Model Minority K – Allen

Model Minority K – Allen .......................................................................................................... 1

Notes ..................................................................................................................................... 2
Dedications .................................................................................................................................................. 5
1NC Shells.................................................................................................................................. 7
v. Academic Achievement (Policy) 1NC ............................................................................... 8
v. Anti-Blackness 1NC......................................................................................................... 18
Block ........................................................................................................................................ 28
Links .................................................................................................................................... 29
Academic Achievement ...........................................................................................................................30
Black-White Binary ..................................................................................................................................32
Impacts ................................................................................................................................ 34
Silencing .....................................................................................................................................................35
Orientalism ................................................................................................................................................38
Sub-Groups ...............................................................................................................................................41
Capitalism/Colonialism ...........................................................................................................................47
Fracturing...................................................................................................................................................50
Violence .....................................................................................................................................................52
Alt ........................................................................................................................................ 54
Conscientization .......................................................................................................................................55
Polyculturalism..........................................................................................................................................59
STEM Narrative .......................................................................................................................................67
Framework........................................................................................................................... 69
2NC ............................................................................................................................................................70
Anti-Oppressive Education ....................................................................................................................73
Narratives Good .......................................................................................................................................75
AT Cede the Political ...............................................................................................................................79
AT Reformism ..........................................................................................................................................82
ATs ...................................................................................................................................... 84
AT “Asian American activism in the Civil Rights Movement” ........................................................85
AT Term “Asian American” = Homogenizing ...................................................................................86
AT Gender ................................................................................................................................................88
AT Educational Futurism .......................................................................................................................90
AT Disability .............................................................................................................................................92
AT Capitalism ...........................................................................................................................................94
Answers .................................................................................................................................... 96
Policy ................................................................................................................................... 97
Cede the Political ......................................................................................................................................98
Reformism .............................................................................................................................................. 100
K Links ...............................................................................................................................105
Anti-Blackness ....................................................................................................................................... 106
Psychoanalysis ........................................................................................................................................ 108

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 Notes
Nicholas Kristof, in “The Asian Advantage”:
“THIS is an awkward question, but here goes: Why are Asian-Americans so successful in America?
It’s no secret that Asian-Americans are disproportionately stars in American
schools, and even in American society as a whole. Census data show that Americans of
Asian heritage earn more than other groups, including whites. Asian-
Americans also have higher educational attainment than any other group. I
wrote a series of columns last year, “When Whites Just Don’t Get It,” about racial inequity, and one of the most common responses from angry whites was along

This stuff about white privilege is nonsense, and if blacks lag, the
these lines:

reason lies in the black community itself. Just look at Asian-Americans.

Those Koreans and Chinese make it in America because they work hard. All
people can succeed here if they just stop whining and start working. Let’s
confront the argument head-on. Does the success of Asian-Americans suggest
that the age of discrimination is behind us?”

**The 1NC shells are overhighlighted, but I would recommend

reading them as is (not in debate, on your own) because they
give a pretty comprehensive description of this K.

The concept of the model minority is that Asian Americans as a

group are largely successful, referred to in this file by various
acronyms as a myth (i.e. MMM = model minority myth, MMS =
model minority stereotype). It became prominent in the 1960s;
when the Civil Rights Movement happened, America said,
“Shoot, we seem so racist right now … if only there was a
minority group that is succeeding now that would disprove that
and show that minorities can succeed here … wait, what about
the people we said would take our jobs and country? That’s
right! Asians!” As a result, the state and media reversed its
Yellow Peril construction of Asians and instead lauded the
success of the community to paper over the Civil Rights
Movement and racism writ-large.

An prominent example of this was a 1966 NYT article by William

Peterson titled “Success Story, Japanese American Style,” which
some credit to starting the widespread adoption of the model
minority myth – “by any criterion of good citizenship that we

2
choose, the Japanese-Americans are better than any group in
our society, including native-born whites.”

Several decades have passed now, but the stereotype remains. In

reality, the reason why Asians were so successful in the 1960s
was because only skilled Asian workers were let in, and while it’s
true that some Asians succeed academically today, Asian
Americans have diversified since then, with groups such as
Hmong, Cambodians, and Laotians immigrating to the US and
not experiencing such academic success. In fact, many Asians
today face barriers in education, desperately needing aid;
however, because of the homogenizing stereotype that Asians
are successful, their concerns are never paid attention to
because we’re assumed to be doing well. That alone causes us to
internalize the oppression they face, causing psychological
violence. The model minority myth also promotes an
essentializing image of Asian Americans as obedient,
unquestioning, hard-working individuals, forcing them to accept
that image and assimilate to be part of society.

Perfectly honest: this argument is not as strategic on the Neg. I

personally think the utility of this position, especially on a
resolution concerned with education, is with an advocacy on the
Aff, but there are a couple of scenarios you could get away with it
on the Neg:

1) As a critique of academic achievement. The lit base I explored

was limited on this question, but the 1NC Ng evidence seems to
do a good job at explaining how the concept of academic
achievement propagates the model minority myth by using
Asian Americans as an example of high achievement. Even then,
you’ll probably need to use CX strategically to set up the link.

2) As a counter-advocacy to anti-blackness. I will warn you that

doing this is risky because one misstep probably means you lose
to arguments like root cause, but if you correctly execute this,

3
you can handily win. The premise is that the model minority
myth is used to justify anti-blackness by promoting Asian
Americans as a “model” they should live up to, when in reality,
structural barriers prevent black students from doing so.
Consequently, black students are blamed for their own failures,
obfuscating the role of structural inequities and failing
government policies in their non-achievement. Since the model
minority myth, therefore, is used to justify anti-blackness,
deconstructing it is in the direction of the Aff while also
resolving Asian violence.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me at

allenkim.debate@gmail.com. Good luck!

Allen Kim
Leland High School ‘18

4
 Dedications
I hate doing thank-yous because I usually am not articulate
enough to describe how thankful I am and end up forgetting
someone. Then again, I want to write one, so I guess you could
say I’m a living paradox. That being said, here goes:

First and foremost, Ian. It must have been interesting at the very
least for you when I ditched the Broadband Aff (thanks States
CP!!!) and chose to go into K lit instead. Thank you for still
finding ways to support this file, searching for links and
providing general advice on how to strengthen it.

Second the best, the person who single-handedly made me

critically conscious: DB. Had it not been for that conversation
we had in the first floor lobby in Carswell, I doubt that I would
have ever fully understood the model minority myth or how to
debate it. I could not have asked for a better mentor in this
adventure, especially given how much advice you gave me. From
“your revolutionary apprentice,” thank you so much :)

Calum, I know how incessant my questions were and how many

video games they interrupted, but you always made time to
answer them in-depth. You were the first person to give me a
direction for this file and provide me the resources to make it;
for that, and the countless times you dealt with my basic K
questions, I’ll be forever grateful. (also your lectures are the
absolute best; I’ll be sure to check whether your books are too)

To the better half of the stronger campus couple, Steph Corinne.

For a person that had never run a K Aff before, let alone cut one,
I needed a lot of help, and you gave me so much, from cites and
advice on how I should frame the impacts in-round to advice on
how to write poems. Good luck at Pitt next year!

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Everyone should check out https://soundcloud.com/tomasiswag
because Adam Tomasi is AMAZING -- an amazing rapper and an
amazing person. Thank you for always radiating positivity, that
time you instantly ran to the library to get the book I needed,
and your bars :) I’ll await the news of your three-peat at the ACC!

Last person: Stephanie. Words can’t describe how much I

appreciate you, so I won’t even try. I’ll embarrass myself.
(Stephanie upon reading this: “You already have like hundreds
of times so this is non-unique.” Thanks Steph.)

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1NC Shells

7
 v. Academic Achievement (Policy)
1NC
The concept of academic achievement propagates the model
minority myth – it’s used to further a Horatio Alger narrative
that Asian Americans are monolithically successful
Ng et al 7 (JENNIFER C. NG, assistant professor at the University of Kansas,
“Chapter 4 Contesting the Model Minority and Perpetual Foreigner Stereotypes: A
Critical Review of Literature on Asian Americans in Education”, 2007
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.3102/0091732X07300046095#, DOA:
6/27/17)//AK
The Asian American1 presence in schools, as captured by cartoonist Garry Trudeau here,
has a compelling grasp on the public imagination. Scholars (Dong, 1995; Wu, 2002)
have utilized the pointed cartoon strip to emphasize the criticality of
understanding how insidious and pervasive is the myth of Asian Americans
as model minorities, especially in education. The Asian American model minority
image is alluring yet troubling. On one hand, the supposed academic achievement of
Asian Americans is used as a beacon to highlight the prototypical American
success story, a group to be admired and emulated by others. At the same
time, however, it is used to produce a heightened sense of fear, particularly
in schools, where the Asian “horde” will take over the classrooms to raise
test scores and ruin the grading curve, resulting in a new form of “White
flight” (Hwang, 2005). These concerns exist at the K–12 level as well as in the realm of
higher education admissions, as captured by Trudeau. In either case, one thing remains
clear: Asian Americans are cast outside the peripheries of normalcy.
An understanding of how racial meanings have been constructed about Asian Americans, or how they have been racialized (Omi & Winant, 1994), requires a
departure from a Black/White racial binary. Legal scholar Ancheta (2000) considers how anti-Asian discrimination is distinctly different from anti-Black
subordination. He writes, “The racialization of Asian Americans has taken on two primary forms: racialization as non-Americans and racialization as the model
minority” (p. 44). This outsider racialization constructs Asian Americans as foreign-born outsiders. In the realm of education, this construction extends to the view
of Asian Americans as “forever foreigners” (Tuan, 1998), where the permanency of equal status as citizens cannot be fully realized.

Asian American racialization as both the model minority and the foreigner exists within larger racial discourses. C. Kim (1999) posits a theory of “a field of racial
positions” that considers how Asian Americans have been racialized relative to Whites and Blacks and how racialization is more complex than a hierarchy with
Whites on top, Blacks on the bottom, and other groups in between (p. 106). Kim’s field of racial positions involves at least two axes (superior/inferior and
insider/foreigner), which acknowledges the different ways that groups are racialized. Asian Americans are “racially triangulated” vis-à-vis Whites and Blacks
through two interrelated processes of “relative valorization” (Whites valorizing Asian Americans relative to Blacks) and the process of “civic ostracism” (Whites
constructing Asian Americans as foreign and Other, p. 107).

The model minority and foreigner images emerge in research on Asian Americans in K–12 schooling (Lei, 1998) and higher education (S. S. Lee, 2006; Suzuki,
2002). Both Lei and S. S. Lee discuss how these representations play off each other and are interconnected, placing Asian Americans in a vulnerable racial position,
ostracized from both the White majority and causing racial tensions with other minorities (primarily African Americans). Placed within the confines of the
Black/White discourse, Asian Americans have been inexactly situated in comparison to Whites and Blacks rather than understood as racialized in distinct ways.
The representations of Asian American students as models and foreigners also uphold the racial status quo, which marginalizes students of color (Jo, 2004; S. J.
Lee, 2006; Lei, 1998).

Although researchers have uncovered the more complex ways that Asian Americans are racialized, Asian Americans continue to be cast as interlopers in a
Black/White racial discourse; being neither Black nor White, Asian Americans rarely gain visibility and voice as racial minorities. Scholars in the fields of history
(Takaki, 1998), English (Lowe, 2000), anthropology (Manalansan, 2000, 2003), sociology (Kibria, 2002; C. Kim, 1999; Min, 1996; Tuan, 1998), ethnic and gender
studies (Espiritu, 1997; R. Lee, 1999), and law (Ancheta, 2000; Wu, 1995) have critically examined the complexities of Asian American experiences and challenged
the ways that the public has falsely imagined them. The field of education, however, has lagged behind these theoretical advances. There is great foundational
knowledge to be gleaned from other disciplines in addressing the educational concerns and needs of Asian American students.

The specter of Asians and Asian Americans as the yellow peril and the model minority has a long history. First invoked during the 19th century to create
comparative labor advantage between and among the railroad barons to yield high profit through the cheapest labor force, Chinese workers were typically
fashioned as the model against which other immigrant groups, such as the Irish, should aspire (Takaki, 1998; Wu, 1995). When the Chinese Exclusion law of
1882—stemming from the fear of the “Yellow Peril,” as popularized by novelist Jack London—curtailed further migration of Chinese, attention started to shift to
the growing population of Japanese immigrants along the West Coast (Daniels, 1988). Again, although seemingly admired for their ability to cultivate difficult arid
lands, they were then shunned and despised for their success in agriculture. At the outbreak of World War II, Japanese immigrants and Americans were
incarcerated for fear of disloyalty and espionage.

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In the 1960s, during the Civil Rights movement, the image of Asian Americans seemed to improve, in relation to African Americans and other racial minority
groups who sought equal rights and protection under the law; at this time, newspaper headlines hailed Chinese and Japanese Americans as the model minority.
Popular magazines such as Time and Newsweek highlighted their Confucian-style “rugged individualism”; Asians did not need government support to make it in
U.S. society. As numerous Asian Americanists have noted throughout the years (Cheng & Yang, 2000; Osajima, 2000), the purposeful ways in which Asians were
heralded for their success was a direct attack against African Americans in their outspoken quest for equality in the 1960s and against a critique of institutional and
structural racism. Such pernicious and unfounded comparisons between the races only served to create fissures that continue to exist today and support a message
of individual effort as a primary means to overcome racism, erasing the existence of structural barriers.

Contemporary characterizations of Asian Americans reveal the persistence

of the foreigner and model minority stereotypes in mainstream culture and more
educated, professional communities. In 2002, for example, the popular young adult
clothing company Abercrombie & Fitch launched a line of T-shirts intended to add
humor and levity to its fashion that featured slant-eyed, Asian characters pulling
rickshaws and working in laundromats (Gliona & Goldman, 2002). Notions of Asian
American foreignness also are evident in educational discussions. In his
1999 Phi Delta Kappan essay titled “The Demise of the Asian Math Gene,”
for example, Gerald Bracey speculated on the role of Confucian ideals
behind Asian American educational success as well as the impact of poorer,
rural, and less literate homeland factors resulting in Asian American
juvenile delinquency. Even more recently, Bracey (2005) wrote about the
“spelling gene” that children of Indian ancestry must possess, helping them
win five of the last seven Scripps National Spelling Bees. Bracey (citing Joseph
Berger from The New York Times) explained that preparing for spelling bees is especially
compatible with the “rote learning methods of their homeland” where people “do not
regard champion spellers as nerds” (p. 92). However, concluding that Indian parents
may be even more single-minded than American parents who want their children to
succeed in extracurricular endeavors, Bracey stated, “I couldn’t help thinking of those
years of mono-maniacally obsessive preparation as a form of child abuse” (p. 92). These
representations reinforce ideas that Asian Americans are culturally (and
even genetically) distinct from the rest of America and that their narrow
focus on achievement is not completely praiseworthy.
Theories about Asian “Otherness” can be applied to educational discussions. Cultural
theorist Said’s (1978) influential work on the theory of Orientalism also provides ample
thought for how the Occident has imagined the place of the Orient as a means for
dominance and control, including the means of representation as reified into the daily
structures of institutions such as education. Indeed, the power of the Western
gaze to focus on its cultural superiority over others has led to the continued
belief and resultant policies maintaining the status quo. As Rizvi and Lingard (2006) write,
Orientalism is best understood as a system of representations, a discourse framed by political forces through which the West sought to understand and control its
colonized populations. It is a discourse that both assumes and promotes a fundamental difference between the Western “us” and Oriental “them.” It is a manner of
regularized interpreting, writing about and accounting for the Orient, dominated by imperatives, perspectives, and ideological biases politically marshaled to self-
justify imperial conquests and exploitation. In this sense, the Orient is an imagined place that is articulated through as an entire system of thought and scholarship.
(p. 296)

As Rizvi and Lingard (2006) note, the influence of Said to education and educational policies comes from one’s perceived notions of how the Other lives. In this
example, and through our years of teaching experiences, we find that a number of educators still come to the classroom with a priori assumptions about the
profound foreignness of their Asian American students. It is that sense of profound cultural difference that underlies the model minority stereotype as well.

One dangerous strain in educational research that perpetuates the construction of Asian
Americans as profoundly different relates to explanations for their academic success. All
too often, cultural explanations are offered. For example, our initial perusal of
research related to Asian American students revealed a troubling tendency
to rely on particular cultural characteristics, such as the Confucian norms,
to primarily account for the academic achievement of Asian Americans

9
(Pearce, 2006; Zhou, 2000). The tenor of these conclusions presumes Asian
American educational achievement, when in fact these studies do not
acknowledge Asian Americans’ bimodal performance, which includes
students performing below the norm (Hune & Chan, 1997). Pang, Kiang, and Pak
(2004) have indicated the great diversity of ethnicities that constitute Asian
Pacific Americans (APA) and assert that creating monolithic truths based on
two or three high-achieving ethnicities does a disservice to everyone. Yet the
continued emphasis on educational research that presumes and highlights
the academic achievement of Asian Americans creates a wedge between
other racial minority groups. Coupled with this, Asian American success discourse is a presumption of African American and
Latino academic underachievement. Critical historians (Anderson, 1998, 2004a, 2004b; Span & Anderson, 2005; Williams, 2005) have provided ample evidence
for the persistence of educational attainment by African Americans since the time of slavery to counter current misconceptions and cultural deficit models in which
African Americans do not value education. Yet the implicit and sometimes explicit academic comparisons between the high-achieving Asians with the low-
achieving African Americans persists and only serves to maintain White privilege. This binary erases the experiences of Asian Americans who do not achieve and
also the experiences of African Americans, Latinas/Latinos, and Native Americans who do achieve. As aptly phrased by S. J. Lee (1996), the model minority
stereotype is a hegemonic device to desensitize the public about the deep and troubling history of race relations in the United States; schools and educators become
implicated in the process.

Our discussion here is not to deny or ignore the population of high-achieving Asian American students per se, but basing conclusions on specific Asian cultural
practices and beliefs limits our understanding of how particular racialized groups in the United States adopt certain adaptive strategies to deal with racism and how
education is seen as one of the few means to gain social capital. Members of a racialized group can come to internalize the myths about cultural difference
themselves without examining the larger structural formations of how racism is lived in the everyday (see, e.g., Abboud & Kim, 2005). The structural barriers that
have been placed to impede larger-scale achievement among all students, therefore, require further investigation.

The myth is false but the Aff continues it – that leads to not only
the homogenization and assimilation of Asian Americans BUT
ALSO continued racism against other minorities
Yu 6 (TIANLONG YU, assistant professor in the Department of Educational
Leadership, School of Education, at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville,
“Challenging the Politics of the “Model Minority” Stereotype: A Case for Educational
Equality”, 2006 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/10665680600932333,
DOA: 6/26/17)//AK
**edited for ableist language
Especially, the proponents of such a stereotype ignore the reality that the Asian American community, like any other community, has always been polarized, and in
recent years, such polarization has increased. Census reports reveal that today Asian Americans, socioeconomically, are divided into two distinct groups: the
“uptown’’ and the “downtown.’’ The former are welleducated professionals who reside in suburban areas and are well integrated into mainstream society; the latter
are predominantly working-class immigrants struggling to survive in isolated and poor urban ghettos (Yin, 2001). The huge median-income gap among different
Asian American groups is stunning in the light of mainstream perceptions about Asian American success. According to the U.S. Census Bureau (2000), among
Southeast Asian Americans, 49% live in poverty, compared to less than 10% of Japanese and Chinese Americans. Some Southeast Asian American communities

While the “models’’—the

face economic hardship that exceeds that of other communities of color (Teranishi, 2004).

economically well-off Asians—are being touted, the poor, the weak, and the
powerless within the community are paid no attention. When the
mainstream society chooses to focus on and laud certain Asians’ American-
style success story, it coldly turns its back to numerous Asian workers who
are being brutally exploited under the current system. One only needs to pay
a careful visit to the workplaces, such as Chinese buffet restaurants and Manhattan
sweatshops, to witness the everyday survival struggles of those less
fortunate Asian workers, and realize how the model minority narrative does
not fit them. Those who embrace the stereotype show no interest in this
reality.
In short, the model minority thesis is a stereotypical overgeneralizing
representation of the diverse Asian American populations. Such

10
representation silences the multiple voices of Asian Americans. “By painting
Asian Americans as a homogeneous group, the model minority stereotype
erases ethnic, cultural, social-class, gender, language, sexual, generational,
achievement, and other differences’’ (S. J. Lee, 1996, p. 6). Yet, silencing Asian
Americans is not what this stereotype is really about. The implications of the model
minority stereotype go well beyond Asian Americans and reach deeply to the center of
race and power relations in America. The stereotype serves a larger political purpose.
“MODEL MINORITY’’: DEVICE OF POLITICAL CONTROL
As J. Lee (1998) notes, the term “model’’ in “model minority’’ directly involves relations
with other racial and ethnic groups. “In this sense,’’ Lee argues, “the model minority
is a racist discourse, which categorizes, evaluates, ranks, and differentiates
between groups’’ (p. 165). A closer examination of the history of the model minority
stereotype will reveal the nature of this racist discourse and its political rationale. The
model minority stereotype emerged during the Civil Rights Movement of the
1960s (S. J. Lee, 1996; Spring, 2001; Suzuki, 2002). That was not simply a
coincidence. Demanding equal rights and economic opportunity, African
Americans led the Civil Rights Movement that seriously challenged white
supremacy and institutional racism deeply embedded in American society.
To fight back, the racist power elite realized that simply responding by saying
“there is no racism’’ would not help; it would make more sense to show an example of
minority success. Then, they could claim that racism or social injustice is really
not an issue because Asians have made it, why not you, too? “‘If,’these
European Americans seemed to say, ‘the black population acted like the Asian
population they could achieve economic success without criticizing the white
population’’’ (Spring, 2001, p. 104). Thus, “Model minority” became a political
instrument used to bash other minorities, African Americans in particular.
Such political motive behind the narrative was no secret. Consider the
December 1966 issue of U.S. News and World Report story titled “Success Story of One
Minority in the U.S.’’ The article contended, “At a time when it is being proposed that
hundreds of billions be spent to uplift Negroes and other minorities, the nation’s
300,000 Chinese Americans are moving ahead on their own—with no help from anyone’’
(p. 73).
Thus, the seemingly benign intention of the powerful group who created and spread this
positive narrative about Asians becomes questionable. Obviously, the recognition of
Asians was not meant for Asians only. Remember, the model minority image stands in
stark contrast to the previous stereotypes of Asians as “yellow peril.’’ Changing the
narrative about one minority group serves a larger purpose to maintain the
hierarchical race relations. Alleviating open discriminations, the ruling
group granted Asians acceptance on the surface and used the model
minority stereotype as a hegemonic device. Asian Americans were being
promoted as the model minority to discredit the protests and demands for
social justice of other minority groups (Suzuki, 2002). This political purpose of the
model minority narrative has been maintained since the civil rights era through to today,
as the New Right and neoconservative movements have continued to project Asian
Americans as the “good’’ race and African Americans the “bad’’ race (S. J. Lee, 1996;
Sleeter, 1993).

