Factually! with Adam Conover - The Model Minority Myth with Ellen Wu

Episode Date: October 30, 2019

History professor and director of Asian Studies at Indiana University Ellen Wu joins Adam this week to discuss the model minority myth, how the stereotype has shifted over history and why it still exists today. This episode is brought to you by Acuity (www.acuityscheduling.com/factually) and The Next Big Idea podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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And let's start off the show today with a little experiment. I'm going to play a short series of musical notes, and I want you to pay attention to the associations that form in your mind when I do. Now, I do want to warn you ahead of time that not only is this a dated and somewhat offensive stereotype, it's also a crappy MIDI file I downloaded from Wikipedia. Okay? Here we go. It's also a crappy MIDI file I downloaded from Wikipedia. Okay, here we go. Wow, I did not underplay how crappy that MIDI file was. All right, now, whether or not you heard that and thought,

huh, sounds like a racist musical from the 1920s, and you'd be right, I'd be willing to bet that when you heard it, you thought of Asia, and perhaps more specifically of China. That short musical phrase, called by musicologists the, quote, Oriental Riff, is a nine-note musical shorthand for a stereotype called Orientalism. And because of the riff's long use in this country, those notes now have an indelible association with Asian culture in the American imagination. But that is super messed up, because the truth is that melody was invented and popularized solely by Westerners.

The first recorded version of the riff is from the 19th century, where an American composer named T. Comer penned it into a rather culturally confused piece called the Grand Chinese Spectacle of Aladdin or the Wonderful Lamp. Now, in case you missed it, Aladdin is not from China historically, so I think it's safe to assume that T. Comer's rendition was not particularly authentic. After Comer's version, the riff started being used over and over again by Western composers who used it to caricature or often to overtly mock Chinese culture. By the early 20th century, it was shown up in pop songs with titles like, quote,

Mama's China Twins and Chinatown, My Chinatown, which was written by two dudes named William Jerome and Gene Schwartz. Again, not super authentic stuff here. And of course, it was famously included in the 1974 disco hit Kung Fu Fighting, as well as in untold numbers of pop songs, cartoons, and TV shows as a marker of Chinese or Asian culture. But the fact is, this musical riff,

which has for many white Americans become inextricably connected to Chineseness, was a Western invention that has nothing to do with real Chinese Americans or Chinese citizens at all, much less actual Chinese music. In 2014, an NPR reporter played the Oriental Riff for a variety of actual Chinese people in China, and most of them said that it didn't sound anything like Chinese music to them at all. And the riff is far from the only harmful stereotype about Asian people that was concocted by Westerners and based on a pure fabrication. Well, to help us unpack the

history and myths of Asian stereotypes in America, my guest today is Ellen Wu, a history professor at the University of Indiana and the author of The Color of Success, Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority. Please welcome Ellen Wu. Ellen, thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks for having me, Adam. So let me just put it all out there. You know, growing up as a white kid on Long Island, I feel like I ingested a lot of ideas about Asian Americans that stuck with me for a long time

that I never really questioned because they're just sort of in the ether, right? And I think those are generally referred to as the model minority myth or the model minority stereotype. Could you sort of, as a scholar who studies this, could you put into your own words what that myth is and a little bit about where it comes from and what it means? Sure. I mean, the model minority stereotype is what we can think of as the dominant stereotype of Asian Americans, mostly East Asian, but also I would say South and Southeast Asian, of being like nerdy, smart, hardworking,

upwardly mobile, but also kind of quiet and not rocking the boat. So there's sort of like white people adjacent, maybe, but not quite white. Sometimes there's even this like aspirational aspect. There's like the tiger mom stereotype of the, oh, so super hardworking and we should all strive to emulate in a way, too. Exactly. Although there is a flip side of that, which is, you know, maybe too hardworking and then perhaps threatening. And so I do think that model minority idea, sometimes there's a little bit of tension in there, too. Right.

model minority idea, sometimes there's a little bit of tension in there too. Right. But what strikes me is that the way that a lot of Americans talk about that stereotype is though that's just what's true. That is just Asian culture, East Asian culture, and that's a fact about these folks. And your work, what you came on Adam Ruins, everything you talk about is how that's not really the case and how this is really a very recent story that we tell about these groups. Is that the case? Right. I would say, you know, the model minority stereotype is not a timeless truth. actually rooted in history and came about in particular historical moments to do certain kinds of, you know, work, political, social work.

Okay, well, that makes me really curious. Can you walk us, just start from, not the beginning of time, but, you know, give us a little bit of a, show us how that history worked. How it began. So I'll tell you a little bit about how it began. how that history worked. How it began. So I'll tell you a little bit about how it began. The way I understand it is that when Asian immigrants started coming to the United States, really beginning with the California gold rush, we get a lot of Chinese and then they're followed by Japanese, Koreans, Filipinos, and South Asians, Asian Indians. At that time, there was a racial stereotype of Asian immigrants

as being devious and sneaky and evil and despicable and completely un-American for all those reasons. Completely incapable of becoming Americans. And certainly they were understood racially as being not white. But right around World War II, that whole typecasting of Asian immigrants began to be a problem for the United States, because the US was really invested in fighting a global war against Nazis, against fascists, and the values that those Nazis and fascists stood for. And racism, you know, white supremacy, that was really one of, obviously, the big ideological underpinnings of those groups. Right. That's like what Nazism is kind of all about. Yeah, it's like their brand, you know.

