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'Model Minority' Myth Again Used As A Racial
Wedge Between Asians And Blacks
April 19, 2017 · 8:32 AM ET
KAT CHOW
The perception of universal success among Asian-Americans is
being wielded to downplay racism's role in the persistent
struggles of other minority groups, especially black Americans.
Chelsea Beck/NP R
A piece from New York Magazine's Andrew Sullivan over the
weekend ended with an
old, well-worn trope: Asian-Americans, with their "solid two-
parent family structures,"
are a shining example of how to overcome discrimination. An
essay that began by
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imagining why Democrats feel sorry for Hillary Clinton — and
then detoured to
President Trump's policies — drifted to this troubling ending:
"Today, Asian-Americans are among the most prosperous, well-
educated, and
successful ethnic groups in America. What gives? It couldn't
possibly be that they
maintained solid two-parent family structures, had social
networks that looked after
one another, placed enormous emphasis on education and hard
work, and thereby
turned false, negative stereotypes into true, positive ones, could
it? It couldn't be that
all whites are not racists or that the American dream still
lives?"

Sullivan's piece, rife with generalizations about a group as
vastly diverse as Asian-
Americans, rightfully raised hackles. Not only inaccurate, his
piece spreads the idea
that Asian-Americans as a group are monolithic, even though
parsing data by ethnicity
reveals a host of disparities; for example, Bhutanese-Americans
have far higher rates
of poverty than other Asian populations, like Japanese-
Americans. And at the root of
Sullivan's pernicious argument is the idea that black failure and
Asian success cannot
be explained by inequities and racism, and that they are one and
the same; this allows
a segment of white America to avoid any responsibility for
addressing racism or the
damage it continues to inflict.
"Sullivan's comments showcase a classic and tenacious
conservative strategy," Janelle
Wong, the director of Asian American Studies at the University
of Maryland, College
Park, said in an email. This strategy, she said, involves "1)
ignoring the role that
selective recruitment of highly educated Asian immigrants has
played in Asian
American success followed by 2) making a flawed comparison
between Asian
Americans and other groups, particularly Black Americans, to
argue that racism,
including more than two centuries of black enslavement, can be
overcome by hard
work and strong family values."
"It's like the Energizer Bunny," said Ellen D. Wu, an Asian-

American studies professor
at Indiana University and the author of The Color of Success.
Much of Wu's work
focuses on dispelling the "model minority" myth, and she's been
tasked repeatedly
with publicly refuting arguments like Sullivan's, which, she
said, are incessant. "The
thing about the Sullivan piece is that it's such an old-fashioned
rendering. It's very
retro in the kinds of points he made."
http://aapidata.com/stats/national/national-poverty-aa-aj/
http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2016/12/the_real_
reasons_the_us_became.html
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0123-wu-chua-
model-minority-chinese-20140123-story.html
Since the end of World War II, many white people have used
Asian-Americans and
their perceived collective success as a racial wedge. The effect?
Minimizing the role
racism plays in the persistent struggles of other racial/ethnic
minority groups —
especially black Americans.
On Twitter, people took Sullivan's "old-fashioned rendering" to
task.

Ida Bae Wells
@nhannahjones
Andrew Sullivan may want to start by studying immigration
policy to see just *which* Asians are allowed into this country
in
the 1 place.
730 2:51 PM - Apr 15, 2017
161 people are talking about this
Ida Bae Wells @nhannahjones · Apr 15, 2017
Replying to @nhannahjones @NYMag
But this is exactly why few people are actually qualified to
write
*well* and *smartly* on race. They haven't studied it, they
sound
dumb.
Jeff Guo
Jeff Guo @_jeffguo · Apr 15, 2017
Replying to @_jeffguo
3. I won't get into them all, but read this interview with
historian
@ellendwu: washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2…
The real reasons the U.S. became less racist toward Asi…
How Asians went from hated minority to useful prop
washingtonpost.com
https://twitter.com/nhannahjones
https://twitter.com/intent/like?tweet_id=853380229380935681
https://twitter.com/nhannahjones/status/853380229380935681

https://support.twitter.com/articles/20175256
https://twitter.com/_/status/853378352626925569
https://twitter.com/_jeffguo
https://twitter.com/_jeffguo/status/853319668022611970
https://twitter.com/_/status/853319397712306176
https://twitter.com/ellendwu
https://t.co/5IPT3bCArF
https://t.co/5IPT3bCArF
@ jeffguo
4. Importantly: Elevating Asian Americans as "deserving" and
"hardworking" was a tactic to denigrate African Americans
2,990 10:56 AM - Apr 15, 2017
1,193 people are talking about this
"During World War II, the media created the idea that the
Japanese were rising up out

