origin myths

asian-americans, affirmative action, and the invention of the model minority

Photo by Corky Lee (Source: The New Yorker)

I was on the beach in Costa Rica, vacationing with my family for spring break during my senior year of high school, when I learned that I’d been rejected from every single one of the Ivy League colleges that I’d applied to—including my dream school, Yale. I was predictably devastated, of course, but I was also deeply confused. On paper, my college counselor had assured me time and time again, I was a competitive applicant—my grades were stellar, my letters of recommendation were glowing, and my extracurriculars were as robust as anyone’s. I’d even done what I understood all Asian-American¹ applicants to elite colleges were supposed to do—write a nauseatingly self-serious admissions essay in which I painstakingly mined the entirety of my seventeen-year existence for whatever shreds of prejudice or discrimination I could find to prove that even I, an affluent Indian kid from an affluent suburb who attended an affluent school with affluent classmates, had experienced my own form of adversity.

In the months that followed, at get-togethers and graduation parties, I was repeatedly told by relatives and family friends from my suburb’s small but tight-knit Indian community that this wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for affirmative action policies that put Asian applicants like myself at a disadvantage in college admissions. These were arguments that I’d heard more times than I could count, and that I myself had repeated on several occasions along with my Indian-American peers. At the same time as we vocally pronounced our righteous indignation at Rachel Dolezal’s decades-long blackface performance, we looked upon figures such as Mindy Kaling’s brother, who infamously feigned Blackness to get into medical school, as a comical and even vaguely sympathetic character, driven to ill-judged and extreme measures by a system that, while well-intentioned, in practice ended up discriminating against people like us—or so we believed.

These misguided beliefs about affirmative action stemmed not from outright prejudice, but rather from our naive acceptance of the fiction that such policies were meant to do anything other than redress the historical exclusion of marginalized groups from the same elite institutions on which we so desperately pinned our aspirations. Faced with the immense pressure of college applications that, we earnestly believed, would not only determine the course of our lives but would also serve to either vindicate or betray the sacrifices our parents made in immigrating to America, these bold-faced lies about affirmative action presented themselves as a welcome refuge. In all our teenage ignorance, we allowed ourselves to be seduced by them. 

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The idea that college admissions are systemically biased against Asian applicants lies at the heart of the plaintiffs’ argument in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the landmark case in which the United States Supreme Court recently overturned fifty years of judicial precedent to rule that racial affirmative action policies in college admissions violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Many have criticized the case’s plaintiffs in the aftermath of the ruling, but the reality is that many Asian-Americans hold similar views—while data from the Pew Research Center indicates that most Asian-American adults who are familiar with the idea of affirmative action are supportive of it as a concept, the same numbers show that as many as 76 percent believe that race and ethnicity should not factor into college admissions. 53 percent feel that considering race in admissions makes the process less fair, and more than a third feel that doing so leads to less qualified students being admitted to colleges.

The actual statistics on college admissions, however, call these claims into question. A 2021 report from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce found that statistically speaking, Asian-American applicants’ likelihood of being admitted to Harvard has remained on par with that of non-Asian applicants from 2000 to 2018. While the likelihood of getting into Harvard has declined over time, that decline holds true across the board, for all groups—not just Asians. Meanwhile, the share of Asian-American students at the most selective colleges over the same period has increased at the same rate as the share of Asian-American students at all colleges. If there really were some widespread institutional conspiracy at elite schools to keep Asians at a disadvantage, this simply wouldn’t be the case. It is true, the report finds, that Asian-American students do face higher rates of rejection from the most selective colleges compared to their non-Asian counterparts, but this isn’t due to systematic bias. Rather, according to the study, this trend is simply reflective of the fact that Asian-Americans—even those with below-average test scores—are more likely than non-Asian students to apply to these highly selective institutions in the first place.

None of this is to say, of course, that Asian-Americans don’t face bias in college admissions—or, for that matter, any other facet of educational or professional life. The truth is, however, that there is simply no credible basis for the argument that affirmative action policies aimed at creating opportunities for marginalized groups are to blame for this bias. The reality is that by buying into this narrative, Asian-Americans such as the plaintiffs in the Harvard case are aligning themselves with the forces of white supremacy, allowing themselves to be weaponized as pawns in pursuit of an odious right-wing agenda—and hindering the collective advancement of all marginalized communities in the process.