And so the United States, you know, U.S. leaders, politicians and leaders and, you know, cultural observers, social scientists, they did a lot of thinking about this. And one area that they really spent a lot of attention on was racial discrimination in American society. And the main problem at that time, of course, was the issue of what people called the Negro problem, quote unquote, that is the status of African-Americans. But related to that Negro problem, as it was called at the time, was the problem, what people called the Oriental problem, which was mostly at that time a West Coast problem. So that was the decades long history of Asian exclusion, meaning that Asians were barred from coming into the United States, becoming naturalized citizens. They were subject to residential segregation, educational school segregation, intermarriage laws, and so forth. And so all of this became a problem, especially as the United States was looking to fight the Pacific War against Japan. And that really became this

incentive for America to rethink how it was treating Asian Americans. And I will say that Asian Americans, and especially at this time, the largest groups, Japanese and Chinese-Americans, were also really invested in, you know, shifting or overturning the popular image of them as these despised Orientals. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it really hurt their chances to achieve, you know, a good life for themselves and their children. achieve, you know, a good life for themselves and their children. Yeah. I mean, if you're being stereotyped as a sneaky other, that is not great for you in society. Yeah.

Like imagine going to a job interview and, you know, sneaky other, you know, I mean, that would probably hurt your chances of getting hired or promoted. So what happens then in the 1940s and 50s is a lot of, you know, is a lot of is this kind of intersection between what we can call racial reforms and then more global factors that drive changes in the way that the United States deals with its racial minority groups. In the case of Asian Americans, the most famous example, of course, would be the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans who, at the time of the Pearl Harbor bombing, were living in Washington, Oregon, and California. And so between about 110,000 to 120,000 of those folks, really without any hard evidence of any kind of disloyalty or sabotage or criminal activity, were rounded up and incarcerated by the United States government. Completely, you know, really in a complete act of racial profiling, essentially. Yeah, I mean, that's it's it's by far one of the most shameful things

our country has ever done. I mean, it's up there with mistreatment of Native Americans and other populations like that. But I mean, yeah, to incarcerate an entire population of people solely on ethnic basis is very bad. It's a very bad thing to do. And it bothers me also people, people

occasionally underplay it now. And they say, Oh, well, it was done to Germans, too, but not nearly the same numbers. Like it was a very small number of German Americans were occasionally interned. But like with Japanese Americans, it was it was most of the Japanese American population of the entire country. And it was hundreds of thousands of people. Right, exactly. And, and I think the other comparison is that for let's say Germans and Italians, I mean, those were more done on a case by case basis. This is we're talking here in the case of Japanese Americans, rounding up entire communities. Yeah. And and not really giving I mean, they supposedly had a choice. But for most people, they didn't really have options. You know,

I always tell my students, you know, we don't we know now how the war for most people, they didn't really have options. You know, I always tell my students, you know, we know now how the war ended. At the time, they didn't. So they really could not look into the future and see what was going to happen. And so for most people, it just made the most sense. And really, they didn't have any other options but to go along with this removal and imprisonment. So anyway, so kind of connecting back to your original question, you know, again, but to go along with this removal and imprisonment. So anyway, so kind of connecting back to your original question, you know, again, this is like the kind of pinnacle of how Asians in the United States had long been typecast as sneaky and untrustworthy, right?

And now it's like they're the enemy among us and they need to be rounded up. Right, you got to put them in prison just because they're so sneaky. They might be, any of them could be an enemy agent. So they all have to be rounded up. Right. You got to put them in prison just because they're so sneaky. They might be, any of them could be an enemy agent. So they all have to be rounded up. Yeah, that's the ultimate in discrimination. Right. Like literally they had, you know, high ranking military officials saying, you know, the fact that they haven't actually done anything wrong kind of proves that they will do something

wrong. Like they're just sneaky. Really? Because they will do something wrong. Like they're just sneaky. Really? Because they're sleeper agents. It's an entire hundreds of thousands of sleeper agents. My God. You can't be too careful. Babies, toddlers, you name it.

