britain grew, and in 1942, President Roosevelt suggested dominion status as a means of garnering Indian support, but he reversed his position when he realized how deeply Winston Churchill opposed an independent India. On February 1, 1944, President Roosevelt assured Indians that the sole American objective in India was to defeat Japan, but Indian hostility toward Americans only increased.
To Roosevelt, a show of goodwill by restoring citizenship and establishing a token quota of immigrants seemed like a logical step. When Congress lifted immigration and naturalization barriers for the Chinese in 1943, Indian activists began to demand similar rights for Indians, and Sirdar Jagjit Singh, president of the India League of America, convinced representatives Clare Booth Luce, a Republican, and Emanuel Celler, a Democrat, to introduce an identical bill for Indians in the House. Opposition was stiff in the House committee, however, and in March, 1945, Roosevelt sent William Phillips, who had visited India as the president’s personal representative, to testify secretly in favor of the bill. Roosevelt wrote the chairman of the committee that statutory discrimination against Indians “now serves no useful purposes, and [is] incongruous and inconsistent with the dignity of both our peoples.” The bill was soon moved onto the House floor, where it passed in October 1945. After resistance in the Senate, in July 1946, the Luce-Celler Act was passed and signed by President Harry Truman, which allowed both Indians and Filipinos to become naturalized citizens and a token quota of 100 from each country to immigrate to the United States each year.11
Filipino-American morale was bolstered by what had become widespread praise of the Filipino war effort. Filipinos were caught up in the patriotic fervor that engulfed the nation, and their zeal became even more pronounced as reports of high civilian casualties in the Philippines made the headlines. Filipinos arrived in multitudes to U.S. recruiting offices, but found, much to their dismay, that they were ineligible to serve, due to their status as noncitizen nationals, though many had previously served in World War I. As the war progressed, the status of Filipino-Americans vacillated, depending on the exigencies of the U.S. government. When it came to their responsibility under the Alien Registration Act, enacted in June 1940, which required all non-citizen adult residents to register with the government, they were classified as “aliens,” which meant that the government retained the right to detain or expel them for any subversive activity. However, they were deemed as “citizens” with regard to the Selective Service Act, which required them to register for military service and enabled them to be drafted. As Rick Baldoz explains, there was an underlying logic to this seeming contradiction. “When it came to exacting maximal loyalty and martial sacrifice from Filipinos,” he writes, “U.S. authorities considered them to be citizens, with the requisite obligation to defend the nation and provide military service to the state during the war. When it came to the state’s reciprocal obligation to extend the full spectrum of rights and protections accorded to citizens, then Filipinos were classed as aliens or nationals, with a limited claim to civic benefits and privileges.”12
In January 1942, the First Filipino Infantry Battalion, a special unit of the U.S. Army, was formed, which Secretary of War Henry Stimson announced was in recognition of the “intense loyalty and patriotism of those Filipinos who are now residing in the United States.” Their conscription, according to Stimson, would provide them with the “eventual opportunity of fighting on the soil of their homeland,” which by the spring of 1942, was fully under Japanese control. Although Filipinos were allowed to serve in “White” combat units, they were strongly encouraged to join up with Filipino outfits. The number of enlistees swelled and reached regiment strength by the summer of 1942; a second regiment was formed a few months later.13
Those Filipinos who did not serve in the military were employed in wartime production, in manufacturing plants that produced planes, ships, and armaments. The Filipino Federation of America pledged the undivided loyalty of its members to the U.S. government and promised to “crush the enemies of democracy,” adding that it was the “duty of every Filipino” to do his part to preserve the “high ideals and principles of American democracy.” In early 1942, Filipino soldiers garnered a path to citizenship when Congress passed the Second War Powers Act, which expedited naturalization for aliens or nationals serving in the U.S. military and established procedures for the naturalization of soldiers serving overseas.14
On July 4, 1946, two days after Truman signed the Luce-Celler Act into law, making citizenship a possibility for all Filipino-Americans, the U.S. and Philippines signed a treaty that provided for the recognition of the independence of the Republic of the Philippines and the relinquishment of American sovereignty. But citizenship for first generation Korean- and Japanese- Americans would have to wait six more years, until the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) of 1952, also known as the McCarran-Walter Act, which repealed the laws excluding the immigration and naturalization of Asians. The Act left a mixed legacy. On the one hand, it removed blatantly racist laws, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the 1917 Asiatic Barred Zone. On the other hand, 70 percent of all immigrant slots were, as in 1924, allotted to natives of the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Germany. Additionally, it instituted a concept called the Asia-Pacific Triangle, whereby immigration of people from Asia was capped annually at 2,000, while each Asian country within the Triangle was permitted 100 immigrants.15 Such restrictions would remain in place until 1965.
