Model Minority

Model Minority

Introduction

The term model minority refers to a racial or ethnic minority that despite past prejudice and discrimination is able to achieve great success economically and socially. The minority subgroup emerges as the “main character of a success story” about how a disadvan-taged group overcomes those disadvantages and achieves prosperity (Lee, 2006). Typically, the term model minority has been used in the United States to refer to Asian Americans generally or, more specifically, Japanese Americans, Asian Indians, and Korean Americans.

Discussion

The alleged prosperity of the model minority is usually measured in terms of economic success, educational attainment, cultural contributions, political participation, and other forms of incorporation to the larger national community, such as exogamy or intermarriage. The minority group is a “model” because its members set an example for other groups to follow. The term has been put to controversial uses, particularly because it foists responsibility for a group's success, failure, and recovery from historical discrimination on the shoulders of the group itself (Lee, 2006), rather than the larger society. Credit for the term's coinage is usually attributed to a January 9, 1966, article in New York Magazine, titled, “Success Story: Japanese American Style” (Lee, 2006).

The concept of model minority is a product of competing visions of the social and cultural heterogeneity of the United States. Before the fairly recent ascendance of the ideal of a pluralistic multiculturalism, where differences are tolerated if not also celebrated, a single, common culture had been the desired product of cultural interactions, often referred to as a “melting pot.” The melting-pot metaphor offered an image of viscous mixing. This conception was appealing because of the smoothness of both the mix and the mixing. Yet this smoothness did not account for myriad conditions that maintained differences, ranging from labor segmentation, ghettoization, and citizenship ineligibility to ethnic ...