Yeah. And many of whom are still alive today who our country did this to. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. So once they once these Japanese Americans, you know, we're talking again between 110, 120,000 people, once they end up being locked away, then the government has a new problem on its hands. And that is to figure out what they're going to do with these people. You know, I mean, assuming the war does not last indefinitely, which, you know, it probably wouldn't. And as strange as it may seem, we can think of the folks who ran the camps in their own way as being liberals of the time, which is to say that unlike nativists and exclusionists who would just rather have all people of Japanese ancestry booted out of the United States forever. The liberal administrators, you know, they thought about this and they imagined this as an opportunity for Japanese Americans

in some ways to have a fresh start in American society. Like within the camps, they could prove they were good Americans by their activities in terms of, you know, learning English or learning American values. You know, each of the camps basically set up their own internal kind of like governments. I think of them kind of like student councils where you can pretend to make decisions, but the authorities can always override them, you know? Right. Oh, we're going to have extra toilet paper in the camp bathroom or that kind of promise. Or sell cigarettes in the vending machines or whatever, you know. And anyway, so, but there was a lot of activity during the camps and a lot of actually publicity

about the loyal, patriotic Japanese Americans. And part of this was because administrators and then certain Japanese American leaders came up with a kind of, I would say, like a plan for how to exit all these people, sort of move them out of the camps and into American society and have a future in America. And the two ways to do that were military service and then what they called resettlement in their words, which was to encourage Japanese Americans to move away from their original communities on the West Coast. So if you think about, let's say, Little Tokyo, Los Angeles, and have them scatter throughout the country and basically like fade into the white middle class.

This was the idea. And they, you know, again, they literally said, we don't want to end up with something like a Native American reservation. Like, that's not what we want. So we want to encourage these folks to assimilate. Yeah, it's assimilation. Okay. Yeah. And I mean, it's actually a really interesting frame, like a framing shift, right? The idea that you can go from being thought of as completely incapable of becoming American and assimilating to actually, yes, you can assimilate if you follow these certain steps. Yeah, I see. I see what you mean about how that would have been a liberal position at the time. I mean, on an objective scale or by our own standard, we might say, well, that's actually a kind of regressive view to say that, you know, these folks should sort of be forcibly assimilated. But at the same time, when the opposition is saying, well, no, these are others who will never have a place in American society and should be forcibly expelled, that's kind of a middle ground position. It's sort of like a, oh, it's kind of like the nice warden at the prison who's like, oh, you can reform yourself in here.

It's like that kind of attitude. So a little bit paternalistic, but a little bit more positive than the alternative. Yeah, I'd say that exactly. Paternalistic and, you know, coercive. Right. But still, it's an it's an option and it's a new kind of option. And so not every. So these were very controversial at the time. I mean, the more famous story is really the one of the military service. And I think it's interesting that the government anticipated that people would sort of just like rush to sign up to the military into the military. And there were certain Japanese American leaders who thought of themselves as spokespeople for the community. But that was, again, a very controversial position to take. But anyway, they took that on themselves and they tried to promote this avenue for assimilation. And that was a really, really contentious proposal within the camps. And, you know, the idea about asking people to swear their loyalty to a country that is just presume them out to be criminals and right up. Yeah. Right. So, again the fact that so many thousands of Japanese

Americans did serve the United States very loyally and faithfully during World War II had a huge impact on recasting that public image, turning it around from that enemy alien image to one of a model patriotic citizen. So that is one of the beginnings of how Asian Americans came to be thought of as a model minority. So Americans often talk about the characteristics of racial groups as though, oh, that's just how people are. Right. But what you're saying is this was we very recently had a very different idea of what characterized Asian-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Chinese-Americans, and that this was a recent shift and that it was actually purposeful in this case, that it was like sort of a reform effort on everybody's part to to change the view of of Asian-Americans. Is that correct? Oh, yeah, totally. I mean, actually, it was literally, there were like literally publicity efforts. You know, there was PR from like the army,

from the Department of the Interior who ran the camps, from Japanese American Citizens League, which was like the leading and very controversial Japanese American political organization of the mid-20th century. And so they were literally promoting this image of Japanese Americans as loyal patriotic citizens. I mean, obviously, because there were actually people doing that work on the ground, you know, in the armed forces. But that work on the ground allowed them to tell a new story about Japanese Americans.

That work on the ground allowed them to tell a new story about Japanese Americans. And then that story gained traction and became useful because the United States was really interested in proving to the world. You know, on one hand, just they were worried that Japan and the Axis powers were exploiting racial tensions in the U.S. to kind of call the United States hypocritical in this war effort. Right. So they were worried about that propaganda. And then certainly as the United States moved into fighting the Cold War after, you know, by the late 40s and the 1950sing Post in 1955, there was this really, really remarkable feature story called California's Amazing Japanese. It's 1955. There's all these great photos, you know, of like the woman who was Miss Little Tokyo or something and farmersers and Gardena and Judge John Iso. I think there's a street named after him in Little Tokyo. And it was all about how they had remarkably rebounded from this trauma of World War II and they'd proven their loyalty to the United States.

And there's this kind of irony in the war that the war actually gave them a chance to become American. And they took that chance and they all are doing so well. And it's only, you know, a decade after the war. Well, that's a, I mean, first of all, what a positive story, right? That's a story anybody would want to hear about anybody because it's, you know, wow, wonderful turnaround. Everyone's so happy now, and, and etc. But what you're describing, it sounds like a specific propaganda effort that in those years, you know, opponents

of the United States in Asia want to say, Oh, look, the United States is hypocritical. Look how poorly America treats its Asian minority population. And the United States was trying to say, no, no, no, this is, look how Asian Americans are thriving. Look how Japanese Americans are thriving. Look how Chinese Americans are thriving. Is that the case? Is that what was going on?