11
What does this model minority narrative mean for Asians, the very people being touted
and praised? Many Asian Americans may have indeed embraced this seemingly positive
label. S. J. Lee (1996) states, “Asian Americans who seek acceptance by the dominant
group may try to emulate model minority behavior’’(p. 9). Many Asian Americans,
especially immigrants and their children, may lack a strong sense of ownership and
belonging in America. They see themselves more like outsiders trying to get into the
society to gain legitimate membership. This is particularly true for those Asian
immigrants who have escaped the economic hardships and/or political persecution in
their home countries and been drawn to the promise of free land and equal opportunity
in the new world (Chan, 1991; Koo, 2001). With a genuine appreciation of any
opportunities (no matter how small) offered to them, they fall into voluntary submission
to the dominant power relations and follow the safe path of hard work and education.
For them, being obedient and productive is the normalized way to survive.
Reluctantly or not, these Asians realize the importance of assimilation—
accepting the established social order and continually working on personal
character and behaviors to adapt to existing norms and mores. Avoiding
conflicts with dominant social groups, they accept “model minority” as an
incentive and a compliment—it is certainly more desirable than the yellow
peril kind of rejection. Their acceptance of “model minority” usually comes
along with a denial of their own cultural identity, a sacrifice they are willing to
make.
Richards (1996) observes, “Asian Americans were deeply aware of the dominance and
sovereignty of Whites in America and the world; they gave this dominance a wide berth,
and did not really understand those who did not’’ (p. 138). Throughout history, the
Asian American representation on the upper rung of the power ladder has
been insignificant and the political activism within the Asian American
community has been almost inconsequential (Min, 1995). This political
inaction of Asian Americans was exactly what the powerful group wanted. S.
J. Lee (1996) points out that the influential 1966 U.S. News and World Report article
singled out Chinese Americans as “good citizens’’ precisely because the ruling class saw
them as the quiet minority who did not actively challenge the existing system. Filipina
writer Jessica Hagedorn reflects on the characterization of Asian Americans this way: “In
our perceived American character we are completely nonthreatening. We don’t
complain. We endure humiliation. We are almost inhuman in our patience.
We never get angry’’ (cited in S. J. Lee, 1996, p. 7). Conformity, passivity, and
nonresistance became the hallmark of the model minority. It is unfair to
blame Asian Americans because they are indeed extremely hard working,
industrious, and self-sacrificing. However, it is tragic that many Asian Americans
overlook [ignore] the politics of the model minority narrative and
voluntarily participate in a larger political conspiracy that aims to silence,
marginalize, and oppress all minorities, including themselves.
Being accepted or not, this ostensibly positive stereotype only works against Asian
Americans. Particularly, the stereotype functions to de-legitimize Asian
Americans’ concerns and protests about racial inequalities. Asian
Americans still face serious discriminatory barriers in society, yet their
complaints about discrimination are often not taken seriously. Asian

12
Americans were initially not included as a protected minority group under federal
affirmative action regulations (Suzuki, 2002). Today, for example, they are still
excluded from the considerations of many universities in constructing
categories for minority scholarship and in recruiting minority students for
admission (Takagi, 1992). Asian Americans in need of assistance are often
ignored because of the perception that they have few, if any, problems; that
they are self-sufficient; and that they can “take care of their own.’’ Such
stereotypical images of Asian Americans make it difficult, particularly for
those underprivileged Asians, to seek support from the larger society. These
Asian Americans are largely forgotten, and in many cases totally written off
by society.

THIS IS ESPECIALLY TRUE IN THE CONTEXT OF EDUCATION

– model minority rhetoric denies Asian American students the
attention they need and accelerates the destruction of their
identities
Yu 6 (TIANLONG YU, assistant professor in the Department of Educational
Leadership, School of Education, at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville,
“Challenging the Politics of the “Model Minority” Stereotype: A Case for Educational
Equality”, 2006 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/10665680600932333,
DOA: 6/26/17)//AK
BEYOND THE ASIAN: EQUAL EDUCATION FOR ALL
The influence of this model minority stereotype is widespread in education.
The success of Asian American students can serve as a valuable lesson for all Americans,
declared former U.S. Undersecretary of Education Linus Wright (1988). Wright, who had
been Secretary of Education William Bennett’s choice to succeed him upon Bennett’s
resignation, said that the educational achievements of Asian Americans demonstrate the
importance of values, particularly those of close ties between parents and children. Like-
minded politicians and educators, who promote conservative social and educational
reforms, often express similar views.
Let us first examine the effects of the model minority stereotype on Asian American
students. Since its inception, the model minority rhetoric has been
discredited for its monolithic treatment and mistaken stereotyping of Asian
students as uniformly successful academically. When the model minority
narrative first received attention, James Coleman (1966) conducted a comprehensive
study of “Equality of Educational Opportunity.’’ The famous Coleman Report
found that Asian American students as a group were not succeeding
academically, certainly not “outwhiting the Whites’’ (“Success Story,’’ 1971, p.
24). The subsequent influential works of Charles Silberman (1970), Colin Greer
(1976), and William Ryan (1976) all showed similar findings about the school
failures of minority students, including Asian American students. The major
lawsuit over English immersion, “sink or swim’’ instruction, which went all the way to
the Supreme Court in 1973–1974, with Lau v. Nichols, was brought on behalf of the

13
Chinese American students suing the San Francisco school system for not providing
them equal educational opportunities. The plaintiffs’ briefs are filled with statistics about
the academic failures and difficulties faced by Asian American students. More recently,
both the 1990 and 2000 censuses show that academic success is not universal across
Asian American groups. For example, in 1998, the percentage of Southeast Asian adults
with less than a high school diploma was 64%, which far exceeded the national average
for all Asian Americans (23%) (U.S. Census Bureau, 2000). Asian American
subgroups, such as Hmongs, Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians, all
rank far below the national average in education (Yin, 2001). Although the
enrollment number of Asian Americans in the nation’s prestigious
universities is highly notable, the proportion of enrollment by students from
different Asian American ethnic subgroups ranges widely. For example, in
2000 Chinese Americans were nearly seven times more likely to attend University of
California—Berkeley than Filipino Americans, although Chinese and Filipino American
populations in California were of equal size (Teranishi, 2002, p. 144). Disregarding all
of these facts, politicians like Wright generally accept a stereotypical portrait
of Asian Americans. In doing so, they simply turn their backs on so many
Asian American students who are victims of the education competition.
These Asian American students are totally left out by the politicians who are
used to overgeneralizing issues driven by their political agenda. These
students are the students who need assistance; and yet, the assistance is
purposefully denied under the rhetoric of the model minority narrative.
The impact of the model minority label on the so-called Asian American
“high achievers’’ is also significant and, very often, negative. One such negative
impact is that it causes and/or reinforces people’s indifference and ignorance
toward these students’ needs and problems. Since Asian American students
are generalized as super-bright, highly motivated overachievers who come from
well-to-do families, it is inconceivable that they could encounter any serious
learning problems. Contrary to this popular misconception, however, Asian
American students are just like any other minority students who may
experience difficulties in school. They perform just as poorly as other
minorities when schools do not come to their aid (Toppo, 2002). Because of the
model minority label, they may encounter more difficulties and problems than expected.
They are often subjected to unrealistically high expectations by their parents, their
instructors, and even their peers. The pressures could be so great that their
academic performance and personal well-being suffer as a result. Thus, the
model minority label has created a mental trap for these Asian students.
They have no other choices but to internalize the oppression imposed on
them by the society. In addition, as Asher (2001) points out, internalized by
many Asian American parents and their children, the model minority
concept turns out to be a hegemonic force that contributes to the damaging
of young Asians’ academic and career choices, playing a detrimental role in
the development of their identities. For example, Asian American parents
overwhelmingly lead their children to pursue “safe’’ careers in science-and
business-related areas, the tangible professional careers, curtailing their
representation in the social sciences and humanities. This further
marginalizes Asian Americans in society.

14
Thus, we affirm conscientization as a method to expose and
deconstruct the model minority myth – critical examination can
make Asian students conscious of oppression and make them
agents for the change they need
Osajima 7 (KEITH OSAJIMA, Professor and Director of the Race and Ethnic Studies
Program at the University of Redlands, “Replenishing the Ranks: Raising Critical
Consciousness Among Asian Americans”, 2/2017
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/213033#bio, DOA: 7/4/17)//AK
**edited for ableist language
In the winter of 1968, Asian American students at San Francisco State College,
together with their Black, Chicano, and Native American counterparts, embarked on
the longest student strike in U.S. history with the goal of transforming higher
education. The students demanded an open admissions policy to counter increasingly
elitist admissions policies. They demanded a College of Ethnic Studies to provide
a "relevant" education that critically examined the experiences of Third
World people within a context of racism, capitalism, and imperialism. They
also insisted on a curriculum that included their histories, cultures, heritages,
and contributions.1
As Glenn Omatsu notes, involvement in the strike "deeply affected Asian
American consciousness."2 Students "redefined racial and ethnic identity,
promoted new ways of thinking about communities, and challenged
prevailing notions of power and authority."3 Under the emergent pan-Asian
banner of "Yellow Power," this new identity and critical consciousness
represented "a rejection of the passive Oriental stereotype and symbolize(d)
the birth of a new Asian—one who will recognize and deal with injustices."4
While the political conditions that gave rise to the Asian American movement have largely faded under the weight of political conservatism and backlash, the goals
of Asian American activists have persisted. Indeed, [End Page 59] in the 35-plus years since their movement's inception, Asian Americans have made significant
progress toward the goal of transforming higher education. A new interdisciplinary field of knowledge has been established. Asian American Studies has been
institutionalized in programs and courses across the country. The 2003 Cornell University Directory lists 50 Asian American Studies Programs.5 Asian American
student activism has played a central role in the formation of many of these programs. It is evident that young Asian Americans, like their 1960s counterparts, have
continued to develop an Asian American critical consciousness and commitment to working for social change. What is less obvious is how those Asian Americans
develop such a critical consciousness. What leads them to become interested in Asian American issues and activism? Some answers can be found scattered in the
literature. Autobiographies and biographies of Asian American activists offer one source of information, often revealing how individuals arrived at their
understanding of and commitment to political activity on behalf of Asian Americans. Helen Zia, for example, in her book Asian American Dreams, tells of how she
went against the wishes of her Confucian father to go to Princeton, where, in the midst of the tumultuous 1960s, she became an Asian American activist.6 The
literature on pedagogy in Asian American Studies offers indirect insights into the process of consciousness-development by identifying key teaching practices and
course content that can help to change the minds of students. Diane Fujino's chapter on integrating feminist pedagogy in Asian American classrooms is a good
example. She shows how experiential learning activities, combined with personal and academic-oriented reflection, can help to move students toward an Asian
American consciousness.7 Within the realm of social science research, the best discussion of how Asian Americans develop a pan-Asian identity and consciousness
is in Nazli Kibria's Becoming Asian American.8 Based on interviews with second-generation Chinese and Koreans, Kibria's study often found that most
respondents developed a pan-Asian consciousness in college, where a "notable individual or class had provided them with the decisive push."9 Involvement in pan-
Asian campus organizations, in Ethnic Studies classes, and in pan-Asian social groups was a significant influence for many. [End Page 60] This article builds upon
and extends the existing literature. Based on interviews with 30 Asian Americans who professed a pan-Asian American critical consciousness and commitment to
social action, the article looks specifically at the process by which these respondents developed their interests, a process to which Brazilian educator Paulo Freire
refers as "conscientization."10 The central purpose is to identify key factors, conditions, and processes that contribute to their critical consciousness. The article
begins with a description of the research methods and analytic strategies. The main body of the article presents the analyses of the interviews. The article concludes
with a discussion of how the research findings can inform those activists and educators who work to bring new generations of Asian Americans into the movement

The study's focus on the process of Asian American

to "replenish the ranks." The Study

conscientization emerged, somewhat serendipitously, from a larger interview study

of Asian Americans in higher education that began in 1988. Between 1988 and 1992, I
conducted fifty-three in-depth interviews with Asian American college students. The goal
was to collect general life stories that explored the issues of family, identity, education,

15
and racism. In that first group of respondents, twelve students described themselves as having a strong pan-Asian American identity. They were involved
in Asian American Studies or student activities on campus. Though conscientization was not part of my original research focus, their stories sparked an interest
that I pursued more directly in a second wave of interviews. In 1998, I set out to follow up my interest in learning more about the process of conscientization.
Unlike the first set of interviews, where the sampling goal was to produce as diverse a pool of respondents as possible, in the second wave of interviews I was more
purposeful in the development of interview subjects.11 Interested in interviewing Asian Americans who were actively involved in pan-Asian American activities, I
identified several respondents through contacts with Asian American cultural and resource centers on college campuses in Southern California. Other subjects
were found through a snowball sampling method, where interviewees put me [End Page 61] into contact with other people across the country whom they knew to
be involved in Asian American activism. A total of eighteen interviews were conducted between 1998 and 2002. Bringing the two sets of interviews together yields a
sample of 30 Asian Americans, representing a wide range of constituencies and involvement in Asian American activities. A table presenting demographic
characteristics of all respondents appears in the Appendix. Of the 30 respondents, 17 were female. There were 9 Koreans, 6 Chinese, 5 Japanese, 3 Filipinos, 1
Indian, and 3 respondents of mixed-heritage. Eight of the interviewees were second-generation, born to immigrant parents. Six were born outside of the United
States, and all had immigrated before the age of six. Three were either third- or fourth-generation, and one had parents from different generations. The
respondents were active in a number of Asian American related activities, and were often involved in multiple activities.12 All had taken at least one Asian
American Studies course. Four had majored in Asian American Studies, and one had minored in the field. Five were in or had completed a graduate program in
Asian American Studies, or in another discipline with a primary focus on Asian Americans. Seven respondents were involved or worked in offices that provided
social, cultural, and political programming on Asian American issues. Eighteen of the thirty were involved in Asian American student organizations. Two had
participated in statewide or regional Asian American groups. Four respondents had worked in an Asian American community-based organization. Interviews with
respondents lasted between one and three hours. I followed what Norman Denzin calls a "nonstructured, scheduled interview" format.13 This method facilitates
comparability across cases by defining common areas of inquiry, but does not impose a fixed order to the questioning which may restrict responses. In each
interview, general areas of education, family, and race and racism were covered. When references to conscientization surfaced in the interviews, follow-up
questions were asked to elicit more detailed information. The overarching purpose of the study shaped the data analysis strategy. My goal was to understand the
process by which respondents had developed their critical consciousness. I wanted to identify the conditions, influences, processes, and experiences that had
contributed to conscientization. [End Page 62] This objective meant taking an inductive approach to the analysis of interviews, which allows "important analytic
dimensions to emerge from patterns found in the cases without presupposing in advance what the important dimensions will be."14 Interview transcripts were first
analyzed individually, paying close attention to those passages where respondents described how their critical consciousness had developed. Then, interviews were
analyzed across cases, developing codes and categories that captured patterns and themes grounded in the data.15 What follows is an analysis of the process of
conscientization as it emerged from the interviews.16

Conscientization as a Transformative Possibility

For the vast majority of respondents, developing an Asian American critical
consciousness involved a process that was transformative, where knowledge
of and commitment to Asian American concerns represented a significant
change from earlier views [beliefs] they had held in their lives. Most had
paid little attention of being Asian or to racism against Asians while growing
up. With the exception of two respondents, all were "first-generation" Asian American
activists, in that they were the first in their family to develop a critical awareness of
issues.
David Chan, 17 for example, had grown up in a predominantly white neighborhood
in Southern California. He had thought of himself as an "ultra-American" while
growing up. In high school, he had clowned around, done drugs, dropped out, and
dove heavily into the graffiti art scene. After a less than illustrious academic start, David
had found his way to a community college, then to a university, and had
ended up getting a master's degree in Asian American Studies.
Margaret Eu also had grown up in Southern California, in a traditional middle-class
household where her Korean immigrant father worked in various entrepreneurial
enterprises while her mother stayed home to raise the children. Through the seventh
grade, the most significant influence in Margaret's life had been the Christian church.
Later, she had been a "super-active high school student," involved in activities like
cheerleading, student government, mock trial, and drama. She had gone to college
with little awareness of Asian American issues. She now has a master's
degree in student development and is working in Asian American student
affairs. [End Page 63]
Pearl Cruz, raised in affluent Marin County, California, described herself as "mega-
apolitical" and "very, very, very apathetic" while growing up. She had been "very into my
own little Marin lifestyle." She had gone to a private elementary school and later to a
private high school. Pearl had attended an Ivy League university for two years, where she

16
got involved in feminist student activities, and then had transferred to the
University of California where she majored in Asian American Studies.
Raj Kapur was born and raised in the Washington D.C. area. Growing up, Raj
described himself as shy and quiet. In high school, he had felt that he "had a real low
self-esteem problem at the time, so that kind of caused some degree of low
achievement." He was not active in extra-curricular activities and pretty much stayed
to himself. In college, Raj had become actively involved in Asian American
student organizations and was one of the most articulate and outspoken
members of the community.

The fact that these young Asian Americans, from widely varying class,
geographic, political, and ethnic backgrounds, could find their way to Asian
American activism speaks to the real possibility that young people can
become critically conscious and politically active. Their active involvement
is especially noteworthy given the post-Civil Rights climate that surrounds
them, where the political momentum has shifted to the right and hopes for
student activism are often drowned in a sea of apathy or hopelessness.
These Asian Americans had gone against the grain and had become
politically involved. They had realized what Cornell West calls the "politics of
conversion," where the tendency toward nihilism is countered by "a chance for people to
believe that there is hope for the future and a meaning to struggle."18 So, what had
happened to change and shape their views? What had contributed to the development of
their critical consciousness? Analysis of the interviews reveals common patterns of
factors and conditions that contribute to the development of an Asian
American critical consciousness.

17
 v. Anti-Blackness 1NC
The black-white binary doesn’t go far enough – the 1AC’s
narrative of blackness versus whiteness is oversimplified and
does not capture the plight of other minorities, such as Asian
Americans – turns the K
Ng et al 7 (JENNIFER C. NG, assistant professor at the University of Kansas,
“Chapter 4 Contesting the Model Minority and Perpetual Foreigner Stereotypes: A
Critical Review of Literature on Asian Americans in Education”, 2007
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.3102/0091732X07300046095#, DOA:
6/27/17)//AK
**edited for ableist language

An understanding of how racial meanings have been constructed about

Asian Americans, or how they have been racialized (Omi & Winant, 1994),
requires a departure from a Black/White racial binary. Legal scholar Ancheta
(2000) considers how anti-Asian discrimination is distinctly different from
anti-Black subordination. He writes, “The racialization of Asian Americans has taken
on two primary forms: racialization as non-Americans and racialization as the model
minority” (p. 44). This outsider racialization constructs Asian Americans as foreign-born
outsiders. In the realm of education, this construction extends to the view
[belief] of Asian Americans as “forever foreigners” (Tuan, 1998), where the
permanency of equal status as citizens cannot be fully realized.
Asian American racialization as both the model minority and the foreigner exists within
larger racial discourses. C. Kim (1999) posits a theory of “a field of racial positions” that
considers how Asian Americans have been racialized relative to Whites and Blacks and
how racialization is more complex than a hierarchy with Whites on top, Blacks on the
bottom, and other groups in between (p. 106). Kim’s field of racial positions involves at
least two axes (superior/inferior and insider/foreigner), which acknowledges the
different ways that groups are racialized. Asian Americans are “racially
triangulated” vis-à-vis Whites and Blacks through two interrelated
processes of “relative valorization” (Whites valorizing Asian Americans
relative to Blacks) and the process of “civic ostracism” (Whites constructing
Asian Americans as foreign and Other, p. 107).
The model minority and foreigner images emerge in research on Asian
Americans in K–12 schooling (Lei, 1998) and higher education (S. S. Lee,
2006; Suzuki, 2002). Both Lei and S. S. Lee discuss how these representations play off
each other and are interconnected, placing Asian Americans in a vulnerable
racial position, ostracized from both the White majority and causing racial
tensions with other minorities (primarily African Americans). Placed within the
confines of the Black/White discourse, Asian Americans have been inexactly
situated in comparison to Whites and Blacks rather than understood as
racialized in distinct ways. The representations of Asian American students

18
as models and foreigners also uphold the racial status quo, which
marginalizes students of color (Jo, 2004; S. J. Lee, 2006; Lei, 1998).
Although researchers have uncovered the more complex ways that Asian Americans are
racialized, Asian Americans continue to be cast as interlopers in a
Black/White racial discourse; being neither Black nor White, Asian
Americans rarely gain visibility and voice as racial minorities. Scholars in the
fields of history (Takaki, 1998), English (Lowe, 2000), anthropology (Manalansan, 2000,
2003), sociology (Kibria, 2002; C. Kim, 1999; Min, 1996; Tuan, 1998), ethnic and gender
studies (Espiritu, 1997; R. Lee, 1999), and law (Ancheta, 2000; Wu, 1995) have critically
examined the complexities of Asian American experiences and challenged the ways that
the public has falsely imagined them. The field of education, however, has lagged
behind these theoretical advances. There is great foundational knowledge to be
gleaned from other disciplines in addressing the educational concerns and needs of
Asian American students.
The specter of Asians and Asian Americans as the yellow peril and the model minority has a long history. First invoked during the 19th century to create
comparative labor advantage between and among the railroad barons to yield high profit through the cheapest labor force, Chinese workers were typically
fashioned as the model against which other immigrant groups, such as the Irish, should aspire (Takaki, 1998; Wu, 1995). When the Chinese Exclusion law of
1882—stemming from the fear of the “Yellow Peril,” as popularized by novelist Jack London—curtailed further migration of Chinese, attention started to shift to
the growing population of Japanese immigrants along the West Coast (Daniels, 1988). Again, although seemingly admired for their ability to cultivate difficult arid
lands, they were then shunned and despised for their success in agriculture. At the outbreak of World War II, Japanese immigrants and Americans were
incarcerated for fear of disloyalty and espionage.