Postwar America: Divergent views of Asian groups
The advent of the Cold War brought with it, like World War II, divergent attitudes toward different Asian groups, reflecting as much America’s geopolitical concerns as events occurring in the United States. After China “fell” to Communism in 1949, Americans now distinguished between the hostile Chinese on the Communist mainland and the “loyal” Chinese nationalist forces, the Kuomintang, in Taiwan, and many Chinese living in the United States found themselves under suspicion of being part of a dangerous communist threat. These fears were exacerbated in 1950 when Chinese Communists joined North Koreans in battle against South Korean and American troops, and the media resurrected images of “yellow hordes” bent on world conquest. The situation of Chinese Americans was all the more tenuous because during the years of Chinese exclusion, the practice of illegal Chinese immigration had become pervasive, and at least a quarter of the Chinese population living in the United States in 1950 was unlawfully present; tens of thousands of Chinese were so-called paper sons, those who entered the U.S. during the first half of the twentieth century by posing as the sons of Chinese who had American citizenship due to native birth.16
The government’s solution to the problem was the Chinese Confession Program, whereby Chinese Americans were subjected to the humiliating process of confessing their hitherto fraudulent claim to citizenship, list the names of their true and “paper” family members, and assure authorities that they were not communists. At the same time, the State Department, concerned about the effect of Communist propaganda on perceptions of the United States, developed campaigns showcasing the achievements and “Americanness” of Chinese in the United States.17
Japan, once a dreaded foe, was now America’s ally, and as the U.S. established military bases throughout Japan in order to “contain” Communist aggression in Asia, tens of thousands of soldiers became romantically involved with Japanese women, many of whom returned to the United States under the War Brides Act, passed in December 1945.18 Between 1947 and 1964, about 72,700 Asian women entered the United States, of which 45,853 were Japanese, 14,435 Filipina, 7,000 Chinese, and 6,500 Korean, and women’s migration helped balance the heavily male-skewed gender ratios of Asia-American communities. Japanese military brides, for example, made up 80 percent of Japanese immigrants in the 1950s and entered at an annual rate between 2,000 and 5,000 in the 1950s and 1960s.19 Following the Korean War, Americans also took a strong interest in adopting Korean children, as the conflict had resulted in the separation of ten million families, the widowing of half a million wives, and the abandonment of tens of thousands of children, many of whom were the offspring of American GIs and Korean women. National publications ran articles about the children and the humanitarian work being done on their behalf and encouraged American families to adopt Korean orphans.20
The Immigration Act of 1965 totally changed the rules of the game for Asian Americans as well as Hispanics, though the law was not expected to make an appreciable change in the nature of future immigrants. It scrapped the national origins quota system and the Asia-Pacific Triangle in favor of overall hemispheric limits, allowing for twenty thousand immigrants per country from the Eastern Hemisphere, while spouses, minor children, and parents of U.S. citizens were exempted. Immigrants from the Eastern Hemisphere were to be admitted based on a preference system favoring family members, professionals, and artists, needed skilled and unskilled laborers, and refugees.
