Stereotyping Asian Americans TheDialectic of the Model Mino.docx

Stereotyping Asian Americans: The
Dialectic of the Model Minority and the
Yellow Peril
YUKO KAWAI
Department of English, Tokai University, Japan
The model minority stereotype is viewed as the most influential
and
pervasive stereotype for Asian Americans today. In this article,
the
author argues that this seemingly positive stereotype, the model
minority, is inseparable from the yellow peril, a negative
stereotype,
when Asian Americans are stereotypically represented in main-
stream media texts. The model minority�yellow peril dialectic
is
explicated with the concepts of racial triangulation and the
ambiv-
alence of stereotypes. Racial meanings for Asian Americans
cannot
be discussed without considering both local and global contexts.
The author explores historical, political, and economic contexts
of both the United States and Asia in which the two stereotypes
were
produced and reproduced, and examines how the dialectic of the
model minority and the yellow peril operates in a Hollywood
film,
Rising Sun.
KEYWORDS Asian, Asian American, model minority, race,

stereotype, yellow peril
The model minority is probably the most influential and
prevalent stereotype
for Asian Americans today. Gotanda (1995) contended that it is
difficult to
‘‘situate this racial category [Asian American] without
succumbing to the
‘model minority’ stereotype’’ (p. 98). F. H. Wu (2002) claimed
that he is
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Asian and
Pacific American Commu-
nication Division, the National Communication Association,
Miami, FL., November 2003.
I appreciate the insightful comments of Professor Ricky Lee
Allen, Krishna Kandath,
Bradford ‘J’ Hall of the University of New Mexico, and Dr.
William Starosta, Howard University.
Address correspondence to Dr. Yuko Kawai, Department of
English, 1117 Kitakaname,
Tokai University, Hiratsuka, Kanagawa Prefecture, 259-1291,
Japan. E-mail: [email protected]
cc.u-tokai.ac.jp
The Howard Journal of Communications, 16:109�130, 2005
Copyright # Taylor & Francis Inc.
ISSN: 1064-6175 print/1096-4349 online
DOI: 10.1080/10646170590948974
109

‘‘fascinated by the imperviousness of the model minority myth
against all
efforts at debunking it’’ (p. 40). Kibria (2002) also posited that
‘‘the model
minority stereotype is undoubtedly pervasive’’ (p. 131).1
The model minority stereotype has been criticized by Asian
American
scholars because of its political implications (e.g., Nakayama,
1988; Osajima,
2000; F. H. Wu, 2002) and also because it does not tell a story
that resonates
with the lived realities of Asian Americans (e.g., Suzuki, 1977;
Takaki, 1989).
It is, however, also the case that the model minority stereotype
has been eval-
uated positively by Asian Americans. Cheng and Yang (2000),
for instance,
contended, ‘‘the model minority concept is not without its
virtues; histori-
cally, it helped turn around the negative stereotypes of Asian
Americans
and the enhanced the positive image of Asian Americans’’ (p.
473).
The model minority stereotype is argued by some to evoke
negative
implications such as racial hostilities and violence despite its
seemingly ‘‘posi-
tive’’ image that it creates for Asian Americans. F. H. Wu
(2002) posited that
‘‘the model minority myth hurts Asian Americans themselves. It
is two-faced’’
(p. 67). The 1982 murder of Vincent Chin and the violence
against Asian
Americans in the 1992 Los Angeles riots are raised as such

examples (e.g.,
Feng, 2002; Osajima, 2000; Palmer, 1999; Takaki, 1989; F. H.
Wu, 2002). These
negative consequences of the model minority stereotype can be
better under-
stood by thinking that ‘‘the concepts of the yellow peril and the
model
minority, although at apparent disjunction, form a seamless
continuum’’
(Okihiro, 1994, p. 141) in the sense that Asian Americans as the
model min-
ority is ‘‘a complementary, benign image’’ of the yellow peril
(p. 139).
The dialectic of the model minority and the yellow peril is
explicated
with the concepts of racial triangulation (Kim, 1999, 2000,
2000�2001) and
the ambivalence of stereotypes (Bhabha, 1983=1996; Cloud,
1992). Kim
argued that Asian Americans have been historically and racially
triangulated
as ‘‘aliens’’ or ‘‘outsiders’’ with regard to White Americans but
as ‘‘superior’’ in
relation to African Americans. The former can be considered to
be corre-
sponding to the yellow peril stereotype that describes Asian
Americans as
‘‘foreigner foreigners’’ who divert from U.S. dominant cultural
norms, are
economic competitors, and thereby undermine the White nation.
The latter
can be considered to be tied to the model minority stereotype
that celebrates
Asian Americans as the model minority group who, unlike other
racial

minority groups, move ahead only with their own effort in U.S.
society. The
latter thus supports ‘‘colorblindness,’’ a dominant racial
ideology in the post-
civil rights era (Kim, 2000). Asian Americans as the model
minority and the
yellow peril relate to the ambivalence of stereotypes, which
means that
stereotypes are ambivalent because they entail contradictory
meanings
simultaneously (Bhabha, 1983=1996; Cloud, 1992). When Asian
Americans
are stereotypically represented in media texts, their portrayals
are ambi-
valent. If they are depicted mainly either as the model minority
or the yellow
peril, their representation entails the conflation of the two
stereotypes.
110 Y. Kawai
Racial meanings involving Asian Americans need to be
examined both
locally and globally as Nakayama (1997) argued that ‘‘we
cannot understand
the experiences and histories of Asian Americans outside of the
context of
both domestic and international contexts’’ (p. 15). In addition,
racial stereo-
types necessitate being explored historically because race is a
social and thus
historical construction (Omi & Winant, 1994). Racial meanings
cannot be
completely local because they are concerned with legitimizing

Western colo-
nialism and imperialism and also constructing West=White
identities
(Okihiro, 1994). Racial stereotypes of the yellow race do not
distinguish
yellows here from yellows there—Asian Americans from
Asians, Chinese
from Japanese, or Koreans from Vietnamese; that is,
stereotyping Asian
Americans is both Asian and American.
Hyphenated designations, such as ‘‘Asian-American,’’ have
been ques-
tioned by intercultural communication scholars because they
create a bound-
ary between minority groups and White Americans and
marginalizes the
former (e.g., Chen, 2004). When exploring Asian American
people’s identi-
ties, it may not be appropriate to stress the inseparability of
Asians and Asian
Americans. It cannot be denied that due to the confusion of the
two, Asian
Americans have been marginalized being seen as ‘‘not fully
American’’ or
‘‘not fully Asian’’ (Chen, 2004). For examining racial
stereotypes, however,
it is crucial to look into the tight connection between the two
because
this is what is problematic about racial stereotypes that
summarize people of
culturally diverse groups as one racial group. Although in this
article, I use
the terms Asian and Asian American interchangeably, this only
indicates
the inseparability of Asians and Asian Americans in racial

stereotyping.
Both historical and present U.S. and Asian contexts influence
the con-
struction of Asian American stereotypes. The yellow peril
concept is said
to have been most popular in its dogmatic forms in the first half
of the
20th century (Palumbo-Liu, 1999). The model minority
stereotype is believed
to have been originally constructed in the 1960s. Both
stereotypes were
revived in the 1980s
2 under the global and local contexts that the United
States had trade conflicts with Asian countries, Japan in
particular and the
Reagan administration started attacking affirmative action and
welfare pro-
grams. What does the revival of both stereotypes in the 1980s
under these
global and local contexts suggest?
This essay has two major purposes; one is to explicate the
relationship
between the model minority and the yellow peril stereotypes
through tra-
cing the two stereotypes historically; the other is to examine
how the
model minority�yellow peril dialectic is produced in a 1993
Hollywood
film, Rising Sun (Kaufman & Kaufman, 1993). The story
unfolds in the
background of Japan’s economic threat to the United States and
‘‘Japan-
bashing’’ in the 1980s. I believe that Rising Sun is an

appropriate media text
to examine the dialectic of the model minority and the yellow
peril con-
sidering the revival of the model minority and the yellow peril
in the
Model Minority and Yellow Peril 111
1980s. This film is regarded mainly as a yellow peril movie that
deals with
economic threat to the United States posed by Japan (Lee,
1999). The point
of using this film as a text lies in examining how a media text
that appears
to reproduce the yellow peril stereotype also engages in
reproducing the
model minority stereotype.
THE YELLOW PERIL
The idea of the yellow peril is a racial stereotype that has been
constructed in
the west. It has a longer history than the model minority
stereotype in the
United States. Although the term the yellow peril is believed to
have been
named and popularized by German Kaiser, Wilhelm II in the
late 19th cen-
tury (Thompson, 1978), its root can be traced back to the
medieval threat
of Genghis Khan and Mongolian invasion of Europe (Marchetti,
1993). In
the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the West feared the
yellow race as a

menace that would threaten the domination of the White race,
which
stemmed from the large population size of East Asia, China’s
potential mili-
tary and economic power, and Japan’s rise as an imperial power
after Japan
defeated China in the Sino-Japanese war in 1885 and Russia in
the Russo-
Japanese war in 1905 (Okihiro, 1994; Thompson, 1978; W. F.
Wu, 1982).
Okihiro (1994) pointed out that ‘‘the idea of the yellow peril
does not derive
solely from the alleged threat posed by the yellow race to the
white race and
their ‘holiest possessions’—civilization and Christianity—but
from non-White
people, as a collective group, and their contestation of white
supremacy’’
(p. 120). The yellow peril referred to cultural threat as well as
economic,
political, and military threats to the White race.
In the United States, the yellow peril signified the fear of Asian
migration
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Laffey, 2000). Asian
immigrants’ dif-
ferent bodies and cultures were perceived as a great threat—the
yellow
peril—to American identity as the country of the White race and
Western
civilization (Lee, 1999). White Americans perceived people of
Asian descent
or ‘‘Orientals’’ as inassimilable foreigners who ‘‘would
eventually overtake
the nation and wreak social and economic havoc’’ (Fong, 2002,
p. 189).

Overlapped with the image of East Asia’s large population size
and the
emergence of an Asian imperial power, the presence of
‘‘Oriental’’ faces in
the United States evoked among White Americans an alarm that
the yellow
race might overtake the White nation by outnumbering and out-
powering
the White race. The yellow peril stereotype led to the exclusion
of Asian
immigrants and to the U.S. colonization of Hawaii, Guam,
Samoa, the
Philippines (Lee, 1999). An American version of the yellow
peril provided
a justification or rationale for excluding Asian immigrants and
continuing
U.S. westward expansion beyond the west coast of the United
States to the
Asia and Pacific region (Okihiro, 1994).
112 Y. Kawai
Not only U.S. domestic but also international contexts
influenced the
yellow peril stereotype (Wu, 1982). As Japan revealed its
ambition to become
an imperial power and conflicted U.S interests in the Asia and
Pacific region, the
yellow peril came to mean Japan. In particular, the 1941 Pearl
Harbor bomb-
ing by Japan during World War II inflated the yellow peril
stereotype and led
to the detention of Japanese Americans in concentration camps
(Okihiro,

1994). In the world of Hollywood films, Fu Manchu served to
enhance the
yellow peril stereotype: a person who ‘‘possessed superhuman
intellect and
ambition’’ and also ‘‘was subhuman in his immorality and
ruthlessness’’ (Fong,
2002, p. 190). After World War 2, the communist takeover of
China in 1949,
the Korean War, and the subsequent Cold War replaced Japan
with China
as the embodiment of the yellow peril; Chinese Americans were
targeted as
the main suspects of treason and espionage (Zhou & Gatewood,
2000).
THE MODEL MINORITY
Two articles published in 1966 by mainstream media are seen to
be respon-
sible for constructing the model minority stereotype (Lee, 1999;
Okihiro,
1994; Osajima, 2000; Zia, 2000). The first model minority myth
article, ‘‘Suc-
cess Story, Japanese-American Style,’’ (Petersen, 1966) was
published in New
York Times Magazine on January 9, 1966. At the end of the
same year, on
December 26, 1966, an article titled ‘‘Success Story of One
Minority in
U.S.’’ that focused on Chinese Americans appeared in U.S.
News and World
Report. The two articles celebrated Japanese and Chinese
Americans as the
model minority groups who had close family ties, were
extremely serious
about education, and were law-abiding (Kawai, 2003).

By stressing that Asian Americans were succeeding through
making
efforts on their own despite their racial background, the model
minority
stereotype produces a ‘‘colorblind talk,’’ the most influential
racial ideology
in the post-Civil Rights Movement era (Kim, 1999, 2000).
Colorblind ideology
‘‘furthers racial power not through the direct articulation of
racial differences
but rather by obscuring the operation of racial power, protecting
it from chal-
lenge, and permitting ongoing racialization via racially coded
methods’’
(Kim, 2000, p. 17). The word colorblind was first used in 1896
in the case
of Plessy v. Ferguson in which U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Harlan, opposing
the ‘‘separate but equal’’ doctrine, stated that ‘‘our constitution
is color-
blind. . . . In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before
the law’’
(quoted in F. H. Wu, 2002, p. 146). Harlan’s statement was
meaningful at a
time when people of color were officially segregated. Yet, in
the post-1965
era, the idea of colorblindness has been appropriated by
conservatives to
rhetorically disguise ‘‘fundamentally racial claims’’ (Kim,
1999, p. 17). Critical
race theorists argue that the ideology of colorblindness abstracts
individuals
from social and historical contexts and attributes the
consequences of racial

inequality to individual under-performance without
acknowledging insti-
tutional racism (Guinier & Torres, 2002). Thus they challenge
the concept
of race as a formal and neutral category and, at the same time,
advocate
understanding the importance of race in U.S. society.
The model minority stereotype is constitutive of colorblind
ideology in
the sense that Asian Americans’ ‘‘success’’ is used to deny the
existence of
institutional racism and to ‘‘prove’’ that U.S. society is
reasonably fair and
open for racial minority groups to move up the social ladder.
For example,
in the U.S. News and World Report article, it is stated that ‘‘at
a time when
it is being proposed that hundreds of billions be spent to uplift
Negroes
[sic] and other minorities, the nation’s 300,000 Chinese-
Americans are moving
ahead on their own—with no help from anyone else’’ (‘‘Success
Story,’’ 1966,
p. 73). The author of the New York Times Magazine article
insists that
Japanese Americans succeeded ‘‘by their own almost totally
unaided effort’’
(Petersen, 1966, p. 21). The two media texts uplift Asian
Americans without
referring to the historical context that, unlike African
Americans who were

forced to come to the United States, ‘‘Asian immigrants start
off relatively
privileged’’ because most Asian immigrants are voluntary
immigrants
(F. H. Wu, 2002, p. 52). Through abstracting each minority
group’s different
social historical contexts, the model minority stereotype
functions to ‘‘[legit-
imate] status quo social institutions’’ (Nakayama, 1988, p. 71).
Therefore, depicting Asian Americans as the model minority
simul-
taneously serves downgrading other racial minorities as
‘‘problem’’ minorities
(e.g., Kim, 1999, 2000; F. H. Wu, 2002). The two 1966 articles
starts and ends
with the comparison between Japanese or Chinese Americans
and African
Americans; thus even when they were not directly compared in
the articles,
the articles could be read as if they constantly compared the two
groups
(Kawai, 2003). As F. H. Wu points out, ‘‘each commendation of
Asian
American is paired off against a reprimand of African
Americans’’ (p. 62).
It was not an accident that the articles portraying Asian
Americans as the
model minority appeared first in the mid-1960s. Osajima (2000)
contended
that the construction of the model minority stereotype was
motivated to send
‘‘a distinct political message to the nascent Black Power
Movement,’’ which
claimed that ‘‘America was fundamentally a racist society,
structured to keep

minorities in a subordinate position’’ (p. 451). Besides
‘‘surface’’ meanings
such as ‘‘academic and economic high achievers,’’ the model
minority stereo-
type contains ‘‘deep-structural’’ meanings such as supporting
colorblind
ideology and dividing racial minority groups.
The model minority stereotype was not constructed only in U.S.
dom-
estic contexts. Palumbo-Liu (1999) postulated that Japan’s re-
emergence as
‘‘a newly hegemonic economic power’’ in the 60 s filtered into
the model
minority stereotype-making process (p. 171). Also it was not a
coincidence
that the first Asian ethnic group depicted as a model minority in
1966 was
Japanese Americans. After World War 2, the United States was
concerned
114 Y. Kawai
about the spread of communism in Asia following China and
North Korea
and thus supported Japan’s economic recovery with massive
financial aid.
Between the 1950s and early 1970s, taking advantage of the
Korean War
and the Vietnam War, Japan experienced extremely high
economic growth.
In 1964, Japan became the first non-White nation-state to host
the Olympic
Games and to be admitted into the Organization for Economic

Cooperation
and Development (OECD). Asian Americans were made as the
model
minority partly because Japan re-demonstrated its willingness
and ‘‘ability’’
to go along with the West=White.
THE DIALECTIC OF THE MODEL MINORITY AND THE
YELLOW PERIL
The model minority stereotype seems to be opposite to the
yellow peril
stereotype in the sense that the former is regarded as
‘‘positive,’’ whereas
the latter as ‘‘negative.’’ The two stereotypes, however, are
inseparable.
Lee (1999) pointed out that ‘‘the model minority has two faces.
The myth
presents Asian American as silent and disciplined; this is their
secret to
success. At the same time, this silence and discipline is used in
constructing
the Asian American as a new yellow peril’’ (p. 190). Okihiro
(1994) further
explicated the dialectic of the model minority and the yellow
peril:
It seems to me that the yellow peril and the model minority are
not poles,
denoting opposite representations along a single line, but in fact
form a
circular relationship that moves in either direction. We might
see them as
engendered images: the yellow peril denoting a masculine threat
of mili-
tary and sexual conquest, and the model minority symbolizing a

femin-
ized position of passivity and malleability. Moving in one
direction
along the circle, the model minority mitigates the alleged
danger of the
yellow peril, whereas reversing direction, the model minority, if
taken
too far, can become the yellow peril. In either swing along the
arc, white
supremacy is maintained and justified through feminization in
one direc-
tion and repression in the other. (p. 142)
People of Asian descent become the model minority when they
are depicted
to do better than other racial minority groups, whereas they
become the
yellow peril when they are described to outdo White Americans.
On one
hand, Asian Americans as the yellow peril embody
‘‘foreignness’’ and ‘‘mas-
culinity’’ that threaten U.S identity as a White, Christian
nation; on the other
hand, Asian Americans who make efforts to succeed silently and
diligently—
without demanding or protesting anything—symbolize ‘‘the
model minority’’
and ‘‘docility’’ or ‘‘femininity’’ and confirm colorblind
ideology. Considering
Lee (1999) and Okihiro’s (1994) arguments, it is possible to
think that the
construction of the model minority stereotype is tied to creating
a less threate-
ning face of the yellow peril.

THE REVIVAL OF THE MODEL MINORITY AND THE
YELLOW
PERIL IN THE 1980s
In the 1980s, the yellow peril and the model minority were
resurrected (Kim,
2000; Osajima, 2000; Shim, 1998). The return of the yellow
peril stereotype
occurred under the deteriorating trade relationship between the
United States
and Asia in the 1980s and the early 1990s. The economic
‘‘success’’ of Japan
and so called Asian ‘‘tigers’’—Hong Kong, Singapore, South
Korea, and
Taiwan—were infused into the pre-war yellow peril stereotype
to create
the renewed yellow peril—Asian Americans as ‘‘unfair’’
economic competi-
tors (Shim, 1998). White’s (1985, July 28) long article (8,225
words) that
appeared in The New York Times ‘‘The Danger from Japan’’
exemplifies a
depiction of Japan as the yellow peril. The ‘‘Japan-bashing’’ in
the 1980s
often used Pearl Harbor analogies and metaphors such as
‘‘Honda, Toyota,
Pearl Harbor’’ or ‘‘the second Japanese invasion of the United
States’’ (Tuan,
1998, p. 44). The ‘‘success’’ of non-White people was
immediately interpreted
as a threat and was attributed to unfairness. When so-called
‘‘Japan-bashing’’
was rampant in the United States in the 1980s and early 1990s,

the Dutch and
the British owned more U.S. real estate than the Japanese
(Espiritu, 1992).
Although the media mostly ignored European investment in the
United
States, they highly publicized Japanese ownership of U.S.
property and
stirred Americans’ protest against it.
Besides Japanese and Chinese Americans, the model minority
stereotype
of the 1980s accommodated other Asian ethnic groups such as
Asian Indians,
Filipinos, Koreans, and Vietnamese, whereas Asian economic
successes were
spotlighted in the media.
3 In the 1966 model minority articles, Asian Ameri-
cans were portrayed as the model minority in comparison with
other racial
minority groups, African Americans in particular. Such a
comparison does
not remain applied only between Asian Americans and African
Americans
but spills over comparison between Asian Americans and White
Americans
as well.4 As early as in 1971, Newsweek published an article
titled ‘‘Success
Story: Outwhiting the White’’ in which it was argued that
Japanese Americans
‘‘on nearly all levels of conventional success. . .not only have
outshone their
minority groups but. . .have ‘outwhited’ the whites’’ (‘‘Success
Story:
Outwhiting,’’ 1971). In 1985, the author of a Time magazine
article posited

that Asian American household income exceeded ‘‘not only that
of American
families in general. . .but also the level reported by whites’’
(Doerner, 1985).
In 1986, in a Fortune magazine article ‘‘America’s Super
Minority,’’ it was
claimed that Asian American children ‘‘outscore white’’ in
various academic,
cognitive, and intelligence tests, and ‘‘got A’s more often and
failed less than
whites’’ (Ramirez, 1986). The ‘‘successful’’ image of Asian
Americans
outdoing not only other minority groups but also White
Americans unsettled
the predominance of the White race and triggered fears.
116 Y. Kawai
RACIAL TRIANGULATION
The model minority�yellow peril dialectic is tied to the concept
of racial
triangulation. Kim (1999, 2000, 2000�2001) argued that Asian
Americans
have been racially triangulated with African Americans and
White Americans:
Although Asian Americans are valorized as the model minority
and are posi-
tioned to be superior to African Americans, they are ostracized
as immutably
foreign in comparison with White Americans. As a result,
throughout the
U.S. history ‘‘Asian Americans are, on the whole, persistently
less advantaged

than Whites and more advantaged than Blacks in the American
racial order’’
(Kim, 2000�2001, p. 37).
In 1879, a former U.S. consul to Japan, who also traveled to
China
testified, ‘‘I think the Chinese are a far superior race to the
negro [sic] race
physiologically and mentally’’ (Spoehr, 1973, p. 198). Around
that time in
California, a White was considered worth 2 Chinese and a
Chinese worth
2 Blacks (Kim, 1999). After the Civil War, Southern industrial
elite and plan-
tation owners, no longer being able to exploit slave labor,
imported the
Chinese as cheap labor source in order to ‘‘punish the Negro
[sic]’’ (Zia,
2000, p. 36). The model minority stereotype that emphasized
Asian
Americans’ solid family ties appeared immediately after
Moynihan’s 1965
book The Negro Family that attributed African Americans’
opposite family
structure to the cause of their poverty (Kim, 1999). The
resurgence of the
model minority stereotype in the 1980s also coincided with
‘‘the explosion
of works on Black ‘underclass’ in the 1980s’’ (Kim, 1999, p.
121).
On the other hand, people of Asian descent have been treated as
‘‘less
American’’ or ‘‘forever foreigners’’ who have been subjugated
to racially moti-
vated exclusion and discrimination such as the exclusion of

Asian immigrants
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the internment of
Japanese Ameri-
cans, and the recent racial profiling case of Wen Ho Lee.
During the O.J.
Simpson trial, in a book Judge Lance Ito was referred to as
‘‘HIRO-ITO’’; his
sketch was accompanied by a poem that ‘‘HIROSHIMA, NUKE
JUDGE
ITO=BANZAI, BANZAI, NAGASAKI=USE HIS HEAD FOR
BACKYARD
HOCKEY’’ (quoted in Kim, 1999, p. 127). In the 1998 winter
Olympics women’s
figure skating competition, MSNBC headline reported the gold
medal winner
of the competition as ‘‘American beats Kwan,’’ although both
Tara Lipinski,
the winner, and Michelle Kwan were American (Tuan, 1999, p.
40).
THE AMBIVALENCE OF STEREOTYPES
If racial triangulation provides an explanation of the
communication context
in which the dialectic of the model minority and the yellow
peril is played
out, the concept of the ambivalence of stereotypes (Bhabha,
1983=1996;
Cloud, 1992) is useful to explain the dialectic in the world of
discourse. Berg
(1990) examined various definitions of stereotypes: Stereotypes

indicate
cognitive mechanisms for making sense of the world (social
psychological
perspectives), pre-existing categories in culture (sociological
perspectives),
ways of differentiating self from the world (psychological
perspectives),
fetishism (psychoanalytical perspectives), or dominant
ideologies (ideologi-
cal perspectives). Although these perspectives explain
stereotypes differently
in terms of how stereotypes operate, all of them associate
stereotyping with
meaning-making processes.
Making difference is crucial for making meaning. Meanings are
made
through making a boundary between things in order to classify
them. Dyer
(1979=2000) argued that ‘‘the most important function of the
stereotype’’ is
‘‘to maintain sharp boundary definitions, to define clearly
where the pale
ends and thus who is clearly within and who clearly beyond it’’
(p. 249).
Although defining boundaries is a necessary process to
construct meaning,
stereotyping, which goes through a similar process, is
problematic because
it ‘‘tends to occur where there are gross inequalities of power’’
(Hall, 1997,
p. 258). That is, people are not equal in deciding boundaries; a
certain domi-
nant group has more power to do so, and the meaning
(stereotype) that the
group creates tends to win consensus. Stereotyping does not

simply involve
making difference; it simplifies, fixes, and exaggerates the
meaning (Hall,
1997).
Stereotypes are ambivalent as they contain contradictory
messages
simultaneously (Bhabha, 1983=1996; Hall, 1997). The
contradictory charac-
teristics of stereotypes are pointed out by various
communication scholars
(e.g., Berg, 1990; Hall, 1997: Hughes & Baldwin, 2002). For
example,
whereas the stereotypical image of Black men as ‘‘childish’’
has been con-
structed under the histories of slavery, colonialism, and
imperialism, another
stereotype, the ‘‘macho’’ image of Black men, has been also
pervasive (Hall,
1997). Latina=Hispanic women are also contradictory
stereotyped as both
‘‘the halfbreed harlot’’ and ‘‘the female clown’’ that neutralizes
the overt
sexual threat posed by the former in Hollywood films (Berg,
1990).
Furthering Condit’s (1989) argument that media texts are not
polysemy
but polyvalent, Cloud (1992) contended that racial stereotyping
in media
texts is not polyvalent but ambivalent: ‘‘images of racial
difference in popular
culture are not polyvalent, subject to any number of possible
evaluations.
Rather, they are often ambivalent; responses are contained
within a binary

meaning system’’ (p. 314; emphasis in original). Stereotypes
are subject to
a binary meaning system rather than to a meaning system with
many possible
meanings because stereotyping is more rigid than a simple
meaning-making
process and also tends to involve power inequality. Bhabha
(1983=1996)
explained this point using the concept of fetishism that ‘‘allows
for the possi-
bility of simultaneously embracing two contradictory beliefs,
one official and
one secret, one archaic and one progressive, one that allows the
myth of
origins, the other that articulates difference and division’’ (p.
50). Currently
118 Y. Kawai
the yellow peril can be considered as a stereotype that is a
secret, archaic,
and original stereotype of Asian Americans, whereas the model
minority
can be regarded as official and progressive, which supports
colorblind
ideology.
Thinking about the yellow peril and the model minority
dialectically,
however, does not mean fixing one as official and the other as
secret or
one as archaic and the other as progressive; it implies grasping
the dynamics
of the ways in which the two stereotypes operate in media texts.