In the 1960s, during the Civil Rights movement, the image of Asian
Americans seemed to improve, in relation to African Americans and other
racial minority groups who sought equal rights and protection under the
law; at this time, newspaper headlines hailed Chinese and Japanese
Americans as the model minority. Popular magazines such as Time and Newsweek
highlighted their Confucian-style “rugged individualism”; Asians did not need
government support to make it in U.S. society. As numerous Asian Americanists have
noted throughout the years (Cheng & Yang, 2000; Osajima, 2000), the purposeful
ways in which Asians were heralded for their success was a direct attack
against African Americans in their outspoken quest for equality in the 1960s
and against a critique of institutional and structural racism. Such
pernicious and unfounded comparisons between the races only served to
create fissures that continue to exist today and support a message of
individual effort as a primary means to overcome racism, erasing the
existence of structural barriers.
Contemporary characterizations of Asian Americans reveal the persistence of the foreigner and model minority stereotypes in mainstream culture and more
educated, professional communities. In 2002, for example, the popular young adult clothing company Abercrombie & Fitch launched a line of T-shirts intended to
add humor and levity to its fashion that featured slant-eyed, Asian characters pulling rickshaws and working in laundromats (Gliona & Goldman, 2002). Notions of
Asian American foreignness also are evident in educational discussions. In his 1999 Phi Delta Kappan essay titled “The Demise of the Asian Math Gene,” for
example, Gerald Bracey speculated on the role of Confucian ideals behind Asian American educational success as well as the impact of poorer, rural, and less
literate homeland factors resulting in Asian American juvenile delinquency. Even more recently, Bracey (2005) wrote about the “spelling gene” that children of
Indian ancestry must possess, helping them win five of the last seven Scripps National Spelling Bees. Bracey (citing Joseph Berger from The New York Times)
explained that preparing for spelling bees is especially compatible with the “rote learning methods of their homeland” where people “do not regard champion
spellers as nerds” (p. 92). However, concluding that Indian parents may be even more single-minded than American parents who want their children to succeed in
extracurricular endeavors, Bracey stated, “I couldn’t help thinking of those years of mono-maniacally obsessive preparation as a form of child abuse” (p. 92). These
representations reinforce ideas that Asian Americans are culturally (and even genetically) distinct from the rest of America and that their narrow focus on
achievement is not completely praiseworthy.

Theories about Asian “Otherness” can be applied to educational discussions. Cultural theorist Said’s (1978) influential work on the theory of Orientalism also
provides ample thought for how the Occident has imagined the place of the Orient as a means for dominance and control, including the means of representation as
reified into the daily structures of institutions such as education. Indeed, the power of the Western gaze to focus on its cultural superiority over others has led to the
continued belief and resultant policies maintaining the status quo. As Rizvi and Lingard (2006) write,

Orientalism is best understood as a system of representations, a discourse framed by political forces through which the West sought to understand and control its
colonized populations. It is a discourse that both assumes and promotes a fundamental difference between the Western “us” and Oriental “them.” It is a manner of
regularized interpreting, writing about and accounting for the Orient, dominated by imperatives, perspectives, and ideological biases politically marshaled to self-
justify imperial conquests and exploitation. In this sense, the Orient is an imagined place that is articulated through as an entire system of thought and scholarship.
(p. 296)

19
As Rizvi and Lingard (2006) note, the influence of Said to education and educational policies comes from one’s perceived notions of how the Other lives. In this
example, and through our years of teaching experiences, we find that a number of educators still come to the classroom with a priori assumptions about the
profound foreignness of their Asian American students. It is that sense of profound cultural difference that underlies the model minority stereotype as well.

One dangerous strain in educational research that perpetuates the construction of Asian Americans as profoundly different relates to explanations for their
academic success. All too often, cultural explanations are offered. For example, our initial perusal of research related to Asian American students revealed a
troubling tendency to rely on particular cultural characteristics, such as the Confucian norms, to primarily account for the academic achievement of Asian
Americans (Pearce, 2006; Zhou, 2000). The tenor of these conclusions presumes Asian American educational achievement, when in fact these studies do not
acknowledge Asian Americans’ bimodal performance, which includes students performing below the norm (Hune & Chan, 1997). Pang, Kiang, and Pak (2004) have
indicated the great diversity of ethnicities that constitute Asian Pacific Americans (APA) and assert that creating monolithic truths based on two or three high-
achieving ethnicities does a disservice to everyone. Yet the continued emphasis on educational research that presumes and highlights the academic achievement of
Asian Americans creates a wedge between other racial minority groups. Coupled with this, Asian American success discourse is a presumption of African American
and Latino academic underachievement. Critical historians (Anderson, 1998, 2004a, 2004b; Span & Anderson, 2005; Williams, 2005) have provided ample
evidence for the persistence of educational attainment by African Americans since the time of slavery to counter current misconceptions and cultural deficit models
in which African Americans do not value education. Yet the implicit and sometimes explicit academic comparisons between the high-achieving

This binary erases

Asians with the low-achieving African Americans persists and only serves to maintain White privilege.

the experiences of Asian Americans who do not achieve and also the
experiences of African Americans, Latinas/Latinos, and Native Americans
who do achieve. As aptly phrased by S. J. Lee (1996), the model minority
stereotype is a hegemonic device to desensitize the public about the deep
and troubling history of race relations in the United States; schools and
educators become implicated in the process.

And that furthers the model minority myth – the black-white

binary limits out Asian Americans, causing them to be rendered
invisible
Ng et al 7 (JENNIFER C. NG, assistant professor at the University of Kansas,
“Chapter 4 Contesting the Model Minority and Perpetual Foreigner Stereotypes: A
Critical Review of Literature on Asian Americans in Education”, 2007
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.3102/0091732X07300046095#, DOA:
6/27/17)//AK
This representation of Asian Americans is the result of a limited Black/White
framework in which “minority” and “high achievement” seem to be
incompatible concepts and, as a result, reifies the idea that Asian Americans
are no longer minorities. Asian Americans have been “de-minoritized” (S. S.
Lee, 2006) and scholars point out that Asian American are now routinely
ignored. Osajima (1995b) discusses how Asian American college students struggle
to prove that they are still minorities as they are rendered invisible, their
academic and student services needs unmet. Inkelas (2003a, 2003b) describes
Asian Pacific Americans as “diversity’s missing minority”; analyses of APA student
attitudes on affirmative action reveal that students feel marginalized by
admissions policies that do not offer them underrepresented minority
benefits or majority legacy benefits (Inkelas, 2003a; Louie, 2004). To capture this
frustration, Inkelas (2003a) describes these students feeling as if they are in a racial
“no-man’s land” (p. 635). Such theoretical constraints limit the ways in
which non-Black minorities experience higher education.

20
The myth is false but the Aff continues it – that leads to not only
the homogenization and assimilation of Asian Americans BUT
ALSO continued racism against other minorities
Yu 6 (TIANLONG YU, assistant professor in the Department of Educational
Leadership, School of Education, at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville,
“Challenging the Politics of the “Model Minority” Stereotype: A Case for Educational
Equality”, 2006 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/10665680600932333,
DOA: 6/26/17)//AK
**edited for ableist language
Especially, the proponents of such a stereotype ignore the reality that the Asian American community, like any other community, has always been polarized, and in
recent years, such polarization has increased. Census reports reveal that today Asian Americans, socioeconomically, are divided into two distinct groups: the
“uptown’’ and the “downtown.’’ The former are welleducated professionals who reside in suburban areas and are well integrated into mainstream society; the latter
are predominantly working-class immigrants struggling to survive in isolated and poor urban ghettos (Yin, 2001). The huge median-income gap among different
Asian American groups is stunning in the light of mainstream perceptions about Asian American success. According to the U.S. Census Bureau (2000), among
Southeast Asian Americans, 49% live in poverty, compared to less than 10% of Japanese and Chinese Americans. Some Southeast Asian American communities
While the “models’’—the
face economic hardship that exceeds that of other communities of color (Teranishi, 2004).

economically well-off Asians—are being touted, the poor, the weak, and the
powerless within the community are paid no attention. When the
mainstream society chooses to focus on and laud certain Asians’ American-
style success story, it coldly turns its back to numerous Asian workers who
are being brutally exploited under the current system. One only needs to pay
a careful visit to the workplaces, such as Chinese buffet restaurants and Manhattan
sweatshops, to witness the everyday survival struggles of those less
fortunate Asian workers, and realize how the model minority narrative does
not fit them. Those who embrace the stereotype show no interest in this
reality.
In short, the model minority thesis is a stereotypical overgeneralizing
representation of the diverse Asian American populations. Such
representation silences the multiple voices of Asian Americans. “By painting
Asian Americans as a homogeneous group, the model minority stereotype
erases ethnic, cultural, social-class, gender, language, sexual, generational,
achievement, and other differences’’ (S. J. Lee, 1996, p. 6). Yet, silencing Asian
Americans is not what this stereotype is really about. The implications of the model
minority stereotype go well beyond Asian Americans and reach deeply to the center of
race and power relations in America. The stereotype serves a larger political purpose.
“MODEL MINORITY’’: DEVICE OF POLITICAL CONTROL
As J. Lee (1998) notes, the term “model’’ in “model minority’’ directly involves relations
with other racial and ethnic groups. “In this sense,’’ Lee argues, “the model minority
is a racist discourse, which categorizes, evaluates, ranks, and differentiates
between groups’’ (p. 165). A closer examination of the history of the model minority
stereotype will reveal the nature of this racist discourse and its political rationale. The
model minority stereotype emerged during the Civil Rights Movement of the
1960s (S. J. Lee, 1996; Spring, 2001; Suzuki, 2002). That was not simply a
coincidence. Demanding equal rights and economic opportunity, African
Americans led the Civil Rights Movement that seriously challenged white
supremacy and institutional racism deeply embedded in American society.

21
To fight back, the racist power elite realized that simply responding by saying
“there is no racism’’ would not help; it would make more sense to show an example of
minority success. Then, they could claim that racism or social injustice is really
not an issue because Asians have made it, why not you, too? “‘If,’these
European Americans seemed to say, ‘the black population acted like the Asian
population they could achieve economic success without criticizing the white
population’’’ (Spring, 2001, p. 104). Thus, “Model minority” became a political
instrument used to bash other minorities, African Americans in particular.
Such political motive behind the narrative was no secret. Consider the
December 1966 issue of U.S. News and World Report story titled “Success Story of One
Minority in the U.S.’’ The article contended, “At a time when it is being proposed that
hundreds of billions be spent to uplift Negroes and other minorities, the nation’s
300,000 Chinese Americans are moving ahead on their own—with no help from anyone’’
(p. 73).
Thus, the seemingly benign intention of the powerful group who created and spread this
positive narrative about Asians becomes questionable. Obviously, the recognition of
Asians was not meant for Asians only. Remember, the model minority image stands in
stark contrast to the previous stereotypes of Asians as “yellow peril.’’ Changing the
narrative about one minority group serves a larger purpose to maintain the
hierarchical race relations. Alleviating open discriminations, the ruling
group granted Asians acceptance on the surface and used the model
minority stereotype as a hegemonic device. Asian Americans were being
promoted as the model minority to discredit the protests and demands for
social justice of other minority groups (Suzuki, 2002). This political purpose of the
model minority narrative has been maintained since the civil rights era through to today,
as the New Right and neoconservative movements have continued to project Asian
Americans as the “good’’ race and African Americans the “bad’’ race (S. J. Lee, 1996;
Sleeter, 1993).
What does this model minority narrative mean for Asians, the very people being touted
and praised? Many Asian Americans may have indeed embraced this seemingly positive
label. S. J. Lee (1996) states, “Asian Americans who seek acceptance by the dominant
group may try to emulate model minority behavior’’(p. 9). Many Asian Americans,
especially immigrants and their children, may lack a strong sense of ownership and
belonging in America. They see themselves more like outsiders trying to get into the
society to gain legitimate membership. This is particularly true for those Asian
immigrants who have escaped the economic hardships and/or political persecution in
their home countries and been drawn to the promise of free land and equal opportunity
in the new world (Chan, 1991; Koo, 2001). With a genuine appreciation of any
opportunities (no matter how small) offered to them, they fall into voluntary submission
to the dominant power relations and follow the safe path of hard work and education.
For them, being obedient and productive is the normalized way to survive.
Reluctantly or not, these Asians realize the importance of assimilation—
accepting the established social order and continually working on personal
character and behaviors to adapt to existing norms and mores. Avoiding
conflicts with dominant social groups, they accept “model minority” as an
incentive and a compliment—it is certainly more desirable than the yellow

22
peril kind of rejection. Their acceptance of “model minority” usually comes
along with a denial of their own cultural identity, a sacrifice they are willing to
make.
Richards (1996) observes, “Asian Americans were deeply aware of the dominance and
sovereignty of Whites in America and the world; they gave this dominance a wide berth,
and did not really understand those who did not’’ (p. 138). Throughout history, the
Asian American representation on the upper rung of the power ladder has
been insignificant and the political activism within the Asian American
community has been almost inconsequential (Min, 1995). This political
inaction of Asian Americans was exactly what the powerful group wanted. S.
J. Lee (1996) points out that the influential 1966 U.S. News and World Report article
singled out Chinese Americans as “good citizens’’ precisely because the ruling class saw
them as the quiet minority who did not actively challenge the existing system. Filipina
writer Jessica Hagedorn reflects on the characterization of Asian Americans this way: “In
our perceived American character we are completely nonthreatening. We don’t
complain. We endure humiliation. We are almost inhuman in our patience.
We never get angry’’ (cited in S. J. Lee, 1996, p. 7). Conformity, passivity, and
nonresistance became the hallmark of the model minority. It is unfair to
blame Asian Americans because they are indeed extremely hard working,
industrious, and self-sacrificing. However, it is tragic that many Asian Americans
overlook [ignore] the politics of the model minority narrative and
voluntarily participate in a larger political conspiracy that aims to silence,
marginalize, and oppress all minorities, including themselves.
Being accepted or not, this ostensibly positive stereotype only works against Asian
Americans. Particularly, the stereotype functions to de-legitimize Asian
Americans’ concerns and protests about racial inequalities. Asian
Americans still face serious discriminatory barriers in society, yet their
complaints about discrimination are often not taken seriously. Asian
Americans were initially not included as a protected minority group under federal
affirmative action regulations (Suzuki, 2002). Today, for example, they are still
excluded from the considerations of many universities in constructing
categories for minority scholarship and in recruiting minority students for
admission (Takagi, 1992). Asian Americans in need of assistance are often
ignored because of the perception that they have few, if any, problems; that
they are self-sufficient; and that they can “take care of their own.’’ Such
stereotypical images of Asian Americans make it difficult, particularly for
those underprivileged Asians, to seek support from the larger society. These
Asian Americans are largely forgotten, and in many cases totally written off
by society.

23
THIS IS ESPECIALLY TRUE IN THE CONTEXT OF EDUCATION
– model minority rhetoric denies Asian American students the
attention they need and accelerates the destruction of their
identities
Yu 6 (TIANLONG YU, assistant professor in the Department of Educational
Leadership, School of Education, at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville,
“Challenging the Politics of the “Model Minority” Stereotype: A Case for Educational
Equality”, 2006 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/10665680600932333,
DOA: 6/26/17)//AK
BEYOND THE ASIAN: EQUAL EDUCATION FOR ALL
The influence of this model minority stereotype is widespread in education.
The success of Asian American students can serve as a valuable lesson for all Americans,
declared former U.S. Undersecretary of Education Linus Wright (1988). Wright, who had
been Secretary of Education William Bennett’s choice to succeed him upon Bennett’s
resignation, said that the educational achievements of Asian Americans demonstrate the
importance of values, particularly those of close ties between parents and children. Like-
minded politicians and educators, who promote conservative social and educational
reforms, often express similar views.
Let us first examine the effects of the model minority stereotype on Asian American
students. Since its inception, the model minority rhetoric has been
discredited for its monolithic treatment and mistaken stereotyping of Asian
students as uniformly successful academically. When the model minority
narrative first received attention, James Coleman (1966) conducted a comprehensive
study of “Equality of Educational Opportunity.’’ The famous Coleman Report
found that Asian American students as a group were not succeeding
academically, certainly not “outwhiting the Whites’’ (“Success Story,’’ 1971, p.
24). The subsequent influential works of Charles Silberman (1970), Colin Greer
(1976), and William Ryan (1976) all showed similar findings about the school
failures of minority students, including Asian American students. The major
lawsuit over English immersion, “sink or swim’’ instruction, which went all the way to
the Supreme Court in 1973–1974, with Lau v. Nichols, was brought on behalf of the
Chinese American students suing the San Francisco school system for not providing
them equal educational opportunities. The plaintiffs’ briefs are filled with statistics about
the academic failures and difficulties faced by Asian American students. More recently,
both the 1990 and 2000 censuses show that academic success is not universal across
Asian American groups. For example, in 1998, the percentage of Southeast Asian adults
with less than a high school diploma was 64%, which far exceeded the national average
for all Asian Americans (23%) (U.S. Census Bureau, 2000). Asian American
subgroups, such as Hmongs, Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians, all
rank far below the national average in education (Yin, 2001). Although the
enrollment number of Asian Americans in the nation’s prestigious
universities is highly notable, the proportion of enrollment by students from
different Asian American ethnic subgroups ranges widely. For example, in
2000 Chinese Americans were nearly seven times more likely to attend University of

24
California—Berkeley than Filipino Americans, although Chinese and Filipino American
populations in California were of equal size (Teranishi, 2002, p. 144). Disregarding all
of these facts, politicians like Wright generally accept a stereotypical portrait
of Asian Americans. In doing so, they simply turn their backs on so many
Asian American students who are victims of the education competition.
These Asian American students are totally left out by the politicians who are
used to overgeneralizing issues driven by their political agenda. These
students are the students who need assistance; and yet, the assistance is
purposefully denied under the rhetoric of the model minority narrative.
The impact of the model minority label on the so-called Asian American
“high achievers’’ is also significant and, very often, negative. One such negative
impact is that it causes and/or reinforces people’s indifference and ignorance
toward these students’ needs and problems. Since Asian American students
are generalized as super-bright, highly motivated overachievers who come from
well-to-do families, it is inconceivable that they could encounter any serious
learning problems. Contrary to this popular misconception, however, Asian
American students are just like any other minority students who may
experience difficulties in school. They perform just as poorly as other
minorities when schools do not come to their aid (Toppo, 2002). Because of the
model minority label, they may encounter more difficulties and problems than expected.
They are often subjected to unrealistically high expectations by their parents, their
instructors, and even their peers. The pressures could be so great that their
academic performance and personal well-being suffer as a result. Thus, the
model minority label has created a mental trap for these Asian students.
They have no other choices but to internalize the oppression imposed on
them by the society. In addition, as Asher (2001) points out, internalized by
many Asian American parents and their children, the model minority
concept turns out to be a hegemonic force that contributes to the damaging
of young Asians’ academic and career choices, playing a detrimental role in
the development of their identities. For example, Asian American parents
overwhelmingly lead their children to pursue “safe’’ careers in science-and
business-related areas, the tangible professional careers, curtailing their
representation in the social sciences and humanities. This further
marginalizes Asian Americans in society.