of the ashes [after being held in incarceration camps] and
proving that they had the
right cultural stuff," said Claire Jean Kim, a professor at the
University of California,
Irvine. "And it was immediately a reflection on black people:
Now why weren't black
people making it, but Asians were?"
These arguments falsely conflate anti-Asian racism with anti-
black racism, according
to Kim. "Racism that Asian-Americans have experienced is not
what black people have
experienced," Kim said. "Sullivan is right that Asians have
faced various forms of
discrimination, but never the systematic dehumanization that
black people have faced
during slavery and continue to face today." Asians have been
barred from entering the
U.S. and gaining citizenship and have been sent to incarceration
camps, Kim pointed
out, but all that is different than the segregation, police
brutality and discrimination
that African-Americans have endured.
Many scholars have argued that some Asians only started to
"make it" when the
discrimination against them lessened — and only when it was
politically convenient.
Amid worries that the Chinese exclusion laws from the late
1800s would hurt an
allyship with China in the war against imperial Japan, the
Magnuson Act was signed in
1943, allowing 105 Chinese immigrants into the U.S. each year.
As Wu wrote in 2014
in the Los Angeles Times, the Citizens Committee to Repeal
Chinese Exclusion

"strategically recast Chinese in its promotional materials as
'law-abiding, peace-loving,
courteous people living quietly among us'" instead of the
"'yellow peril' coolie hordes."
In 1965, the National Immigration Act replaced the national-
origins quota system with
one that gave preference to immigrants with U.S. family
relationships and certain
skills.
In 1966, William Petersen, a sociologist at the University of
California, Berkeley,
helped popularize comparisons between Japanese-Americans
and African-Americans.
https://twitter.com/intent/like?tweet_id=853321032953974785
https://support.twitter.com/articles/20175256
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0123-wu-chua-
model-minority-chinese-20140123-story.html
His New York Times story, headlined, "Success Story,
Japanese-American Style," is
regarded as one of the most influential pieces written about
Asian-Americans. It

solidified a prevailing stereotype of Asians as industrious and
rule-abiding that would
stand in direct contrast to African-Americans, who were still
struggling against
bigotry, poverty and a history rooted in slavery. In the opening
paragraphs, Petersen
quickly puts African-Americans and Japanese-Americans at
odds:
"Asked which of the country's ethnic minorities has been
subjected to the most
discrimination and the worst injustices, very few persons would
even think of
answering: 'The Japanese Americans,' ... Yet, if the question
refers to persons alive
today, that may well be the correct reply. Like the Negroes, the
Japanese have been the
object of color prejudice .... When new opportunities, even
equal opportunities, are
opened up, the minority's reaction to them is likely to be
negative — either self-
defeating apathy or a hatred so all-consuming as to be self-
destructive. For the well-
meaning programs and countless scholarly studies now focused
on the Negro, we
barely know how to repair the damage that the slave traders
started. The history of
Japanese Americans, however, challenges every such
generalization about ethnic
minorities."
But as history shows, Asian-Americans were afforded better
jobs not simply because of
educational attainment, but in part because they were treated
better.

"More education will help close racial wage gaps somewhat, but
it will not resolve
problems of denied opportunity," reporter Jeff Guo wrote last
fall in the W ashington
Post. "Asian Americans — some of them at least — have made
tremendous progress in
the United States. But the greatest thing that ever happened to
them wasn't that they
studied hard, or that they benefited from tiger moms or
Confucian values. It's that
other Americans started treating them with a little more
respect."
At the heart of arguments of racial advancement is the concept
of "racial resentment,"
which is different than "racism," Slate's Jamelle Bouie recently
wrote in his analysis of
the Sullivan article. "Racial resentment" refers to a "moral
feeling that blacks violate
such traditional American values as individualism and self
reliance," as defined by
political scientists Donald Kinder and David Sears.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/11/19/the
-real-secret-to-asian-american-success-was-not-
education/?utm_term=.7037e43c01c1
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/opinion/sunday/the-asian-
advantage.html
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/0
4/andrew_sullivan_s_perpetuation_of_model_minority_and_bla
ck_pathology_myths.html

