"Model" minorities
The term "model minority" refers to a minority group, often of non-European descent, that is perceived to achieve a higher level of success in various socio-economic metrics despite facing discrimination. This concept emerged in the 1960s, notably in an article by sociologist William Petersen, who highlighted the post-World War II advancements of Japanese Americans in education, income, and social behavior. Other groups, particularly Asian Americans such as Chinese and Korean Americans, have also been labeled as model minorities, attributed largely to cultural values that promote education and entrepreneurship.
However, the model minority concept is contentious, as it implies that some minority groups succeed while others fail due to their cultural attributes. Critics argue that this oversimplification overlooks systemic barriers and discrimination faced by less successful groups, particularly African Americans. Additionally, the model minority stereotype can have harmful implications, potentially leading to neglect of the needs of less affluent members within these groups and fostering resentment among other racial communities. Sociologists continue to debate the validity of this label, examining its effects on societal perceptions and public policy, while recognizing the diversity and complexities within minority populations.
"Model" minorities
Significance:The term “model minority” generally refers to a minority group that has attained educational and economic success and has achieved a high degree of assimilation into a dominant society. In the United States the term has most often been applied to Asian Americans, notably Japanese, Korean, and Chinese Americans.
The concept of the “model” minority has been studied and debated since the 1960s when the term first appeared. Its validity has been both defended and attacked, and the possible harmful effects of the concept as an accepted and unquestioned stereotype have been argued. Another particularly contentious issue is that the suggestion that certain minorities are “model” implicitly contains the opposite idea: Other minorities are less than “model” and are perhaps even deficient in some way.
Definition and History of the Term
A “model” minority is any minority group (typically of non-European background) that does well despite having faced discrimination. The criteria by which a minority group is judged as doing well or not doing well vary, but they have included average family income; success in entrepreneurship; children’s educational achievement (for recently settled groups); and extent of symptoms of deviance or social pathology. The higher the first three, and the lower the last one, the likelier a group is to be considered a model minority. Since every ethnic or minority group in the United States has produced at least a few high achievers and at least a few failures and criminals, social scientists’ judgments of ethnic group success or failure are always statements of averages; they are often based on census data.
The term first appeared in an article in the January 9, 1966, New York Times Magazine. It was titled “Success Story, Japanese-American Style” and was written by white American sociologist William Petersen. Before World War II, Petersen points out, those Japanese Americans born in Japan could neither own land in California nor become naturalized American citizens; their American-born children (the Nisei) were barred from many types of employment. During World War II, Japanese Americans living in the Pacific coast states were herded into internment camps. Yet in the two decades after World War II, Japanese Americans achieved a level of education higher than that of white Americans; a level of family income at least equal to that of whites, and a level of social pathology (such as juvenile delinquency) lower than that of whites. Hence, Petersen calls Japanese Americans “our model minority.”
In Japanese Americans: The Evolution of a Subculture(1969), Harry L. Kitano, a Japanese American sociologist, also uses the term “model minority,” acknowledging its origin with Petersen. Kitano expresses ambivalence about the term, which he regards as an ethnocentric white majority’s view of a racial minority. Yet, like Petersen, Kitano ascribes the economic success of Japanese Americans after World War II to ethnic Japanese cultural values.
Model Groups
Japanese Americans are not the only Asian American ethnic group that has been noted by social scientists for its level of achievement since the 1960s. Chinese and Korean Americans have also been so identified. The business success of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese Americans has been attributed by some sociologists and historians to ethnic cultural values, as exemplified by the rotating credit systems that immigrants established to help provide one another with funds to start businesses. Korean business success has been similarly explained. The academic success of Indochinese refugee schoolchildren has been ascribed to the congruence of the refugees’ Confucian ethic with the ethic of the American middle class. Louis Winnick, a scholarly expert on urban neighborhoods, went so far as to lump all Asian Americans together as a model minority.
Some non-Asian groups have also been viewed as model minorities as well. In the early 1970s, post–1959 Cuban refugees were praised in the mass media for having overcome adversity quickly. Thomas Sowell, a black conservative intellectual, asserts that British West Indian immigrants (who are mainly black) outperform native-born black Americans economically and educationally. Similarly, Ivan Light argued in 1972 that British West Indian immigrants do better in small business than native-born black Americans; they do so, he said, because of their rotating credit system. Writing in 1993, two journalists (white New Yorker Joe Klein and Haitian émigré Joel Dreyfuss) contended that Haitian immigrants exhibit fewer social pathologies and more signs of economic and educational advance than native-born black Americans. Social scientist Kofi Apraku has described post–1965 African immigrants (such as refugees from Ethiopia) as above average in occupational and entrepreneurial attainment.
Sociological Viewpoint
Sociologists who employ or support the model minority concept usually adhere to the assimilation model of interethnic relations. According to this theoretical model, the ultimate destiny of any American ethnic or minority group is to climb upward into the broad middle class. Such thinkers tend to see the progress of any ethnic or minority group as a function of its cultural values rather than of the extent of the discrimination it suffers. The relative slowness of any particular group to overcome poverty and win the acceptance of the majority is ascribed, at least in part, to that group’s cultural values; hence, one can regard some minorities as “model” and others as less exemplary.
Such structural theorists as sociologist Stephen Steinberg, by contrast, argue that it is not cultural deficiencies that retard minorities’ progress but discriminatory barriers erected by the majority. These barriers can be far more widespread and insidious than is first apparent. Such theorists also contend that the seemingly miraculous progress of some model minorities can be explained by the social class background of the immigrants and by the opportunity structure that they found upon arrival rather than by any alleged superiority of those minorities’ cultural values.