Thus, we offer polyculturalism as a counter-methodology to

their approach to race. Unlike their affirmation of a single
identity as distinct from another, polyculturalism holds that all
of our identities are fluid and interconnected, avoiding divisive
ethno-nationalism
Jackson 13 (Tamela Teara Jackson, in a report to become a Master in Arts at UT
Austin, ““I Can Turn Karaoke Into Open Mic Night:” An Exploration of Asian American
Men in Hip Hop”, 2013

25
https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/bitstream/handle/2152/22417/jackson-
mastersreport-2013.pdf?sequence=1, DOA: 6/29/17)//AK
Distinctly different from multiculturalism, Vijay Prashad’s text Everybody was
Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (2001)
centers on the idea of “polyculturalism.” Coined by Robin D.G. Kelly, the term
pushes the readers focus towards a world-culture of Brown folk that is
inclusive. Prashad gives an assumed minority reader a challenge: to understand the
differences between the two and essentially identify the areas where multiculturalism
falls short. Prashad explains: When people actively or tacitly refuse the terms of vertical
integration they are derisively dismissed as either unassimilable or exclusionary. We
hear “Why do the black kids sit together in the cafeteria,” instead of “Why do our
institutions routinely uphold the privileges of whiteness?” There is little space in popular
discourse for an examination of what goes on outside the realm of white American
among people of color.46
For Prashad, multiculturalism presents the wrong approach to issues of race
and racism amongst marginalized groups of people; especially those in the
United States. The typical paradigm of multiculturalism fails to take into
consideration how restricting multiculturalism is. Prashad argues that “culture
wraps us in to a suffocating embrace” and fails to consider various historical
interactions throughout time and varied political exchanges that point to
shifting alliances.47 Borrowing from Kelley, Prashad challenges the reader to
reject the idea that individual races have exclusive ties to their culture.
According to Prashad’s theory of polyculturalism, every culture has borrowed
and has been influenced by another world culture. Borrowing from Kelley,
Prashad argues: All of us, and I mean ALL of us, are the inheritors of European,
African, Native American, and even Asian past, even if we can’t exactly trace
our bloodlines to all these continents. Rejecting the posture of “racism with a
distance,” Kelley argued that our various cultures “have never been easily
identifiable, secure in their boundaries, or clear to all people who live in or
outside our skin. We were multiethnic and polycultural from the get-go.”
The theory of the polycultural does not mean that we reinvent humanism
without ethnicity, but that we acknowledge that our notion of cultural
community should not be built inside the high walls of parochialism and
ethno-nationalism.48
It also, as suggested earlier, does not give any room for growth or movement. More
specifically, multiculturalism does not issue any possibility for the recognition of the
contributions from one culture into the next; regardless of their geographical location.
From this observation, Prashad centers Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting on Kelley’s
notion of polyculturalism, which creates a foundation for the consideration of the
worldwide, cultural intersectionality. Additionally, this idea also engages other
theorists and historians such as Karl Marx, Amari Baraka and Stanley Fish.
Throughout the majority of his text, Prashad explores various historical accounts and
examples of Polyculturalism, examining how it is formed. What we initially encounter is
a historical analysis of the origins of polyculturalistic, Afro-Asian interactions. Prashad
sufficiently clarifies to the reader that these alliances were not initially based on skin

26
color, as they actually arose out of “cultural exchange.” For example, in the first chapter,
Prashad highlights various examples of early non-skin color based cultural exchanges.
He highlights interactions of Afro-Asians that occurred through commercial trade,
slavery, interactions along geographical boundaries and economics. Prashad notes
historian Suvira Jaiswal, citing, It was largely due to the unequal accessibility of political
and economic power that hierarchical status distinctions crystallized. From textual and
archeological evidence, Jaiswal demonstrates that the differentiation of caste in southern
Asia finds its origins in the ecology of Vedic cattle keepers and that state formation and
patriarchy are the crucial pieces of the story, not any anachronistic notion of race.
Here, Prashad explicates two very important aspects of his argument. First, he asserts
that race is not a biological truth but a socially constructed ideal. As for the
second point, he argues that the definition of culture can be fluid. He wants the
reader to understand how xenophobia has played a critical role in the historical
development of polyculturalism. In the earlier parts of the text, he writes, “Difference
among peoples is something that we negotiate in our everyday interactions,
asking question and being better informed of our mutual realities[;] To
transform difference into the body is an act of bad faith, a denial of our
shared nakedness.”49 It is this “shared nakedness” that births
polyculturalism. This aspect becomes sharper throughout the rest of his text as he
encourages the reader to critically parse through xenophobia. If one takes into the
account that xenophobia involves “fear of foreigners or strangers,” Prashad’s argument
then becomes even more engaging as it teases out the idea of polyculturalism by
challenging the reader to understand that cultures are co-dependent on one
another. Given this case, would not xenophobic ideals be a form of self-hatred,
especially if we consider polyculturalism engages a “world-culture”. How can one fear of
foreigners when they themselves have been influenced by the “foreign”?
Moving forward Prashad highlights the main problems with the theoretical and political engagement with racism. He does this by focusing on two main concerns:
colorblindness and multiculturalism. The problem with color blindness is, for Prashad, a problem of the twenty first century. He argues: The problem is simple: it
believes that to redress racism, we need to not consider race in social practice, notably in the sphere of governmental action. The state, we are told, must be above
race in its actions…That is, we are led to believe that racism is a prejudicial behavior of one party against another rather than the coagulation of socioeconomic
injustice against groups…Colorblind justice privatizes inequality and racism and it removes itself from the project of redistributive and anti-racist justice. 50

From this point on, Prashad makes it very clear that one cannot address how polyculturalistic works without first addressing the issues of the twenty-first century,
which surround race and racism. Through a historical analysis, he finds the state’s negotiation of racial categories as dangerous and irresponsible. Prashad stresses
the main disconnect with multiculturalism : it pulls from the most desirable elements of the said cultures and neglects any points of conflict, difference or
disinterest. Prashad further states, “In short, they want the fun, but not the fundamentalism.”51

One of the strongest elements of Prashad’s text lies in its ability to consider the many
different variations of Afro-Asian interactions throughout history. For example, he
explores Chinese, East Indian, and African exchanges in the Caribbean during
the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries by dissecting various social and
political interactions. Mutual threads, such as the Hosay Festival, the Rasta religion and
the Trinidad Workers Association function as the most appropriate and effective
examples of polyculturalism.

27
Block

28
Links

29
 Academic Achievement
The 1AC’s endorsement of academic achievement as a standard
to measure success is complicit with the model minority myth –
that erases the experience of underachieving minorities
Li 5 (GUOFANG LI, professor at MSU, “Other People’s Success: Impact of the “Model
Minority” Myth on Underachieving Asian Students in North America”, 2005
https://msu.edu/~liguo/file/KEDI%20Journal-Guofang%20Li%202005%5B1%5D.pdf,
DOA: 6/26/17)//AK
Contemporary public perceptions of Asian students in North America have
been associated with the label “model minorities” (Lee, 1996; Suzuki, 1989,
2002). Asian students are described as intelligent, industrious, enduring,
obedient, and highly successful, and have been constructed as “academic
nerds,” “high achievers” who are “joyfully” initiated into North American
life and English literacy practices (Lee, 1996; Townsend and Fu, 1998). These
model minority images are based on reports of Asian students’ high test
scores in mathematics and SAT, and higher grade point average in high
school in comparison with other minority groups such as African and Hispanic
students in the U.S., and Aboriginal students in Canada (Hsia, 1988; Kim & Chun, 1994;
Sue & Okazaki, 1991). In recent years, there are also reports that Asians are outdoing
whites in test scores, educational attainment, and family income (Min, 2004). These
images are further reinforced by reports of only success stories in research literature and
in the media. According to the U.S. Census Bureau 2001 population survey, in 2050, one
of the greatest increases in the U. S. population will be Asian American/Pacific Islanders
(from 3.7% in 2000 to 8.9% in 2050). In Canada, Asia/Pacific has become the leading
source of immigrants since the 1990s (53.01% in 2001), with China (including Hong
Kong) being the No. 1 source country (Citizenship and Immigration Canada, 2002). In
the Province of British Columbia (B.C.) alone, Asian immigrants accounted for 87.2% of
its population growth during 1993-2000. With the increase of Asian population in North
America, the number of school age Asian Pacific children also increased tremendously.
For example, between 1960 and 1990, it grew about six-fold and it continues to grow at a
high rate in the U.S. and Canada.
Are the “model minority” images true to all Asian students? Are the Asian students
destined to excel as “model minorities”? The fast growing Asian Pacific population has
posed unprecedented challenges to schools that are under prepared for educating
students who do not speak English as their first language and who come from a wide
range of cultural, political and economic backgrounds. With the increasing number of
Asian children in today’s schools, researchers began to see the other side of the
“model minority myth.” Contrary to the widely reported success stories,
research on recent Asian immigrants began to draw public attention to “an invisible
crisis” that many Asian Pacific children face in today’s schools (AAPIP, 1997). More and
more Asian children are reported to experience difficulty not only in
learning English, but also in achieving academic success. For example, the 2001
results of the British Columbia Foundations Skills Assessment indicated that nearly 37%
of the 4th graders (in addition to 21% of whom were excused from taking the test due to

30
their limited English proficiency) in the school had not yet reached the provincial
standards in reading comprehension (B. C. Ministry of Education, 2001). In many
districts with high Asian concentration (e.g., California, New York, and Chicago),
Asian drop out rates are also reported to be increasing (NECS, 2004). Since
most studies on Asian children centered on their success stories and the realization of
the invisible crisis that many Asian children face is fairly recent, few studies have
addressed the diverse and complex experiences of Asian children, especially those who
do not fit the “model minority” stereotype (Lee, 1996; Li, 2004). This paper revisits the
model minority myth and examines how it has become a “destructive myth” for
those underachieving children whom the schools are failing. In the following
pages, I first present a contextualized understanding of the “model minority” myth—
what it is and what it means. I then demonstrate that the myth has been an
inaccurate and invalid representation of many Asian students. Following this,
I discuss the impact of the “model minority” stereotype on underachieving
Asian students’ schooling. I argue that the stereotype has posed as a threat to
the students’ advancement in school (and in society) and it has been a
hegemonic device that disguises the challenges many Asian children face in
school. In order to illustrate the impact of the model minority stereotypes on individual
experiences, I reveal the academic struggles of an underachieving Chinese student who
lived under the shadow of other children’s success. Lastly, I discuss the implications of
his experiences in relation to the “model minority” myth.

31
 Black-White Binary
The black-white binary has some merit descriptively but is
inadequate in describing racism against non-White or Black
bodies AND prescribes identities onto Asian Americans solely
based on their relation to this bipolar scheme
Alcoff 3 (LINDA MARTÍN ALCOFF, professor of Philosophy at CUNY, “LATINO/AS,
ASIAN AMERICANS, AND THE BLACK-WHITE BINARY”, 2003
http://sites.middlebury.edu/gsfswhitepeople/files/2016/09/alcoff.pdf, DOA:
7/7/17)//AK
**edited for ableist language
It is unlikely that the electoral college will be eliminated anytime soon, but even if this
were to happen, political power for people of color would require building
coalitions, the difficulty of which has been brought home by recent city government
elections in New York and Los Angeles. This paper is an attempt to make a contribution
toward coalition building by showing that, even if we try to build coalition around
what might look [seem] like our most obvious common concern - reducing
racism - the dominant discourse of racial politics in the U.S. inhibits an
understanding of how racism operates vis-a-vis Latino/as and Asian
Americans, and thus proves more of an obstacle to coalition building than
an aid. First and foremost, of course, we must begin to talk more with one another.
There are many important similarities between the history of oppression specifically faced by Latino/as and Asian Americans in the U.S. Historically, both groups
were often brought to this country as cheap labor and then denied certain political and civil rights, thus making them a more vulnerable and exploitable labor force
once on U.S. shores (a practice that continues to this day in sweatshops in many cities on the east and west coasts and on the U.S.-Mexican border, and in the
erosion of even basic protections or emergency hospital services for "illegals").2 And both groups are often coming from countries of origin that have been the site
of imperialist wars, invasions, and civil wars instigated by the cold war, some of which involved the U.S.'s own imperialist aggressions such as in the Philippines,
Puerto Rico, El Salvador, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Korea, the Dominican Republic, and most recently, Colombia.3 In this sense, many of
these immigrants had experience with the U.S. Government, direct or indirect, well before they became refugees or immigrants there. There are also similarities
that Latino/as and Asian Americans share with other people of color after they go there: having to continually face vicious and demeaning stereotyping along with
language, education, health care, housing and employment discrimination, and being the target of random identity based violence and murder (random only in the
sense that any Mexican farm laborer or Asian American or Arab American or African American or Jewish person would do). Perhaps because of their similar
genealogy as sources of cheap, easily exploitable labor, there are also some important commonalities between the ideological justifications and legal methods that
have been used to persecute and discriminate against Latino/as and Asian Americans.4 Both have been the main victims of "nativist" arguments which advocate
limiting the rights of immigrants or foreign-born Americans, and both have often been portrayed as ineradicably "foreign" no matter how many generations they
have lived here. Yet an account of these nativist-based forms of discrimination and persecution has not been adequately incorporated into the civil rights paradigm
of progressive politics.

The discourse of social justice in regard to issues involving race has been
dominated in the U.S. by what many theorists name the "black/white paradigm,"
which operates to govern racial classifications and racial politics in the U.S.,
most clearly in the formulation of civil rights law but also in more informal arenas of
discussion. Juan Perea defines this paradigm as the conception that race in
America consists, either exclusively or primarily, of only two constituent
racial groups, the Black and White ... In addition, the paradigm dictates that
all other racial identities and groups in the United States are best
understood through the Black/White binary paradigm.5 He argues that this
paradigm operates even in recent anti-racist theory such as that produced by Andrew
Hacker, Cornel West, and Toni Morrison, though it is even clearer in works by liberals
such as Nathan Glazer. Openly espousing this view, Mary Francis Berry, former chair of
the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, has stated that the U.S. is comprised of "three nations,
one Black, one White, and one in which people strive to be something other than Black to

32
avoid the sting of White Supremacy."6 To understand race in this way is to
assume that racial discrimination operates exclusively through anti-black
racism. Others can be affected by racism, on this view [belief], but the
dominance of the black/white paradigm works to interpret all other effects
as "collateral damage" ultimately caused by the same phenomena, in both economic
and psychological terms, in which the given other, whether Latino/a, Asian
American, or something else, is placed in the category of "black" or "close to
black." In other words, there is basically one form of racism, and one continuum of
racial identity, along which all groups will be placed. The black/white paradigm can
be understood either descriptively or prescriptively (or both): as making a
descriptive claim about the fundamental nature of racializations and
racisms in the U.S., or as prescribing how race shall operate and thus
enforcing the applicability of the black/white paradigm.7
Several Latino/a and Asian American theorists, such as Elaine Kim, Gary Okihiro,
Elizabeth Martinez, Juan Perea, Frank Wu, Dana Takagi, and community activists such
as Bong Hwan Kim have argued that the black/white paradigm is not adequate,
certainly not sufficient, to explain racial realities in the U.S. They have thus
contested its claim to descriptive adequacy, and argued that the hegemony of the
black/white paradigm in racial thinking has had many deleterious effects for
Latino/as and Asian Americans.8 In this paper, I will summarize and discuss what I
consider the strongest of these arguments and then develop two further arguments. It is
important to stress that the black/white paradigm does have some descriptive
reach, as I shall discuss, even though it is inadequate when taken as the whole
story of racism. Asian Americans and Latino/as are often categorized and
treated in ways that reflect the fact that they have been positioned as either
"near black" or "near white," but this is not nearly adequate to
understanding their ideological representation or political treatment in the
U.S. One might also argue that, although the black/white paradigm is not
descriptively adequate to the complexity and plurality of racialized identities, it yet
operates with prescriptive force to organize these complexities into its
bipolar schema. Critics, however, have contested both the claim of descriptive
adequacy as well as prescriptive efficacy. That is, the paradigm does not operate with
effective hegemony as a prescriptive force. I believe these arguments will show that
continuing to theorize race in the U.S. as operating exclusively through the black/white
paradigm is actually disadvantageous for all people of color in the U.S., and in many
respects for whites as well (or at least for white union households and the white poor).

33
Impacts

34
 Silencing
The stereotyping of Asians as the model minority was part of a
broader political strategy to silence them – studies on their
success are flawed
Kim and Taylor 17 (Eun Hee Kim and Kay Ann Taylor, doctoral candidate and
professor, respectively, at Kansas State University, “The Model Minority Stereotype as a
Prescribed Guideline of Empire: Situating the Model Minority Research in the
Postcolonial Context”, 2017
http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1156&context=jsaaea, DOA:
6/26/17)//AK
Hartlep (2013a) wrote that it was not accidental for Asian Americans to be
chosen as a model minority, asserting that there was a political purpose
behind it. By the mid-1960s, the U.S. government was increasing its intervention in
race relations as the Civil Rights Movement progressed with African Americans as the
central power (Osajima, 2005). In 1964, President Johnson declared a “war on poverty”
to build a “Great Society” (Lyndon Johnson’s ‘Great Society,’ n.d.). The war was intended
for social welfare, but it served the status quo by depicting messages: Asian
Americans are hardworking with no need for welfare; people of all races can
make the same achievement as Asian Americans do through hard work,
which proves the United States is not a racist society (Fong, 2008; Osajima,
2005; Sakamoto et al., 2012). This served as a divisive and controlling
mechanism for people of color following the Civil Rights Movement when
more underrepresented groups joined African Americans in asserting their
rights.
For five decades, scholarship on the MMS has attempted to debunk the myth and reveal
racism behind the notion. Hartlep (2013a) summarized what MMS research has
revealed so far: it has silenced Asian Americans against racism, maintained the
status quo, and challenged the mental health of Asian Americans. However, as noted by
Sakamoto et al. (2012), the MMS scholarship has centered on racial discrimination that highly educated Asian Americans experience in the labor market.
Influenced by the hardworking and over-achieving image of a model minority, the most popular argument in the MMS literature is that Asian Americans are over-
educated compared to non-Hispanic Whites and receive lower income for their education, which is known as the “overeducation” view (Sakamoto et al., 2012). This
argument is elitist because it pertains to highly educated Asian Americans who are the most privileged group in the labor market (Hartlep, 2013a; Sakamoto et al.,
2012). As a result, the view has not only failed to illuminate issues such as class disparities between the highly educated and low educated workers, but suggested
more inequality and income gap in the labor market by claiming a higher income for the already highest-earning Asian Americans (Sakamoto et al., 2012).

Moreover, the MMS tends to be complied with and embraced by these highly educated
and highest-earning Asian Americans as evidenced in several empirical
studies as a strategy for success in universities and workplaces (Eguchi &
Starosta, 2012; Ho, 2003; Oyserman & Sakamoto, 1997; Trytten, Lowe, & Walden, 2012;
Wong, Lai, Nagasawa, & Lin, 1998).

35
The model minority myth obfuscates the role of the schooling
system in failing Asian students while simultaneously silencing
them
Li 5 (GUOFANG LI, professor at MSU, “Other People’s Success: Impact of the “Model
Minority” Myth on Underachieving Asian Students in North America”, 2005
https://msu.edu/~liguo/file/KEDI%20Journal-Guofang%20Li%202005%5B1%5D.pdf,
DOA: 6/26/17)//AK
**edited for ableist language
The harmful effect of the model minority myth is also evident in higher education.
Research shows that the false representation of Asian students has resulted in
the reemergence of the perfidious foreigner stereotype that they are a threat
to the U.S. and white dominance (Lei, 1998; Suzuki, 2002). The increased racial
profiling against Asian students in higher education, for example, is
reported to have resulted in adverse learning environments that place them
at risk (Yeh, 2002). Recent studies on Asian college students’ experiences demonstrate
that increasingly, more and more Asian college students are feeling
marginalized, misunderstood and disconnected from the college campus
and are experiencing institutionalized racism (Lagdameo, Lee, & Ngyen, 2002;
Suzuki, 2002).
As mentioned earlier, the “model minority” myth reinforces the “blaming the
victims” approach. It obscures the accountability of schools and institutions
for students’ underachievement. Explanations of Asian success often focus
on parental support and cultural traits that lead to success (Barrozo, 1987;
Min, 2004; Peng & Wright, 1994). Many attributed Asian success to family background,
parental investment in their children’s education, and parental emphasis on
achievement. However, such analysis often fails to look at [examine] the critical
role school and societal factors in Asian children’s education. As Walker-
Moffat (1995) points out, “this perspective shifts the responsibility for the high
rate of minority student failure from the schools—and hence the taxpayers—
to the students themselves and their families” (p. 21). Researchers have
concluded that the model minority stereotype, true or not, shapes students’
intellectual identity and their expected performance (Lee, 1996; McKay &
Wong, 1996). As evidenced in several studies on Asian American adolescents’ identity
formation (e.g., Lee, 1996; McKay & Wong, 1996), the “model minority” discourse
operates as a very powerful force in their academic and personal lives. For
students who are underachieving, trying to live up to the model minority
stereotype may result in mental and emotional problems. Many Asian
students struggle with cultural dictates that motivate them to embrace high
academic achievement and are reported to resent the success myth (Chun,
1980; Goto, 1997; Lee, 1996). In order to measure up the expectations, many
students have been pressured into assimilation into the mainstream and
rejection of their cultural identity. As a result, they are more likely to have
serious psychological and emotional issues (Chun, 1980). In their study on Asian
American adolescents’ emotional and behavioral problems, Lorenzo, Pakiz, Reinherz, &
Frost (1995) revealed that many Asian American adolescents are significantly

36
more isolated, more depressed and anxious, and are more likely to
internalize their problems and less apt to be involved in after school
activities or seek help for their problems than those from other ethnic
groups.

In sum, the consequences of the “model minority” stereotype can be

destructive. The glowing image may mask the problems many
underachieving Asian children face in and out of schools and prevent us
from unraveling the social realities and academic needs of those who do not
fit the model. It may promote the “blaming the victims” approach, and lead
our attention away from a scrutiny of the role of public schooling. In order to
further demythologize the “model minority” myth, in the following, I present the story of
a middle class Chinese family whose children do not fit the “model minority” stereotype.

37
 Orientalism
The model minority myth is born from Orientalist ideology that
painted Asian men as effeminate and Asian women as
submissive
Kim and Chung 5 (MINJEONG KIM AND ANGIE CHUNG, associate professors,
“Consuming Orientalism: Images of Asian/American Women in Multicultural
Advertising”, 2005 https://www.depts.ttu.edu/education/our-
people/Faculty/additional_pages/duemer/epsy_6305_class_materials/Kim-Minjeong-
Chung-Angie-Y-2005.pdf, DOA: 7/1/17)//AK
Discursive images of American Orientalism have been profoundly shaped by
the historical context of race relations in the domestic homefront, as well as
the nation’s diplomatic relations with Asian countries abroad (Gee 1988; Lee
1999, pp. 8–9). In his influential book, Orientalism, Edward W. Said argues that “the
essence of Orientalism is the ineradicable distinction between Western
superiority and Oriental inferiority” (1979, p. 42). Westerners’ knowledge about
the East imagines the Orient in a way that polarizes the Orient from the Occident and
places the Occident higher than the Orient in the world hierarchy. The West is depicted
as developed, powerful, articulate, and superior, while the East is seen as undeveloped,
weak, mysterious, and inferior. Although Said focuses mainly on Europe’s relations with
the Middle East and South Asia, the political ideologies and cultural imageries
implicit in such hegemonic dichotomies help to shed light on the internal
dynamics of Orientalism in America. Specifically, American Orientalism has
been sustained by this notion of Western/White power as a means to justify
and exert its cultural domination over Asia and Asian America.
While European Orientalism was purported to justify the colonization and
domination of Third World people, early American Orientalism was first
invented to exclude Asian immigrants from entering or making a home on
American soil. To this end, the mass media began its long history of
cultivating insidious stereotypes of Asian/Americans for the visual
consumption of the White American public— everything from the
aggressive, ominous images of Japanese and Chinese immigrants during the
“yellow peril” to more modern depictions of Asian/Americans as the passive
“model minority” (Espiritu 1997; Hamamoto 1994; Lee 1999; Moy 1993; Taylor and
Stern 1997). In all these stereotypes, the assimilability of Asian Americans has always
been at question (Palumbo-Liu 1999; Yu 2001). Robert G. Lee’s book, Orientals: Asian
Americans in Popular Culture (1999), shows how Orientalist images during the Gold
Rush era depicted Asian/Americans as “pollutants” in the free land of California and
Chinese immigrant workers as potential threats to the stability of the White immigrant
working class. In movies like The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933) and Fu Manchu films,
the image of emasculated, asexual Asians co-existed with the image of Orientals as
licentious beasts that threatened to undermine the economic and moral stability of the
U.S. nation and the American family. Such cultural representations help set the
ideological backdrop for anti-Chinese fervor, which led to the outbreak of anti-
Chinese rioting and the implementation of the first Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882.