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And, Bouie points out, "racial resentment" is simply a tool that
people use to absolve
themselves from dealing with the complexities of racism:
"In fact, racial resentment reflects a tension between the
egalitarian self-image of most
white Americans and that anti-black affect. The 'racist,' after
all, is a figure of stigma.
Few people want to be one, even as they're inclined to believe
the measurable
disadvantages blacks face are caused by something other than
structural racism.
Framing blacks as deficient and pathological rather than inferior
offers a path out for
those caught in that mental maze."
Petersen's, and now Sullivan's, arguments have resurfaced
regularly throughout the
last century. And they'll likely keep resurfacing, as long as

people keep seeking ways to
forgo responsibility for racism — and to escape that "mental
maze." As the writer
Frank Chin said of Asian-Americans in 1974: "Whites love us
because we're not black."
Sometimes it's instructive to look at past rebuttals to tired
arguments — after all, they
hold up much better in the light of history.
model minority black people japanese americans asian american
americans asian
asian americans u.s. african americans andrew sullivan racism
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tory
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Software Requirements Specification
Project Name
Prepared By:

1. SUMMARY 4
...............................................................................................
.................................................
1.1. VISION 4
...............................................................................................
...............................................
1.2. GOALS (BUSINESS REQUIREMENTS) 4
...............................................................................................
..
1.3. ASSUMPTIONS 4
...............................................................................................
....................................
1.4. DEPENDENCIES AND CONSTRAINTS 4
...............................................................................................
...
1.5. INTENDED AUDIENCE 4
...............................................................................................
.........................
2. OVERALL DESCRIPTION 4
...............................................................................................
.....................
3. SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS 4
...............................................................................................
.............
3.1. REQUIREMENTS 4
...............................................................................................
..................................
3.1.1. 101 5
...............................................................................................
.................................................

3.1.2. 102 5
...............................................................................................
.................................................
3.1.3. 103 5
...............................................................................................
.................................................
3.2. REQUIREMENT CONSTRAINTS 6
...............................................................................................
............
3.2.1. Hardware Limitations 6
...............................................................................................
....................
3.2.2. Architecture Limitations 6
...............................................................................................
................
3.2.3. Tool Limitations 6
...............................................................................................
.............................
3.2.4. Security Limitations 6
...............................................................................................
.......................
3.2.5. Globalization/Localization Limitations 6
........................................................................................
3.2.6. Time Limitations 6
...............................................................................................
............................
3.3. SOFTWARE SYSTEM ATTRIBUTES 6
...............................................................................................
.......
3.3.1. Reliability 6
...............................................................................................
......................................
3.3.2. Availability 7
...............................................................................................

....................................
3.3.3. Security 7
...............................................................................................
..........................................
3.3.4. Maintainability 7
...............................................................................................
..............................
3.3.5. Portability 7
...............................................................................................
......................................
3.3.6. Usability 7
...............................................................................................
........................................
4. HIGH LEVEL TEST PLAN 7
...............................................................................................
......................
5. REQUIREMENTS REVIEW 7
...............................................................................................
...................
6. UI/SUBSYSTEM PROTOTYPE (OPTIONAL) 7
....................................................................................
7. REFERENCES 7
...............................................................................................
...........................................
8. DEFINITIONS AND ACRONYMS 8
...............................................................................................
..........
9. APPENDICES
8.............................................................................................
..............................................

1. SUMMARY
1.1. VISION
Update vision statement from Initiation Phase – make sure you
identify all users and stakeholders
1.2. GOALS (BUSINESS REQUIREMENTS)
Update goals statement from Initiation Phase
1.3. ASSUMPTIONS
Update assumptions from Initiation Phase
1.4. DEPENDENCIES AND CONSTRAINTS
Update dependencies and constraints from Initiation Phase
1.5. INTENDED AUDIENCE
Who is this document written for (project team, sponsoring
organization, etc.)
2. OVERALL DESCRIPTION
Provide more detail regarding what exactly is being done in this
project. Give an overview of the product,
its functions, user characteristics, etc. (Include any known
limitations.)
Include major Use Cases and Scenarios here (The aim of a good
scenario is to get the reader to say, “Aha, I
can see why it’s important to provide this feature for this
customer.” If you’re having trouble specifying
your scenario, think about the goal that the user is trying to