Yeah, I think so. And I think what, and I'm building on the work of lots of scholars here too. And I think what is going on, it's what you're saying, that the United States was able to point to this story

as an example of how democracy can correct its own mistakes. In other words, we recognize we made a mistake, but we're trying to correct it. And actually, in trying to correct it, we've got these great results. Now, the other part of that story is basically that Japanese Americans have also done their part by being good, loyal citizens. So they're not really rocking the boat. So remember, again, this is 1955. And what we're talking about is this moment in U.S. history, right, when racial tensions are really, really kind of brewing and bubbling up in the U.S. South

and the civil rights movement, the black freedom movement is really gaining steam. So part of that model minority stereotyping of the 1950s is that Japanese Americans and Chinese Americans, too, are, you know, they are good team players. You know, they don't rock the boat. They follow the rules, and that's how they get ahead. Yeah, I'm also reminded of a story that I heard, and you probably know more about this than I do, but that there was even a concerted effort in the middle part of the century

to revitalize Chinatowns as being almost like tourist destinations for white Americans to go visit. Is that correct? Yeah, that is correct. So, okay, we can turn the conversation a little bit. So the other main group that the model minorities, like its origins were really rooted in was Chinese Americans. Yeah. And I'm sorry, by the way, I don't mean to conflate, but it is sort of a linked story in a way. Oh, yeah. I mean, I think of it as like, like a DNA, like that double helix thing where they're kind of winding around each other, but they're connected. Right. And so as far as the Chinese story goes, in some ways, it's similar, right? We've got this pattern where earlier immigration from the 19th century into the early 20th century,

Americans thought of Chinese immigrants as all those things, the sneaky, the spies, they eat rats, they can't be trusted. And then World War II breaks out again, and the United States is fighting this war against Japan in the Pacific. And it's very important ally in the Pacific is China. And so that actually spurs Congress and the president to overturn 60 years of Chinese exclusion acts in immigration and citizenship law, and really celebrate Chinese, Chinese Americans as what they called our allies, which is kind of interesting, because it's not not just like they are fellow citizens, but they're also still kind of foreign, you know. So at the same time that Japanese Americans are being, you know, interned in camps, Chinese Americans are sort of being, oh, these are our allies because China is our ally in this

war. That's right. They're kind of like our friends and our allies, but they're also American like us. Like I'm also thinking about, and you can look this up online. I think the Bancroft Library at Berkeley has these photos online, but Look Magazine, which was like Life Magazine, they had lots of pictures.

In 1944, they ran a feature on San Francisco Chinatown and how American it was. You know, they have like a girl eating an ice cream cone and grandpa reading the Sunday funnies with his like grandsons. And so, yeah, again, there's a lot of PR going going out at this time celebrating Chinese as just like another ethnic American group. And we are Americans all and we're all contributing to the war effort. And actually, that works really great for Chinese

Americans. You know, they they also signing up for the military and really feeling like for the first time, I think Kerry McWilliams said something like and he was like a great liberal thinker of the time that, you know, the war has brought the Chinese out of Chinatown and they should like lock the door behind them or slam the door behind them or something. And so, yeah, they're breaking out of this segregated enclave for the first time. And it's really, really exciting. But the problem is, it's all because, you know, if we think about the driver of this opportunity, again, it's like geopolitical. So once China becomes an enemy with the Cold War after 1949, it does pose then a problem. Chinese Americans actually, like in 1950, you know, China also, I should say the People's

Republic of China enters the Korean War on the side of the North Koreans. And this is really worrisome for Chinese in the United States who think, you know, what happened to the Japanese Americans during World War II is going to happen to them. Oh, wow. Yeah. And so kind of back to your question about Chinatowns, what Chinatown leaders try to do then in the 1950s really is, again, I would say like an internal PR project, where they, their goal is to convince other Americans that Chinese Americans are, you know,

American as you and me. We're not sneaky. Also, come spend your tourist dollars in Chinatown. So there's a lot of interesting... Right. Yeah. There's a little piece

of the Far East right in your own town and you can go down and it'll be safe and nice and you can get some dumplings it'll be safe and nice and you can get some dumplings and look at the big pagoda we just built and then go on home. Yeah, it's like safe exoticism. And really, you know, for a lot of Chinese, the tourist economy was still like a major source of livelihood. So San Francisco Chinatown, just to take that example,

in like the 50s and 60s, they did spend some, you know, community leaders to try to figure out how to fix it up and make it like enticing for tourists. And, and actually, one of the stories that they told partly to entice tourists was this idea that Chinese families are like these model families, like the children, so especially the children, the children are super well-behaved. They love to study. They listen to their elders. And they're just like these model children.

And that's like a really key kind of messaging and story that gets circulated about Chinese Americans in the 1950s and why it gets a lot of attention, I think, is because there's a big juvenile delinquency panic, you know, so if you've seen like Rebel Without a Pause. Right. That was a whole, that was like the vaping of like the 1950s. Exactly.