38
Within this context, it is important to note that the practice of “consuming Orientalism”
evolved long before the advent of the post-industrial era. Even in the early twentieth
century, Americans supported Orientalism in their day-to-day purchasing and
consumption practices. Advertising cards for various products like soaps, dentifrice,
waterproof collars and cuffs, clothes wringers, threads, glycerin, hats, and tobacco drew
on Sino-phobic themes, such as Chinese queues, porcelain doll-like Chinese women, and
hyper-feminized Asian men, to market the distinctive appeal of their products (see Chan
http://www.chsa.org/features/ching/ching conf.htm). These cultural representations
reinforced White America’s moral and masculine superiority over the foreign elements of
the East and allowed them to lay both physical and sexual claim to the bodies of
Orientals at home and abroad.

During the 1950s and 1960s, the concept of Oriental inassimilability began to give
way to the assimilation-oriented Model Minority myth—that is, the belief
that Asian/Americans have achieved the American Dream through hard
work and passive obedience. After World War II and the Korean War, movies like
Flower Drum Song (1961) evolved their plots around less threatening, passive versions of
Asian/American characters who happily shed their backwards ancestral culture in order
to embrace the American lifestyle. However, as Gina Marchetti argues, “Hollywood used
Asians, Asian Americans, and Pacific Islanders as signifiers of racial otherness to avoid
the far more immediate racial tensions between blacks and whites or the ambivalent
mixture of guilt and enduring hatred toward Native American and Hispanics” (1993, p.
6). For one, the media’s obsession with the model minority arose within the political
context of the Civil Rights era (Lee 1999; Suzuki 1989). Images of effeminate Asian
men and submissive Asian women were used to counter images of violent
and vociferous African Americans and feminists and to demonstrate that
familial stability, social mobility, and ethnic assimilation could be achieved
without militant social activism. Thus, the Asian American model minority
became the symbolic antithesis of militant Civil Rights activists and feminist
groups.
Nonetheless, focus on the assimilability of Asian Americans as “honorary
whites” did not exempt them from the whims of racial antagonism and
continued to co-exist with the image of Asian Americans as “forever
foreigners” (Tuan 1998). For instance, America’s bitter experiences during the
prolonged Vietnam War simultaneously revived cultural images of Asians as villains and
“gooks.” Countless war movies repeatedly invoked images of the faceless, merciless and
destructive Viet Cong instigating unmentionable travesties against brave, White U.S.
soldiers. In the 1970s and 1980s, American society, once again threatened by surging
economic development in Japan, projected its fears through the cultural resurrection of
sinister Fu Manchu-like villains in movies such as Blade Runner (1982) or Rising Sun
(1993). The massive influx of Asian immigrants in the post-1965 era has only helped to
sustain the identification of Asian/Americans with mystical beings from the Orient.
Compared to African Americans whose activists had been vigilant enough to protest
racist movies like Birth of the Nation (1915), Asian/Americans were considered to be
politically acquiescent and indifferent to misrepresentations in popular culture—a view
that seemed to justify Hollywood’s all-too-familiar messages of anti-miscegenation and
White superiority.

39
Throughout the evolution of American Orientalism, the notion of the Orient as the
culturally-inferior Other has also converged with the concept of women as
the gender-inferior Other. Orientalist romanticism in the West synchronized White
men’s heterosexual desire for (Oriental) women and for Eastern territories through the
feminization of the Orient (Kang 1993; Lowe 1991). American Orientalism in many
ways depended on the masculine, superior image of White men juxtaposed
with the emasculation of Asian/American men. By portraying
Asian/American men as sexually excessive or asexually feminine, such
cultural themes reaffirmed Orientals’ deviance from “normal” heterosexual
gender norms implicit in White middle-class families (Espiritu 1997; Lee 1999).

40
 Sub-Groups
Cambodian, Laotian, and Vietnamese American student studies
show that the model minority myth is false
Pang et al 17 (Valerie Ooka Pang, professor at SDSU, “Academic Needs and Family
Factors in the Education of Southeast Asian American Students: Dismantling the Model
Minority Myth”, 2017
http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1154&context=jsaaea, DOA:
7/1/17)//AK
The “model minority” is a stereotype that serves as an obstacle to Asian
American groups such as Cambodian American, Laotian American, and
Vietnamese American students who are not receiving equality in education.
The findings of this study demonstrate that there are Asian American
students who like some African American students have problems with reading and
math in school. The performance of Cambodian American, Laotian American, and
Vietnamese American students is heavily influenced by their socioeconomic status.
Students who are participants in the school lunch program perform significantly lower
than students who are not members of the school lunch program. In addition, it is
important to note that students whose parents have more educational experiences do
better in math and reading on the CAT/6 assessment.
This study looked at almost a million students from the state of California
who were in the seventh grade in 2003–2008. The findings of this study
show the existence of a large achievement gap between Whites and African
Americans, Cambodian Americans, and Laotian Americans in reading and math.
Whites compared to African Americans do significantly better in both math and reading
with high effect sizes. In addition, whites also perform significantly higher than
Cambodian American and Laotian students in math and reading, with sizable effect
sizes. Though there was a significant difference found between whites and Vietnamese in
reading, the effect size was minimal. There was also a significant difference found
between Vietnamese American students and their White peers in math where
Vietnamese had a higher mean score. The effect size was fairly strong.
Parent education levels among the groups significantly influenced the achievement of all ethnic/racial groups in both reading and math. The researchers in this
study believe that school lunch status and parent education levels are highly correlated and therefore demonstrate strong interactions. In addition, both ethnicity
and school lunch status, and ethnicity and parent education levels showed interactions. In the United States, income and ethnicity are aspects of society that are
highly correlated and shown to make major differences in the achievement of students (Obradović, Long, Cutulli, Chan, Hinz, Heistad, & Matsen, 2009). Students
who are members of low-income score lower than learners who are members of high-income families. There is more risk that these students do not have as many
opportunities as students whose parents have higher levels of education and income.

Conclusion

The study shows the academic needs for reading and math among students of color from African American, Cambodian American, Laotian American, and
Vietnamese American families. Intervention is needed for these students in the area of reading. Students of color scored significantly lower than Whites on the
reading assessment. There has been much research that has indicated that AAPIs and other students of color need programs that address vocabulary development,

Many Southeast Asian

writing, and comprehension skills (Kiang & Kaplan, 1994; Pang, 1990; Pang, Han, & Pang, 2011; Suzuki, 2002).

American students may be English language learners or from second generation families
where their parents do not speak Standard English at home; parents may speak a
heritage language (Portes & Rumbaut, 2001; Rumbaut, 1995). Though many children
may not speak the heritage language and understand what is spoken, they may not have
the language modeling needed to develop high-level vocabulary in English. The children also may
have more trouble learning how to write because they have not had the opportunity to read print and digital materials if their families have limited financial
resources. Writing is difficult for many students because it is a complex process. Students need a strong command of English and have developed high level

41
language skills. Students must be able to think logically and produce a clear argument. We highly recommend that schools develop writing intervention programs
for these students to teach them how to effectively communicate in writing.

This study also demonstrated that contrary to the “model minority” myth,
Cambodian American and Laotian American students performed
significantly lower in math than their White American peers. This again
demonstrates the need for schools to provide intervention programs in math for
Southeast Asian students along with their African American counterparts. This is
probably one of the most serious findings because the stereotype of the
nerdy, math and science AAPI student is pervasive within this country.
Many teachers do not believe that Asian American students are in need of
assistance in mathematics because of this powerful myth.
In summary, not all Southeast Asian American students perform on the same
level. There are differences. In this study, Vietnamese American students attained
significantly higher levels of achievement in both reading and math than their
Cambodian American and Laotian American peers. Looking forward, research that
examines differences in gender, generation in the United States, and when student
families arrived in the United States may be fruitful areas of investigation. These
characteristics may be valuable in explaining the differences between the academic
achievement of Vietnamese Americans, Cambodian Americans, and Laotian Americans.
There is a great diversity among Southeast Asians and more study is needed.
Finding larger numbers of Southeast Asian Americans could bring to light important elements about the diversity within the community. Though this study
examined the performance of three Southeast Asian American communities, the population also includes individuals with ancestry from the Philippines, Thailand,
Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. If the achievement of additional Cambodian American and Laotian American students could be located, similar disaggregate
analyses could be performed. Though this study did not have enough students to create two separate groups, Cambodian American and Laotian American students
come from distinctly different countries and cultures.

School personnel should also consider providing a parent liaison to assist Cambodian, Laotian, and Vietnamese parents. Even if parents do not speak English well,
they can still volunteer in the school. For example, parents may put up bulletin boards, collect library books, and copy materials for teachers. Their efforts help
teachers and parents as active members of the school community will learn about what goes on in schools. Parents who would like to participate in schools can
contribute to their children’s education. Also some parents may want to attend evening Open Houses or PTA meetings. However, if they do not have transportation
to the school, some principals have provided buses to pick up and take home parents who live in the neighborhood. This is another way to encourage parent
involvement in school affairs.

Cambodian American, Laotian American, African American, and

Vietnamese American students need academic interventions in both reading
and math. Equal educational opportunity is not being provided to many of these
students. The achievement gap between these groups and whites still exists and the
“model minority” myth is a major reason for the lack of educational
opportunities and interventions needed.

The model minority myth has been particularly harmful for

Hmong Americans – racialization causes them to be whitened as
model minorities despite low achievement and blackened when
they protest these standards
Lee et al 17 (STACEY LEE, professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies
and faculty affiliate in Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison,
“The Model Minority Maze: Hmong Americans Working Within and Around Racial
Discourses”, 2017

42
http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1153&context=jsaaea, DOA:
7/1/17)//AK
**edited for ableist language
Hmong people, often referred to as Miao or Meo in Asia, are an ethnic group that
originated from China and Southeast Asia. During the Second Indochina War
(Vietnam War) and the Secret War in Laos, Hmong people in Laos were recruited as
guerilla fighters to support American troops against the Communist-backed North
Vietnamese Army (NVA) and Pathet Lao forces (Cha, 2010; Quincy, 2012; Vang, 2008).
After the United States pulled out of Vietnam in 1975, Hmong people became
targets for ethnic and political persecution (Vang, 2008). As a result of their
involvement with the U.S. military, Hmong people were forced to flee from
Laos to Thailand, the United States, and other European countries as refugees. After
initial resettlement across the United States, many Hmong people engaged in secondary
migration to California and several Midwestern states in order to maintain kinship ties
and co-ethnic networks, build social and cultural capital, increase economic
opportunities, and gain access to different and better educational opportunities (Chan,
1991; Office of Refugee Resettlement, 1984; Vang, 2008). Hmong Americans have
experienced economic and academic challenges since their resettlement in
the United States in the mid-1970s.
Race has been a central organizing principle in the United States since the formation of
the nation, and research on immigrants and refugees reveals that the process of
racialization is central to becoming American (Abu El-Haj, 2015; Lee, 2005; Olsen,
1997). The dominant discourse on race centers on the White and Black
dichotomy that associates Whites with desirable and positive characteristics and Blacks
with undesirable and negative characteristics (Feagin, 2000). Scholarship on Asian
Americans has shown that the two dominant racial discourses surrounding Asian
Americans are the image of Asians as “perpetual foreigners” and the image of Asian
Americans as “model minorities” (Fong, 2008; Lee, 2014; Okihiro, 1994).
According to the “perpetual foreigner” stereotype, Asian Americans are continuously
positioned as outsiders based on binaries of profound cultural differences: Eastern
versus Western, preliterate versus modern. As noted previously, the model minority
stereotype suggests that Asian Americans have achieved widespread
academic and economic success through hard work and adherence to
traditional Asian cultural norms. While there has been a lot of attention to the
academic and economic achievements associated with the model minority image, it is
important to point out that the stereotype also includes significant behavioral
characteristics—hard work, self-sufficiency, obedience, respect, compliance, etc.
(Petersen, 1966). Like other Asian Americans, Hmong Americans are rejected
for their “foreignness” through the discourse of cultural differences, yet
they are accepted as “honorary Whites” when they perform model minority
achievements and behavior (Tuan, 1998). These racial discourses shape
(mis)understandings of Hmong Americans in educational spaces. The educational
experiences, particularly the causes of educational inequity among Hmong Americans,
are often understood to be the result of cultural clashes or cultural differences between
Hmong culture and mainstream U.S. culture (Donnelly, 1994; Rumbaut & Ima, 1988;
Sherman, 1988). Within the cultural clash discourse, Hmong culture is depicted as

43
homogenous, fixed, savage and primitive in comparison to modern Western
culture (DePouw, 2012; Ngo, 2008). Hones (2002), for example, argues that due to
cultural differences and limited English proficiency, parents “don’t know what to expect
from American schools, how to be involved, or what questions to ask regarding the
schooling their children are receiving” (p. 46). Similarly, Lee and Green (2008) attribute
Hmong American students’ poor academic achievement to parents not being educated
and not keeping track of their children’s whereabouts. Xiong and Huang (2011) argue
that students’ low motivation level for education accounts for delinquent behaviors. As
these examples demonstrate, the cultural clash discourse defaults to an individualist
argument that blames parents and individuals for poor academic achievements and high
truancy rates (Lee, 2015; Xiong et al., 2008). In other words, an exclusive focus on
cultural differences overlooks systematic inequities (Lee, 2001).
Binary assumptions regarding Asian versus mainstream American culture and deficit perspectives on languages other than English have been identified with
English as a Second Language (ESL) programs that promote English monolingualism (Xiong & Xiong, 2011). While ESL programs do provide resources for
newcomers and English learners, Xiong and Zhou’s (2006) study point out that Hmong Americans are tracked into ESL based on the assumption that Hmong
Americans need ESL programming simply because Hmong is spoken in the home. Importantly, research demonstrates that placement in ESL classes tracks
students into lower academic classes that limit academic success (Callahan, 2005; Xiong & Zhou, 2006).

As Asian Americans, the Hmong American community is also judged against

the standards of the model minority stereotype. The scholarship on Hmong
Americans and U.S. Census data on Hmong Americans reveal that Hmong students
often struggle to achieve the levels of economic and academic achievement
associated with the model minority stereotype (Ngo, 2006; Ngo & Lee, 2007). Given
the Black and White discourse of race in the United States, the academic and economic
struggles experienced by Hmong Americans and other Southeast Asians lead to the
ideologically blackening of these communities (DePouw, 2012; Lee, 2005; Ong, 1999).
Lee’s (2005) study of Hmong Americans at University Heights School (UHS) reveals the
ways that race and racism frame the educational experiences of Hmong Americans. In
particular, Lee discovered that Hmong Americans at UHS who aspired to high
academic achievement and reflected “traditional” Hmong values were
viewed [thought of positively] by their teachers. In contrast to the
“traditional” students, many of the self-identified “Americanized” students
questioned the value of education and adopted hip-hop styles of clothing
and language associated with African American youth culture. As a result of
the way the “Americanized” students performed their identities they were viewed
negatively by their teachers. Most significantly, these “Americanized” students were
compared to African American students or ideologically blackened within the school and
thus excluded from opportunities.
Adding to Lee (2005), DePouw (2012) argues that colonialism and racism are
embedded in the process of Hmong racialization based on the Black/White
binary. Beyond statistical performances of the model minority and being
ideologically blackened, DePouw’s (2006, 2012) discussion of Black/White binary
suggests that the process of Hmong racialization is also tied to behavioral
performances. Despite Hmong Americans' academic and economic
struggles, Hmong Americans are still expected to behaviorally perform a
non-complaining citizenship. When Hmong American students help
institutions recruit “diversity,” promote cultural events, and graduate from
their programs despite academic struggles, Hmong Americans successfully
performed the behavioral aspects of the model minority. On the contrary,

44
Hmong Americans are blackened when they engage in student activism,
demand curriculum inclusivity in schools, and request for meaningful
inclusion in campus decision-making process. In the performance of the
model minority, Hmong Americans achieve honorary whiteness. When they
engage in resistance, Hmong Americans become blackened. This process of
racialization systematically silences and polices Hmong Americans to
perform the model minority.

Hmong Americans are consequently rendered invisible, stuck

within the model minority myth – critical consciousness key
Lee et al 17 (STACEY LEE, professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies
and faculty affiliate in Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison,
“The Model Minority Maze: Hmong Americans Working Within and Around Racial
Discourses”, 2017
http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1153&context=jsaaea, DOA:
7/1/17)//AK
Our research shows that Hmong people still struggle to be seen after over
thirty-five years in the United States. Whether cast as model minorities or as
“failed” and underachieving Asian Americans, the complex experiences of
Hmong Americans are invisible. Quantitative data on Hmong American students in
one school district in Dane County, Wisconsin suggests that the academic needs of
Hmong American students are going largely unaddressed. Our middle-class and low-
income participants are equally concerned about the invisibility of the
Hmong American community and both groups recognize the role that the
model minority stereotype plays in making the community invisible. In fact,
their respective responses to the model minority stereotype are directly tied to their
responses to invisibility. Although both our middle-class and our low-income
participants are invested in advocating for the Hmong American communities, they take
different approaches that reflect their respective class positions.
For middle-class participants, the dilemma appears to be about how to make visible the
concerns facing Hmong American students without contributing to a deficit discourse. In
other words, they want to draw attention to the academic challenges facing Hmong
American students and build on assumptions regarding the good behavior of Hmong
American students. As such, their response appears to be a partial challenge to
the model minority stereotype. Their ambivalence regarding the model minority
stereotype suggests that they recognize that being cast as model minorities is a form of
relative racial privilege (Cheng, 2013). Their reluctance to directly challenge the
stereotype, however, suggests that they may also recognize that despite their relative
success that they are still constrained by the racial discourses controlled by the dominant
group (i.e., Whites). Finally, it is important to point out that our middle-class Hmong
American participants appear to be crafting a strategy for advocacy that involves framing
the concerns of the Hmong American community as largely distinct and separate from
concerns facing other communities of color. Here, they are implicitly drawing on a

45
discourse that Asians are neither Black nor White (Ancheta, 2003; Okihiro, 1994; Wu,
2002).
In contrast, our low-income Hmong American participants are highly critical
of the model minority stereotype. Their critique of the model minority
stereotype is based on a larger critique of White supremacy and a
commitment to cross-racial coalition building with Black communities. The
differences between the ways our middle-class and our low-income participants make
sense of and respond to the model minority stereotype point to the complex and
important ways that race and class intersect in the lives of Hmong Americans in the
United States. (Ng, Lee & Pak, 2007). Regardless of social class background, however,
the experiences of our participants illustrate that Hmong Americans cannot escape
racialization, including racial stereotypes. Our research also demonstrates
that the model minority stereotype may be a form of relative racial privilege,
but it also contributes to the invisibility of Hmong American and other
Southeast Asian students (Lee, 2005, 2009; Museus, 2009; Wing, 2007).
While most of the educational scholarship on the model minority stereotype has focused
on issues of achievement, our research contributes to the scholarship that has pointed to
the role of behavior in being cast as a model minority (Bascara, 2006; Osajima, 1988;
Wu, 2003). Not insignificantly, “good” behavior is defined as obedience towards and
compliance with the dominant norms and rules. Indeed, our research suggests that even
in the absence of high academic achievement, Southeast Asian American
students continue to be labeled as model minorities as long as the
behavioral component is being performed. Future research should focus more
attention on how Asian American students’ behavior shapes ideas regarding the model
minority stereotype. Finally, our research demonstrates that the model minority
stereotype continues to shape Asian American experiences and identities in
the 21st century, which highlights the fact that critically conscious educational
research on the impact of the stereotype remains relevant and crucial.

46
 Capitalism/Colonialism
The model minority myth is not just a tool for racialization but
also for the capitalist order – images of a passive, Asian
workforce are hegemonic devices of control
Lam 15 (KEVIN LAM, Assistant Professor of Urban and Diversity Education at Drake
University, “Theories of Racism, Asian American Identities, and a Materialist Critical
Pedagogy”, http://www.jceps.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/13-1-5.pdf, DOA:
7/7/17)//AK
According to Omatsu (1994), the widespread acceptance of the model minority
thesis was not just a result of the growing number of Asians in the U.S. or
the increasing attention from mainstream institutions, but in fact, coincided
with the rise of the New Right and the corporate offensive on the poor (p. 63).
Omatsu correctly notes that the model minority myth has been critiqued politically, but
not ideologically. It is critical that we do not leave out this important dimension. I would
also like to stress a materialist dimension in my critique of the myth for Asian American
subjects.
It is fundamental to understand the myth in the context of material conditions in U.S.
society at different historical junctures. The racialization of Asian Americans has
much to do with the economic and political imperatives of the U.S. with the
Asian country of origin. Asian Americans as “obedient,” “docile,” and
“apolitical” bodies are also used to perpetuate and reproduce certain
colonial relationships in the domestic sphere. In particular, the neo-conservative
movements of the early 1980s played an important role in redefining the language of
civil rights and creating a “moral vision” of capitalism. It clearly constituted a
campaign to “restore” trust in capitalism and those values associated with
the rhetoric of “free enterprise.” It was a return to a “celebration of values, an
emphasis on hard work and self-reliance, a respect for authority, and an attack on
prevailing civil rights thinking associated with the African American community”
(Omatsu, 1994, p. 63). Asian Americans, in this instance, were used to
symbolize the resurrection of capitalist values. The images of hard-working
Asian American petit bourgeois class and immigrant merchants laboring in
our inner-cities and over-achieving students excelling in the classrooms
reinforce the long-held meritocratic belief that if you work hard and do not
complain, the system will reward you regardless of ethnicity or class
location.
Describing Asian Americans as “model minority” continues to obfuscate the diverse and
complex experiences of Asians in the U.S. Instead of recognizing difference, Asian
Americans are lumped into a “race.” By “painting” Asian Americans as a
homogeneous group, the model minority myth “erases ethnic, cultural, social-class,
gender, language, sexual, generational, achievement, and other differences (Lee, 1996, p.
6). The imposition of categorical labeling on a “race” suggests that all Asians are
“successful” in the face of racism, in the classrooms, at the office, restaurant, cleaner,
liquor store, or doughnut shop. In any case, the myth denies the rates of poverty,

47
illiteracy, and high dropout rates in Asian American communities,
especially from Southeast Asian American students (U.S. Commission on Civil
Rights, 1992). Situating Asian American experiences in relation to political economy,
migration, diaspora, and critical pedagogical approaches (Freire, 1970/2001; McLaren,
2007; Darder, 2012) help us begin to comprehend the complex nature of this racialized
population.
There are ideological and material implications to which we must tend. The “model
minority” myth as a hegemonic device tells us that we need to engage in more
substantive analyses of the racialization of Asian Americans (and other populations) and
challenge the presupposition of “race” as a commonsense notion. Gramsci’s notion of
hegemony is a concept referring to a particular form of dominance in which the ruling
class legitimates its position and secures the acceptance, if not outright support, of those
below them (Hoare & Smith, 1971). In this instance, Asian Americans have “consented”
to their label as the “model minority.” This is not to suggest that there is no resistance or
agency. In fact, Asian American scholars and activists have critiqued this stereotype from
its inception. Regardless, the myth has great adhesive value, for it still plays a prominent
role in our thinking and analysis of and about Asians in the U.S.
The minority model stereotype as a hegemonic device maintains the
dominance of elites in a racialized hierarchy by diverting attention away
from racialized inequality and by “setting standards for how minorities
should behave” (Lee, 1996, p. 6). Asian Americans as the “model minority” captured
the U.S. imagination when the U.S. News and World Report published an article in 1966
“lauding” Chinese Americans as a “success” in the midst political upheavals. As the
article states, “At a time when it is being proposed that hundreds of billions be spent to
uplift Negroes and other minorities, the nation’s 300,000 Chinese Americans are
moving ahead on their own-with no help from anyone (“Success Story,” p. 73). The
article also presented Chinese Americans as “good citizens” and Chinatowns across the
U.S. as “safe” places. Asian American writer and activist Frank Chin (1990) articulates in
his writings the notion of a “racist love” for Asian Americans, and paradoxically, a “racist
hate” for African Americans and other marginalized groups in their relationship to the
nation-state. Chin’s naming gives context to the positionality of racialized populations in
U.S. society and how they have always been strategically used against each other.