accomplish, which will help you put yourself
into his or her shoes.) Optionally include Use Case Diagrams.
3. SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS
3.1. REQUIREMENTS
These requirements relate to project xxx (Committed vs.
Targeted requirements plus no-commit items)
You may want to separate these into the following categories:
• Functional requirements – how a software product must map
program inputs to program outputs
(e.g. The traffic light control module must switch a green lamp
on a traffic light face to an amber
lamp on that face, never to a red lamp.)
• Data requirements – how data must be input to, output from,
or stored by a product (e.g. The
system must accept product descriptions consisting of
arbitrarily formatted ASCII text up to 1,024
characters in length.)
• Non-functional requirements – states that the software product
must have certain properties (e.g.
The payroll system must process the payroll for all 32,000 XYZ
Corp. employees in six hours or
less.)
• Interface requirements – These can be functional, data or non-
functional but should be listed
separately for clarity
o User Interfaces –
o Hardware Interfaces –
o Software interfaces –

• Use of standards – list any requirements to use specific
standards (e.g. for interfaces include
those requirements in the interface section)
Several categories of requirements are listed below in sections
4.2 and 4.3 to help trigger you thinking.
The following rules are from the IEEE Standards Style Manual:
• The word shall is used to indicate mandatory requirements
strictly to be followed in order to
conform to the standard and from which no deviation is
permitted (shall equals is required to). The
use of the word must is deprecated and shall not be used when
stating mandatory requirements;
must is used only to describe unavoidable situations. The use of
the word will is deprecated and
shall not be used when stating mandatory requirements; will is
only used in statements of fact.
• The word should is used to indicate that among several
possibilities one is recommended as
particularly suitable, without mentioning or excluding others; or
that a certain course of action is
preferred but not necessarily required; or that (in the negative
form) a certain course of action is
deprecated but not prohibited (should equals is recommended
that).
• The word may is used to indicate a course of action
permissible within the limits of the standard
(may equals is permitted to).

• The word can is used for statements of possibility and
capability, whether material, physical, or
causal (can equals is able to).
All requirements shall map to a SOW high level requirement.
After the Requirements Document has been
approved, any changes to the requirements shall be indicated in
the Version field as appropriate.
3.1.1. 101
Details of requirement 101 (possible additional Use Case or
Scenario)
3.1.2. 102
Details of requirement 102
3.1.3. 103
Details of requirement 103
Req. ID Version Description
SOW
High
Level
Req.
C T
N
C
101 (Changed)
1.2
Shall implement abc 100
X

102 (New) 1.0 Shall implement bcd. 100 X
103 (New) 1.1 Should implement cde 100 X
201 (Removed)
1.2
Should implement def 200
X
202 (New) 1.2 Shall implement efg 200 X
301 (Changed)
1.1
May implement xyz 300
X
401 (New) 1.1 Shall implement wxy 400 X
402 (New) 1.2 Shall implement ijk 400 X
3.2. REQUIREMENT CONSTRAINTS
3.2.1. HARDWARE LIMITATIONS
3.2.2. ARCHITECTURE LIMITATIONS
3.2.3. TOOL LIMITATIONS
3.2.4. SECURITY LIMITATIONS
3.2.5. GLOBALIZATION/LOCALIZATION LIMITATIONS

3.2.6. TIME LIMITATIONS
3.3. SOFTWARE SYSTEM ATTRIBUTES
Define any special requirements due to
reliability/availability/etc.
3.3.1. RELIABILITY
Req. ID Description
Req. ID Description
Req. ID Description
Req. ID Description
Req. ID Description
Req. ID Description
Req. ID Description
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1/16/2019 The real reasons the U.S. became less racist toward
Asian Americans - The Washington Post
-real-reason-americans-stopped-spitting-on-asian-americans-

and-started-praising-them/?utm_term=.9… 1/9
The Washington Post
Economic Policy
The real reasons the U.S. became less racist toward Asian
Americans
By Jeff Guo
November 29, 2016
Between 1940 and 1970, something remarkable happened to
Asian Americans. Not only did they surpass
African Americans in average household earnings, but they also
closed the wage gap with whites.
Many people credit this upward mobility to investments in
education. But according to a recent study by Brown
University economist Nathaniel Hilger, schooling rates among
Asian Americans didn’t change all that
significantly during those three decades. Instead, Hilger’s
research suggests that Asian Americans started to
earn more because their fellow Americans became less racist
toward them.
[The real secret to Asian American success was not education]
How did that happen? About the same time that Asian
Americans were climbing the socioeconomic ladder,
they also experienced a major shift in their public image. At the
outset of the 20th century, Asian Americans
had often been portrayed as threatening, exotic and degenerate.
But by the 1950s and 1960s, the idea of the
model minority had begun to take root. Newspapers