Oh, all the kids are wearing jeans and riding motorcycles and going off cliffs. And it was like a pop culture panic around the idea of delinquency. Exactly. Because you know where denim, you know where that leads. Nowhere good. Nowhere good. And so, yeah, there's this juvenile delinquency panic all over the country. And then there's also a real kind of cultural conservatism, right?

Again, the 1950s, you know, we always think about like leave it to Beaver and sort of these like suburban families and mom baking cookies and dad going to work. And that kind of cultural conservatism, that emphasis really, I think becomes kind of this, you know, it makes it so

that these stories about Chinese Americans having these model families, also who were anti-communist, I should say, model anti-communist families, that story can gain a lot of attraction. And it really does. A lot of major newspapers and magazines run these stories. And, you know, it's just a really, really interesting way to evidence of how Chinatown leaders were actually able to gain some traction and shift that popular narrative of the Chinese. And one reason, especially why this is so important, it's not just because of, you know, Red China, as they called it, and the threat that it might pose to the future of Chinese in the U.S.

But it's also because in the mid 1950s, the federal government decided to crack down on years of unauthorized immigration in the Chinese community. So 1956, they actually the United States government actually issued all these like mass subpoenas to community groups in Chinatowns across the country and basically trying to smoke out, you know, or just like pull out all of these what they call papers, paper families, like like literally like chains of, you know, migrant migrant chains who had all come to the U.S. on false documents, right, as a way to evade the Chinese Exclusion Acts. So Chinatown leaders were also like kind of panicked that, you know, this mass subpoena and this crackdown would really, you know, really pull the image of Chinese in the U.S. back to the exclusion times and really just be hurtful to everybody. And, you know, and everybody would be like, again, sort of racially profiled and criminally suspect. So this story of the model minority myth that Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans and Asian Americans more broadly are, you know, good children, strong family units, hardworking,

successful patriotic. That was that story was like a deliberate construction in the middle of the century, both by the government and by Asian American groups themselves. Is that right? Yeah, that's that's definitely the evidence that I found. I mean, I want to say, Adam, for sure, I want to make it clear. This is not to diminish anybody's individual accomplishments or, you know, actually, if they have a strong family life. I mean, that's great. Right. But yes, it was also a publicity effort, a messaging situation and was really very intentional, very intentional as for Asian Americans

about making sure that they might still have a good future in the United States. And then for, you know, the United States government and other folks, these stories became useful for other kinds of political agendas. Well, I want to dig into what this story means for Asian Americans and all of us in America today. But first, we got to take a quick break. We'll be right back with more Ellen Wu. So Ellen, we've been talking about how the model minority stereotype, you know, doesn't, it's, you know, not really an inherent characteristic of Asian Americans at all, if anybody believed that. It's a, you know, it's a story that was constructed in the middle of the century due to deliberate historic forces. I want to talk, though, about what that story means to us today, both in the Asian American

community and to Americans at large. How does that affect us? How does that idea that we have about Asians in America, what effects do we see from that? Okay, so great and complicated question. Again, I'll try to break it down a little bit. It's more of a topic for the second half of the podcast, you know, just like, okay, right. So I think the so one piece we have to make sure we understand before we can sort of fully get into your question is what happened to those stories after the 1950s. And then in the 1960s, the stories of model Japanese and Chinese American families and, you know, model citizens and patriots, those stories then got picked up for a different reason by both liberals and conservatives. And that was when, again, liberals, as we talked about earlier, you know, were really wringing their hands over what to do about the so-called Negro problem. And, you know, it's the 1960s and things are really heating up. Right. And the black freedom movement is persisting and becoming, you know, taking different directions that make I would say make white people pretty uncomfortable, regardless of which side of where their politics were.

And amidst that whole swirl of debate and sort of hand-wringing, definitely liberal politicians and thinkers like the famous Daniel Patrick Moynihan, He's known for his very explosive report on the Negro family, where he pinpoints a lot of the troubles of African-Americans on their family structure. And he was the consummate liberal. He's a titan of liberal Senate politics. Yeah. And so it's pretty interesting. A lot of times today, people think of the model minority stereotype, which I'll get to in a minute, as, you know, so-called like it is sort of a conservative racial stereotype, but it actually has liberal roots. blame essentially on family structures of African Americans in terms of how to explain their poverty. One of his defenses is that he says, look, let's look at the example of, you know, Orientals, Japanese, Chinese. 25 years ago, we thought they were colored, but, you know, they're not really colored anymore. You know, they've achieved socioeconomic mobility. And the reason is that they have these stable families. And so that idea, right, that they were, you know, they had stable families and they, you know, remember the kids not getting into trouble.

