![]() ![]() Asian Americans are the least likely to be promoted to management positions at their places of employment. ![]() Lack of representation is another pressing issue. When the model minority stereotype is invoked, it puts unreasonable pressure on students and workers of Asian descent, based on an imaginary racist trope and completely obscures the many real socioeconomic challenges that millions of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders face.įurthermore, Yvonne Hsu, chief policy and government affairs officer at the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum (NAPAWF), states that millions of Asian American women live in multigenerational households that require caregiving “not just for their children, but for elderly parents and extended family members, too.” On a related front, the Center for American Progress found that half of Asian American women live in a child care desert, impeding their ability to hold a job that can raise money for their families. In fact, Asian Americans are the most economically divided racial or ethnic group in America today, and the gap between rich and poor Asian Americans doubled between 19. For one, it’s clearly intended to use Asian Americans as a cudgel against Blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities – the classic “Divide and Conquer.” It also ignores the tremendous diversity within the AANHPI community, which encompasses citizens of Chinese, Korean, Indian, Japanese, Filipino, Thai, Indonesian, Pakistani, and Vietnamese descent, among many other nations. I have written before about the model minority myth, but in brief, this is a dangerous stereotype for many reasons. One particularly pernicious Asian stereotype in recent years has been the notion of the “model minority,” which suggests that the relative success of Asian Americans in American life is due to essential ethnic characteristics that other minorities don’t seem to possess. Rhode Island and New Jersey have since followed suit, and MUV is now taking the fight to more than a dozen more states.įrom the “ Yellow Peril” of the 19 th century to attacks on American Sikhs after 9/11 to Donald Trump calling COVID “ the kung flu” in June 2020, our country has been no stranger to ugly spates of anti-Asian racism. Last year, thanks in part to an organization founded in 2021 by Asian American parents and students called Make Us Visible (MUV), Connecticut became the first state to mandate the teaching of Asian American history in K-12 schools. While some politicians are working overtime to erase Black History from high school textbooks, more often than not – and with the exception of WWII internment – these and other key episodes in Asian American history just aren’t taught at all. And, in the most infamous example of anti-Asian discrimination, nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans were relocated and imprisoned in internment camps during World War II. In 1913, California passed one of several “alien land laws” to prevent Japanese Americans from owning land. Around the same time, Hawaii, Guam, American Samoa, and the Philippines were all forcibly annexed to the United States. According to scholars, an estimated 300 Chinese settlements were displaced in the late 19 th century by white mob violence. ![]() In the meantime, AANHPI families often found themselves victims of both official and unofficial discrimination. By the 1920s, restrictive immigration laws effectively banned all Asian immigration to the United States. Two decades later - soon after the Transcontinental Railroad was completed through the hard work of thousands of Chinese laborers (hundreds of whom gave their lives) - the federal government banned Chinese immigration to America altogether with the 1875 Page Act and 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act – the first laws to restrict immigration by ethnicity. ![]()
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