The Wall Street Journal made the erroneous prediction that the family-preference system “insured that the new immigration pattern would not stray radically from the old one.” Representative Emanuel Celler of New York assured Congress: “Since the people of … Asia have very few relatives here, comparatively few could immigrate from those countries because they have no family ties in the U.S.” At that time, the Asian population in the United States was so small, just one half of one percent, that the Japanese American Citizens League observed: “Although the immigration bill eliminated race as a matter of principle, in actual operation immigration will still be controlled by the now discredited national origins system, and the general pattern of immigration which exists today will continue for many years to come.”21
However, designating employment desirability and family reunification as criteria for admittance led to a sharp increase in the number of Asians, not only from established populations, namely Chinese and Filipinos, but also those from other Asian countries with a small or nonexistent population, and the composition of the U.S. Asian population changed rapidly.22
In 1960, over half of Asian Americans were Japanese, a quarter were Chinese, and 20 percent were Filipinos. By 1985, while the proportion of Chinese and Filipinos remained relatively the same, Japanese Americans accounted for only 15 percent of the Asian American population. During those 25 years, Korean and Indian immigrants took advantage of amendments to immigration law that led to a shift toward highly skilled immigrants, and U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia and the end of the Vietnam War in the early 1970s led to waves of Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian refugees. In 1985, Southeast Asians accounted for nearly 20 percent of Asian Americans while Koreans and Asian Indians each accounted for about 10 percent.23
The growth of the Southeast Asian population was indeed precipitous. From a population of about 15,000 in 1975, by the late 1990s, the number of Southeast Asians in the U.S. increased to about one million.24 Of the first refugees arriving in 1975, most were political evacuees who fled during the Communist takeover, fearing reprisals because of their employment positions, economic status, or religious beliefs. In 1976–77, the U.S. Attorney General, under the Indochinese Parole Program, authorized the admission of refugees, and beginning in 1978, there was a mass exodus of Southeast Asians, many of whom had been “reeducated” by the Communist government. Nearly all had spent time in refugee camps in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Hong Kong. The United States accepted 44,500 Vietnamese refugees in 1979, 95,000 in 1980, 86,000 in 1981, and 44,000 in 1982. While there was a great sense of sympathy for the refugees, a Gallup Poll and a Harris Survey reported that more than half of Americans did not favor their resettlement in the United States; they were a reminder of an unpopular war, one with huge casualties for the U.S.25
Refugee policy was inexorably linked to Cold War politics, and the United States introduced the 1975 Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act, the 1980 Refugee Act, and the 1987 Amerasian Homecoming Act, which facilitated the arrival of Vietnamese and other Southeast Asians, as well as mixed race people who were the product of unions between Asian women and American men serving in the military.26 Although government officials attempted to scatter the refugee families around the country, in order to facilitate their blending in to American societies, refugees reorganized themselves and established their own distinct Southeast Asian communities.27
As demographer William H. Frey notes, Asian immigration waves continue to bring gains to Asian populations. In the 20-year period from 1990 to 2010, the Chinese population more than doubled to 3.3 million, and the Asian Indian population more than tripled to 2.8 million, becoming the second-largest Asian population in the United States; Filipinos, Vietnamese, and Koreans also increased by large numbers. The only decline was that of the Japanese-American population. These six groups make up 85 percent of the Asian population, with the remaining 15 percent consisting primarily of Pakistanis, Hmong, Cambodians, Laotians, Thais, Bangladeshis, Indonesians, Burmese, and Nepalese.28
Building the model minority myth in postwar America
Before World War II, White Americans, for the most part, considered Asian Americans, who were more often called Oriental or just Chinese or Japanese – the two major Asian-American groups at the time – regardless of their ancestry, as unable to or unfit to assimilate into greater society. “Aliens ineligible for citizenship” was the legal phrase used to discriminate against Asians in the early 20th century in the exclusionary state and federal laws passed in the 1910s and 1920s. Immigrants and even their U.S.–born children were steered into occupations such as farming, gardening, restaurants, and laundry, and lived in Little Tokyo and Chinatown ghettoes. The underlying premise was not only that they were considered unassimilable; they were not white.