Basically, another way of saying that is that they weren't predisposed to criminal activities, like they weren't criminals. predisposed to criminal activities, like they weren't criminals. Those are really, I'd say, very electrified kind of ideas, you know, in the 1960s. And so essentially what happens is that Asian Americans come to be thought of as not just model, but model minorities in the sense that they're not like African Americans. They're not like other black and brown people that have all these problems like poverty and crime. Yeah, it's that. So it becomes a way to sort of cast dispersions on black families saying, oh, if if, hey, if they had the family structure, the excellent they made the excellent choices of how to organize their culture in quotation marks that that Asian-Americans do, then, hey, it would be fine. So therefore, it's it's kind of all on them. Is that the idea?

I think that's a lot of it. Right. Like culture. Culture is you. It's not us. It's not society. It's like what's what's in you. So if you change what's in you, then maybe you won't have these problems that you are dealing with. Right. Right. And it's and it is funny because you do hear that. I mean, I've heard exactly that argument from conservative commentators on race. And it is interesting to hear that that stemmed from Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who, again, is like one of the foremost liberals of the 20th century. Yeah, I mean, it's not just him, of course,

but he would say he's one of the most interesting people that is like using this idea and kind of circulating it. Right. Another I think I'll just throw this into another interesting example is the contrast is when in the late 60s, people would sometimes talk about, compare, you know, what was happening in Detroit or Newark. You know, that's code for African-Americans. Right. With the harmonious relations of Hawaii, which at that time, you know, you know, a majority Asian population. And again, and Hawaii had been narrated or framed as a racial paradise, you know, a place where everyone got along. A racial paradise that the United States illegally seized from its original. Right, like terms and conditions

may apply. Yeah, we did a whole episode, if you want to go watch Adam Ruins' Vacation if you're curious about that. Incredibly messed up history. But yeah, I'm sorry, go ahead. I don't mean to go on a tangent here. Oh, I have seen that one. I was very excited to see that one. Yes. And so again, and that whole story did a lot of other stuff, right? It sort of allowed United States to erase that whole history of illegal and overthrown conquest, right? And kind of wrote indigenous native Hawaiians out of the picture in a way. And so, again, there's that contrast. You know, Hawaii, Honolulu is not like Detroit or Newark.

So, again, this idea that Asian Americans are what I call decidedly or definitively not black. So that's a new kind of racial position for Asians in the United States by the late 1960s. And the other big transition that's happening in the 60s is that the United States reforms its immigration laws. And that's some of the, I mean, the impulse for that is goes back to that whole, like, you know, we need to project the right image for ourselves as a leader of the free world. So we're going to get rid of some of our discriminatory, you know, our discriminatory immigration policy that had been put into place in the 1920s, basically to screen out, you know, the undesirables of Southern and Eastern Europe. And so after 1965, when the U.S. decides it's going to select for immigrants based on basically based on how they could contribute to the economy, to the health of the economy and or, you know, family reunification.

So they actually they didn't think it would lead to a bunch of Asians and other brown people coming in. But that's what happened. But the folks from Asia that came in after 1965 tended to be people who were highly educated, you know, or, you know, maybe they were like my own, like my father came as a graduate student in pharmacy and then ended up staying, you know, to permanent resident and then citizen. So after the 1960s, the demographics of Asian America really change. And what we see is the influx of lots of educated people. And these are folks that because of what has happened with civil rights and everything, they actually get to reap some of those benefits. They can move into the suburbs usually without much problem or they can take certain kinds of jobs. So tell me if I've got this right. The immigration laws were reformed to specifically select for folks who could contribute to the economy, meaning highly educated, upwardly mobile, pharmacy grad students, for instance,

to specifically select those people to enter. And then, yeah, because of better conditions, those people were able to do well. And that contributed to our stereotype of Asian Americans as being successful because we were specifically admitting successful Asian Americans in. Maybe that I'm oversimplifying, but. I mean, no, that sounds pretty clear.

Right, exactly. Okay, good. I mean, that is so on its. I mean, it's so that is so on its face like that. It's so blunt. I almost worried I was overdoing it. But it's like, yeah, we we let in a certain type of person then said, oh, they're all that way. Yeah. And we could say that because we already had this, you know, there was already this like foundation of common sense, you know, racial common sense. Asians are like this. And then now we can, they're really like this, you know,

and it kind of goes viral in the sense that you see all over the country where maybe places that didn't even have many Asian Americans before the 1965 changes, you know, places like where I grew up,

which is Indianapolis, right? And then all of a sudden you get this, you know, more visible populations of Asian Americans, many of whom are highly, not all. I mean, there were certainly after the 70s, you know, refugees, for instance, from the Southeast Asian wars, but a lot of folks highly educated.

That's right. It's just so strange to create a self-fulfilling prophecy like that and not see it, right? That if you, yeah, if you're allowing one type of person and then you're making an assumption, oh, every type of person is that way, that's, I mean, you're skewing your sample in this very obvious way that was somehow invisible to Americans as they were doing it. I think, you know, and I think there is a kind of it's a little I was thinking of Nelson on The Simpsons, you know, he goes, I mean, it's kind of like that in the sense that at the time, policymakers, because family reunification was, you know, written into that law, they just kind of assumed that the people coming

would be joining people who are already here. Basically, white folks with roots in Europe. But because of who actually wanted to come and then the demands of the, as the United States economy was transitioning to more of a, I would call knowledge-based economy rather than industrial-based economy. That's how we get these large numbers of educated agents. Yeah, so it wasn't, you know, I don't think, certainly policymakers did not intend for that to happen.

