Myth: Asian Americans are high earning and well educated

May 29, 2021 10:44 AM

6 Charts That Dismantle The Trope Of Asian Americans As A Model Minority Characterizing Asian Americans as a model minority flattens the diverse experiences of Asian Americans into a singular, narrow narrative.
posted by mecran01 (18 comments total)

The majority of bubbles in the income/education graph show Asian subgroups earning more than the US median household income. Here's the same graph with that data added.
posted by hopeless romantique at 12:09 PM on May 29, 2021 [6 favorites]

I don't think that edited graph is at odds with the point of the NPR article, which (judging by the poster and the replies) seems to be the implication? The NPR article is arguing against the model minority myth, i.e. that all Asians are high-earning and have high levels of education. However, examining further, there are many Asian groups that are near the national median and lower (and have correspondingly lower levels of education). The model minority myth obfuscates the lives and struggles of those groups (and those in the wealthier groups that don't live up to the model minority myth); it also (in my experience as an Asian myself) breeds resentment against Asians generally for being "too good" at school, the idea that we're taking up jobs and spots in universities, buying up all the property, etc etc. Yes, there are plenty of Asian subgroups that earn more than the US median household - that's why the median is higher, as noted by NPR. There are also plenty of Asian subgroups that earn around the same or less.
posted by thebots at 12:51 PM on May 29, 2021 [12 favorites]

On the other axis, only about 35% of US adults have a bachelor's degree. That is well below the median educational attainment in the graph linked by hopeless romantique. Conclusion: the title of this post is not well chosen. It needs, at least, the addition of the word "All" which thebots suggests.
posted by drdanger at 12:55 PM on May 29, 2021 [5 favorites]

I mean, that's what you get when you have supremely racist immigration policies that basically prevent all immigration from East Asia until the 1960's and then loose it up only a little so that only the best educated and highest attaining people have a way in. And honestly the expectations that creates for Asian American kids who don't have parents from that kind of background can be really not great.

One of my good friend's parents were from Vietnam, and were fairly successful small business owners, though not college educated. Still, they tried to put all their kids through college and did their best to help, but still, she really struggled. That whole "Asians are smart" stereotype really didn't help, because there was a lot of pressure on her to do well, but her parents couldn't really offer her the support and knowledge that my college educated family could. All the unwritten little day to day things: how to study effectively, what's a reasonable course load, how to get the most out of interacting with your professors - these were all things I could just sit down with my mom or grandpa or uncle and ask about, and get good advice based on experience.

My friend couldn't do that. They could ask their family for help, sure, but their parents didn't actually know or have the experience of being a college student in the US. It made me very aware of my own personal privilege in having the personal experiences of my family to draw upon. I knew a lot about how to be a college student before I even got there without having to consciously try. And I feel like a grave injustice was done to my friend in being expected to just do really well, in part because she was "Asian," when there was absolutely no one there to help her and explain to her how to do that besides her peers - who were just starting college who may have been only a little less lost than she was.

It doesn't matter what the "averages" and "medians" are when generalizations based on race hurt real people who don't fit that model. As the article said "Asian" is not a monolith. And the first step of racism is to disrespect someone's individuality by treating them like they are.
posted by Zalzidrax at 2:23 PM on May 29, 2021 [17 favorites]

In the Bay Area there’s been a lot of talk about how caste (for Indian Americans) and ethnic groups/migration period (for Chinese Americans) heavily impacts the opportunities available, so I suspect there are huge variances within some of these national groups too beyond what is represented here.
posted by cali at 2:44 PM on May 29, 2021 [5 favorites]

Yeah, I think the edited graph is misleading -- it collapses each subgroup to a point and makes it look like almost all Asian Americans make more than the median income. Here's the Pew Research Center study quoted in the article, which goes into more detail about income inequality among Asian Americans.
posted by ectabo at 3:11 PM on May 29, 2021 [4 favorites]

Yes, lumping in, e.g, the Laotian refugees that my church sponsored in in the mid-80s, who fled violence to come here with close to literally nothing, or the Hmong, with highly-educated Indian immigrants who came here voluntarily on H-1B visas to work as doctors or software engineers obscures a LOT.
posted by praemunire at 4:07 PM on May 29, 2021 [6 favorites]

I don't think it's misleading or obscuring, what you're talking about is the point of the graph. "Asians" are not a monolith, various groups within that continental category have different experiences and backgrounds, and as a result they have different outcomes when living in the USA.

I will agree there's a need for more sub-categorization. How do Laotian refugees from the 80's compare to current Laotian refugees for example. Or how do the various Indian castes compare?

But that's reason for further breakdown.

For that matter, lumping "Chinese" together is also kind of the whole monolith type thinking again. Often when people say "Chinese" they mean "Han", but there are plenty of non-Han Chinese and I'd be interested in seeing how the various ethnic groups from China experience life in America.

But even just breaking it down by nation of origin, as these graphs do, illustrates that the model migrant idea is racist drivel, and that's the whole point.

I can't help but suspect there's a lot of overlap between the model minority idea, the far too common fetishization of East Asian women by white men, and the way a lot of the alt-right is deeply into anime weeb culture. All of it others Asian people, and all of it tries to collapse Asian people into a monolith.

Well... A dialith? In my experience when most white Americans say Asian they typically mean East Asian and don't include India. There's a whole separate, awful, set of white American stereotypes about Indian people.
posted by sotonohito at 6:13 PM on May 29, 2021 [8 favorites]

More like "Myth: Asian Americans". We should just jettison the concept of "Asian" altogether, along with "Asian American" which is even more unhelpful.