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Much has been written about the closely interwoven relationship between the weaponized role Asian-Americans play in debates over affirmative action and the pervasive stereotype of us as so-called “model minorities”—supposedly more hardworking, law-abiding, and high-achieving than other racial and ethnic groups. The “model minority” stereotype has its roots in a 1966 New York Times article by the sociologist William Petersen, entitled “Success Story, Japanese-American Style.” In the article, Petersen attributed the relative socioeconomic success of Japanese-Americans—particularly in the aftermath of their internment during World War II just two decades earlier—to what he argued were innate cultural characteristics such as a strong work ethic, robust family values, and an emphasis on education. Petersen contrasted this “success story” with the experience of what he termed “problem minorities”—namely Black people—and while he did superficially acknowledge the role that historic oppression played in shaping the marginalized social position of Black Americans, implicit in Petersen’s argument was the deeply racist idea that this community lacked certain cultural traits that had predisposed Japanese-Americans to success.

At the time that Petersen was writing, Japanese-Americans already had deep roots in the United States. His arguments, however, would soon be extended to other groups whose presence in the country was much less established—the article was published just one year after the Immigration and Nationality of Act of 1965 opened the door for larger-scale immigration from other Asian countries by removing the national-origin national-origin quotas that had explicitly excluded Asians and largely restricted immigration to white Europeans from the 1920s onward. In place of these quotas, the Act instituted a new system which gave preference for admission to individuals who had attained higher levels of education and who worked in white-collar professions, while simultaneously making it more difficult for would-be immigrants from poor and working-class backgrounds to secure visas. Predictably, these requirements had the effect of ensuring that many of the Asian immigrants who came to the United States in the wake of the 1965 Act represented a particular social background—highly educated, professionally successful, upwardly mobile—that dovetailed conveniently with the widespread conception of an American Dream rooted in hard work and self-sufficiency further reinforcing the model minority stereotype in the eyes of many Americans.

The stereotype has remained pervasive ever since, and many Asian-Americans have embraced the model minority narrative as part of a frantic bid for proximity to whiteness in a country where whiteness is perhaps the single most powerful form of social currency an individual can have. (This pursuit of whiteness, it should be noted, is nothing new—in an infamous Supreme Court case from 1923, a Punjabi immigrant named Bhagat Singh Thind unsuccessfully sued for naturalized United States citizenship on the grounds that his background as a “high-caste Hindu” qualified him as “white” under the prevailing racial logic of the time.) This embrace of the model minority stereotype comes at a cost—internalization of the stereotype is associated with adverse mental health outcomes, barriers to accessing mental support, and a higher prevalence of anti-Black attitudes.

Beyond these individual harms, the stereotype itself is also riddled with grotesque misrepresentations. It obscures, for example, the fact that Asian-Americans have the largest economic disparities of any racial or ethnic group in America, or that Asians constitute some 17 percent of undocumented immigrants in the United States. It leaves little room for the Desi taxi drivers and Vietnamese nail techs, the Chinese restaurant workers and Filipino nurses who are no less Asian-American than their counterparts in medicine, tech, or business, but whose stories and experiences are never held up in the same way as examples of what “good” immigrants ought to look like.

Though this stereotype is often referred to as the “model minority myth,” simply calling it a myth risks obscuring the reality that the idea of the model minority is far more than just a widely-held misconception—it is a conscious narrative, intentionally constructed in service of particular political ends. Accepting the model minority narrative entails more than just falling for an unfounded belief—it means buying into the agenda that underlies this narrative, aligning oneself with a political project that seeks to reify a supremacist social order in which whiteness is elevated to the top of the racial hierarchy and all other groups are forced to scramble for the places underneath it. The model minority narrative, in other words, is not just a myth—it is a potent and insidious fabrication, and one which far too many of us bear responsibility for perpetuating.

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Apart from being patently false, of course, this narrative is also extremely dangerous—for obvious reasons. While on its face it may appear to be a “positive stereotype,” the fact is that the model minority cannot exist without a counterexample against which its own “model” status can be measured—so-called “problem minorities,” whose social marginalization is attributed to laziness, ignorance, criminality, and other supposed markers of ontological inferiority. So long as some communities are held up as models of how racialized minorities ought to exist in a society whose very structure is premised on their Othering, there will always be other groups who are not so lucky—whose own marginalization is only exacerbated by the acceptance of their “model” counterparts. Little wonder, then, that the model minority narrative has long served to drive a racial wedge between Asian-Americans and other minority groups—forestalling the sort of radical cross-ethnic solidarity that emerged, for example, during the British Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Perhaps, had the stars aligned differently, such solidarity might have emerged in America as well.

This narrative’s harms are not just limited to undermining solidarity between different racial and ethnic groups. By reinforcing a particular, narrowly-defined idea of what “success” means for Asian-Americans, the internalization of the model minority narrative also drives an internal wedge between those members of our communities who conform to this constructed image and those who do not. The model minority narrative places the greatest value on those markers of success—elite education, lucrative employment, acceptance as unobtrusive members of “polite” society—which serve to uphold and reinforce the same structures of capitalism and white supremacy that have oppressed communities of color for centuries. Ultimately, the internalization of these criteria is about trying to secure Asian-Americans’ positions within these structures, rather than putting us in a position to effectively challenge them.