But then once it started happening, it seemed, right, you're right, it seemed to be that kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. I see. But looking at a narrow lens at the, you know, the folks who did come to America and drawing a conclusion from that that really shouldn't have been drawn. I think, yeah, it's just one of these unpredictable, you know, unintended consequences of history.

But I think it makes it sometimes hard to understand that just like any other group, there's a lot of diversity within Asian America. If we count some 19 million people, not everybody is a certain way. I mean, that's just the reality. is a certain way. That's just the reality. You can't always see that if you assume that all Asians fit into this model minority box. Let's talk about that. I've sort of been

conducting this interview under the assumption that we all realize that stereotypes are inherently false. Of course, every group is far more diverse than any one particular image of it that we have. But let's break down a little bit the diversity of Asian Americans that is not captured within this stereotype. If you can just elaborate on that point a little bit.

Yeah, I think that I'd have to go back and study the exact statistics. But the way I understand it is that Asian Americans, in some ways, if we group all these people together, again, we're talking 19 million people with our origins in many different places throughout the Asia Pacific coming to the United States under all kinds of different circumstances. So, of course, there's going to be diversity, right, whether it's socioeconomic, but also we could say religious, linguistic, and then just all kinds of other stuff like politically diverse, you know, diverse in interests and talents and so forth. I think the demographics of the pattern seem to be that there is a lot what social scientists sometimes call bifurcated, to use a fancy word, in the sense that you have a lot of people at the upper end of the socioeconomic spectrum, but you also have a lot of people at the bottom end. issues that don't get a lot of attention, I think, a lot of times is the fact that, you know, like undocumented immigration is an issue in Asian American communities. And certainly, you know, poverty is an issue, all kinds of other, you know.

And those are not issues that we talk about in our political conversation as being Asian American issues. We're always, you know, we're usually talking about other groups or when we're having conversations about problems in the Asian American community where those aren't the problems that come up because they don't fit our stereotype. I think that's right. I think that's exactly right. Those things get kind of hidden or just pushed aside. Well, yeah. What are other ways that this model minority stereotype affects Asian Americans today? You know, it's funny to me how or it's just kind of interesting how the model minority stereotype seems to be.

It's like this like infection or something or virus that you can't shake. Like it's just sort of always there and then it flares up every once in a while. And, you know, most recently it's come up with, like, the Andrew Yang campaign, for instance, and then the whole flap with, you know, Shane Gillis and the SNL situation. I read an interesting article in, I think it was the LA Times, just the other day, about Andrew Yang's candidacy and about how,

it was just, you know, I don't want to speak for anybody, but the quotes I read from, you know, different Asian Americans, some were all very excited that, oh, wow, a legitimate, you know, presidential candidate who really proves that, you know, Asian Americans can do anything. But then other folks were like, wow,

but his, you know, they felt at times that he was trading on this specific myth in ways that made them a little uncomfortable, but they weren't sure how they felt about it. And it was, you know, it seemed like a very complex issue. Yeah, that's the sense I get too. You know, it's an interesting case

because here we have this presidential candidate who is surprising in the sense that, you know, he's doing something I would say a lot of people don't expect, you know, Asian Americans to do, which is to be in politics, for one, and then sort of unabashedly embracing, maybe a little tongue-in-cheek, but maybe not. I mean, that's where people get uncomfortable, this model minority stereotype, right? Like math or whatever is his slogan. Yeah, people chant math at his rallies.

Yeah, yeah. Which, you know, like math is awesome. Like everybody, you know, math is great. I love math. Not to put down math at all. And all of that is interesting, I think, because it's almost like an inside joke, but then what it is,

it's making some of the insiders kind of uncomfortable, right? Because if you don't recognize that next layer, which is to say, he might be playing with this stereotype, then it might just seem to be reinforcing a stereotype that I think a lot of Asian Americans, including myself, think is harmful, not just because it obscures a lot of the issues and diversities in our communities, but its long history of being want to say that it is, but, you know, I've heard the argument made. It's still a cudgel that's being used against other Americans. And there is a degree to which, like, the stereotype has sort of, like, hidden lacunae, right? has sort of like hidden lacunae, right? Like things that it does not include that are not part of, like, you know, the stereotype is Asians excel at math.