often glorified Asian Americans as industrious, law-
abiding citizens who kept their heads down and never
complained.
Some people think that racism toward Asians diminished
because Asians “proved themselves” through their
actions. But that is only a sliver of the truth. Then, as now, the
stories of successful Asians were elevated, while
the stories of less successful Asians were diminished. As
historian Ellen Wu explains in her book, “The Color of
Success,” the model minority stereotype has a fascinating origin
story, one that’s tangled up in geopolitics, the
Cold War and the civil rights movement.
To combat racism, minorities in the United States have often
attempted to portray themselves as upstanding
citizens capable of assimilating into mainstream culture. Asian
Americans were no different, Wu writes. Some,
like the Chinese, sought respectability by promoting stories
about their obedient children and their traditional
family values. The Japanese pointed to their wartime service as
proof of their shared Americanness.
African Americans in the 1940s made very similar appeals. But
in the postwar moment, Wu argues, it was only
convenient for political leaders to hear the Asian voices.
The model minority narrative may have started with Asian
Americans, but it was quickly co-opted by white
politicians who saw it as a tool to win allies in the Cold War.
Discrimination was not a good look on the
international stage. Embracing Asian Americans “provided a
powerful means for the United States to proclaim
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/jeff-guo/

-real-secret-to-asian-american-success-was-not-education/
https://jacl.org/asian-american-history/
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~hist32/Hist33/US%20News%20&%
20World%20Report.pdf
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10134.html
http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/10/22/450821244/
where-does-the-pull-up-your-pants-school-of-black-politics-
come-from
https://www.nps.gov/wwii/learn/historyculture/japanese-
americans-at-war.htm
itself a racial democracy and thereby credentialed to assume the
leadership of the free world,” Wu writes.
Stories about Asian American success were turned
into propaganda.
By the 1960s, anxieties about the civil right movement caused
white Americans to further invest in positive
portrayals of Asian Americans. The image of the hard-working
Asian became an extremely convenient way to
deny the demands of African Americans. As Wu describes in her
book, both liberal and conservative politicians
pumped up the image of Asian Americans as a way to shift the
blame for black poverty. If Asians could find
success within the system, politicians asked, why couldn’t
African Americans?

“The insinuation was that hard work along with unwavering
faith in the government and liberal democracy as
opposed to political protest were the keys to overcoming racial
barriers as well as achieving full citizenship,”
she writes.
Recently, Wu and I chatted on the phone about her book and the
model minority stereotype — how it was equal
parts truth, propaganda and self-enforcing prophecy.
Can you tell us a little bit about the question that got you starte
d on this book?
WU: America in general has had very limited ways of thinking
about Asian Americans. There are very few ways
in which we exist in the popular imagination. In the mid- to
late-19th century, all the way through the late
1940s and 1950s, Asians were thought of as “brown hordes” or
as the “yellow peril.” There was the sinister,
weird, “Fu Manchu” stereotype.
Yet, by the middle of the 1960s, Asian Americans had
undergone this really arresting racial makeover. Political
leaders, journalists, social scientists — all these people in the
public eye — seemed to suddenly be praising
Asian Americans as so-called model minorities.
I thought that might be a very interesting question to try to
unravel.
How did these earliest stereotypes —
these very negative, nasty images — take root?
Asian Americans first started coming in significant numbers
during the California Gold Rush. Chinese
immigrants came to do mining, then they ended up working on

the Transcontinental Railroad, and agriculture.
When those jobs died down, a lot of them moved to the cities
where they started working in manufacturing.
At that time, in the 1870s, the economy wasn’t doing that well
in California. White American workers were very
anxious about keeping their jobs. They looked around and they
saw these newcomers who seemed very
different from them.
There already had been a long tradition in the Western world of
portraying the “Orient” as unknowable and
mysterious. American workers started attaching these ideas to
the Chinese newcomers, who were an easy target
for white American anxieties about the growth of industrial
capitalism and the undermining of workers’
autonomy and freedom. They believed that the Chinese
threatened American independence and threatened
American freedom.
These ideas were particularly popular among the white working
class at the time. The momentum started to
build in the American West. There was the Workingmen’s Party
in California — one of their platforms was “The
Chinese must go.” That’s how they rallied people. And they
were very successful at it.

By 1882, Congress passed the first of a series of Chinese
Exclusion Acts, which was the first time a race- and
class-based group — Chinese workers — were singled out by
American immigration law. The Chinese Exclusion
Acts restricted their entry into the United States and said they
couldn’t become naturalized citizens.
What’s really striking is that in the 1890s, the federal
government even mandated a Chinese registry. That
sounds a lot like this issue of the Muslim registry today, right?
A lot of what you’re describing sounds familiar today —
the economic anxiety bleeding into
racial anxiety, the targeting of outsiders …
Absolutely. There are a lot of resonances. What’s happening
today didn’t spring out of nowhere — it has a very
long history in the United States.
Can you describe some of these old stereotypes? I think that mo
st people have some idea from
old Hollywood movies, but it’s just such a contrast to how Asia
ns Americans are portrayed
today.
The ways in which Americans thought about these “Orientals”
hinged a lot on moral differences and on issues
of gender, sexuality and family.
Many great historians and scholars have done work on this. The
major groups that came before World War II
were the Chinese, Japanese, South Asians, Koreans and
Filipinos. There were both similarities and differences
in how the groups were viewed, but generally they were thought
to be threatening — significantly different in a

negative sense.
For the most part, a lot of Asian immigrants weren’t Christian,
so that was suspect. American Chinatowns had a
thriving vice economy, so gambling, prostitution and drugs
became popularly associated with Asians. (Of
course, some of the same white Americans who were criticizing
Asians were also the ones participating in these
activities.)
There was this idea of moral depravity. At the time, the Chinese
and Filipinos and South Asians in America
were mostly single, able-bodied young men, so that also raised
a lot of eyebrows. It looked like they were
sexually wayward.
If you look at old stereotypical imagery of Asians in political
cartoons, the way they tend to be depicted is that
they are not aligned with white, middle-class notions of
respectable masculinity. There’s the long hair, the
flowing clothing that didn’t quite look masculine yet didn’t
quite look feminine — or maybe it was something
in-between, as some scholars have argued.
The women were also thought of as morally suspect — as
prostitutes, sexually promiscuous, that kind of thing.

An important argument in your book is that Asians were compli
cit in the creation of the model
minority myth. The way we talk about this issue today, it’s as if
the white majority imposed this
stereotype on Asian communities —
but your research shows that’s not the case. How did it
really get started?
Absolutely. That is a critical point to understand. The model
minority myth as we see it today was mainly an
unintended outcome of earlier attempts by Asians Americans to
be accepted and recognized as human beings.
They wanted to be seen as American people who were worthy of
respect and dignity.
At lot was at stake. At the time, Asians were living life under
an exclusion regime that had many similarities to
Jim Crow — not the same as Jim Crow, but certainly a cousin of
Jim Crow. There was a whole matrix of laws
and discriminatory practices.
By 1924, all immigration from Asia had been completely
banned. Asians were considered under the law “aliens
ineligible for citizenship.” There were all these racial
restrictions to citizenship under the law — and the last of
these didn’t fall until 1952.
Asian Americans tended to be restricted to segregated
neighborhoods, segregated schools. They often did not
have the kind of job prospects that white people had. They
would be barred from certain kinds of employment
either by law or by custom.
In 1937, a young U.S.-born Japanese-American man lamented
that even if you went to college, you could only

end up being a “professional carrot-washer.” That was really
true for a lot of people. They had very limited
options for social mobility. And of course there was also
violence — lynchings.
So for Asian Americans, one survival strategy was to portray
themselves as “good Americans.”
As you argue in your book, it became increasingly expedient for
mainstream Americans to
acknowledge, and even amplify, Asian attempts to gain respecta
bility. What changed?
Those claims really start to stick in the 1940s, when the nation
was gearing up for global war. American leaders
started to worry about the consequences of their domestic racial
discrimination policies. They were concerned
it would get in the way of forging alliances with other people
abroad. That really motivated American leaders
and the American people to work on race relations.
During World War II, lawmakers thought that Chinese exclusion
made for bad diplomacy. So Congress decided
to overturn Chinese exclusion as a goodwill gesture to China,
who was America’s Pacific ally.
With the beginning of the Cold War, American policymakers

became really attentive to putting their best image
out into the world. They were very interested in winning hearts
and minds in Asia.
Japan is a very good example. Japan lost the war and the United
States took charge of reconstructing Japan in
its own image as a rising democratic, capitalist country. And
because Japan became such an important ally,
that was the moment when Japanese exclusion laws could
finally be overturned, which happened in 1952.
Again, people in Congress worried that if we left these laws on
the books, it would endanger a billion hearts and
minds in the Far East.
It wasn’t just a geopolitical thing right? It seems that by the 196
0s, there were other reasons for
investing in this image of Asians as upstanding citizens, reasons
that were closer to home.
Oh, absolutely. There were definitely domestic reasons for why
the idea was appealing that Asians could be
considered good American citizens capable of assimilating into
American life.
In the 1950s, there were general concerns about maintaining the
right kind of home life. There’s this image of
the perfect American family — a suburban household with a
mom, a dad, two to three kids, a white picket
fence. That was the ideal, but it wasn’t always realized. There
was a juvenile delinquency panic in the 1950s, a
big scare over how the nation’s youth were getting themselves
into trouble.
The Chinatown leaders were really smart. They started to peddle
stories about Chinese traditional family values

and Confucian ethics. They claimed that Chinese children
always listened to their elders, were unquestioningly
obedient and never got into trouble because after school they
would just go to Chinese school.
When I started digging, I found that this idea of this model
Chinese family, with the perfect children who
always just loved to study and who don’t have time to get into
trouble or date — started to circulate quite
prominently in the 1950s. That speaks to America’s anxieties
about juvenile delinquency.
Also, since these stories were taking place in Chinatowns, it
allowed Americans to claim that America had these
remaining repositories of traditional Chinese values at a time
when the Communist Chinese had completely
dismantled them. So there’s this other level where these stories
are also anti-Communist — they are doing this
other ideological work.
How true were these stories though? How much of this was raci
al propaganda, and how much
of it was rooted in reality?
These are obviously very strategic stories. In 1956, the federal
government started to crack down on illegal
Chinese immigration, which was in part motivated by the Cold
War. So partly, the conservative Chinatown
leaders thought this model Chinese family story would do a lot
to protect them. They thought this PR campaign
would reorient the conversation away from “Communists are
sneaking into our country” to “Hey, look at these
squeaky-clean, well-behaved children.”

From reading community newspapers in these Chinatowns, we
know they also had a lot of concerns about
juvenile delinquency. In fact, behind closed doors there were
heated disagreements about what to do. One
woman in particular — Rose Hum Lee, a sociologist with a PhD
from the University of Chicago — wrote lots of
books and papers about the problems in Chinatown, and accused
leaders of sweeping these problems under the
rug.
There were Asian Americans then, as today, at the end of the
socioeconomic spectrum. And that segment of the
population tends to go unnoticed in these kinds of narratives.
It’s interesting to compare the efforts of the Chinatown leaders t
o the parallel efforts of leaders
in the African American civil rights movement, who also empha
sized respectability — who wore
their Sunday best on these marches where they were hosed down
and attacked by dogs. What’s
stunning to me is the contrast. One group’s story is amplified, a
nd the other’s is, well, almost
denied.
I think the Japanese American experience also highlights some
of this contrast. At the same time in the 1950s,
you hear these stories about how the Japanese Americans
dramatically recovered from the internment camps,
how they accepted their fate. “After internment, many families

were scattered across the country, but they took
it as an opportunity to assimilate,” that sort of thing.
Japanese Americans aren’t perceived to be doing any kind of
direct action, they weren’t perceived to be
protesting. A bad thing happened to them, and they moved on,
and they were doing okay.
These stories were ideologically useful. They became a model
for political cooperation. The ideas solidify in the
1950s. Americans had recast Asians into these citizens capable
of assimilating — even if they still saw Asians as
somewhat different from whites. And by the 1960s, what
becomes important is that these socially mobile,
assimilating, politically nonthreatening people were also
decidedly not black.
That’s really the key to all this. The work of the African
American freedom movements had made white liberals
and white conservatives very uncomfortable. Liberals were
questioning whether integration could solve some
the deeper problems of economic inequality. And by the late
1960s, conservatives were calling for increased law
and order.
Across the political spectrum, people looked to Asian
Americans — in this case, Japanese and Chinese
Americans — as an example of a solution, as a template for
other minority groups to follow: “Look how they
ended up! They’re doing just fine. And they did it all without
political protests.”
That isn’t really true, by the way. Asian Americans did get
political, but sometimes their efforts didn’t get seen
or recognized.