The myth upholds sustains colonial structures – it posits Asian

Americans as good workers that others should follow to paper
over structural issues in neoliberal schooling
Patel 14 (RUSHIKA V. PATEL, Director at the University of Michigan - Flint,
“NEOLIBERAL GLOBALIZATION, RACISM AND EDUCATION: THE MODEL
MINORITY THESIS IN EDUCATION POLICY”, 2014
https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/49804/Rushika_Patel.pdf?sequ
ence=1, DOA: 7/17/17)//AK
The model minority discourse is the prevailing ideological assertion about
Asians in the US. The idea is that we Asians have pulled ourselves up by our
bootstraps in an ultimately meritocratic US educational system. The question
posed then, is that if so many disadvantaged Asians can succeed, including Asian women

48
and the working class, why can’t African Americans, Chicanos/Latinos, Indigenous
people, and other non-white racialized groups? (Prashad, 2000). The model minority
discourse posits that Asians, conceived as a uniform cultural unit, have
evolved a superior cultural value, familial, and belief system as well as a superior
work ethic that allows us to achieve social and economic advancement
despite any obstacles we face. In this dissertation I will explain how the model minority
discourse, as historically applicable to Asians in US education, plays a primary role in
processes of racial and gendered exploitation within a transnational network of
neoliberal capitalist regimes and the retreat of the social welfare state.
Research on Asians in US education specifically wrestles with one fundamental question:
why do Asian2 students consistently outperform other students? This question brings
with it two false assumptions. The first is that Asians are ‘outperforming’ other students.
The second is that measurements of educational outcomes and performance are
objective, neutral, and superior indicators of educational achievement. The model
minority discourse contradictorily attempts to homogenize differences
among Asians on the one hand, while on the other hand celebrating cultural
distinctiveness and identity. By representing Asians as a model minority
compared to other minority groups, the discourse indirectly legitimizes the
superiority of whiteness and neocolonial systems of educational
measurements and qualifications, while further positioning non-white
racialized communities, including whites who are racialized as not quite
white, for the racialized exploitation of labor (Wray, 2006). Further, the model
minority discourse uses a politics of identity that is strongly rooted in social
psychological traditions to explain educational disparities. This completely
sidelines the central role of neoliberal globalization on education and its
concomitant restructuring of social, political and economic life as well as
the subjective positions that are available to individuals within the
neoliberal paradigm for development (Pedroni, 2006).

49
 Fracturing
The model minority myth is self-contradictory, creates self-
fulfilling prophecies, and pits minority groups against each
other
Wu 2 (FRANK H. WU, law professor at UC Hastings, "The Model Minority: Asian
American 'Success' as a Race Relations Failure" from Yellow: Race in America Beyond
Black and White, 2002
http://www.faculty.umb.edu/lawrence_blum/courses/CCT627_10/readings/wu_model
_minority.pdf, DOA: 7/15/17)//AK
The use of the model minority myth becomes self-contradictory in its
vacillation between color blindness and color consciousness. In 1988 at
Vanderbilt University, for example, a white student disc jockey was censured for
interviewing a Ku Klux Klan member on his radio show.6l In his defense, the neophyte
broadcaster argued that African Americans complained too much about
discrimination and abused their racial status. He said they should imitate Asian
Americans, because "Asians have a subtle approach. They go out into the
community and prove themselves as individuals." His reasoning is at odds
with itself. He extols Asian Americans on a group basis but also insists that
he admires them for their individual behavior. By recognizing Asian Americans
as a group and comparing them to African Americans, he thwarts their very attempt to
distinguish themselves as individuals. Even if the praise of the model minority
myth were genuine and not feigned in a particular instance, it cannot help but
send a message about African Americans. African Americans know full well what
the model minority myth is all about. In Spike Lee's movie Do The Rig/a,Thing, a chorus
of elderly African American men sitting in lawn chairs both respect and envy the Asian
American shopkeeper across the street. The corner men, Sweet Dick Willie, Coconut Sid,
and ML, "have no steady employment, nothing they can speak of" except that "they do,
however, have the gift of gab" and with the aid of a bottle "they get philosophical."
Watching the Asian American toil in his business, ML frets, "Either dem Koreans are
geniuses or we Blacks are dumb."64 Were we to accept the usefulness of
assessing racial groups against each other and forgo qualms about the
morality of such an exercise, the model minority myth evaluation of Asian
Americans vis-a.-vis African Americans has been executed so poorly as to be
worthless. Asian Americans and African Americans should not be compared
in racial terms, but the model minority myth forces the task. Acknowledging
that African Americans in general have endured worse discrimination does
not diminish the serious racial discrimination that Asian Americans as a
group have faced. The adulation of Asian Americans considers only Asian Americans.
Asian Americans are not as inspiring if the unique history and distinctive present
circumstances of African Americans are fairly weighed-without supposing that African
Americans have been so traumatized that they are damaged beyond redemption.65 We
make what social psychologists call the "fundamental attribution error." We
believe that other people behave as they do because of their personalities (of course, we
recognize that our own failings are influenced by factors beyond our control). We

50
discount the importance of their role, the context, and external constraints. In a racial
context, we believe that if Asian Americans receive good grades, it is because
they are disposed to be studious; that if African Americans receive bad
grades, it is because they prefer to be ignorant; and so forth. Yet in the
educational context, studies consistently show how powerful self-fulfilling
prophecies can be. For example, telling teachers that some students-who have been
randomly selected will make dramatic improvements in their IQ actually tends to
produce those effects. We also do not recognize the effect of an observer. Children do not
behave in the same manner when parents are present as when they are absent, nor do
parents behave in the same manner when children are present as when they are absent.
We do not even realize that, even with the few proven correlations between behaviors
and traits, they are extraordinarily weak connections. 66

51
 Violence
The model minority myth creates violence against Asian
Americans – it justifies incomprehensible racial attacks
Wu 2 (FRANK H. WU, law professor at UC Hastings, "The Model Minority: Asian
American 'Success' as a Race Relations Failure" from Yellow: Race in America Beyond
Black and White, 2002
http://www.faculty.umb.edu/lawrence_blum/courses/CCT627_10/readings/wu_model
_minority.pdf, DOA: 7/15/17)//AK
The model minority myth does more than cover up racial discrimination; it
instigates racial discrimination as retribution. The hyperbole about Asian
American affluence can lead to jealousy on the part of non-Asian Americans,
who may suspect that Asian Americans are too comfortable or who are
convinced by Treires and others telling them Asian American gains are their losses.
Through the justification of the myth, the humiliation of Asian Americans or
even physical attacks directed against Asian Americans become
compensation or retaliation.
Such an attack occurred in Detroit during the recession of 1982, becoming a
defining moment for Asian Americans. Two white autoworkers used a
baseball bat to beat to death Vincent Chin, a twenty-seven-year-old Chinese
American engineer celebrating his upcoming wedding. The father and
stepson blamed Chin for their being out of work. Using racial epithets and
obscenities such as "chink" and "nip" and "fucker" in exchanging words with
him at a strip joint where all of them had been hanging out, they hunted him down
after they'd left the bar. When they caught him, one held Chin down and the other swung
a Louisville Slugger at his head repeatedly. The clubbing broke his skull and left
him mortally wounded. As punishment for their crime, the two received
probation and were fined $3,780 apiece. As the Emmy-winning documentary,
Who Killed Vincent Chin? recounted, Asian Americans in the heartland were
shocked at the attack and the mild sentence. Even middle-class Asian American
professionals who had a steadfast belief in conformity were shaken up.
The tensions of that time in the Motor City are hard to recall, but the context made
race central to everything about the Chin case. Congressman John Dingell-
whose father, also a member of the House of Representatives, had called for the
internment of Japanese Americans during World War II- gave an angry speech in
Congress blaming "little yellow men" for the economic woes of American
automakers, whose products were facing unprecedented competition from
efficient and economical Japanese imports.77 Driving such an imported car
meant taking a chance. Local car dealers held raffles for the honor of taking a baseball
bat to a Toyota to bash it to pieces. Owners of Hondas reported to unsympathetic police
departments that their vehicles had been "keyed" in parking lots. Vandals would take a
key and run it along the length of the fender, gouging the steel so that costly refinishing
would be required. People who supported the "Buy America" campaign wore T-
shirts with an atomic bomb mushroom cloud over the slogan, "Made with
Pride in America-Tested in Japan."

52
"Little yellow men" is clear enough. Chin was singled out because of his
race; his only connection to Japan was racial, and it was tenuous at that. His
white friends were not similarly targeted, nor were his white killers penalized severely.
African Americans who have committed such transgressions have received the death
penalty at disproportionate rates. The judge believed that the sentence matched
the people, not their actions. Although Asian Americans over time made Chin a
martyr, we, too, were initially disinclined to broach the issue of race. White observers
tended to disbelieve that his murder had been a hate crime; this was before the concept
of a "hate crime" had become recognized. Helen Zia, an activist who later wrote Asian
American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People,78 recalls that a union
official even informed her that if Chin had been Japanese in ancestry, the
brutal killing would have been comprehensible. Thus, to some non-Asian
observers, the Chin case was appalling only to the extent that it involved mistaken
targeting. Like Michigan residents of all racial backgrounds many Asian Americans were employed by and depended on the "Big Four": Ford, General
Motors, Chrysler, and AMC. Unlike foreign Asians, the Asian Americans in the Detroit area helped domestic automakers, and, like other Americans, they were
harmed by foreign competition. The earliest community meetings among Asian Americans in response to the Chin case were held at Ford world headquarters.

In Stockton, California, in 1989, Patrick Purdy dressed in military fatigues,

took a semiautomatic rifle, went to the elementary school he had once
attended, and opened fire on the playground, spraying bullets that hit three
dozen victims. Five of the students were fatally wounded. Although he had
purposefully aimed at a crowd of predominantly Southeast Asian refugee
children, local authorities and national media dismissed immediately any
racial factor even though Purdy had expressed both his animus toward
Asians and his fear that the country would be taken over by immigrants.

53
Alt

54
 Conscientization
Internalized oppression causes Asian Americans to not critically
challenge the squo – breaking from this allows them to disrupt
this silence
Osajima ND (KEITH OSAJIMA, Professor and Director of the Race and Ethnic
Studies Program at the University of Redlands, “Internalized Oppression and the Culture
of Silence: Rethinking the Stereotype of the Quiet Asian-American Student”,
http://nypolisci.org/files/PDF%20FILES/Chapter%20IV_%209_%20internalized%20o
ppression%20and%20the%20culture%20of%20silence%20FEC2.pdf, DOA:
7/7/17)//AK
**edited for gendered, ableist language
The impact of internalized oppression on the attitudes, feelings, and actions
of the oppressed is profound. First, it hinders one’s ability to think and reflect.
People have difficulty objectifying and perceiving the structural conditions that
shape and reshape their lives. Second, oppressed people come to believe
that the source of their problems lies, not in the relations within society, but
in themselves, in their own inadequacies and inabilities. At the same time
that they feel themselves to be inferior, they see those in the dominant group to be
superior. Third, the feelings of inferiority, of uncertainty about one’s identity, lead
oppressed people to believe that the solution to their problem is to become
like or be accepted by those in the dominant group. As Freire says, “At a certain
point in their existential experience the oppressed feel an irresistible attraction
toward the oppressor and his their way of life. Sharing this way of life
becomes an overpowering aspiration. In their alienation, the oppressed
want at any cost to resemble the oppressor, to imitate him them, to follow him
them.”
On the flip side of this desire to be like the oppressor is a degree of self-hatred,
a belief that who they are is not good enough, smart enough, beautiful enough,
strong enough. The overall impact of internalized oppression is that the
oppressed become resigned to their situation and do not look [think]
critically at it. They feel powerless to change it, and fearful of taking the
risks to make change. In this way, the status quo is not questioned nor
challenged. Freire writes: “As long as the oppressed remain unaware of the
causes of their conditions, they fatalistically accept their exploitation.
Further, they are apt to react in a passive and alienated manner when confronted with
the necessity to struggle for their freedom and self-affirmation.”
They live in what Freire calls a “culture of silence,” where the oppressed
believe and feel that they do not have a voice in determining the conditions
of their world. The important outcome is that internalized oppression
makes it difficult for the oppressed to take action to transform their world.
It serves to perpetuate oppression, without necessarily resorting to overt

55
forms of violence and force. The oppressed become unwitting participants
in their own oppression.
ON THE OPPRESSION AND INTERNALIZED OPPRESSION OF ASIAN-AMERICAN STUDENTS How can the general discussion on internalized oppression be
applied to the experiences of Asian American students? I think it is useful to view the behavior of Asian American students as manifestations of two ways that they
have experienced and internalized oppression as students and as members of a racial minority group.

First, as students in this society, Asian-Americans participate in an educational

system that is often structured in an oppressive manner; a system that does
not consistently encourage the development of people’s natural intelligence, and
joy for learning, but instead forces students to comply to a form of instruction
that is severely limiting and disempowering. Again, Freire provides a useful
analytical framework. He argues that much of formal schooling follows the “banking
system” of instruction. In this mode, teachers are seen as the legitimate holders of
knowledge. It is their role and their power to disseminate that knowledge, mainly
through lectures, and “deposit” it into the empty receptacle—the student. Students are
primarily passive recipients. Their role is to listen, and to replay the information in the
form that it was given. In this mode, students are rarely encouraged to think, question,
analyze, or synthesize.
A
One of the ways that the structures of this banking system are held in place is through clearly-defined images of what it means to be a “good student.”

good student is quiet, obedient, unquestioning, prompt, and attentive. They do well on tests designed by the
teacher. They can give the right answer. In return for this behavior, “good” students are rewarded with good grades, praise from teachers, honor rolls, and college

A “bad student”, who is loud, rebellious, defies and questions authority,

entrance.

skips class or comes in late, and doesn’t do the homework, is stigmatized and
isolated from the rest.
For many of us, these messages are so strong that they become a natural,
internalized indicator of our self-worth. We come to believe that our abilities and
our intelligence are best measured by our grades, or by the opinions and praise we
receive from our teachers. This creates a tremendous pull to adhere to the image
of a “good” student. At the same time those rewards become a means to control
students, for in the process we lose sight of the fact that we are smart enough to
think and figure many things out ourselves, and we also lose sight of our
critical, reflective abilities that allow us to question the ways that schooling
may be oppressive.
I think for Asian students, the pull to be “good” students becomes even stronger when we
place that student oppression in the context of the way Asians have responded to racial
oppression in this country. For many Asian-Americans, silence and education lies
at the heart of how we have dealt with racial oppression. As Colin Watanabe
and Ben Tong argued in the early 1970’s, Asian-Americans often adopted a
passive, quiet, conforming behavior as a means to survive racial hostilities.
It was deemed safer not to rock the boat than to call attention to oneself and risk
oppression. Many of us learned these lessons from our parents as we were growing
up, internalized them, and came to believe that we too might be in danger if
we speak out, or call attention to ourselves. Thus, even when the situation
may not be threatening, the internalized oppression often makes us feel that
we need to be quiet in order to be safe.

56
Conscientization is portable and can translate to material action
Osajima 7 (KEITH OSAJIMA, Professor and Director of the Race and Ethnic Studies
Program at the University of Redlands, “Replenishing the Ranks: Raising Critical
Consciousness Among Asian Americans”, 2/2017
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/213033#bio, DOA: 7/4/17)//AK
Given the profound change that conscientization had effected in the lives of
respondents, it is not surprising that many of them wanted to be in positions where
they could help to create for others the educational experiences that were so
meaningful to them. They took leadership positions in student
organizations; they helped to organize and put on educational programs;
they worked in community organizations; they pursued graduate studies;
and they took positions in student affairs to work closely with new cohorts
of Asian American students. Pamela Kim, who wanted to become a professor of
Asian American studies, best expresses their desire: One of the reasons why I want to be
a professor of Asian American Studies is because I want to help these kids who are going
through the same things that I did. I want to help them figure things out, to help educate
them about these issues because I had no idea about them while I was growing up. I
could see what these kids are all going through in college, and it helps to be where you
can pop those bubbles that they have around themselves.37
As they go about the task of trying to replenish the ranks by raising critical
consciousness amongst new groups of Asians, a number of lessons learned
from their collective experiences may provide helpful guides. From the
interviews, we can identify critical elements that contribute to
conscientization. While these elements do not guarantee that conscientization will
follow, incorporating them into one's practice may enhance the possibility that efforts
will be successful.
First, respondents described the importance of obtaining information and
conceptual tools that helped them to cognitively understand how their lives
and the lives of others are shaped by larger historical and social-structural
[End Page 74] forces. An Asian American Studies course on a college campus was the
most common source of relevant information, but as we have seen exposure can take
place in many venues. People can learn from reading on their own, from student groups,
and from multimedia sources.
Second, breaking through isolation and interrupting the tendency to explain
their life experiences solely in individual terms reflects a social dimension
to conscientization. Contact and conversation with other Asian Americans was
often the most effective way to help respondents make connections between
their lives, the experiences of others, and information on the Asian
American experience. Connections to key mentors and peers provided a safe
environment in which to think and question further.
Third, respondents described important affective aspects of conscientization. When
respondents talked about important moments in their education or key
social support that made a difference, invariably they referred to how they
felt about these experiences. They were angered by the realization that their

57
schooling had not taught them about racism or the Asian American
experience. They felt inspired by the experiences of other Asian Americans
who struggled to overcome harsh conditions. They were excited to learn
more.
Fourth, respondents' commitment to Asian American issues was deepened
when they transformed understanding into action. Involvement in protests,
organizing, programming, teaching, and research gave respondents a
chance to extend their knowledge and learn from efforts to make change.
Finally, the study indicates that conscientization occurs when the discrete
elements work in combination. No respondent described his or her conscientization in terms of a single element. It was not a
purely intellectual or cognitive experience in a classroom, absent of social or affective elements. Nor was it a purely social or affective experience without
information and conceptual tools. Instead, respondents described multifaceted and interrelated experiences that reinforced each other, inspiring further thinking
and commitment to action.

For activists seeking to raise the critical consciousness of Asian Americans, the study's findings carry implications for practice. For some, combining elements in a
single venue, like an introductory course or a [End Page 75] training program, will be the main focus. In these cases, the study suggests that the course or program
should offer substantive content and concepts to lay the cognitive foundation needed for people to see themselves in relation to the world. It also should include
social activities to break isolation and opportunities for people to share stories with each other in a non-judgmental, safe environment.