When Asian-Americans accept the model minority narrative, we become active participants in our own dehumanization. Internalizing this narrative means more than just setting impossible standards for ourselves—it means limiting the horizons of our experience to a narrowly-defined set of criteria for “success” that define us in the eyes of white America. It means leaving no room for the possibility of our surviving and thriving beyond the expectations set for us by the same forces that colonized our homelands, enslaved our brothers and sisters, and continue to hold us back to this day. By reducing ourselves to these arbitrary and oppressive standards, we deny ourselves the space to exist in this world as full and flawed human beings, capable of stumbling and faltering and, yes, even failing.

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It’s undeniable that the model minority narrative is deeply entrenched in Asian-American culture and identity. But for as long as this narrative has existed, and for as long as Asian-Americans have internalized it, there have also been activists, organizers, and radical leaders who have bravely called on our communities to resist it. In 1969, just a few years after William Petersen coined the term “model minority,” poet and activist Amy Uyematsu wrote an article in Gidra—a revolutionary magazine which published writings on Asian-American identity and culture from a radically anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist perspective—entitled “The Emergence of Yellow Power in America”. In the article, Uyematsu took the Asian-American mainstream to task for its acceptance of model minority status in pursuit of whiteness by proxy, writing that “precisely because Asian Americans have become economically secure, do they face serious identity problems. Fully committed to a system that subordinates them on the basis of non-whiteness, Asian Americans still try to gain complete acceptance by denying their yellowness. They have become white in every respect but color.” By allowing the white-dominated American society to “hold up the ‘successful’ Oriental image before other minority groups as the model to emulate,” Uyematsu argued, “Asian Americans are perpetuating white racism in the United States.”

Excoriating Asian-Americans for their general refusal to engage in radical political activism—a passivity which she attributed to a pervasive culture of fear—Uyematsu argued that this deferential stereotype of Asians only exacerbated the oppression of other groups, in particular Black people: “Asian Americans have formed an uneasy alliance with white Americans to keep the blacks down…Fearful whites tell militant blacks that the acceptable criterion for behavior is exemplified in the quiet, passive Asian American.” Uyematsu forcefully challenged this stereotype, instead arguing for a new conception of “yellow power” that would reject the “passive Oriental stereotype” and instead bring about “the birth of a new Asian—one who will recognize and deal with injustices” rather than silently accepting them.

In the summer of 2020, with the nation reeling in the aftermath of George Floyd’s brutal murder at the hands of four Minneapolis police officers—one of them himself Asian—many people issued renewed calls for Asian-Americans to abandon the model minority narrative, critically examine and reject patterns of anti-Blackness within our communities, and stand in unyielding solidarity with Black people in the struggle for justice and liberation. Some three years later, however, the cynical weaponization of Asian-Americans as pawns in an odious right-wing campaign to eliminate even the most basic protections for marginalized groups is a sobering reminder of just how far we still have to go if we want to build the sort of radical, cross-ethnic solidarity that is so direly needed to ensure our collective liberation.

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Earlier in this essay, I critiqued the widespread tendency to refer to the model minority narrative as a “myth.” My critique was based on the common definition of a myth as “a commonly believed but false idea,” on the grounds that calling the stereotype a myth in this sense allows us to evade responsibility to a certain extent for our own complicity in actively upholding it. I suppose the argument could be made, however, that the model minority narrative does function in many ways as a myth in the other sense of the term, specifically as an origin myth—a story that we tell ourselves to help explain an aspect of the world whose true origins lie beyond our comfort or comprehension. Viewed through this lens, the model minority is a sort of origin myth—a way for Asian-Americans to more comfortably explain the unique position of relative privilege that many of us occupy in American society, rather than having to reckon with the far less comforting reality that this position is both contingent and predicated upon the violent marginalization and dispossession of other groups.

The model minority narrative is a powerful origin myth, and a deeply alluring one for any community seeking acceptance and security in a white supremacist society. It’s easy to understand why so many of us have internalized this myth, but that doesn’t make it any less vital for us to cast it aside (as we should have done long ago). We simply cannot afford for our comfort to come at the expense of others’ humanity—or, for that matter, at the expense of our own.

1. For an explanation of why I choose to hyphenate “Asian-American”, see the following essay I wrote on this subject back in April:

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no more mangoes is a blog by Pranay Somayajula, a London-based cultural critic and essayist. Click the button below to subscribe for free and receive new essays in your inbox: