Amok Essays Asian American Perspective

The thesis of the myth of the model minority has much to do with the history of Asian Americans and their economic status in the United States.The simple idea is that Asian Americans have long been a minority group in the United States, but unlike other minority groups, Asian Americans have achieved a middle-class status, or so we are led to believe.I don't think it's a fear of diversity, it's that she felt a fear of not being accepted.

The CEA and the Geary Act severely limited Chinese and, when the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907 came about, Japanese immigration as well.

The policies themselves were not the only racist attitude to come about, as the push for these stricter immigration policies were also accompanied by racist propaganda (pictured above and below): as “degenerate heroin addicts whose presence encourage prostitution, gambling, and other immoral activities.” The poster above, particularly, shows that Chinese men were dangerous to white women and solidified a threat paradigm that has changed and evolved.

Such large disparities come at the cost of intergenerational wealth accumulation, where we need to highlight Not only that, but the data surrounding Asian American wealth accumulation paints a different picture of the model minority status.

First, the monolithic understanding that Asian Americans as a group fare better as a whole is wrong (pictured below), and specific ethnicities within the Asian American diaspora show a Not only that, but the perception of Asian American families below the poverty line is also wrong, where the variation by state shows that it is not as utopian as we would like to believe (pictured below): The model minority myth is not just about the economic status of Asian Americans, but it also encompasses the general attitude that Asian Americans are well off, but the large divide also has to do with the lack of diversity in Congress.

Specifically, the comparative statement that pits other minority groups to Asian Americans by showing that if Asian Americans could succeed, then other racial groups should be able to as well, ends up leaving out the large structural and systemic barriers that exist.

The threat construction of Asian Americans, for instance, is radically different from the criminalization of blackness where, that ties into the brutal era of slavery and Jim Crow where black men were seen as criminals, savages, and thugs.

This primary assumption leads to a comparative evaluation of other minority groups that assume that the United States has become a society in which any minority can succeed, they just need to be like the Asians.

Not only is this a false equivalency that conflates and homogenizes the experiences of different racial minorities in the United States, but it also ignores the insular problem that the model minority thesis hides, which is that the economic success of Asian Americans cannot be the sole determining factor of bridging the racial gap, and also overlooks the economic struggles that Asian Americans face.

Even Trump’s rhetoric, based on the long-held belief that jobs are somehow being stolen by Chinese workers is .

This divide sharply places Asian Americans in the political periphery as there is a constant antagonism between two notions of “home,” where the United States may not feel like such a safe haven, but the political and military conflicts in places like South Asia, for instance, are not exactly as welcoming.