That's the sort of most basic version of the model minority stereotype or a very, you know, clear, small part of it. But there's a lot of other things that are very important that the stereotype does not include that Asians excel at. Like say sports, for example, is not part of it, and is like, sort of left out of our assumption of things that, you know, Asian

Americans might be good at. Yeah, or not good at, right? Like, maybe you're not good at math, or you're not good at sports, or whatever, or, you know, the ukulele, or so at the end of the day, it's a it's a limited box, right? It's which is it's still sort of a straitjacket that's being placed on Asian Americans that they fit something that is not placed on me as a white American, particularly. I'm going to go out on a limb and say yes, that you aren't being, those things aren't placed on you, right? Yeah. But yeah, I think that's absolutely right. It's a straitjacket. And then it's, it just, it has all these consequences sometimes that people don't

always, you know, we can't always foresee, but we can, looking backwards, we can see that there have been certain patterns, right? And then there are, I think, I'll just put this in here too, because this is something we've talked about before. There's another stereotype, I think, since 9-11, especially, that has impacted some people in the Asian American community and then outside of it. And that is the idea of like the so-called Muslim terrorist. Right. And so I think one one issue that, you know, Asian Americans have is just even defining what Asian-Americans are. Right. We've been talking about East Asian or we've been talking about Chinese and Japanese Americans primarily during this conversation. But Asia is such a large landmass. It encompasses, right, it encompasses, I guess, South Asians and et cetera. There's so many groups under this and we have different stereotypes about all of them. Right. And it's sometimes it's there's so many groups under this. And we have different stereotypes about all of them.

Right. And it's it's sometimes it's confusing. Right. So, again, when we talked about that post 1965 wave of educated folks and how the model minorities stereotype really did expand to kind of encompass those groups. So we can, for instance, think about, you know, if I said spelling bee winner, who would you picture in your mind? You might think like an Indian kid, right? From Ohio or something. Right. And, and so I, I would put that in that model minority stereotype box. Right. But at the same time, we've seen, especially since 9-11 is a really hurtful stereotyping, racial, religious profiling of brown people in the United States from, you know, assumed to be from certain parts of the world as terrorists. And that has been extremely, you know, extremely harmful and really deadly serious consequences in a lot of ways. So, yeah, it's just like it's another one of these very limiting stereotypes that I think have really high stakes in the sense that they do things, you know, they do a kind of cultural work that justifies how our country treats certain groups of people. our country treats certain groups of people. Yeah, and they're so deep down as well. I mean, it's because there's a lot of nuance to these images and to these ideas. It's often a little bit trickier to unpack them in a way

or they don't get unpacked as much in the media as some of our blunter stereotypes about other groups in my experience. there's just, there's just a certain, a certain, you know, difficulty to them. That means they don't get exhumed quite as often. I think so. And I think exhuming things would force, you know, force us as a country to reckon with a long and really unjust history of treatment of different kinds of groups and then figure out what we really have to do about that.

So it's maybe just easier to say, well, brown people are terrorists, black people are criminals. I don't know, East Asian people are good at math. But then that just allows us to, in some ways, that shorthand allows us to evade a lot of this real hard digging and real honest look at the evidence how how would you like what sort of conversation would you like to see happen i mean uh like what does that honest look look like if we were to actually you know uh uh psych ourselves up and do the difficult work we need to do.

Yeah, that's a tough one. I think I'm really into this idea of reparations for slavery and slavery's aftermath, you know, Jim Crow and mass incarceration. I think that is really the important place to start. And I think the other important place really would be to reckon with the treatment, our country's treatment of indigenous peoples and land theft, and then resource theft and think about how to try to make those things right for their descendants. I think, you know, another thing I try to do as an educator is to

really highlight how what all these different threads are interconnected. And so one thing, I mean, you know, maybe those things seem really big and daunting, and they are, like reparations and such. But meanwhile, what we can do, you know, as part of that is to educate ourselves and really be willing to do things like read and talk and learn, I guess, learn American history, maybe in ways that, you know, we were never taught it. That's why I really appreciate what you guys do on your show. Thank you.

Well, yeah, I mean, I feel that my feeling is that the first job is to take a clear-eyed look at this history and how these trends actually occurred and, and what was actually done to, you know, our fellow citizens or fellow, you know, folks who are, who live in this country, because, you know, you, you sort of get, you know, all the Asian American history I learned in school was, ah, the internment camps, those are pretty bad, moving on. Right? It was like really brief. It was like a paragraph in the textbook, you know? And the rest of this history is not something that we ever went into, especially how the history then intersected with the history of black Americans and everything else. It's just, it's not something that we often have the stomach to dig into, it seems like. But it also seems like the most important work we can do when examining our own history.

Yeah, you know, I think about I have a friend, Charlotte Brooks, who's an Asian-American historian. She's white. And I love how she says Asian-American history is her history too. And that's always just stuck with me. Like, you know, it might seem like this, just some kind of side thing or not really that important to know. But what I like about doing Asian American history is it gives you this new entry point into rethinking, you know, American history. And then we come out with new insights because we took this other perspective and then we can kind of see how things are all connected. Yeah. Well, I really thank you so much for coming on the show to talk to us about it. It's been really wonderful. Thanks for the invite.

It was a lot of fun. Thank you to our producer, Dana Wickens, our researcher, Sam Roudman, and the party god, Andrew WK, for our theme song, I Don't Know Anything. Check it out on iTunes or whatever. That was a HeadGum Podcast.