With the demise of Exclusion in the 40s and 50s, restrictions on employment and neighborhoods were relaxed. By the 1960s, Asian Americans enjoyed a radical transformation in social standing as the model minority stereotype emerged. The idea was that Asians were highly intelligent, technically skilled, hard-working, disciplined, serious, upwardly mobile, and thrifty, all solid American values. Asian students were expected to exceed their allotment of spaces at top universities, fill the upper economic brackets, and not make any waves politically. They embodied many of the attributes that Americans saw in themselves, a symbol of American exceptionalism, the Horatio Alger story with an immigrant twist. However, in many ways the standing of Asian Americans shifted, at mid-century, from not White to not Black.
The Immigration Act of 1965 was a game changer for Asian Americans, opening up opportunities for new immigrants and their children to live and work and associate as they wished. But in minimizing considerations of race and national origins and prioritizing family reunification, employability, and refugee status, the U.S. government was not only ending the quota system of immigration. It was also, unwittingly, setting up Asian American immigrants to be perceived as the “better” immigrants.
In the post-World War II era, and particularly after the mid-60s, Asian-American cultural values, usurped and promoted as American cultural values, were praised at the expense of African American cultural values. In fact, one could see the rise of the Model Minority stereotype in the 1960s and 70s as a direct response to urban riots that happened after Civil Rights legislation was passed. The thinking, though not always stated, was, if Asian Americans could work hard and play by the rules and succeed at doing so, other racial minorities should be able to do the same.
The term model minority appears to have been coined in 1966 in a New York Times article entitled “Success Story, Japanese American Style.” In the article, sociologist William Petersen attributed the success of Japanese Americans after World War II to cultural values, a strong work ethic, family structure, and genetics.29 In 1971, Newsweek added other Asian nationalities to Petersen’s thesis on Japanese advancement with an article entitled “Success Story: Outwhiting the Whites.” In the late 1980s, as American automakers were being killed by Japanese competition, Time profiled “Those Asian-American Whiz Kids” on its cover.30
Political activist Scott Nakagawa says that the model minority image, first promoted by Asian-American civil rights leaders to lessen the otherness of Asians, particularly the Japanese in the wake of World War II, was soon used as a lever of White supremacy. He writes:
To promote the myth, many unflattering facts of life in the Asian ghettos of the period were suppressed. Meanwhile, Asian American accomplishments in the arts, business, and, most of all, World War II were touted as indicators of Asians’ suitability for citizenship and ability to vertically integrate themselves into the White middle class. In other words, the Asian American model minority myth was a shield against the persecution of the Chinese and Japanese in the U.S. Sadly, that shield was quickly picked up by opponents of the Black Civil Rights and Black Power movements and used as a weapon against Black Americans who were stereotyped as a “problem minority,” mired in crime, unemployment, and inter-generational poverty because of cultural deficits they would do well to overcome by making like Asians and pulling themselves up by their bootstraps.31
As historian Madeline Hsu points out, students, particularly Chinese students, had an outsized impact on the image of Asians in the U.S., relative to their numbers. She writes, “Students … demonstrated the possibilities of cultural convergences between Chinese and Americans and presented living examples that Americans could welcome and economically benefit from the presence of the right kind of Chinese: educated, Westernized, well-mannered, and possessed of practical skills and talents.” According to historian Ellen Wu, Asian Americans “strategically typecast themselves,” as both natural ambassadors to Asia, an area of tremendous strategic importance to the U.S. following World War II, and as culturally aligned to America’s post-war social conservatism. Writes Wu:
Japanese and Chinese Americans harbored a profound interest in characterizing anew their racial image and conditions of citizenship, and they often took the lead in this regard … [Their] self-stereotyping convinced others … because it corroborated the nation’s cultural conservatism at midcentury. Ethnic Japanese and Chinese emissaries consistently touted their putatively “Oriental” attributes, such as the predisposition to harmony and accommodation, the reverence for family and education, and unflagging industriousness to enhance their demands for equality … Self representations of Japanese and Chinese American masculinity, femininity, and sexuality, purposely conforming to the norms of the White middle class, were crucial to the reconstruction of aliens ineligible to citizenship into admirable – albeit colored – Americans.32
The end of the model minority
Critics of the model minority say the term is overly broad and damaging to Asian communities that are in need of assistance, such as refugees. Others push back against the persistent expectation that “all Asians are smart,” which sets the bar far too high for most. Yet numerous Asian Americans, at least those who do not come from countries with a high refugee exodus, tend to hold up that stereotype. Asian Americans have the lowest rates of being arrested.33 Nationally, Asian Americans tend to get higher grades and have lower rates of drug use and premarital sex. On the other hand, communities with a high number of refugees, Cambodians, Vietnamese, Laotians, and Hmong, have much lower levels of education and a much higher unemployment rate.