On a broader level, the study suggests that there is a value in and need to offer a
range of experiences across campus and community to increase the likelihood
that students will combine, on their own, elements that contribute to
conscientization. Pressure to have one person, course, or program that single-
handedly transforms students' lives subsides when we recognize that the interrelated
process of conscientization benefits from contributions across diverse segments of the
community.
The importance of combining influences also casts new light on how different parts of
the campus and community can work collaboratively to raise critical consciousness.
Breaking from binary constructions that often pit academic programs against student life
activities, or divide academe from community, the study shows how conscientization
arises when people are exposed to and combine lessons learned from a
variety of sources. This process implies that increased appreciation for the work done
across campus and community, along with greater coordination of influences, is an
important dimension of conscientization. [End Page 76]

58
 Polyculturalism
Marxism and SetCol fail – polyculturalism uniquely
deconstructs racial barriers and prevents assimilation
Sulistio 7 (WIBOWO SULISTIO, campaign leader for various social movements,
“Polyculturalism: One World, One People, United in Diversity”, 9/1/7
http://nooventures.edublogs.org/2007-09-21-polyculturalism-one-world-one-people-
united-in-diversity/, DOA: 6/29/17)//AK
**edited for ableist language
Thus, the idea that there are ‘pure’ nations or ‘pure’ cultures to which we owe
our allegiance is a problem. It is not the solution to imperialism, nor is it a
healthy reaction to racism. But neither is the idea, held by some, often
Marxists, that all culture is ‘bourgeois’, and that after capitalism, cultural
differences will disappear and we’ll have good socialist culture. That is just the
flip side of national purity–this time it’s “socialist purity”, forced assimilation, which is
equally a nightmare for most people.
We now turn to a proposed solution that at first seems perfect, but can actually worsen
the problem at hand. Multiculturalism What is multiculturalism? Multiculturalism is
a proposed solution to racism. The analogy people often use is that
multiculturalism is a ‘salad bowl’ compared to the ‘melting pot’ of
assimilation. In a ‘salad bowl’, vegetables retain their own characteristics,
their unique identity. In a ‘melting pot’, they do not. It is an approach that says every
culture has its own space and its own resources. It implies that cultures are fixed,
discrete entities that exist side by side — a kind of zoological approach to culture.
What is good about multiculturalism, and useful to retain, is the recognition
that cultures, modes of communication and expression and group
identification other than the dominant one are worthy and deserve a certain
autonomy. In a multicultural framework, all cultures are respected and indeed, all
cultures are equal. Groups are free to express their cultural preferences and dominant
groups are to have special respect for minority groups. It also encourages some humility
in encounters with other cultures: it suggests you suspend judgment and try to
understand people on their own terms, to try to understand the cultural baggage that you
are bringing to the situation when you do so. Tolerance and diversity are the order of the
day.
However, such a view [belief] of multiculturalism not only obscures power
relations, but often reifies race and gender differences. Thus, it is not a
complete solution to racism. Indeed, if a system of power is still in place,
multicultural ideals of respect, tolerance, and diversity can then be used as
arguments against mobilization aimed at identifying or redressing power
imbalances (as divisive or intolerant). Ideas of fairness and equality developed as an
antidote to bigotry become arguments against affirmative action.
Moreover, what is lacking in multiculturalism is a notion of what happens within these
‘cultures’ and between them. If we have a multicultural society where every

59
‘culture’ gets to ‘govern itself’, does this mean that ‘culture’ can be used to
justify sexism, or homophobia, or capitalism? What rules govern the
hundreds of interactions across cultures that will happen every day? How
will conflicts between people of different cultures be solved?
Multiculturalism doesn’t provide the right tools to understand these
problems or to deal with them.
Here, we come to the limitations of the definition of racism we employed beforehand, which are related to the limitations of multiculturalism. Both are highlighted
by the proposed solutions to the problem. If we are against power differentials between groups, do we eliminate the differentials but preserve the groups? Or do we
eliminate the groups? If we want to preserve the groups neatly and separately, we have a separatist solution. If we want to eliminate the groups, we are after
assimilation. Instead of the purity of separate cultures that don’t interact, or the purity of assimilating all into one culture, I would suggest polyculturalism.
Polyculturalism, Autonomy and Citizenship

Polyculturalism is a concept which asserts that all of the world’s cultures are
inter-related. It is thus opposed to the concept of multiculturalism. A
polyculturalist sees [thinks of] the world constituted by the interchange of
cultural forms, while multiculturalism (in most incarnations) sees [thinks
of] the world as already constituted by different (and discrete) cultures.
Multiculturalism focuses too much on ‘cultures’ having autonomy, resources, and so on,
while polycultural outlook puts the focus on people and on whole societies.
Polyculturalism recognizes that a single person holds multiple identities,
multiple allegiances and affinities. We speak different cultural ‘languages’, and we
can change. And to go from the individual to the society, polyculturalism recognizes that
cultures overlap, they change, they evolve over time. They cross-fertilize, and all
societies are in a permanent state of flux, with all kinds of often very creative exchanges
and interactions happening. Rather than see Hong Kong business exclusively as a hybrid
of an ancient Confucianism and a modern capitalism, as in the work of Tu-Wei Ming, we
might take heed of the Jesuit role in the making of early modern “Confucianism”, as in
the fine work of Lionel Jensen. Rather than treat Indian students at Yale as aliens, we
might consider that the university received seed money from Elihu Yale, one time
governor of Madras, whose wealth came from the expropriated labor of Indian peasants.
History looks quite different from a polycultural lens.
So if a multiculturalist says that a society should allow all cultures to develop
autonomously, a polyculturalist says fine. But the “wider society” has a culture of its own,
and that culture is one that everyone would have to relate to. It is in this shared space
where people of different cultures interact that the basis for solidarity can be built. So in
addition to having cultural autonomy, it would be important that the shared space be
representative of everyone, and be based on things that are universal (and I believe there
are some universals) — a space that is open for people to bring their cultures to the mix.
So there are opportunities for communication, exchange, debate, that are made to be
open for people to explain and learn about differences. So, no one is going to live sealed
off in a single culture. There is just no such thing–and there probably never was.
So, polyculturalism also wants to respect and protect all cultures, but without
losing sight of their entwinement and mutual responsibilities. It wants
autonomy, but also mutuality or even solidarity. It wants to escape the bias away
from entwinement that characterizes multiculturalism so it seeks a kind of
integration without assimilation and with retention of identity — actually,
multiple identities — and without making land central.

60
Winona LaDuke said: “On a worldwide scale, it is said there are 5,000 nations of
indigenous people; 500,000,000 indigenous people in the world; 5,000 nations. These
nations have existed for thousands of years as nations. We share under international law
the recognition as nations in that we have common language, common territory,
governing institutions, economic institutions and history, all indicators under
international law of nations of people. Yet the reality is that on an international scale
most decisions are not made by nations and people. Instead they are made by states.
There are about 170 states that are members of the United Nations. Most of those states
have existed only since World War II.” From the polyculturalism perspective, the
proposed solution of the indigenous is not to create thousands of additional states, but
instead that everyone on the continent must change their conception of land, economics,
culture.
Taiaiake Alfred, in his book “Peace, Power, Righteousness: an Indigenous Manifesto”,
argues not for indigenous ‘sovereignity’, but that the whole concept of sovereignty is
flawed: not only for indigenous but for everyone. If idea of sovereignty
means that one state, acting in the name of one nation, claims priority over
some piece of territory, it is analogous to ideas of a “pure culture” to which a
person should have primary loyalty. The antidote to sovereignty and to
purity of culture is the same: to recognize multiple allegiances, overlapping
uses and rights without rigid boundaries.
Likewise if a nationalist says that you should owe your primary loyalty and
cultural affiliation to the nation, a polyculturalist says no, there are many
loyalties and affiliations, that overlap and merge and change.
Thus we turn to the next logical step after polyculturalism.
Autonomy
In March 2001, the Zapatistas marched from Chiapas to Mexico City on what they called
the “march of indigenous dignity”. One of their demands was the passage of a “law on
indigenous rights and culture”. What they wanted was not the creation of a new,
separate, indigenous nation state. In that sense, it was not exactly a ‘nationalist’ demand.
Instead, their proposed law featured territorial autonomy within Mexico. So, in their
proposal, one could be indigenous and Mexican. Or, put another way, one could be
Mexican without having one’s indigenous identity erased or devalued. A Mexico where
“without losing what makes each individual different, unity is maintained, and, with it,
the possibility of advancing by mutual agreement. A country where difference is
recognized and respected. Where being and thinking differently is no reason for going to
jail, for being persecuted, or for dying.”
The proposal is to make room for an autonomous, indigenous Mexico–part of the
multicultural ideal, even part of what’s best in the nationalist aspiration–but also to
change the whole of Mexico, so that it includes the indigenous. It is integration without
assimilation, and it is autonomy without separation. That’s a good proposal for cultural
relations.
This is what polyculturalism is getting at.

61
Polyculturalism is a net better praxis than multiculturalism –
avoids ethnonationalism and static conceptions of race
Prashad 1 (VIJAY PRASHAD, professor of International Studies at Trinity College,
“Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural
Purity”, 2001 pages 64~69, DOA: 7/8/17)//AK
**edited for ableist language
Disenfranchised by white supremacy, many people of color lean on nar-row
nationalist frameworks to make claims upon the state. The most obvi-ous
strategy is to ask for resources based on authenticity (‘‘we need to be represented by
our own, or else we need money for our community’’). The demand is unimpeachable,
principally because it calls for a redress of past history. When the 2000 U.S. census allowed people to tick one
or more boxes for race, the NAACP and other civil rights organizations took umbrage. Hil- ary Shelton of the NAACP noted, ‘‘Census statistics are used for the
alloca- tion of programmatic dollars— everything from education and health care to transportation’’ and that the tabulation of race numbers allows for civil rights

Without the numbers of people of

groups to ‘‘most fully and consistently enforce our existing civil rights laws.’’118

color it is hard to argue against job discrimination or other such acts of

affirmative disenfranchisement. On college campuses, progressive faculty adopt the language of authenticity to argue for
more faculty of color and for a further diversification of the curric- ulum. The Asian American students need Asian American faculty members and Asian American

Race is used here in light of historically consid-ered categories that have

studies.

been the basis of racism in the past, and therefore that have functioned to
exclude certain people from political, economic, and social power. To gain
redress, race has to be quite central, since it was on the basis of race that
disenfranchisement took place. The strategy of redress, however, is limited by its
entrapment in the framework of bourgeois law. A person (or institution) has
to prove that an- other person (or institution) has done substantial harm to
himself or herself for the case to be taken seriously both before the court of law
and bourgeois public opinion. Harm to a community in the past provokes the
problem of remedy: Who should pay for which crimes, and who must collect the re-
demption? Angry white students sometimes say that they are tired of the implication that
they are culpable for the acts of their ancestors or of their race. The onus is placed on
those who have been historically oppressed to settle the problem of a remedy, and the
experience of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and of interned Japanese Americans
shows us that the standard for redress is posed rather high (an apparently
insurmountable problem for the reparations claim of descendants of enslaved Africans).
To counter the injudiciously high standards, many of us turn to questions of
cultural au-thenticity and of demography to make our case. On college
campuses, for instance, we ask for representation based on our numbers and on the need
to have cultural presence of certain groups based on these numbers. The lim-its of
multiculturalism—notably the assumption that culture is definable and
discrete—badger this strategy. The call for amends on the multicultur-alist
platform leads, in many cases, to a Hobbesian war of one against all among
the oppressed: the divide-and-rule strategy comes to pass. Besides,
demographically insignificant groups, such as Amerindians, do not have ac- cess to this
political strategy, and furthermore, the appeal often transforms the student into a
customer who makes a market-based demand that is quite opposed to the moral struggle
for social justice. The cry for cultural authen-ticity is a defensive gesture
against a recalcitrant, white supremacist set of institutions: we must

62
recognize it for what it is and seek more creative ways to transform the
structures from whom we seem to be simply asking for some spoils. This
brings me, finally, to the idea of the polycultural.119 In an article for ColorLines
Magazine in 1999, historian and cultural critic Robin Kelley dismissed the idea of the
purity of our bloodlines, finding the world of cul- tural purity and authenticity
equally unpleasant too. Kelley argued that ‘‘so- called ‘mixed-race’ children are not the
only ones with a claim to multiple heritages. All of us, and I mean ALL of us, are
the inheritors of European, African, Native American, and even Asian pasts,
even if we can’t exactly trace our bloodlines to all of these continents.’’120
Rejecting the posture of a ‘‘rac- ism with a distance,’’ Kelley argued that our various
cultures ‘‘have never been easily identifiable, secure in their boundaries, or
clear to all people who live in or outside our skin. We were multi-ethnic and
polycultural from the get-go.’’ The theory of the polycultural does not mean
that we reinvent hu- manism without ethnicity, but that we acknowledge
that our notion of cul-tural community should not be built inside the high
walls of parochialism and ethno-nationalism. The framework of
polyculturalism uncouples the notions of origins and authenticity from that
of culture. Culture is a process (that may sometimes be seen as an object) with no
identifiable origin. There- fore, no cultural actor can, in good faith, claim proprietary
interest in what is claimed to be his or her authentic culture. ‘‘All the culture to be had is
culture in the making,’’ notes anthropologist Gerd Baumann. ‘‘All cultural
differences are acts of differentiation, and all cultural identities are acts of cultural
identification.’’121 Kelley’s idea of polyculturalism draws from the idea of
polyrhythms— many different rhythms operating together to produce a
whole song, rather than different drummers doing their own thing. People and
cultures, from the outset, then, are seen to be at the confluence of multiple
heritages and ‘‘living cultures, not dead ones . . . [that] live in and through us
every- day, with almost no self-consciousness about hierarchy or meaning.’’
Even though people form what appear to be relatively discrete groups
(South Asians, African Americans, Latino Americans), most of us live with the
knowledge that the boundaries of our communities are fairly porous and
that we do not think of all those within our ‘‘group’’ as of a cohesive piece. We
forge group solidarity even, or especially, when we are thrown together by imputed
solidarities. Furthermore, multiculturalism tends toward a static view [notion]
of history, with cultures already forged and with people enjoined to respect
and tolerate each cultural world. Polyculturalism, on the other hand, offers a
dynamic view of history, mainly because it argues for cul- tural complexity.
The history of Garveyism is, in fact, illustrative of polyculturalism. The Garvey
movement has been the largest mobilizer of black people in the world. Despite the fact
that the Universal Negro Improvement Association restricted membership to those who
claimed African descent, Garvey was close to the Indian nationalist exile Lajpat
Rai (who again also courted Booker T. Washington), and he hired as the editor of Negro
World the Indian writer Hucheshwar G. Mugdal. The Negro World, under Mugdal,
opened it- self to the international struggles against white supremacy. In early 1922, the
paper published a letter from an Indian man, Ganesh Rao: I am one of those millions
that are being oppressed by the imperialistic English government. My interest, my
responsibility, my duty, has thus impelled me to study the tragic tales of other oppressed

63
peoples, e.g. the Negro, and his future. From my humble study so far I have confidently
felt that the UNIA is doing the real work for the uplift of the Negro, and the U stands for,
in word as in action—Universal . . . India is in her birth-throes; she soon shall be free.
Ethiopia, self conscious, is working for her indepen- dent and unhindered progress.
Peace shall not dawn on this world until Asia and Africa and their ancient peoples are
free and enjoy all human rights. Oppressed people of the world unite. Lose no
time!122 Mugdal simply continued an internationalist strain long evident in Garvey’s
biography. In New York Garvey took the counsel of the Indian liberal Hari- das T.
Muzumdar and his strong anticolonial rhetoric attracted a young Ho Chi Minh to his
Harlem meetings.123 This interchange, at a late stage, is a continuation of the
history of interaction between Africans and Asians across the Indian Ocean.
There can be no history of Gujarati peoples, as we saw in the previous chapter, without
consideration of Zanzibar, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Muscat. A polyculturalist sees
[thinks of] the world constituted by the interchange of cultural forms, while
multiculturalism (in most incarna-tions) sees [thinks of] the world as
already constituted by different (and discrete) cul- tures that we can place
into categories and study with respect (and thereby retain 1950s relativism
and pluralism in a new guise). What would history look like from a polycultural
perspective? Well, rather than see Hong Kong business exclusively as a hybrid of an
ancient Confucianism and a modern capitalism, as in the work of Tu Wei-Ming, we
might take heed of the Jesuit role in the making of early modern ‘‘Confucianism,’’ as in
the fine work of Lionel Jensen.124 Rather than evince surprise at English education in
India, we might recognize, along with Gauri Viswanathan and Kumkum Sangari, that
‘‘English’’ as a discipline emerges in the East India Company colony of lower Bengal.125
Rather than treat Indian students at Yale as aliens, we might consider that
the university received seed money from Elihu Yale, onetime governor of
Madras, whose wealth came from the expropriated labor of In- dian
peasants.126 These examples are not random, for they enable us to indulge
in one of the traits of the polycultural approach—to snub the pretensions of
Europe and the United States, which arrogates certain parts of world knowledge to
itself, thereby placing its ideas at the top of a cultural hierarchy leaving the rest of us to
fend offboth the legacy of colonial knowledge and violence with our meager economic
and cultural resources. Several historians of Europe these days recognize the interlocking
heritage of the Eurasian landmass, as well as the substantial links between Africa and
Europe.127 The interchange between the continents produced what is today
so cavalierly called ‘‘Western rationality,’’ ‘‘Western science,’’ and ‘‘Western
liberalism’’: this erases the in- fluence of those Arab and Jewish scholars who
extended Aristotle’s insights, those Indian wizards who made mathematics
possible with their discovery of the zero, those Iroquois whose experiments with
federalism helped frame some of the concepts for the U.S. Constitution.128 Instead of
laying claim to the complex heritage of these modern phenomena, chauvinists of color
ar- gue for such traditions as ‘‘Hindu Economics’’ and ‘‘Islamic Science,’’ as well as cede
the terrain of democracy to Europe.129 Polyculturalism refuses to allow the
‘‘West’’ to arrogate these combined and uneven developments of so many
sociocultural formations, since it scrupulously investigates the con-
nections that dynamically generate them. The polyculturalist outlook says to the
proponents of the color blind that their position is in a bad faith, since it acts to

64
perpetuate the racist status quo. To the primordialists it says that to deny internal
differentiation and intermixture of cultural forms may allow it to leverage
power over those whom it treats as part of its group, but it does not provide
an adequate agenda to dismantle the status quo kept in place by the color
blind. Instead, the posture of authenticity occludes its privilege. Antiracists
sometimes ar- gue that authenticity is one of the few avenues to make claims
on institu- tions. Polyculturalism offers some solace but implicit within it is the under-
standing that this defensiveness is a trap that is able only to garner crumbs from the
racist table—and these days few of them. Should the antiracists accept the idea of
authenticity to build a black studies or Asian American studies department (staffed
respectively by blacks and Asian Americans) or should we make wide claims on the
resources of the entire educational en- semble, to train people of color to be
mathematicians, geographers, philoso- phers, historians of France?130 In 1969, David
Hilliard, speaking to the stu- dents at San Francisco State College, enunciated the Black
Panther Party position against ‘‘an autonomous Black studies program that excludes
other individuals.’’ Hilliard understood the need to claim resources, but he was wary of
the claim for it being made on the grounds of exclusions and of a hidebound notion of
cultural autonomy. He said, We recognize nationalism because we know that our
struggle is one of national salvation. But this doesn’t hinder our struggle, to make
alliance with other people that’s moving in a common direction, but rather it strengthens
our struggle. Because it gives us more energy, it gives us a more powerful force to move
and to withstand the repression that’s being meted out against us.131 Within this
framework, concern for the obliteration of cultural forms is met not by an
encirclement of the false cultural wagons, but by the generous em- brace of
all the energy that is ready for a genuine antiracist struggle. Hilliard did not
argue against cultural nationalism simply on the expedient ground that the black
liberation struggle required allies for demographic strength. On the contrary, talk of
‘‘energy’’ seemed to indicate that the entry of all manner of antiracists would
qualitatively strengthen the movement, give it a kind of dynamism. Difference may yet be
valued, for, as legal scholar Leti Volpp holds, to retain an idea of cultural difference
(notably of forms of so- cial life) is not the same as to abdicate the right to
adjudicate between differ- ent practices in struggle.132 A broad antiracist
platform would not (like liberal multiculturalism) invest itself in the management of
difference, but it would (like a socialist polyculturalism) struggle to dismantle and
redistribute unequal resources and racist structures. Furthermore, polyculturalism,
as a political philoso-phy, does not see [think of] difference ‘‘as evidence of
some cognitive confusion or as a moral anomaly’’ (as liberal multiculturalism is
wont to do), but it sees [thinks of] those features of difference with which it
disagrees as ‘‘the expression of a morality you despise, that is, as what your
enemy (not the universal enemy) says.’’133 The advantage of this reaction is that it
explores the politics of various posi- tions which are then measured on the
basis of the ethico-political agenda forged in struggle (not as some universal,
ahistorical verities). For example, the liberal chauvinist may argue that immigrants
should assimilate into the U.S. core culture, taking for granted that there is such a thing
as a core in the first place. The word assimilate is used as a universal value, so that few of
us can reply that we don’t want to assimilate, we want to remain separate (‘‘Then why did
you come here?’’ is the response). If we reframe the problem not as assimilation but as

65
conformity, we have a political leg to stand upon (‘‘my being here is already assimilation,
but I refuse to conform to some of your mores’’).134 The answer to American ideology,
then, comes against a language of ‘‘skin,’’ but not in a color-blind fashion.
Polyculturalism does not posit an undifferentiated ‘‘human’’ who is
inherently equal as the ground for its cri- tique of the world, one that says
something like ‘‘we are all human after all,’’ but seems to offer only the
smallest palliatives against racist structures. In- stead it concentrates on the
project of creating our humanity. ‘‘Human’’ is an ‘‘unfinished product,’’ one
divided by social forces that must be overcome for ‘‘human’’ to be made
manifest.135 In the nineteenth century near Delhi, Akbar Illahabadi intoned that we
are born people, but with great difficulty we become human (aadmi tha, bari muskil se
insan hua). A polycultural hu- manism, for this tradition, is a ‘‘practical index’’ that sets
in motion the pro- cesses that might in time produce a humanity that is indeed in some
way equal.136

66
 STEM Narrative
Asian narratives in STEM can disrupt Whiteness and allow
interrogation of racialized social structures
McGee et al 16 (EBONY O. MCGEE, assistant professor at Vanderbilt University,
“The Burden of Being “Model”: Racialized Experiences of Asian STEM College Students”,
4/14/16
http://www.academia.edu/29264401/The_Burden_of_Being_Model_Racialized_Exper
iences_of_Asian_STEM_College_Students, DOA: 7/1/17)//AK
Success in the STEM disciplines in college does not render Asian students immune to
racial stereotyping in either subtle or overt ways. Al-though the model minority
stereotype origi-nated in the 1960s and was used to describe individuals from East Asia,
it has become a catchall for most Asian groups. The myth was manufactured in part to
challenge the African American civil rights struggle, in that the myth of a racial group of
color being passive, hard-working, and successful upholds the merito-cratic rhetoric that
if one just works hard enough, keeps quiet, and obeys laws (legal and ideological), one
will succeed (Hartlep, 2013a).This myth disguises economic inequality and
educational disparities, dismisses mental health and other psychological
issues, and homoge-nizes Asian people into a perceived problem-free
population (Hartlep, 2013b; Suzuki, 2002).The assumption is that Asian
students are the people of color to emulate, and are thus an acceptable
buffer between Whites and Blacks. However, Asian students still face the
chal-lenges and stereotypes associated with being non-White.