I have never liked identifying as "Asian", which just seems so uselessly broad as to make these myths inevitable. It's literally mashing together over half the population of the world. And don't even get me started on "AAPI", a term I have never heard anyone outside an HR department use in my life. Breaking it down by region to Southeast Asian, South Asian, East Asian, Pacific Islander, and Other, as rough as that still is, is sufficient to show how the broader term makes no sense statistically.
posted by hyperbolic at 6:20 PM on May 29, 2021 [8 favorites]

I do think that using median stats for US household income as a whole seems to undercut the fallacy being pointed out.
posted by asra at 7:29 PM on May 29, 2021

The term "Asian-American" was self-chosen by, um, Asian-American activists in the 60s who wanted a term that unified different Asian groups that was not the same term one would use to describe an object such as a rug.

I don't think it's outlived it's usefulness and it's okay if people choose it as a self-identifier or not, because people can have more than one way to self-identify themselves.

But I think this highlights that politics, demography, and culture each have different ways to categorize and group people. What's useful in one context is less useful in another.

And just to add to the discussion, here's an article also discussing a bit about the term Asian-Americans, but is mostly about the term "Yellow" for East Asians, which is a more fraught term with a longer history that includes being used by racists (Yellow Peril) but also Asian-American activists (Yellow Power).
posted by FJT at 8:00 PM on May 29, 2021 [6 favorites]

The point of the article was not "Asian-American is a slur and no one should use it for any purpose."
posted by praemunire at 8:47 PM on May 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

Asian-American is an extremely helpful term to this Asian-American, since it 1. helps to highlight similarities and commonalities in the experience of Asian immigrants to America, which there are, and 2. helps to develop solidarity between communities that, if identifying solely with their countries of origin, can bring with them historical grudges that fail minority communities in the US.

At the exact same time, it's unhelpful to assume that Asian-Americans are a monolith, or that each member is somehow sitting at the median status of all Asian-Americans, which is the point of the original article. (It's also unhelpful, though besides the point of the original article, to assume that Asians are all Asian-American, or vice versa.)

A person can have more than one demographic or even ethnic label applied to them accurately, with different labels being useful in different contexts. An Italian-American can also be white, or someone could be white, Hispanic, and Mexican-American simultaneously. Or Black and Latina. And so on and so forth.
posted by pykrete jungle at 10:44 PM on May 29, 2021 [3 favorites]

I teach a lot of refugees or children of refugees who fall in the bottom left portion of that graph. I'm continuously frustrated that many US government "diversity in science" initiatives do not welcome Asian-American students, even though by every metric I'm familiar with, my Vietnamese and Burmese refugee students are not privileged in the US and could really benefit from these programs aimed at helping first generation college students succeed in science, just as much as my Black and Latinx students do.
posted by hydropsyche at 5:13 AM on May 30, 2021 [13 favorites]

Yeah, I've always thought that 'first generation college-student' or 'students from historically underrepresented groups' or even 'students whose parents are not wealthy' would be more precise ways of targeting people that programs actually should be helping. But then I suspect the programs would have to work harder to find applicants.

My product group has quite a candid newsletter about race as it pertains to the workplace: apparently we have reasonable representation from Latine folks, but they're disproportionately light-skinned people who come from social capital (father is / was their country's IEEE president, e.g.). Causes: the company only recruits at the most expensive university in Mexico, plus all the other socioeconomic factors.

Education and large employers aside, I do wonder what all these health statisticians at the CDC are seeing about 'Asian' people in their post-COVID surveys. (I opted into their post-vaccination text message follow-up and am indeed one of those model minority Asians.)
posted by batter_my_heart at 2:48 PM on May 30, 2021

I like Asian-American. As a South-Asian-American I have found meaningful solidarity, inclusivity and community via that term (both casually, and structurally in terms of organizations that welcome me). Like many of my friends, I married a different flavor of Asian. So we value the intermingled spaces that "Asian-American" creates and normalizes for our families.
posted by BlueBlueElectricBlue at 5:19 PM on May 30, 2021 [1 favorite]

I'm Indian American and don't find the "Asian American" label particularly useful, though I know many who do. If you find it helpful, that's great! AAPI just sounds like alphabet soup though.

The "model minority" stereotype is harmful across the board -- because by "model" they mean "doesn't make a fuss [unlike those other minorities]." And there's all kinds of stuff there about emasculated Asian men* and submissive Asian women, being good in STEM but not humanities/art/sports, and in general just a lot of appropriative/colonizing behavior, where white people decide to make something trendy (yoga, martial arts, naan pizza) which a "model minority" would be totes cool with, yeah? (OK fine naan pizza actually is delicious, it is the exception that proves the rule.)

I do think that US political parties need to pay a lot more attention to the Asian American vote (OK maybe the label is kinda useful after all), which is exploding. But the way you do that is by recognizing that different communities are going to have different needs. Just like (shocker) white communities.

* I finally finished Schitt's Creek, and while it's a charming show, the "Happy Ending" of the last few episodes was definitely marred by the return of Ray, aka human Apu. The actor's from fucking Calgary!
posted by basalganglia at 6:48 PM on May 30, 2021 [1 favorite]

Conclusion: the title of this post is not well chosen. It needs, at least, the addition of the word "All" which thebots suggests. @drdanger

Response: the title was taken directly from a subheader within the article, written by Connie Hanzhang Jin

I'm learning a great deal from this discussion and wish to thank the participants, especially those speaking from their own experiences.
posted by mecran01 at 4:03 PM on May 31, 2021