Additionally, as sociologists Rosalind S. Chou and Joe R. Feagin note, “Subtle and blatant stereotyping of Asians and Asian Americans still predominates in many areas of U.S. society.”34 In 2006, Adidas launched a new, limited-edition shoe, decorated with the face of an Asian character with buckteeth, a bowl haircut, and slanted eyes as a logo, provoking a heated debate about racism.35 That same year, Rosie O’Donnell used the expression “ching chong” to describe Chinese people talking about Danny DeVito’s drunken appearance on The View: “The fact is that it’s news all over the world. That you know, you can imagine in China it’s like, ‘Ching chong … ching chong. Danny DeVito, ching chong, chong, chong, chong. Drunk. The View. Ching chong.’”36 In March 1997, the National Review released a cover titled “Manchurian Candidates,” with then President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton as slant-eyed, bucktoothed caricatures in Mao suits and turn-of-the-twentieth-century Chinese hats.37
On a daily basis, Asian Americans are continually seen as outsiders, despite that many have been in the United States for generations. Notes Erika Lee, “’Where are you from?’ they are continually asked. And when the answers ‘Oakland,’ ‘New York,’ or ‘Chicago’ do not satisfy the questioner, they are asked, ‘No, where are you really from?’ The underlying assumption behind these questions is that Asians cannot possibly be real Americans and do not belong in the United States. Instead, they are perpetual foreigners at worst, or probationary Americans at best.”38
In her book Forever Foreigners or Honorary Whites, sociologist Mia Tuan relates the experience of one fourth-generation Chinese American, in her 20s, of being ridiculed because of her race, one that was compounded by being a newcomer:
I think I was pretty conscious [of being Chinese] because of being called names and prejudice, and I used to think it’s unfair, like, “Why am I this color? How come people used to make fun of you, and you didn’t do anything wrong?” I mean, I think it was really sad to have to go through that adjustment, ‘cause moving is just a hard enough thing, to move to a new area, when you’re settled there. But then to also experience people calling you names and things. You feel very left out. I felt very left out when I was in school. I used to kinda like to hang out by myself and try to avoid certain people that I thought would make fun of me.39
For Millennial Asian Americans, the term model minority is increasingly cringe-worthy, and there has been a vocal pushback against it in recent years. In addition, there has been a growing understanding among younger Asian Americans that their perceived status in society has come at the expense of other groups. In his May 2014 commencement speech to Yale’s Asian American alumni, jazz musician and Harvard professor Vijay Iyer said that to succeed in America is, “somehow, to be complicit with the idea of America, which means that at some level you’ve made peace with its rather ugly past.”40 That same year, this sentiment was underscored by the online forum ChangeLab, which announced a new social media campaign, #ModelMinorityMutiny, which rejected the notion of Asian Americans as the “good” minority because it perpetuates racism against Blacks.
To be viewed as Asian in America, comes with its own baggage, its own limitations. In his commencement address, Iyer describes his challenges of being accepted as a serious jazz musician:
I’ve seen my work described repeatedly (mostly by White men, who tend to do most of the talking in jazz) as “mathematical,” “technical,” “inauthentic,” “too conceptual,” “jazz for nerds,” “dissonant,” “academic,” and just last month, a “failure.” Over the years a racialized component emerges in such language – basically a kind of model minority discourse that presumes that Asians have no soul and have no business trying to be artists, especially in proximity to Blackness, which is, in the White imagination, a realm of pure intuition, apparently devoid of intellect. No such critique, I should add, is typically leveled at White jazz musicians, of which there are many.41
In the spring of 2020, with the Covid-19 pandemic, another harmful stereotype, has emerged – one linking Chinese and other Asian Americans to the coronavirus. A May 2020 incident at a Rose Garden press briefing is illustrative. During the briefing, CBS News correspondent Weijia Jiang asked President Donald Trump why he sees coronavirus testing as a global competition when more than 80,000 Americans had died. Trump had been aggressively pushing a debunked conspiracy theory that the coronavirus originated in a Chinese lab, despite a scientific consensus that the virus was not man-made or genetically modified. “Maybe that's a question you should ask China," Trump told Jiang, who was born in China and immigrated to the United States when she was 2 years old. "Don't ask me. Ask China that question, OK?"
Trump tried to move on by calling on Kaitlan Collins, a CNN White House correspondent, but Jiang interjected. "Sir, why are you saying that to me specifically?" asked Jiang. "I'm telling you," Trump replied. "I'm not saying it specifically to anybody. I'm saying it to anybody that asks a nasty question."
"That's not a nasty question," Jiang responded. Trump then looked again to take a question from another reporter. Collins, who had let Jiang ask Trump her follow-up questions, approached the microphone. "I have two questions," Collins said. After responding that she had lost her chance, an angry Trump ended the press conference.
Trump’s remarks were met with outrage by many in the Asian American community and beyond. "Asian Americans are Americans. Some of us served on active duty in the U.S. military. Some are on the frontlines fighting this pandemic as paramedics and health care workers," Ted Lieu, a congressman from California, tweeted. Representative Grace Meng of New York replied to Trump: "We are very angry at you. You use racism to disguise your lack of responsiveness and responsibility. American lives of all backgrounds have been lost. Your words have led to increased discrimination against Asian Americans which will outlast the coronavirus." In March, Representative Judy Chu of California said in a statement. "We are now watching in real time as the Republicans change the way they talk about coronavirus, intentionally stoking xenophobia in order to shift attention away from President Trump's truncated response … Trump has repeatedly labeled this pandemic as the 'Chinese virus,' and his loyal Republican followers have come to his defense in increasingly hateful terms. Their words are inciting racism and violence against Asian Americans in the United States."42
The coronavirus, fueled by hate speech from the White House, has indeed led to an outbreak of hate incidents directed at Asian Americans. The group STOP AAPI Hate announced that it had received over 1,700 reports of coronavirus related discrimination from Asian Americans in at least 45 states since it launched in March. About 70 percent of those incidents had a clear link to the pandemic, and about 40 percent of cases were reported to police. In California, for example, an elderly man was attacked with an iron bar, and a teenager was taken to hospital after being physically assaulted.
Other Asian Americans have reported being refused service from hotel rooms or Uber rides because of their ethnicity. One Chinese American emergency room doctor in Connecticut noted that several patients asked to be admitted to hospital because they said an Asian person had coughed near them. The same doctor also reported an incident that he experienced personally. "I had my protective equipment on, walked in and introduced myself. Once they heard my surname, they were like 'don't touch me, can I see someone else – can you just not come close to me.’”43
While the association of Asian Americans with the coronavirus may fade with time, the image of Asian Americans as hardworking, success-oriented, but not successful enough to usurp White men at the top of the corporate hierarchy, is the most firmly established. Still, there is hope. With an increasing share of Asian Americans being born in the United States, the model minority stereotype is beginning to unravel. It is true, as the Pew Research Center shows, that Asian Americans are the best educated and best paid racial group in the U.S. But the apparent achievement of this highly diverse group only tells part of the story. Nevertheless, the U.S. has come a long way in its representation of Asian Americans from the earlier contacts with this group more than 150 years ago.
NOTES
1. Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 365.
2. Daniels, Roger. “Incarcerating Japanese Americans,” OAH Magazine of History. Vol. 16, No. 3, (Spring, 2002), 19.
3. Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 393.
4. Ibid., 397.
5. Rosenberg, Emily S. A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory. (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press Books, 2003), 32.
6. Scott Kurashige, The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles. (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2008), 117.
7. Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 370.
8. Ibid.
9. Lee (Shelley Sang-Hee), 226.
10. U.S. Department of State, “Repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act, 1943.” https://2001-2009.state.gov/r/pa/ho/time/wwii/86552.htm.
11. Jensen, 278.
12. Baldoz, 199.
13. Ibid., 211.
14. Ibid.
15. Campi, Alicia J. “The McCarran-Walter Act: A Contradictory Legacy on Race, Quotas, and Ideology,” Immigration Policy Center, June 2004. https://www.immigrationpolicy.org/sites/default/files/docs/Brief21%20-%20McCarran-Walter.pdf.
16. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 204.
17. Wu, Ellen D. “’America’s Chinese’: Anti-Communism, Citizenship, and Cultural Diplomacy during the Cold War,” Pacific Historical Review. Vol. 77, No. 3 (August 2008), 391.
18. Spickard, Paul R. ed. Lon Kurashige and Alice Yang Murray. “Marriages Between American Men and Japanese Women After World War II,” in Major Problems in Asian American History. (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2016), 341.
19. Lee (Shelley Sang-Hee), A New History of Asian America, 248.
20. Ibid., 251.
21. Takaki, Strangers from a Distant Shore, 419.
22. Frey, William H. Diversity Explosion: How New Racial Demographics are Remaking America. (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2014), 55.
23. Takaki, Strangers from a Distant Shore, 420.
24. Trinh V?, Linda. eds. Jean Yu-Wen Shen Wu and Min Song. “The Vietnamese American Experience: From Dispersion to the Development of Post-Refugee Communities,” Asian American Studies: A Reader. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 290.
25. Ibid., 292.
26. Dhingra, Pawan and Robyn Magalit Rodriguez, Asian America: Sociological and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2014), 54.
27. Trinh V?, 293.
28. Frey, 56.
29. “Success Story, Japanese-American Style,” The New York Times, January 9, 1966. https://inside.sfuhs.org/dept/history/US_History_reader/Chapter14/modelminority.pdf).
30. https://time.com/3475962/asian-american-diversity/.
31. “The Model Minority is a Lever of White Supremacy,” March 25, 2014. https://www.racefiles.com/2014/03/25/the-model-minority-is-a-lever-of-white-supremacy/.
32. Wu, Ellen D. The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 5.
33. “The Color of Crime: Race, Crime, and Justice in America,” New Century Foundation, 2005. https://2kpcwh2r7phz1nq4jj237m22.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/2005-Color-of-Crime-Report.pdf.
34. Chou, Rosalind S. and Joe R. Feagin. The Myth of the Model Minority: Asian Americans Facing Racism. (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2010), 9.
35. “Asians Decry Adidas Shoe as a Misstep,” The Washington Post, April 14, 2006. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/13/AR2006041301886.html.
36. “How ‘Ching Chong’ Became The Go-To Slur For Mocking East Asians,” NPR. https://www.npr.org/ sections/codeswitch/2014/07/14/330769890/how-ching-chong-became-the-go-to-slur-for- mocking-east-asians.
37. “Parsing the Politics of Caricature.” https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2009/06/19/guest-post-parsing-the-politics-of-caricature/.
38. Lee (Erika), The Making of Asian America, 9.
39. Tuan, Mia. Forever Foreigners or Honorary Whites? The Asian Ethnic Experience Today. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 82.
40. Iyer, Vijay. “Our Complicity With Excess.” https://aaww.org/complicity-with-excess-vijay-iyer/.
41. Ibid.
42. Choi, David. Trump Broadly Claims Chinese-Americans Are 'VERY Angry' with China, But Some Asian-American Lawmakers Say 'We Are Very Angry at You.” Business Insider, May 12, 2020. https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-claims-asian-americans-very-angry-with-china-2020-5.
1. “In Six Weeks, STOP AAPI HATE Receives Over 1700 Incident Reports of Verbal Harassment, Shunning and Physical Assaults,” Chinese for Affirmative Action, May 20, 2020. https://caasf.org/press-release/in-six-weeks-stop-aapi-hate-receives-over-1700-incident-reports-of-verbal-harassment-shunning-and-physical-assaults/.