These stereotypes about Asian Americans being patriotic,
having an orderly family, not having delinquency or
crime — they became seen as the opposite of what “blackness”
represented to many Americans at the time.
I would say it also costs the majority less to allow Asian Ameri
cans, who were still a very small
part of the population, to let them play out this saga of upward
mobility, rather than
recognizing the rights and claims of African Americans during t
hat same time.
I’m not saying somebody sat down and did a cost-benefit
analysis. But in some ways, there seemed to be a big
payoff for little risk. Even with the overturning of the exclusion
laws, it’s not like large numbers of Asians were
coming into the United States at the time. Asian Americans at
that time were still a pretty marginal part of the
population.
As harmful as Asian exclusion was, I would agree that those
structures were not as deep or pervasive as anti-
black racism. It wouldn’t do as much to change the overall
social picture by allowing these small numbers of
Asian Americans to move forward. It was easier to do, in some
ways, because those exclusion structures were
not as pervasive, and the consequences had not been as long-

lasting as they had been for African Americans.
A really fascinating part of your book describes how these new
Asian stereotypes shaped the
Moynihan Report, which infamously blamed the plight of Africa
n Americans on “ghetto
culture.” I think that is a great example of how this model minor
ity stereotype started to get
used against others in the 1960s.
Daniel Moynihan, the author of that report, was a liberal trying
to figure out how to solve this huge problem —
the status of African Americans in American life.
If you look in the report, there’s not really any mention of
Asian Americans. But just a few months before the
Moynihan Report came out in the summer of 1965, Moynihan
was at a gathering with all these intellectuals and
policymakers. They're talking about how Japanese and Chinese
Americans were “rather astonishing” because
they had thrown off this racial stigma. Moynihan points out that
25 years ago, Asians had been “colored.” Then
Moynihan says, “Am I wrong that they have ceased to be
colored?”
That was a very striking and powerful moment to me.
I think a lot of people believe that the model minority stereotyp
e came out of the huge surge of
highly educated Asians who started coming to the United States
after 1965. But as your book
shows, I think, the causality actually runs the other way.
It’s mutually reinforcing. At the time that the United States did
this major immigration law overhaul in 1965,
policymakers decided that the nation should select its

immigrants based on how they could contribute to the
economy (and also to reunify families). So what we start to see
is people coming to the United States with these
credentials and backgrounds and training, and they seem to
confirm some of the ideas that are already there —
that Asian Americans are model minorities.
My book stops in the late 1960s, but what I think has happened
since then is that the model minority
stereotype story has really shifted away from the original ideas
of patriotism and anti-communism. We now
fixate more on education. There’s the image of the tiger mom
focused on getting her kid into Harvard. That
emphasis also speaks to a shift in the American economy, how
upward mobility really depends on having a
certain kind of educational training.
And the anxieties about Asians have never really gone away.
Now they’re portrayed as our global competitors.
So underlying the praise there’s also this fear.
Sometimes in America, it feels like there are only so many racia
l buckets that people can fall
into. With increased immigration from South Asia and Southeas
t Asia, for instance, it seemed
like lot of the newcomers were swept up into this model minorit

y narrative.
What happened in 1965 is that we opened up the gates to large-
scale immigration from places like Latin
America, the Caribbean and Asia. From Asia, you get large
numbers of people coming from South Asia, the
Philippines, Korea. Then by the 1970s, the United States is
fighting a war in Southeast Asia, so you get this
refugee migrant stream. And you’re right, they’re stepping into
this predetermined racial landscape, these
preconceived notions about how Asians are.
But as a historian, as someone who thinks about race in
American life for a living, I also think that the “model
minority” category has only a limited usefulness now in terms
of our analysis. We talk about it as a common
stereotype, but it doesn’t explain the whole scope of Asian
American life today — especially since 9/11, when
you have communities of South Asians who are Muslims or
Sikhs now being racially targeted or labeled as
terrorists. So that has become another stereotype of Asians
these days.
I think that underscores maybe the meta-narrative of your book
— how we in America have
always viewed ethnic and racial minorities through the lens of p
olitics and geopolitics, right? In
terms of international relations, in terms of what kind of image
we want to project to the world,
and in terms of what our national anxieties about other countrie
s are.
Absolutely, that’s the link. The model minority stereotype and
the terrorist stereotype are related, I agree, in
how they speak to the geopolitical anxieties of their times.

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