That is,
the model minority stereotype is not always official; there are
cases that the
yellow peril is official, while the model minority is secret. In
addition, the
two stereotypes may not be distinctively represented; they are
blended
and create a little more complex meaning. Such cases are
exemplified in
Rising Sun.
ANALYSIS
I analyze a Hollywood movie, Rising Sun to examine how the
model
minority�yellow peril dialectic is produced in the media text.
Rising Sun,
a bestseller book written by Michael Crichton, was published
first in 1992;
the film version was released in 1993. The background of the
story is a time
like the 1980s when the United States had trade frictions with
Japan. At that
time, Japan had a large trade surplus with the United States and
was purchas-
ing out popular real estates such as Rockefeller Center and large
corporation
such as MCA, CBS Records, and Columbia Pictures. The story
unfolds around
a gigantic Japanese corporation, Nakamoto’s purchase of an
American semi-
conductor company, Microcon, and a murder that occurred in
the building of
Nakamoto in downtown Los Angeles. Two police detectives,
John Connor, a
White detective played by Sean Connery, and Pete Smith, a

Black detective
played by Wesley Snipes, are assigned to investigate the case.
John Connor,
an ‘‘expert’’ of Japanese culture who understands the Japanese
language,
takes the lead in the investigation and solves the case in the
end.
Asian Cowboy as the Model Minority and the Yellow Peril
The starting scene of Rising Sun is very suggestive. The scene
starts with
several cowboys riding horses in the dusty, dry, and desert
looking land that
reminds the audience of the old American West. White
cowboys, who
dressed in bright colors, were towing a White-looking woman
with black hair
who was tied up with a rope on the horse. Suddenly an Asian-
looking man,
who is dressed identically with the White cowboys but totally in
black,
appears and stares at the cowboys from behind. At this point,
audiences
realize that this scene is part of a karaoke videotape. Eddie
Sakamura, a
Japanese big business owner’s son, is singing with the
videotape in a karaoke
bar. The karaoke videotape continues to show the Asian cowboy
chasing the
White cowboys, attacking them in a ‘‘cowboy style,’’ and

saving the White
woman.
The Asian man dresses exactly like the White cowboys—a
cowboy hat,
boots, trousers, and a shirt—except that his clothes are totally
black, whereas
the clothes of the White cowboys are bright colors. He looks
like one of the
cowboys except for the color of his clothes. The color
difference between the
Asian cowboy and the White cowboys indicates a typical binary
opposition:
white=black refers to good=evil. Compared with Black skin,
Asian com-
plexion is more difficult to distinguish from that of Whites; thus
the Asian
man is dressed in black to maintain the binary oppositions—
East=West,
black=white, and evil=good.
The twist is that the Asian cowboy is not represented as a bad
guy. He
not only follows the same rule by dressing in a similar way with
the White
cowboys but also plays a ‘‘saint’’ who fights against
‘‘villains’’—White
cowboys—to save a woman. Although he is portrayed as a
‘‘model cowboy’’
by assimilating to or even ‘‘out-cowboying’’ the White
cowboys, he does not
indicate a completely good guy due to the color of his clothes
and the setting.
The cowboys and the old American West are well-recognized
signifiers
for the westward expansion of White America; the Asian man

interrupts what
the White cowboys (i.e., westward expansion) try to achieve.
What the Asian
cowboy indicates is the yellow peril who is ‘‘an apt imitator of
Western
material progress’’ (London, 1999, p. 441) and eventually
attempts to surpass
the West=White. The ‘‘copyist’’ or ‘‘imitator’’ image of the
yellow race has
always been part of the yellow peril discourse (Thompson,
1978; Okihiro,
1994). Another important aspect of this scene is that the Asian
man ‘‘takes
away’’ a woman from White men. The yellow peril stereotype in
the Holly-
wood films of the early 20th century stressed the fear of
miscegenation,
especially the threat posed by Asian men to White women
(Marchetti,
1993). The Asian man in the film is a ‘‘good’’ guy in the sense
that he is will-
ing to assimilate to the White rules of the game (i.e., dressing
exactly like the
White cowboys do and attacking them in a ‘‘cowboy style’’) but
is a ‘‘bad’’
guy who disrupts what the White cowboys attempts to achieve
(i.e., taking
away their woman).
The dialectic of the model minority and the yellow peril is
personified
in the Asian character. Unlike the earlier version of the yellow
peril, the
Asian man’s appearance does not signify immutable foreignness
as he acts
like White cowboys; yet he does not divert completely from the

early
yellow peril stereotype in the sense that he appears to ‘‘mimic’’
the White
cowboys and is depicted as a person who takes a woman away
from them.
He also represents the model minority stereotype in the sense
that he con-
forms to the ‘‘White norms’’ by following the ‘‘norms’’ of
White cowboys in
Hollywood western movies and saving a woman from
‘‘villains’’ as if he
were a cowboy in the these films starred by White men.
Although the
120 Y. Kawai
model minority in the 1960s just ‘‘does better’’ than other
minority groups,
the Asian cowboy ‘‘does better’’ than the White cowboys and
threatens
them by interrupting the White cowboys’ business. In this
scene, the model
minority and the yellow peril stereotypes are conflated with
each other,
which produces a character who is not simply the model
minority or the
yellow peril but both.
Japan=Japanese as the Model Minority and the Yellow Peril
In the film, Japan (and the Japanese) serves both the model
minority and the
yellow peril. The film depicts Japan as a super affluent and
super high-tech

entity: the giant building of Nakamoto company equipped with
latest tech-
nologies, a Japanese high-tech company office building in
which an array of
high-tech equipment—including a dancing robot—is
highlighted, expensive
Japanese restaurants, golf-courses, and wealthy private houses.
A main
location of the film, Nakamoto corporation’s building, is
enormous, domi-
neering, glittering, and towering into the sky. The building is
furnished with
elevators that speak in Japanese and tells passengers which
floor they are,
state-of-the-art video cameras that put every single room and
event under
surveillance, and expensive furniture and decorations.
In contrast to the affluence of Japan, America is portrayed as
poor and
ordinary. American scenes are set on the streets with homeless
people, a
poor neighborhood in which only African Americans and
Latinos appear,
and an ordinary apartment complex in which Smith, an African
American
police detective, lives. The following scene shows an example
of direct com-
parison between Japan’s affluence and America’s poverty: On
the way from
examining the room of the murder victim, Cheryl Austin, a
White woman
with blond hair, Connor says to Smith in the car, ‘‘Business is
war. We are
in the war zone.’’ Immediately after the lines, the camera cross-
cuts to

Connor and Smith in the car, to homeless people standing in the
rain on
the street, and to the gigantic building of Nakamoto: homeless
people—
America—are compared with the enormous building—Japan. By
relating
and relaying these two scenes, the film tries to create a message
that Japan
is to blame for America’s problems.
Japan’s ‘‘superiority’’ is consistently stressed throughout the
film. After
Connor and Smith saw the murder scene, the Japanese expert,
Connor, says
to Smith, ‘‘In Japan, criminals are expected to be caught.
Convictions run
about 90 percent. Here, it’s closer to 70.5 percent. They think
we are stupid.
They think we are corrupt. They are not often wrong.’’ An
African American
security worker who watches over every room of the Nakamoto
building
through surveillance cameras, explaining the equipments, says
to Connor
and Smith, ‘‘There is nothing like this in this country—yet.
This is all next-
generation.’’ The security worker continues to say, ‘‘Around
here, if some-
thing does not work or I’ve got a problem, I tell somebody, and
they fix it.
It is not like when I was working at GM. This is different

here.’’ These
dialogues that compare Japan and the United States seem to
elevate Japan
over the United States: Japan’s conviction rate is higher than
that of America,
Japanese technologies are more advanced than those in the
Untied States,
Japanese people are more efficient at their work.
Uplifting Japan, however, does not create a positive image of
Japan
because while stressing the ‘‘superiority’’ of Japan, the film
exaggerates the
foreignness of Japan. At the Nakamoto party scene, Japanese
women wear
kimonos, powder their face in extremely white like geishas, and
speak only
in Japanese. An Asian-looking waitress puts on a simple black
dress also
makes up her face like a geisha and delivers drinks to the party
guests with-
out showing any emotion at all as if she wore a noh mask.
Japanese senior
company executives who pose for a photo with White women
are all
extremely shorter than these women and are dwarfed. Japanese
customs
such as bowing and apologizing are also exaggerated in the
film. As two
White men enter the Nakamoto building, they say, ‘‘One thing
you have to
remember is the custom here is bow when you are bowed to.’’
They jokingly
repeat the sentence together whenever they bow to Japanese
quests in the
party. In front of the building, the red carpet is spread and

women with
kimonos whose faces are powered, again unnaturally white, bow
to party
guests by saying ‘‘Irasshaimase (welcome).’’ When Ishihara, an
employee
of Nakamoto, delivers the disk that Connor and Smith are
looking for, he
apologizes to Connor speaking in Japanese and bowing,
‘‘Doomo sumima-
sen. . .Doomo sumimasen (I am very sorry).’’ He bows so many
times and
repeats the phrase almost crying. In addition, the otherness of
Japan is exa-
cerbated by having Japanese characters switch their language
back and
forth from English to Japanese and English translations are not
provided.
Because the meaning is unclear when Japanese characters speak
in Japanese,
their foreignness becomes intensified to audiences lacking much
knowledge
of the Japanese language.
Traditional intercultural communication concepts such as
individualism=
collectivism, power distance, and high context=low context are
also used to
exaggerate Japanese otherness. For example, in the meeting
scenes with
Nakamoto and Microcon, all people of Nakamoto wear the same
dark suits,
whereas Microcon people put on different kinds and colors of
suits. In an
expensive Japanese restaurant in which Connor and Smith meet
with
Yoshida, the president of Nakamoto, a White American

