The Minority Predicament: An Analysis of Asian American Success and the

The Minority Predicament: An Analysis of Asian American Success and the Model Minority Paradigm My grandmother sent me a letter from home, telling the success story of her old Chinese tenants who, through hard work, had become very wealthy in the 9 short years they lived in America. My grandmother embraces the belief that "with hard work, patience and a little help from the model minority stereotype, someday Asians will gain full approval of white America". She believes that Asian Americans are inherently smarter, more diligent and thrifty than other racial minorities of our time. I, on the other hand, am skeptical towards this assumed advantage that other minorities have perceived as "elevators to the ladder of success" in American society. While Asian Americans are able to achieve acculturation by gaining material success, despite this economic advancement, they are unable to assimilate socially into mainstream America because of prejudice and discrimination. Prejudice and oppression by whites underlies the discourse used to describe Asian Americans as the "model minority". According to Eric Liu, Asian Americans have been called the "New Jews," a label "meant to accentuate the many parallels between these two groups of immigrants: Jews started out as outsiders; Asians did too†¦ Jews climbed the barriers and crowded the Ivies; Asians did too. Jews climbed faster than any minority in their time; Asians did too". The difference between these two racial groups asserts Liu, is that in America "the very metaphor of ‘the Jew’ now stands for assimilation", but Asians are unable to blend into white American society as Jews did half a century ago. The model minority paradigm first emerged during 1960’s in response to the civil ... ...r frustration on this Asian American, and "assailed Chin with racial epithets and blamed those ‘like him’ for the unemployment of American auto workers". The American auto industry, they felt, had been threatened by competition with Japan’s prospering automobile industry. This violence again engages the Orientalist stereotyping that all Asians can be classified together as a collective foreign "other". Many minorities like Mukherjee and Divakaruni have expressed that although many traditional obstacles of prejudice have been made obsolete, discrimination still exists, especially in the negative responses of other Americans to their success. The peaking of Anti-Asian sentiment and violence on America’s streets and office buildings has reinforced this theme ten fold. Asians must seek to dissolve the racist love behind the distortions of the model minority paradigm.