Implications
The model minority concept has most often been applied in discussions of the relative success of certain Asian ethnic immigrant groups in the United States. The term has engendered much debate because of its implicit criticism of other groups—if these “model” groups could succeed, it suggests, then others should be able to as well. This implication then leads to the question: If certain groups cannot succeed as well as others in American society, where does the problem lie—with discrimination, with the attitudes of the dominant culture, or with the cultural attributes and attitudes of the minority groups themselves?
The model minority concept has surfaced repeatedly in debates over the status of African Americans, the minority group that has been in the United States the longest but that has arguably assimilated least effectively. In the late 1950s and the 1960s, many white Americans felt anxieties about the civil rights movement; the urban unrest of the late 1960s exacerbated fears and uncertainties about the future of race relations. Then, in the late 1970s and 1980s, white resentment of affirmative action programs, which primarily benefited African Americans, grew. At the same time, there was some bewilderment that inner-city black poverty persisted despite affirmative action. The model minority concept, with its evidence of Asian American success, seemed to suggest that such programs might be, or should be, unnecessary.
Hence, from 1966 onward, the notion of Asian Americans as a model minority found receptive ears among conservative white Americans. By the middle and late 1980s, it was being purveyed in a speech by President Ronald Reagan (in 1984), in magazine articles, and on television news programs (which placed special emphasis on the scholastic achievements of Asian American youth). Although most blacks in the 1980s resented being compared unfavorably with Asian Americans, some conservative black intellectuals, Thomas Sowell, Walter E. Williams, and Shelby Steele among them, defended the concept and pointed to Asian American success as an example for blacks to follow.
Controversy and Challenges
Because of its use in arguments over public policy, the model minority thesis is hotly disputed. Thus a laudatory report on Indochinese refugee schoolchildren by Caplan, Whitmore, and Choy was criticized by sociologist Rubén Rumbaut for having covered only the Vietnamese, Sino-Vietnamese, and Lao, omitting data on the less successful refugees, the Hmong and the Cambodians. The overall high Asian American average in income and education, Asian American scholars Ronald Takaki, Deborah Woo, Peter Kwong, and Arthur Hu point out, hides a bipolar distribution: Chinese immigrants, for example, include both sweatshop laborers and scientists. Many of the Asian American youth who excel in school, it is emphasized, are children of well-educated immigrants who either hold professional jobs in the United States or did so in Asia; Asian immigrant teenagers from poorer, less well-educated families are not always high achievers, and they are sometimes members of urban juvenile gangs. Asian American immigrant family incomes, it is conceded, may equal or surpass those of whites, but only because of a larger number of earners per family. Per capita income is less than that of whites; moreover, Asian Americans tend to live in areas with a higher than average cost of living, such as Hawaii, New York, and California. Also, Asian Americans statistically must achieve higher education levels than white Americans to equal their incomes.
Sowell’s portrait of British West Indian immigrants to the United States as an ethnic success story has also been challenged. These immigrants, economist Thomas Boston argues in Race, Class, and Conservatism (1988), exceed both the average British West Indian and the average native-born black American in educational level; hence, the superior West Indian economic performance in the United States is no simple rags-to-riches story. Sociologist Suzanne Model, using census data, asserts that any West Indian socioeconomic lead over American-born blacks had disappeared by 1990.
If the “model” part of “model minority” has been criticized, so has the “minority” part, at least regarding Asian Americans. Although everyone agrees that certain Asian American groups have been unjustly persecuted, some scholars, such as political scientist Lawrence Fuchs, argue that no Asian American group was ever discriminated against as consistently, or for as long a time, as black Americans were.
Some view the Asian American model minority stereotype as potentially harmful to Asian Americans themselves. Writing in the late 1980s, Ronald Takaki warned that widespread acceptance of the stereotype might lead to governmental indifference to the plight of those Asian Americans who are poor and to neglect of programs that would help Asian immigrants learn English and find jobs. Takaki, worried about the loss of legitimate minority status, points to examples of low-income Asian American university students being denied aid under educational opportunity programs. He also thinks that the envy generated among black and white Americans by the model minority stereotype partially explains the violent anti-Asian incidents of the 1980s.
Bibliography
Barringer, Herbert R., Robert W. Gardner, and Michael J. Levin. Asian and Pacific Islanders in the United States. New York: Russell Sage, 1993. Print.
Gibson, Margaret A. Accommodation without Assimilation: Sikh Immigrants in an American High School. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988. Print.
Hartlep, Nicholas Daniel. The Model Minority Stereotype: Demystifying Asian American Success. IAP, 2013.
Kitano, Harry L. Japanese Americans: The Evolution of a Subculture. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1969. Print.
Pang, V. O., and J. D. Palmer. "Model Minorities and the Model Minorities Myth." Encyclopedia of Diversity in Education. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2012. 1518. Print.
Petersen, Willima. Japanese Americans: Oppression and Success. New York: Random House, 1971. Print.
Takaki, Ronald. “Breaking Silences.” Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. Boston: Little, Brown, 1989. Print.
Trytten, Deborah A., Anna Wong Lowe, and Susan E. Walden. "'Asians Are Good at Math. What an Awful Stereotype' The Model Minority Stereotype's Impact on Asian American Engineering Students." Journal of Engineering Education 101.3 (2012): 439–68. Print.