employee of
Nakamoto cuts into the conversation between Connor and
Yoshida. Yoshida
and his right-hand man Ishihara stared at the American
employee without
saying a word in order to show their resentment. These
‘‘cultural’’ binary
oppositions function to construct the racial other in the film.
The exaggeration of foreignness is an important feature of the
yellow
peril stereotype. The yellow body tends to be smaller than the
white body,
bowing and apologizing are Japanese customs, and Japanese
people speak
122 Y. Kawai
the Japanese language—what is depicted in the film is not
completely false.
The problem is, however, the excessive emphasis and
essentialization of dif-
ference in the film. As Nakayama (2002) posited, ‘‘difference is
a driving force
for narration"; in racial meaning, ‘‘difference must be concrete
in such a way
that it appears substantial and concrete’’ (p. 93). Racial
stereotyping involves
not only creating difference, which is indispensable for
constructing any
meaning but also exaggerating and fixing difference in order to
make a sub-
stantial and concrete other. At the beginning of the 20th
century, an Ameri-

can popular novelist Jack London (1999) in his article ‘‘The
Yellow Peril’’
introduces the following comment of a woman who had lived in
Japan for
a while: ‘‘It seems to me that they [the Japanese] have no soul’’
(p. 443).
London continued to argue that ‘‘it [her comment] serves to
illuminate the
enormous difference between their souls and this woman’s soul.
There
was no feel, no speech, no recognition. This Western soul did
not dream that
the Eastern soul existed, it was so different, so totally
different.’’ (p. 443). The
White woman could not feel that Japanese people were also
human beings
like her, could not understand their language, and could not
recognize simi-
larities between her and the Japanese, who were soulless
creatures and thus
less human.
While the foreignness of Japan is stressed in the film, Japan
cannot be
completely foreign. The main Japanese characters—Japanese
business-
men—all dress like American counterparts, play golf, use latest
technologies,
and work in a modern environment: They are very foreign and
very assimi-
lated to U.S norms simultaneously. Although the emphasis of
foreignness has
been also part of the model minority stereotype, unlike in the
yellow peril
stereotype, foreign culture is seen as a factor that makes them
successful in

U.S. society (Kim, 1999; Okihiro, 1994). The film portrays
Japan as a ‘‘high
achiever’’ in the world of business (the model minority) even
by ‘‘out-
performing’’ the United States, the most powerful capitalist
nation in the
world (the yellow peril). It also represents Japan as a
threatening entity that
operates in a different cultural system extremely different from
the U.S.
system (the yellow peril), which at the same time makes Japan
succeed
economically (the model minority).
RACIAL TRIANGULATION
Stereotyping Japan=Japanese as the model minority and the
yellow involves
racial triangulation. When Smith and Connor find themselves
chased by
Eddie Sakamura’s friends, Smith drives his car into a ghetto-
like neighbor-
hood filled with poorly maintained houses and streets. People
who appear
in the neighborhood are mostly young African American men
and a few
young Latinos. Smith stops his car and greets the African
American youths
hanging out on the street. Telling them a made-up story that
Smith and
Connor are being run after by the Japanese because they left a
sushi

restaurant without paying, Smith asks the African American
youths for inter-
vention. Eddie’s friends, who are depicted as Japanese
gangsters, are
surrounded and threatened by these young men and run away
giving up
chasing Smith and Connor.
The scene of African Americans attacking Japanese overlaps
with that
of the 1992 Los Angeles riots in which that Asian Americans
were attacked
by African Americans and Latinos. The original novel of Rising
Sun, pub-
lished in 1992, neither suggests that Smith is African American
nor includes
this particular scene (Crichton, 1992). The film was first shown
in theaters
in 1993. Although it is not known whether the scene was
included because
of the riot, the point here is that after 1992, the signifier that
African Amer-
icans attack Asians cannot help but evoke the incident. The riots
occurred
after a ‘‘not-guilty’’ verdict was given to the White policemen
who were
charged with beating Rodney King, an African American man.
Although
it can be argued that the preceding racial tensions between
Korean
Americans and African Americans in the area contributed to the
occurrence
of the riot, the Rodney King case was not caused by Asian
Americans. One
of the most publicized conflicts occurred in 1991 in Los
Angeles when a

Korean storeowner, Soon Ja Du, shot to death a fifteen-year old
African
American girl, Latasha Harlings because of an unpaid $1.79
bottle of orange
juice. Superior Court Judge Karlin put Du on probation with a
$500
fine and 400 hours of community service (Park, 1999). This
extremely
light sentence angered African American communities in South
Central
Los Angles.
Mainstream media are believed to be responsible for turning the
Rodney
King case, a White racial issue, into an Asian�Black racial
issue (Lie &
Abelmann, 1999). After the not-guilty verdict was delivered on
April 29,
1992, ABC-TV repeatedly showed the videotape of Du shooting
Harlings first
and then the videotape of Rodney King being beaten by the
White policemen
(Min, 1996). The media framed the riot as an inter-racial
conflict between
Asians and Blacks because such a portrayal ‘‘resonates with
underlying
American ideological currents, which pit Asian Americans, as a
model min-
ority, against African Americans, as an urban underclass’’ (Lie
& Abelmann,
1999, pp. 79�80). Kim (1999) argues the implication of this
case as follows:
‘‘by valorizing Korean immigrants and defending them against
Black ‘agita-
tors,’ the media once again used Asian Americans and the
norms of color-

blindness to protect White privilege from a Black Power
challenge’’
(p. 126). The Rodney King case, which was undoubtedly
motivated by White
racism, was re-contextualized as an inter-minority conflict in
which ‘‘urban
underclass’’ African Americans attacked ‘‘model minority’’
Asian Americans,
and White Americans disappeared from the scene. White
Americans became
‘‘neutral,’’ African Americans became ‘‘villains,’’ and Asian
Americans became
‘‘victims.’’ White racism was covered-up and became invisible,
while racial
minority groups were divided as they fought each other.
124 Y. Kawai
A similar meaning is produced in that scene of the film. Smith
says to
Connor, ‘‘We are safe here, senpai.5 Rough neighborhoods may
be America’s
last advantage’’ as he drives into the poor neighborhood and
asks African
American youth for help to save them from Japanese gangsters.
Although
Lee (1999) posited that this scene implied ‘‘the notion of a
black and white
alliance against an alien’’ or ‘‘a new alliance that restores
national unity against
the alien’’ (p. 215), the meaning produced here is more
complex. The neigh-
borhood in which mostly African American young men appear
suggests that

poor neighborhoods signify darker-skinned minority groups.
This scene trig-
gers a question: Whose advantage is Smith talking about? It is
surely an advan-
tage for White America to have African Americans to protect its
interests. This
scene—that people who protect America from an alien are
described to live in
a ghetto—captures the reality of institutional racism in which
African Ameri-
cans are used for sustaining White America, while they live
under poverty.
Because Smith, an African American, speaks for White
America, this scene
makes institutional racism invisible. If Smith were a White, he
could not go
into the poor neighborhood and ask for intervention, the scene
of African
Americans attacking Asians would not be possible, and the line
spoken by
Smith would convey the racially charged meaning more
obviously.
The Japanese who are attacked by African Americans are not
‘‘victims’’
like in the model minority stereotype but ‘‘villains’’ or the
yellow peril who
try to retaliate against Conner and Smith, the American heroes,
for Eddie
who signifies Japan. At the same time, Asian affluence is
contrasted against
Black poverty. Although these Japanese are portrayed as
gangsters, they are
still ‘‘model’’ gangsters who put on nice suits, drive a neat car,
and run away
without causing any trouble when they are threatened, whereas

their African
American counterparts are depicted as opposite. In addition, the
Japanese
characters are associated with ‘‘passivity’’ and ‘‘docility,’’
which are part of
the model minority stereotype (Kibria, 2002; Okihiro, 1994),
even when they
are gangsters. Moreover, taking into account the consistent
emphasis of
Japanese affluence in contrast to American poverty throughout
the film, this
scene can provide an idea that Black poverty resulted from
Asian affluence.
The dialectic of the model minority and the yellow peril creates
a mean-
ing that the yellow race is a menace not only for the White race
but also for
the Black race in the United States. Asian Americans are ‘‘bad’’
to White
Americans because they are the yellow peril. So is the case to
African
Americans because Asian Americans are the model minority.
Like the 1992
riots, while having Asians and Blacks fight each other, this
scene makes
Whites become invisible and neutralized and thereby produces a
colorblind
situation that sustains White privilege and hinders interracial
solidarity to
challenge the privilege.
The film includes a symbolic character against interracial
solidarity.
Jingo Asakuma grew up in Japan as a child of an African
American father

in the air force and a Japanese mother who worked at a noodle
shop. She
is a girlfriend of Connor and helps his investigation of the
murder case. What
is striking is her left hand: it is deformed. This signifier—a
child of Black and
Asian parents has a deformed hand—can mean a warning
against an alliance
between minorities: A mixed child of two people of color will
be deformed
or will have an ‘‘imperfect’’ human body; interracial alliance
will lead to
negative consequences.
CONCLUSION
Both local and global contexts have influenced the production
of the yellow
peril and the model minority stereotypes. In the past, the
increasing number
of Asian immigrants—non-Christian and non-White ‘‘other’’—
in the United
States and the rise of an Asian imperial power contributed to the
construction
of the yellow peril stereotype. The model minority stereotype
was initially
produced in the contexts in which racial minority groups stood
up for racial
equality and the institutional transformation of U.S. society,
and Japan
re-emerged as an economic power. The revival of both

