Andrew Sullivan's perpetuation of model minority and black pathology myths is pretty bo... - 0 views
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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?
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there is still a host of problems with Sullivan’s question-begging argument. That includes, but is not limited to, an ignorance of selection effects—a substantial cohort of Asian Americans chose to come here and entered the United States with advanced degrees—as well as an invocation of “culture” without any awareness that this image is a construction, a contingent narrative tied to the politics and political atmosphere of the mid-20th century United States.
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As historian Ellen Wu explains of these historical realities in The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority, “The United States’ battles against fascism and then Communism meant that Asiatic Exclusion, like Jim Crow, was no longer tenable.” The result, she argues, was the “entrance of Asian Americans into the national fold” and, in the 1960s, a “profound metamorphosis [of Asian Americans] into the model minority: the Asiatic who was at once a model citizen and definitely not-black
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