The Asian-American debate

As the election cycle crescendos into a full-blown wave of political drama, the country is becoming increasingly obsessed with its minority populations. Political pundits and newscasters almost comically group minorities into singular clusters referring to Hillary’s domination of “the black vote” or puzzling over Trump’s failure to capture the “Latino vote.” My biggest beef as I’ve listened to these constant references to minority voting blocks happened when I realized that one minority has been missing in these conversations: Asian Americans.

There’s an excellent and obvious reason that no one is obsessing over the “Asian vote.” There just aren’t enough Asian Americans for it to matter. Since campaigning and voting is largely a numbers game, this seems fair enough—Asian Americans make up a mere 5.4 percent of of the US population. But noticing the lack of discourse about Asian Americans in politics made me realize that Asian Americans are largely left out of many national discussions.

Asian Americans walk an interesting line as both a privileged and underprivileged racial group. According to a national study conducted by the Pew Research Center, Asian Americans are the fastest-growing, most highly educated, highest-income racial group in the US. In addition, Asian-Americans were found to place a distinctly high amount of emphasis on family, marriage and career success. Due to the group’s overall socioeconomic status, Asians do not face the same challenges and burdens that other minorities face. On the other hand, it is a mistake to assume that Asian Americans, with high income or education, have no challenges and that our lives are peachy.

The notion of the “model minority” has evolved as an apparent compliment for the success achieved by Asian Americans. The debate over whether the concept of being a model minority is a compliment to be embraced or a debilitating, flawed label is fierce amongst Asian Americans. The term appears to have entered the public domain when a 1966 New York Times article, “Success Story, Japanese American Style” popularized the term and fueled decades of similar Asian stereotyping.

So what’s wrong with this whole idea of being a model minority? While there are many challenges posed by the “model minority” myth, I am most concerned about the way it sensationalizes Asian Americans and creates this sense of weird fascination with them. In 1987, Time magazine published a piece titled, “Those Asian-American Whiz Kids” that perpetuates stereotypes of Asian children being hard-working and unnaturally gifted and objects of wonder.

The problem is that society seems to think that Asian Americans are harboring some kind of enviable, clandestine formula. A secret Asian “success sauce” if you will. Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times article titled, “The Asian Advantage” and Jennifer Lee’s “The truth about Asian Americans' success (it's not what you think)” article in CNN both dwell on admiration of “the Asians” and speculate about the ingredients in the sauce.

Listen, there is no secret Asian sauce. I don’t think it is wrong for people to note the usually high levels of academic and socioeconomic success achieved by Asian Americans. It also isn’t wrong for Asian Americans to be proud of their accomplishments. However, it is problematic to then scrutinize and objectify Asian Americans as some sort of outlier, non-human group. To perpetuate ideas of a particular racial group as being distinctly smarter, more capable and inherently different than all other Americans solely because of their racial heritage simultaneously erodes at our individuality and humanity. The challenge is recognizing that even though these are positive stereotypes, they still strip away Asian American’s right to establish a sense of self. Instead, these stereotypes replace the legitimate achievements of individual Asian Americans with the broad assumption that these accomplishments come from an inherent, God-given success. The greatest danger of the model minority categorization is its compete and utter failure to recognize that the achievements of Asian Americans do not come from an inherent, pre-programmed advantage, but rather in spite of stereotyping and objectification that the model minority myth ignores. In the face of these invisible barriers, the persistent belief that the Asians have some sort of inherent advantage negates and delegitimizes the challenges and negative stereotypes that are also part of the Asian American experience.

As an Asian American, I constantly sometimes feel like I am being envied for something that I don’t control and withheld credit for overcoming barriers that society fails to recognize. While I doubt that Asian American’s voices will be hotly contested and courted in political elections any time soon, national discourse should stop treating Asian Americans as a case study and attempt to define the Asian American identity for Asian Americans themselves.