stereotypes in the
1980s coincided with the rise of Asian economic powers and
also the Reagan
administrations’ attack on affirmative action programs that were
indebted to
the Civil Rights Movement. The model minority stereotype has
fed and been
fed by the yellow peril stereotype in various social and
historical contexts of
both the United States and Asia. When Asian Americans are
stereotypically
represented in media texts, the model minority and the yellow
peril stereo-
types are blended, and ambivalent meanings are produced.
The ambivalence of Asian American racial stereotyping
indicates the
ideological characteristic of stereotyping. Ideology as a system
of shared
meanings needs to be hegemonic in Gramsci’s (2000) sense.
Gramsci posited
that in order for a particular group to control society, using
coercion is not
sufficient; it is necessary to persuade people to follow their
ideas and pro-
duce consent, for which accommodating contradictory meanings
is impera-
tive. Likewise, for stereotypes to be influential, they have to be
ambivalent
to also look ‘‘attractive’’ even to the stereotyped.
The point of viewing the model minority and the yellow peril
stereo-
types as a whole—not opposite and separate entities—lies not
only in under-
standing the characteristics of stereotypes but also in being

conscious of the
political implications of the model minority stereotype that
seems to be
‘‘positive’’ and currently more ‘‘official’’ than the yellow peril
stereotype.
Stereotype as ideology can have actual effects on the
stereotyped people
as Berg (1990) postulated that ‘‘one of the saddest aspects of
stereotyping
is that out-group [the stereotyped] members may begin to
believe and accept
the stereotype’’ (p. 299). Because of the ‘‘positive’’
appearance, the model
minority stereotype is more seductive for people of Asian
descent in the
United States to internalize the stereotype.
126 Y. Kawai
Under the current form of globalization in which neo-liberalism
has
gained prominence (Fitzsimons, 2000), colorblind ideology that
closely
relates to neo-liberalism (Delgado & Stephanic, 2001) provides
a theoretical
support for conservatives to argue against the existence of
institutional
racism and attempt to eliminate affirmative action programs.6
In addition,
colorblind ideology obscures Asian Americans’ relative
privilege. Kim
(2000�2001) contended:
When Asian American scholars, activists, and advocates argue

that Asian
Americans are minorities, too, deserving of equal consideration
with
Blacks, they abstract from history and decline to explore the
ways in
which Asian Americans are, on the whole, persistently
advantaged rela-
tive to Blacks. (p. 38)
It is true that all Asian American ethnic groups are not equally
advanced: the
poverty rate of Americans of Southeast Asian ancestry is still as
high as or
higher than other racial minority groups. Yet, it is also the case
that ‘‘with
blacks at the bottom, there is every indication that any migrants
have a good
chance both of being above the nether end of society and of
experiencing
some mobility’’ (Prashad, 2000, p. 163). By seeing the two
stereotypes as
one, it will become more difficult for people of the yellow race
to accept
the model minority stereotype and enable us to critically view
the position
of the yellow race in U.S. racial relations.
The ambivalent meanings of Asian Americans are not totally
fixed. As
local (U.S.) and global (Asian) contexts change, meanings
regarding Asian
Americans also change. These contexts, however, do not change
without
human practices including communication acts. Making ethical
meanings
for Asian Americans involves developing ethical racial relations

with all other
racial groups and creating more possible meanings by turning
the ambivalent
meanings of Asian Americans into polyvalent meanings.
NOTES
1. Kibria (2002) included an independent chapter dealing with
the model minority stereotype but not
other stereotypes in her book Becoming Asian American.
2. See Shim (1998) for the revival of the yellow peril stereotype
and see Kim (2000) for the revival of
the model minority stereotype.
3. On the other hand, people from Southeast Asia, especially
Hmong immigrants, tended to be left
out. For example, Southeast Asian immigrants are labeled as the
superminority’s poor cousins (Ramirez,
1986, p. 156).
4. The New York Times Magazine article of 1966 already
contains comparison between Japanese
Americans and Whites in terms of occupation, income, and life
expectation.
5. Senpai means the senior person. Connor teaches Smith about
the senpai-kohai relationship in Japa-
nese culture. Smith calls Connor senpai, and Connor calls Smith
kohai, the junior person.

6. The elimination of affirmative action programs has occurred
since the 1990s in California, Texas,
Florida, and Washington (Steinberg, 2003).
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Resisting Whiteness: Mexican American Studies
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Chad M. Nelson
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Resisting Whiteness: Mexican American
Studies and Rhetorical Struggles for
Visibility
Chad M. Nelson
In late 2012, Santino J. Rivera published a collection of
Chicana/o literature as a
cultural and political response to the closure of Mexican

American Studies in the
Tucson Unified School District. This essay argues that Rivera’s
text invites critical
interrogation of the whiteness ideologies underlying critiques of
MAS in an attempt to
make spaces for Chicana/o sensibilities. Such sensibilities, this
essay argues, include In
Lak’ech and mestiza rhetorics, which emphasize cultural
empowerment, identification,
spiritual love, and humanization.
Keywords: Whiteness Ideology; Post-Racism; Mexican
American Studies; Chicana/o
Identities; Critical Rhetoric
The Tucson Unified School District’s (TUSD) Mexican
American/Raza Studies
program (MAS) is the late harvest of numerous labors including
student organizing
in the 1960–1970s, Chicana/o1 grassroots activism, and various
class action lawsuits
including Mendoza et al. v. Tucson School District No. 1, et al.
(1978) and Rosalie
Lopez et al. v. Tucson Unified Schools (1997) (Acuña, 2011;
Romero, 2010).
Inaugurated in 1998, the MAS department offered courses in
literature, mathematics,
government, history, and art. Similar to multicultural education
in general, these
courses aimed for diverse cultural inclusion and educational
equity. But unlike
dominant forms of multicultural education, MAS teachers
achieved their goals
through an educational model called Critically Compassionate
Intellectualism that

Chad M. Nelson is a Doctoral Candidate at Bowling Green State
University. An earlier version of this article was
presented at the 2013 annual conference of the National
Communication Association in Washington, DC. The
author wishes to thank Dr. Alberto González for his helpful
advice, Sarah Petrie for her suggested revisions to the
manuscript, and guest editors Dr. Dreama Moon and Dr.
Michelle Holling as well as the blind reviewers for their
constructive suggestions and comments. Correspondence: Chad
M. Nelson, School of Media and
Communication, Bowling Green State University 08 West Hall,
Bowling Green, OH 43403, USA. Email:
[email protected]
Journal of International and Intercultural Communication
Vol. 8, No. 1, February 2015, pp. 63–80
ISSN 1751-3057 (print)/ISSN 1751-3065 (online) © 2014
National Communication Association
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17513057.2015.991080
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17513057.2015.991080
combines critical pedagogies, authentic caring of students, and
a social justice-
oriented curriculum (Cammarota & Romero, 2006). Coupling
critical race theory
(Delgado & Stefancic, 2001) with critical pedagogy (Freire,
1970/2010), the MAS
curriculum centered Chicana/o experiences and knowledge in
the educational
environment in order to invite students and teachers into
dialogic struggles toward
critical consciousness of oppressions. This restructuring of the
classroom offered
“each student the opportunities they need to construct his or her
own counterhistory”
to “the majoritarian story that legitimizes the Anglo story as the
‘American’ story”
(Romero & Arce, 2011, p. 7). After all, Critically
Compassionate Intellectualism was
intended to deconstruct systemic injustices in the TUSD, create
spaces for previously
silenced voices in Tucson, and position all students, especially
Latina/o2 students, for

academic success (Cammarota & Romero).
But despite the program’s impressive success at closing the
achievement gap
(Cambium Learning, 2011), the TUSD Governing Board and the
state of Arizona
belligerently criticized the curriculum and pedagogical model.
Tom Horne, the
former Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction (2003–
2011) and the current
Arizona Attorney General, was the primary critic of MAS. To
get a sense of the oft-
repeated primary argument against the ethnic studies classes, it
is necessary to quote
at length from a rather transparent letter Horne distributed to
the “Citizens of
Tucson”:
I believe people are individuals, not exemplars of racial groups.
What is important
about people is what they know, what they can do, their ability
to appreciate
beauty, their character, and not what race into which they are
born. They are
entitled to be treated that way. It is fundamentally wrong to
divide students up
according to their racial group, and teach them separately. (T.
Horne, personal
communication, June 11, 2007)
Following Horne’s extensive campaign to shut down MAS,
Governor Jan Brewer
signed Arizona HB 2281 (2010) into law. Suspiciously parroting
the anti-immigrant
tone of Arizona SB 1070 (2010), the legislation prohibits
courses that “promote the

overthrow of the United States government. Promote resentment
toward a race or
class of people. Are designed primarily for pupils of a particular
ethnic group.
Advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as
individuals” (p. 1).
Ironically, these texts allege the dangerousness of centering
specific racial identities in
the classroom while simultaneously minimizing their
significance in a student’s
education. In this supposed “post-racial” moment, individuality
is commonly
accepted as the elixir for racial inequities (Lacy, 2010). If we
somehow treat every
person as equal, then racial discrimination will eventually
dissipate. Within this
colorblind logic, the accusation of racism is racist par
excellence in that it violates the
fundamental liberal belief in a student’s individuality as her
only morally legitimate
path to academic success. In the absence of racism,
multiculturalism and tolerance
have emerged as means to celebrate cultural diversity while
inadvertently deracializ-
ing public discourse and cloaking institutional racism (Flores,
Moon, & Nakayama,
2006; Herakova, Jelača, Sibii, & Cooks, 2011).
64 C. M. Nelson
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critical theory and critical pedagogy allowed students to
restructure their counter story
Janiece
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despite the programs ability to help close the achievement gap
the curr. was criticized
Janiece
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Janiece
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the majoritarian or dominant narrative legitimizes anglo history
as "american history"
Janiece
Sticky Note
AZ superintendent of instruction states that ppl are individuals
not exemplars of racial groups...it's wrong to divvy up students
by racial groups
Janiece
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Janiece
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the legislation prohibited courses that overthrow the us gov't
designed for pupils of specific groups rather than all students
and prohibits courses that promote resentment towards a
specific group of ppl
In this essay, I argue that this twisted post-racial logic underlies
and motivates
criticisms of TUSD’s Mexican American Studies. Colorblind
arguments, such as those
embedded in Tom Horne’s letter and HB 2281, neglect
historical positions of white
privilege and falsely assume that race can be simply
transcended by both whites and
non-whites (Crenshaw, 1997). This argument is artistically
developed in Santino J.
Rivera’s collection of Chicana/o literature titled, ¡Ban This!:
The BSP Anthology of
[email protected] Literature (2012). The collection is a piercing

political and cultural critique of
the dominant racial discourses and inequitable experiences of
Chicana/os in the
TUSD. Explicating the present mechanics of racism, Rivera’s
selections collectively
function to expose how xenophobic positions toward Chicana/os
are maintained by
whiteness. Whiteness ideologically functions to erect and
protect discursive and
material forms of white privilege (Crenshaw). Because
whiteness has become
naturalized and seemingly universalized, it is often perceived as
the norm by which
all “others” are to understand themselves (Nakayama & Krizek,
1995). Of course,
whiteness is tricky to delineate owing to its ever adaptable and
historically contingent
qualities (Frankenberg, 1993). Nonetheless, invisibility does not
lighten its effects.
Whiteness has been strategically used to marginalize the lived
experiences of “others”
(Morrison, 1992), further capitalist exploitation (Roediger,
1991), and justify violent
racial wars (Baldwin, 2011). It becomes the task of the critical
rhetorician to
illuminate the historically contingent constructs that promote its
socially privileged
position (Nakayama & Krizek, 1995).
One of the many pressing questions posed by the study of
whiteness is how to
interrupt the interpretation of its normative power. Whiteness
scholars in Commun-
ication Studies have offered several strategies including
conversation between whites
and non-whites (Simpson, 2008; Warren & Hytten, 2004),

critical self-reflexivity
(Crenshaw, 1997; Nakayama & Krizek, 1995), intersectionality
(Moon & Flores,
2000), and critiques of embodied performances of whiteness
(Cooks, 2003; Warren,
2001). Drawing from Rivera’s literary collection, this essay
offers an additional critical
strategy, namely, positioning Chicana/o identities as a resource
of intervention into
the invisibility of whiteness. Rhetoricians have well
documented how Latina/os have
articulated their identities through cultural forms such as music
(Pineda, 2009),
murals (LaWare, 1998), and theater (Holling & Calafell, 2007).
Performances such as
these are intended to resist, at least in part, hegemonic
discourses, empower spaces
for alternative cultural narratives, and draw critical attention to
the discriminatory
political and economic contexts in which co-cultural
communities live. For Calafell
(2007), embracing a Chicana feminist perspective in a space of
overwhelming
whiteness places her “experience as a woman of color at the
center, allowing me to
see myself not as a victim or someone with no history but as a
strong woman with an
illustrious but silenced history” (p. 14). Centering previously
marginalized identities
in curricula and pedagogies presents viable opportunities for
both critical engagement
with whiteness and empowerment of co-cultural communities,
as Calafell and TUSD
student experiences testify.
Following suit, this essay positions co-cultural consciousness,

and particularly the
Chicana/o sensibilities and experiences voiced in Rivera’s
literary collection, as
Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 65
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colorblind policies like this undermine white privilege and

falsely assume that race can be simply transcended by both
whites and non-whites
Janiece
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because whiteness has become naturalized and normalized
"others" have to understand themselves through this lens
Janiece
Highlight
whiteness has been strategically used to marginalize the lived
experiences of others
Janiece
Highlight
communication scholars have posed ways to mitigate whiteness
critical self-reflexivity
convos b/t whites and non-whites
intersectionality
critiques of embodied performances of whiteness
Janiece
Highlight
positioning chicano studies as a resource of intervention into
the invisibility of whiteness is what the author proposes
theatre, music in part resist hegemonic discourses
Janiece
Highlight
centering previously marginalized identities in curriculu and
pedagogies presents viable opps for critical engagement with
whiteness and empowerment of co-cultural communities
integral to the whiteness studies project. Certainly self-

reflexivity of whiteness and
privileged practices is crucial for working against white
privilege (Jackson, Shin, &
Hilson, 2000), but self-reflexivity alone risks becoming a post-
racial echo chamber
wherein white norms and privileges are reinforced and
amplified. John Warren
(2001) voiced a similar concern, which he described as “an
unreflective immersion in
the politics of whiteness” (p. 101). Apprehension over self-
reflexivity begs a critical
impetus to set reflexivity into motion and to ensure it achieves
its anti-racist pursuits,
and according to Rivera’s collection, Chicana/o sensibilities and
experiences function
as such impetuses to expose the hegemonic constructions of
whiteness and to locate
potentialities for Chicana/o empowerment in Tucson. Critiques
of whiteness through
the lens of Chicana/o sensibilities and experiences extend
similar co-cultural critiques
of whiteness (Griffin & Calafell, 2011; Jackson et al., 2000).
However, I am not
suggesting that a redefinition of Chicana/o identities alone is
able to improve material
conditions for Chicana/os in Tucson or to undermine altogether
the discursive and
material aspects of whiteness circulating in the TUSD. But
rather, as Enck-Wanzer
(2011) models, rhetorical critics must view performances of
cultural empowerment as
negotiated within historical colonialisms as well as the
economic and political
constraints on that particular community. Out of such work, a
nuanced depiction
emerges of the ways in which identities in a community

contribute to opportunities
for political agency that are themselves shaped by dominant
interests.
With that being said, the Chicana/o identities read in ¡Ban This!
(2012) constitute
compelling challenges to the assumption of a “post-racial”
society, exposing its
representations to be elaborate, persuasive constructs upheld
(in)visibly by whiteness.
To expose this facade in the TUSD, I employ the tools of
critical rhetoric. As
McKerrow (1989) argues, “the initial task of a critical rhetoric
is one of re-creation—
constructing an argument that identifies the integration of
power and knowledge and
delineates the role of power/knowledge in structuring social
practices” (p. 102). Out
of this re-creation of the arguments embedded in Rivera’s
literary selections emerge
two rhetorical strategies for interrupting and working against
white privilege. Deeply
rooted in Chicana/o sensibilities, these rhetorical strategies are
referred to in this
essay as In Lak’ech and mestiza rhetorics. The collection
suggests that these
humanizing rhetorics are at the true center of MAS, and as such,
they are intended
to empower audiences to challenge embedded whiteness in
Tucson.
In writing this rhetorical critique, I first briefly survey the
history of Chicana/o
educational experiences and the literatures pertaining to
Chicana/o identities and
resistant literature. I then interpret how Rivera’s collection

invites critiques of
whiteness before explaining how the text empowers Chicana/o
sensibilities of In
Lak’ech and mestiza rhetorics.
Historical Background: Chicana/o Educational Experiences
Chicana/o schooling in the U.S. Southwest cannot be understood
apart from the
historical contexts of Spanish colonialism, Americanization
programs, and resistance
against these hegemonic forces (MacDonald & Monkman,
2005). That is, the
66 C. M. Nelson
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self reflexivity of whiteness and privileged practices is crucial
work against white privilege
but self-reflexivity along risks becoming a post-racial echo
chamber
Janiece
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Janiece
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critical rhetoric is one of recreation-is a way of constructing an
argument that identifies integration of power and knowledge
and delineates the role of power/knowledge in structuring social
practices
Janiece
Highlight
schooling of Chicana/os is situated within the “broader Latina/o
collective experience
of oppression within the U.S. racial classification system”
(Hidalgo, 2005, p. 378). The
dominance of core American cultural values in schooling,
including individualism
and achievement orientation, has historically alienated
Chicana/os from their

communal identities (Bernal, 2006). Whether it was “Mexican
schools” acculturating
Latina/os for perceived cultural and linguistic deficiencies after
the Mexican–
American War, immigrant education designed to produce cheap
labor during the
twentieth century, or persistently under-resourced and
segregated schooling, Latina/o
experiences in the U.S. education system have been marked by
xenophobia and
inequity (Gonzalez, 1990/2013; Spring, 2013).
In the 1960s, addressing these inequitable and culturally
exclusive education
policies and practices were among the foremost civil rights
issues for Chicana/o
communities. Before 1960, Mexican American struggles for
educational equity
centered on overcoming segregation with litigation and were
primarily carried out
by adults; however, post-1960 Chicana/o involvement in
education reform was driven
by mass student mobilization and direct action in schools (San
Miguel, 2013).
Students, teachers, and community activists strategically used
strikes, walkouts,
boycotts, and demonstrations against English-only and Anglo-
centric structures and
curricula (Gutiérrez, 2011). For instance, in 1968, thousands of
Chicana/o high school
students walked out of East Los Angeles public schools to
challenge discrimination,
cultural exclusion, English-only rules, poor school conditions,
and lack of Chicana/o
teachers and administrative staff (San Miguel). Additional
strategies for addressing

educational inequity included increasing Chicana/o school board
representation,
advocating bilingual and bicultural education, improving
Chicana/o student achieve-
ment, implementing pluralism, including Mexican American
content in the class-
room, and attempting to address community poverty (San
Miguel).
In the late 1960s, similar struggles for educational justice took
place in Tucson.
Community organizers, parents, and students participated in a
series of school
walkouts. The goal simply stated: Chicana/o voices and
experiences should be
included in the classroom. In spite of these demonstrations,
discrimination against
Latino/as, African Americans, and Native Americans remained
deeply entrenched in
the school district. It was not until a series of court rulings that
the situation began to
change. In June 1978, the court ordered the district to
desegregate, and in compliance
with the ruling, the parties drew up a comprehensive
desegregation plan that added
phonetics programs for Chicano/a first graders and a bilingual
Standard English as a
Second Language program for co-cultural students (Brousseau,
1993). Despite
considerable white opposition within the district, Tucson
community advocacy led
to the inclusion of courses for Native Americans, Mexican
Americans, African
Americans, and Asian students in 1998 (Brousseau; Romero &
Arce, 2011). In 2009,
the TUSD filed a petition and was granted an end to federal

court oversight of its
desecration plans. But, in 2011, the U.S. Court of Appeals for
the Ninth Circuit
reversed that court’s decision and ordered continued oversight
of the district’s plans
to achieve unitary status.
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Janiece
Highlight
the US dominance of American cultural values in schooling has
alienated latinos from their communal identities due to the
emphasis in individualism and achievement orientation
Janiece
Highlight
latino schooling experiences have been marked by xenophobia
and inequity
Janiece
Highlight
strategies for achieving ed equity includes increasing school
board representation, bilingual ed, improving chicano
achievement, plularism, mex am content in classroom and
attempting to address community poverty
Janiece
Highlight
in 1978 desegregation was ordered and parties drew up plan and
phonetics programs of chicano first graders bilingual ed
Janiece
Highlight
tucson community advocacy led to inclusion of courses for
marginalized communities in 1998
Ch(X)icana/o Identities: Struggles for Empowerment
The identities of the Chicana/os at the center of these struggles
for educational equity
emerged out of what Anzaldúa (1999) calls “una herida abierta”
(p. 25) of oppression
and illegitimacy. With the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe

Hidalgo (1848), the
US–Mexico border crossed those who were once living in
Mexico. In these colonized
territories lived the “prohibited,” “forbidden,” and
“transgressors” alongside those
considered “legitimate inhabitants” (Anzaldúá, p. 25). This
crisis of home, and the
racism and exploitation that accompanied it, forced most
Mexicans to assimilate into
Mexican Americans. But the 1950–1970s generation refused to
assimilate and
constituted an identity that was neither Mexican nor Anglo
(García, 1997). Within
a context of political and economic marginalization and racial
injustice, the
assertiveness of their Indigenous, Mexican, and Spanish
identities brought about a
culture-affirming national consciousness among people who
called themselves
“Chicano” (Alurista, 1981). In the 1960s, “Chicano” united a
heterogeneous
population around a common culture and language, and out of
this cultural
nationalism, a resistance movement emerged to seek equity and
social justice for
Mexican Americans (Alurista; Hammerback & Jensen, 1994).
Vital to the success of
this Chicano Movement was the Mexican and Indigenous
symbols used to critique
dominant racialized ideologies, empower political action, and
establish a sense of
cultural empowerment among Chicana/os (Delgado, 1998).
Rightly, several scholars have critiqued Chicanismo as
harboring masculine biases
and gender inequities (Garcia; 1989; Holling, 2006a).

Rhetorical critiques of the
intersection of Chicana/o identities with gender, sexuality, and
class continue to
multiply (Calafell, 2007; Holling, 2006b). Additionally, in
response to the exceeding
complexity and heterogeneity of oppression under neoliberal
polices, Xicana/o
identities have sprouted (Rios, 2008). “Xicana/o” hails from the
Nahuatl spelling of
“Chicana/o” and symbolizes a desire to draw from Indigenous
cultural roots to locate
symbols and strategies for resistance to colonization (Baca,
2008). Extending beyond
Mexican Americans to include Central and South Americans,
the Xicana/o identity
highlights unity and justice as guiding moral principles,
represents a willingness to
critique other Xicana/os, and incorporates a multidimensional
approach to address
issues faced by all Xicana/os, including immigration and
language barriers (Rios;
Urrieta, 2004).
Chicana/o Literature: A Project of Self-Assertion and
Resistance
From the 1960 to the 1970s, most Chicano literature embodied
the cultural
nationalism of the Chicano Movement (Alurista, 1981).
Chicana/o authors strategic-
ally imported cultural nationalism into their novels and poetry
to voice their social
alienation and to claim a sense of self for a forgotten and
abhorred people (Eysturoy
& Gurpegui, 1990). Literary works such as The Autobiography
of a Brown Buffalo

(1972) and Memories of the Alhambra (1977) describe
characters searching for
identity among Spanish, Mexican, and Indigenous roots. Novels
such as … y no se lo
68 C. M. Nelson
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Janiece
Highlight

Janiece
Highlight
treaty of hidalgo in 1848 made those who were once in mexico
once the border was drawn forced assimilation towward being
mexican am.,
Janiece
Highlight
those who identify as chicano united for social justice for
mexican am. shared equity in mind and common lang. and
culture
Janiece
Highlight
Janiece
Highlight
xicano draws from the indigenous roots of the chicano
movement this is a form of resistance to colonization
tragó la tierra (1971) and the work of Rolando Hinojosa
highlight the brutal
conditions of Chicana/o farm workers and the politico-economic
systems that
maintain oppressive Anglo-Chicana/o power relationships
(Eysturoy & Gurpegui).
Within the Chicano Movement, these literary works spurred a
critical consciousness
of dispossession and displacement (Pèrez-Torres, 1995). In this
context, conscientiza-
tion implies more than mere awareness. It simultaneously
requires emancipatory
change. As Freire (1970/2010) writes, dialogic struggles with
the contradictions of

their social and political realities empower the oppressed to take
action against
dominant structures and false representations of co-cultural
communities. Likewise
Chicano literature in this historical period functioned as a space
wherein Chicana/os
could dialogically engage in a critical process of becoming
“authors of their realities
and self-determine their roles in society” (Berta-Ávila, 2003, p.
128). For instance,
cultural myths such as the Nahuatl homeland of Aztlán were
used in Chicano
narratives including “The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez” to critique
Anglo power
structures in the U.S. Southwest and to carve out a land for the
disinherited to call
home (Rodriguez, 2000). This self-assertion of Chicana/o values
and political interests
in the form of Mexican and Indigenous literary archetypes,
bilingual conversational
styles, cultural folklore, and Chicana/o imagery also countered
popular Anglo
representations of Mexican Americans as lazy, criminal, and
ignorant (Alurista).
In response to this literary era, Chicana literature emerged as a
critique of the
patriarchy and stereotypical maternal roles for women in
Chicanismo (Eysturoy &
Gurpegui, 1990). Whereas Chicanismo was narrowly focused on
cultural survival,
Chicana feminists also argued for critiques of sexism in
Chicana/o communities
(Garcia, 1989). In Chicana literature, this critique took the form
of opposition to
patriarchal institutions, a reinterpretation of Chicana cultural

archetypes, and an
emphasis on distinctive female experiences (Sandoval, 2008).
Several Chicana authors
centered the mestiza identity in their writing in an attempt to
resist both Chicanismo
and Anglo stereotypes of Chicanas (Anzaldúá, 1999; Delgadillo,
2011). This mestiza
trope draws from the inclusive hybrid identity of Chicanas as a
means to locate
interrelationships between Anglos and Chicana/os as well as to
address racism,
sexism, and classism (Pèrez-Torres, 1995). Similar to earlier
Chicana prose, Ana
Castillo’s (1994) Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on
Xicanisma is an example of
both a Chicana feminist critique of traditional gender roles and
use of the mestiza
trope to critique other dominant dualities. She calls this
consciousness, Xicanisma:
“Xicanisma is an ever-present consciousness of our
interdependence specifically
rooted in our culture and history. … It is yielding; never
resistant to change, one
based on wholeness not dualisms” (Castillo, 1994, p. 226).
Drawing from, but not
limited to the Chicana experience, Xicanisma empowers a
subversive politics that
opposes individualism and other capitalistic values (Schoeffel,
2008). Read through
Xicanisma and Chicana/o resistance literatures, we begin to see
the subversive nature
of TUSD’s Mexican American Studies and Rivera’s collection
of Chicana/o literature,
and with this in mind, I now turn to the rhetorical text.

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¡Ban This!: Making Whiteness Visible in Tucson
Published by his independent publication company, Broken
Sword Publications,
Santino J. Rivera’s collection includes selections of poetry,
short stories, nonfiction,
and excerpts from larger novels. The book is divided into 40

short sections. Each
section is devoted to a single author, and typically includes a
brief biography of the
author followed by one or more of her works. These selections
vary from a poem
about breakfast tacos to Rodolfo Acuña’s defense of TUSD’s
Mexican American
Studies program.
Taken as a whole, Rivera’s collection rhetorically serves to
expose the whiteness
tropes underlying critiques of MAS. One way in which the
collection does this is by
interrupting the perceived normativity of whiteness by which all
“others” are judged.
In her poem, “Finding a Voice,” Adrianna Simone describes her
childhood
experiences in the U.S. education system:
When I was young, I had no voice./ I tried to speak, but no one
understood me./ I
spent fourteen long years in speech therapy./ I knew I was
different, and I was
tormented for it./ I needed to learn perfect English/ if I wanted
to “fit in.” (p. 293)
In this state of “loneliness” separated “from potential friends
and the family who
loved me,” she desperately attempted to learn English by
reading “European” books
(p. 294). “I started with their tradition, their norm./ What I
discovered was my
culture, my history./ Always there, sitting on the bookshelves,/
if a bit hidden behind
other crap” (p. 295). Simone is disclosing the pain associated
with the cultural deficit

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