These Asian STEM students’ narratives dis-rupt and deemphasize

Whiteness, which situates being model as being “almost White” or an
“honorary” White (C. J. Kim, 1999; Wu, 2002).As we challenge the traditional
narrative of being a high-achieving Asian STEM student in the United States,
we also suggest ways to sup-port the identities of this typecast population. The
demeaning stereotype of the MMM continues to marginalize Asian students
who have been identified as talented in STEM while mak-ing non-STEM Asian
students invisible or anomalous. However, our research supports the conclusion
that the stereotype of high expecta-tions and a proclivity toward STEM can create
systematic stress in students from being pigeon-holed into STEM disciplines and having
the stressful and unrealistic expectation of always being perfect. Thus, this research can
help col-leges gain a critical understanding of the MMM and provide
programs that address Asian STEM students’ lived experiences, including the
insid-ious role of racial microaggressions.
The majority of Asian students in this study challenge the stereotype, even as some of them found some benefit in its assumptions. At times the model minority
characterization can be a source of motivation (both adaptive and mal-adaptive), driving these students to live up to expectations of high achievement in STEM
sub-jects. Some students said they appreciated the credit the MMM gives them in academic cir-cles, even as it hampers some of their social interactions. Hartlep
(2013b) argues that some Asian Americans actively resist or at least are not complicit in perpetuating the model minor-ity stereotype. Recent books such as Top of
the Class: How Asian Parents Raise High Achiev-ers—and How You Can Too (Abboud & Kim,2005) and Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (Chua, 2011) reinforce
the MMM with parallel narratives, providing little room for counterna-rratives. In order to combat the stereotype, Asians need to critique those peers who are
reifying false stereotypes of Asians in U.S. higher education.

Other students reflected on the many ways the stereotype is more damaging
than helpful, and how it discounts much of their life experi-ence. Some
students describe their momentum into STEM fields as a result of being

67
channeled into majors and professions on the basis of a stereotype. These
students had developed a del-icate balance of their myriad other identities and their
STEM identity (Thakore et al., 2014).Many participants reflected that they had been missing out

on important aspects of life because others perceived them as incapable of

achieving in fields not associated with Asians’ “natural” abilities. They
discussed others’ willingness to place them in stereotypical categories and
ig-nore their unique qualities, interests, and desires as individuals. Asian
student communities should be given additional opportunities to challenge
rather than passively accept hateful and discriminatory stereotypes
imposed on them by their college STEM experiences. Insti-tutional leaders
should recognize that stereotyp-ing, and pigeonholing Asian students results in
an assault to their identities. Institutional leaders could serve as the catalyst for change by makin bold initiatives that reset the
college discourse about race and diversity and by moving forward in robust discussions about race, with less ste-reotyping, less generalization, and more appre-
ciation.

Most students in this study identified nega-tive aspects of the model minority stereotype,
which suggests that a racialized social structure that discriminates against
non-Whites has influ-enced their lives. The stereotype implies that Asian
students perform in STEM with relative ease, which ignores the sometimes
hostile cli-mate of racial discrimination and bias that these students endure.
This is especially relevant for South Asian students, who occupy a unique
racialized niche. For the Asian students in this study and for those they represent,
such limiting stereotypes can cause psychological pain that is ignored or
perceived as unjustified. The emo-tionally troubling experiences resulting from
imposition of the MMM are hard to dispute because they are often challenging to
identify and difficult to discuss. For some students, in-ternalization of the MMM or a
lack of strategies to counter it can lead to depression and other unhealthy outcomes (B.
S. K. Kim, 2007; Shea& Yeh, 2008).

68
Framework

69
 2NC
Our counter-interpretation is _______________________.

The role of the ballot is to endorse the team that best opens up
pedagogical spaces for more individuals.

The role of the judge is to be an anti-oppressive educator. Asian

Americans have been silenced countless times, forcing them to
internalize their struggles at the cost of their identities. You can
be part of our fight and open up this space so we can critically
examine our identities.
Osajima ND (KEITH OSAJIMA, Professor and Director of the Race and Ethnic
Studies Program at the University of Redlands, “Internalized Oppression and the Culture
of Silence: Rethinking the Stereotype of the Quiet Asian-American Student”,
http://nypolisci.org/files/PDF%20FILES/Chapter%20IV_%209_%20internalized%20o
ppression%20and%20the%20culture%20of%20silence%20FEC2.pdf, DOA:
7/7/17)//AK
**edited for ableist language
As teachers of Asian students, how can understanding the nature of
internalized oppression help us in practice? I think the value of the
perspective is that it locates an important impetus of individual behavior in
the oppressive structures and practices in society. It is not the unchanging
nature or static culture of Asian American students that accounts for their quiet
behavior. Rather, it is the internalizing of student and racial oppression that
makes Asian students feel that the best way to get through is to be quiet or
makes them believe that they can be nothing other than the quiet student.
The key implication here is that Asian students should not be blamed nor chastised if
they exhibit this behavior. It is not their fault that societal structures and
oppression conveyed messages that this is the way to behave.
As teachers, the notion of internalized oppression should help us to see
[think about] how the pressures of being an Asian-American student can
often be limiting and constraining. Our job is to create a learning
environment that contradicts those pressures and constraints; that
encourages and makes it safe for Asian students to take some risks and to
critically examine their lives in relation to societal oppressions.
I tried to structure these contradictions into the class I just completed. 1) To move away from the banking system, I tried to limit the amount of time I lectured. In a
2-hour meeting, I never talked for more than half the period. I also tried to lecture in a way that elicited as much interactive thinking as possible. 2) To encourage
each student to take some risks and think about issues, I had them regularly do “dyads” where I would have students pair off and each take a few minutes to think,
for themselves, about a question or issue that was being presented. These dyads usually preceded the general discussion, and helped students to prepare and
organize their thoughts before presenting them in the larger group. 3) I made it clear that each student’s contribution would be listened to respectfully, and that
each student would get a chance to participate. To accomplish this, I made sure that no one, including myself, could “trash,” ridicule, or harshly criticize another
student’s viewpoint. I also did not allow any one or two students to dominate discussions. I made it clear to them that I wanted to give other people a chance to talk
before they got another chance.

70
All of these techniques seemed to work well. Students participated in discussions,
and began to grapple with questions that they had rarely been asked before.
The experience provided me with hope that the educational process can do
more than reproduce a compliant work force, but can be a vehicle for
liberation. I invite you to join the struggle.

(against Policy Affs) Political Control DA – their claim that

institutional debates should be the sole focus reifies the same
logic used by White elites to silence us as a group of secondary
importance. We never get a voice unless we conform to the
system and what the model minority myth says we are, papering
over structural problems like racism
Yu 6 (TIANLONG YU, assistant professor in the Department of Educational
Leadership, School of Education, at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville,
“Challenging the Politics of the “Model Minority” Stereotype: A Case for Educational
Equality”, 2006 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/10665680600932333,
DOA: 6/26/17)//AK
The only group who benefits from such stereotyping is undoubtedly white
elites. It was Whites who created and spread the model minority stereotype. Being the
dominant social group, Whites realize the importance of control: Power flows
not only from the control of economic production and governmental
functioning but also, and even more importantly, from the control of the
superstructure of a society, namely its culture, or value system. Gramsci
(Hoare & Smith, 1971) informs us, a ruling class forms and maintains its hegemony and
political power by creating cultural and political consensuses through political parties,
the media, schools, and other voluntary associations. That is exactly what the powerful
Whites have been doing in America. They have attempted to make the model
minority concept, along with the more widely accepted meritocracy theory, one of
the cultural consensuses that serve their hegemonic control. They
overemphasize the seemingly commonsensical belief in hard work and
education, and pick one particular racial group—Asians in this case, as the
role model for its practice. Justifying their ideologies of morality, character,
and values, they create official definitions of human conduct= and establish
normative frameworks for others to follow. The “model’’ as illustrated by
Asians is a particular behavioral model, which emphasizes certain
individual character traits: hard work, frugality, strong family, and high regard for
education which are hailed as the path to individual success and personal salvation.
These values are distinctly nonresistant and conservative as they emphasize
passivity and conformity to established social order while devaluing critical
thinking and active participation in social change. The message is clear:
Societal problems such as racism and inequalities are insignificant; what
really matters is the display of virtuous personal character traits and
behaviors. Therefore, political struggle is not necessary; individual

71
perfection is the answer. Asian Americans make it, so can everyone; as long
as you fit into “the system.’’
Thus, the model minority narrative reflects the sociopolitical interests of the
dominant white group and serves as a tool of their ideological control. As a
device of political control, the stereotype silences the voices of Asian
Americans, other racial minorities, and even disadvantaged Whites (J. Lee,
1998). Through silencing, the stereotype marginalizes these minority groups’ places in
society, and meanwhile, it maintains the dominance of powerful Whites in the racial
hierarchy. The model minority stereotype is used to deflect people’s attention
away from social and structural problems, such as racism and class division,
and to perpetuate a highly unequal social system. This political function of the
model minority stereotype is well reflected in education.

72
 Anti-Oppressive Education
Oppression in education is what prevents students from
critically challenging the squo – the judge can make this space
one where we can challenge it
Kumashiro 2K (KEVIN K. KUMASHIRO, former Dean of the School of Education
at the University of San Francisco, “Toward a Theory of Anti-Oppressive Education”,
2000
http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1170593.pdf?refreqid=excelsior:9ba063bd396fb6de37
33ce3467885eb1, DOA: 7/14/17)//AK
Some researchers have turned to poststructuralism to help formulate conceptualizations
of oppression that center around notions of discourse and citation (Britzman, Santiago-
Valles, Jimenez-Munoz, & Lamash, 1993; Butler, 1997; Davies, 1989; Kumashiro, 1999a,
1999b; McKay & Wong, 1996; Walkerdine, 1990). Earlier, I mentioned Walkerdine's
(1990) study on nursery classrooms. Her analysis suggests that oppression and harm
originate in (or are produced by) not merely the actions and intentions of individuals or
in the imperatives of social structures and ideologies. Rather, oppression originates in
discourse, and, in particular, in the citing of particular discourses, which frame how
people think, feel, act, and interact. In other words, oppression is the citing of
harmful discourses and the repetition of harmful histories.
To understand this notion of citation, consider the "model minority" stereo- type
of Asian American students, that they are all smart and hardworking "aca-demic
superstars" (Lee, 1996). As I discussed above, researchers have explained the
harmfulness of stereotypes by turning to individual prejudice and discrimi-
nation (Miller, 1995) and to a White-dominated racial order that claims to be
meritocratic and non-racist by pointing to the "success" of "model" minorities (Osajima,
1988). They have argued that the power of a stereotype to harm either exists
inherently in the stereotype (so that an individual using a stereotype is like
an individual wielding a weapon) or derives from social structures and
ideologies (so that using a stereotype is like assisting in the maintenance of
the structures/ideologies). They have also argued that this stereotype has
tangible consequences, that it may cause differential treatment of students
by teachers and even psychological harm (Crystal, 1989; Lee, 1996; Osajima,
1993). These theories imply that in order to challenge oppression educators
should prohibit the use of the stereotype-as well as the voicing of hateful,
harmful speech (Butler, 1997)-or strategize ways to "resist," "challenge," or
dismantle an al- ready-existing structure (through critical pedagogy).
Post-structuralism offers a different view. As I have argued elsewhere (Kumashiro,
1999b), iterating a stereotype can cause harm because every such iteration cites past
iterations of that stereotype. In other words, the power of a stereotype to harm derives
from a particular history of how that stereotype has been used and a particular
community of people who have used that stereotype and who constitute that history
(Butler, 1997). If someone was to tell me that I should be a better student because I am
Asian American, I would likely con-clude that the speaker is making racist assumptions

73
about me because I have heard other people talk about and generalize about Asian
Americans in similar ways before. The speaker's words would have racist meaning to me
because I would read them as constituting part of the history of how the model-minority
stereotype has been and is being used. Furthermore, if I believed that the speaker was
judging me based on this stereotype and I valued the speaker's judgment, the speaker's
words would likely produce in me feelings of failure or abnormal-ity. I should note that
the model-minority stereotype plays out not only in individual thoughts and
interpersonal interactions, but also in institutional prac-tices. Affirmative action
offices and policies, or advisory commissions on race, for example, that fail
to address the racism experienced by Asian Americans or otherwise ignore
Asian Americans, are doing so because they are buying into the model-
minority stereotype. In these institutions and ideologies the associa-tion between
"Asianness" and "success" (or, the process in which Asianness cites success) gets
repeated over and over.

74
 Narratives Good
Narratives are good – they allow us to challenge rational and
objective modes of knowledge, which are net worse for
accessibility and subjectivity
Chang 93 (ROBERT S. CHANG, Professor of Law and Executive Director of the Fred
T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality, “Toward an Asian American Legal
Scholarship: Critical Race Theory, Post-Structuralism, and Narrative Space”, 1993, pages
1277~1281, DOA: 7/10/17)//AK
When the real question about objectivity is asked, further questions are
revealed. What counts as knowledge? What counts as evidence? One use of
outsider stories is to demonstrate the inequities of the present situation.
The disempowered find ourselves in a peculiar position in that the evidence
we would use to prove our oppression consists of the very stories that are
now disbelieved or excluded because they are only stories. In this way, rules
of evidence silence us. In order to get our stories into evidence, we need to
broaden or change the very meaning of evidence.'73 In order to make the case
for narrative, I turn now to epistemology because our theory of knowledge largely
determines what counts as knowledge and what counts as evidence.
C. Epistemological Strategies There seem to be two ways to argue the case for personal
narra-tive.174 The first takes place within the rational/empirical mode.175 In this
mode, an argument will be convincing if it meets certain standards of
"impartiality, objectivity, evidential confirmation, comprehensiveness or completeness,
and explanatory power.176 Personal narrative would be offered to challenge the
current formulation of objectivity, but not the notion of objectivity itself.177 In this
sense, personal narrative reveals bias in supposed objectivity and then
reconstructs it to include previously excluded perspectives. Some strands of
feminist theory and critical race theory have this as their goal and rely to some extent on
a version of standpoint epistemology to legitimize the use of stories of oppression. I will
examine these arguments in Part II.C.1.
The second, more radical approach challenges the rational/empiri-cal mode
by challenging the very notion of objectivity and the accessibil-ity of
knowledge. This more radical critique is often characterized as post-modem or post-
structural. 78 In challenging the rational/empirical mode, this more radical critique also
challenges the standpoint episte-mologies that might support the use of personal
narrative. Since all standpoints are equally validated (or invalidated), there is
no longer any compelling reason to privilege any viewpoint. To state it
differently, my personal narrative is as relevant as your personal narrative, and since
both of them are equally relevant, they are equally irrelevant.179 I will
examine how post-structural theory has responded to this challenge in Part II.C.2, but I
turn now to the rational/empirical mode.
L Arguing in the Rational/Empirical Mode

75
Mainstream academic legal discourse begins from the premise that
objective knowledge exists and is accessible. I call this the rational/empirical
position. My own theoretical bias tells me that this is a false premise, but I start here
to show how the case for personal narrative would appear within the context of
mainstream academic discourse.180
Different disempowered groups have developed a similar methodology that tries to
reveal bias in supposedly neutral standards. Feminist legal scholars ask "[t]he woman
question." They ask "about the gender implications of a social practice or rule: have
women been left out of consideration? If so, in what way; how might that omission be
cor-rected? What difference would it make to do so?"181 Race scholars ask the race
question, and so on. The use of the objective voice is one of the social practices that has
come under the scrutiny of those asking this type of question.
The objective voice is obtained by abstracting from the individual in order to
universalize the perspective of the author so that not only does the author, as an
abstracted entity, speak as Everyman Everyperson, the author also presumes to
speak for everyone. A favorite device is the use of what one commentator calls the
"constitutive we."182 This "constitutive we" appears in the work of many
philosophical and legal theorists. For example, John Rawls uses "we" in a subtle way that
includes "us" as fellow inquirers into the questions he poses.183 But who does he think
"we" is?184
Too often, the individual used as the model for the universal is a man, and
more specifically, a white man. Thus, one goal of personal narrative is to
discredit this "we." For example, I might use personal narrative to show
that the "we" is a lie because it does not include "me." The stories of
outsiders become important because they tell the story from different
perspectives, perspectives that may have been excluded when formulating
the objective, universal "we." It is important to remember that at this stage,
personal narrative is not being offered to replace what had previously been
thought of as objective: to impose my subjectivity upon everyone else only
repeats the sin.185 Rather, personal narrative is being offered to show that
objectivity may actually be a dis-guise for white male subjectivity, which
takes away the subjectivity of the disempowered.186

Our kritik of the debate space in and of itself is a praxis that we

engage in – that turns all their critical thinking offense and is
the only internal link to material change
Zompetti and Lain 5 (JOSEPH ZOMPETTI AND BRIAN LAIN, professor of
communication at Illinois State University and Associate Professor at UNT, “Kritiking as
Argumentative Praxis”, 2005 http://cornerstone.lib.mnsu.edu/speaker-
gavel/vol42/iss1/3/, DOA: 7/21/17)//AK

Our position is that the debate round is more than just a “game.” It is, rather, a
forum for advocacy. Even if the debate team does not (in “reality”) believe their

76
position, they nevertheless must take a position in the debate context. The debate
round becomes, if nothing else, a training ground for how to advocate a
position. Integral to this concept is the ability to think critically, which is
obtained by, among other things, intense research experience, anticipation of opposing
arguments, skills in cross-examination, mastery of reasoning by analysis and synthesis,
and the ability to take a position of advocacy on opposite sides of a proposition. In other
words, critical thinking is the ability to know how and when to ask questions. We view
this combination of advocacy with the ability to think critically as a coupling
of theory with action (advocacy). Simply put, kritiking occurs as a form of
praxis, or at least helps to frame praxis, in an argumentative format.

The ability to think critically should not be limited to a situation where X is

chosen for discussion, researched, and then debated. Instead, critical
thinking in debate can be (and is) expanded to ask questions about X: what
is it, how does it function, is it valuable, does it contribute to the good of
society? Arguments in the form of kritik ask such questions, among others. To this
end, the critical thinking skills in debate are polished to include factors otherwise
ignored. In fact, if we are going to emphasize the critical thinking skills that debate
fosters as a selling point to recruits, parents and administrators, then we should inquire
about how we can improve such skills. Ignoring critical factors and questions
about the nature of the topic, such as X, does not bid well for an activity that
stresses its ability to think critically.
Additionally, while most contemporary debates are absent of spectators, except typically
for final rounds which are attended by fellow debaters, the debate is still a public
event. Nothing precludes or forbids observations of NDT debates. Also, many debates
are videotaped or transcribed for classes, public officials and parents throughout the
country. Thus, academic debate is not decoupled from the non-debate world.
As such, academic debate is a forum for arguments meant to advance the skills and
education of its participants but also to influence others who do not debate. Oral
advocacy, then, becomes a serious enterprise in which “real” thoughts,
stereotypes, beliefs, and policies are affected. Furthermore, the debate
participants themselves, after years of debating, become conditioned to
their style of debating and ways of thinking. This educational process and
experience undoubtedly affects the way debaters think and act once they
graduate and enter society. Thus, as we have been arguing, kritiking can help
expand and intensify the quality of oral advocacy in contemporary academic
debate. It promotes a range of possibilities that can serve effective oral
advocacy. Additionally, because debate is a forum with multiple audiences
and with the potential to influence different social groups, kritiking can
have “real” consequences other than those typically encountered in a debate
round. In essence, then, by advocating that their positions are better, the participants
make value judgments. They take a position about an issue and make arguments about
that issue’s worthiness, especially as it is compared to competing issues. The debate
round becomes a forum whereby the merits of issues are articulated.
The debate round also allows feedback from the audience and judge(s). After the
debaters conclude their positions of advocacy, the effect of the round can be seen in post-

77
round critiques. Judges can explain why they were or were not persuaded from the policy
arguments presented in the debate. Of course, judges do not actually implement an
affirmative plan. However, judges may be (can be) persuaded — based upon
the debating — to take personal action, such as changed ways of thinking,
writing letters to NGOs or government leaders, and the adoption of certain
positions when they talk to friends or teach classes. Additionally, judge
comments after the round may influence the debaters in a similar fashion.
Of course, arguments presented in the debate have unlimited possibility in
influencing other audience members as well.
The debate round, therefore, can serve to persuade people about policy
implications that transcend the hypothetical issues of debate, such as fiat
and topicality. Substantive issues that affect the participants in an everyday fashion
can be (are) discussed. Debaters have often used these types of arguments to
persuade judges, such as “Judge, you have children, and I doubt that you
relish the thought of your kids growing up in a nuclear winter.” Such
arguments bring the often abstract nature of policy positions down-to-earth
and function as a particular type of persuasive technique. Kritiking
supplements this process by encouraging participants to adhere to critical
thinking once the debate round is over. In other words, a kritiking can
encourage the judge not only to vote a certain way because a hypothetical
policy may result in nuclear winter, but also, for example, to take personal
action against nuclear power or nuclear weapons. Debate’s nature of persuasion and
advocacy creates an atmosphere where debaters talk and judges listen. If compelled,
judges may reciprocate with their own thoughts and opinions after the last speech. In
any case, the debate round provides a forum, not only for intellectual
competition, but also social activism. It offers an opportunity for “real” people with
“real” problems to persuade others about “real-world” solutions.
In this way, the debate round can become a site for political struggle. Political concerns
that are germane to the policy being debated can be waged into the debate round.
Actual persuasion and personal transformation can occur if participants
remain open to how viewing debate arguments (i.e., kritiking) relates to
their non-debate lives. Kritiking, therefore, can be a form of social activism. Kritiking
opens a space for social activism in another way. Kritiking requires additional ways
of thinking and arguing, an openness for alternative perspectives, and new
methods of research. Just as “traditional” debate skills help debaters in
other areas of life both during and after their debate careers, skills in
kritiking also help participants in other areas. For example, the expanded
ways of thinking that kritiking instills helps people become better critical
thinkers and more sensitive to political concerns than do other debate skills.
Kritiking helps train participants to recognize certain ways of thinking that
typically entrench power relationships. As such, people who engage in
kritiking become more likely to engage in social activism. At the very least,
the critical skills that are intrinsic to kritiking encourage people to be active
socially and politically because such concerns are given primacy by the
questioning-assumptions paradigm.

78
 AT Cede the Political
The political is already ceded but activism is key to regain it –
critical analysis gives students the agency they need to become
visionaries of a better society
Giroux 7/13 (HENRY GIROUX, professor and one of the founding theorists of
critical pedagogy, “Rallying cry: Youth must stand up to defend democracy”, 7/13/17
https://theconversation.com/rallying-cry-youth-must-stand-up-to-defend-democracy-
81003, DOA: 7/14/17)//AK
**edited for ableist language
There’s no doubt that democracy is under siege in several countries, including the
United States, Turkey, the Philippines, India and Russia. Yet what’s often
overlooked [ignored] in analyses of the state of global democracy is the
importance of education. Education is necessary to respond to the formative
and often poisonous cultures that have given rise to the right-wing populism
that’s feeding authoritarian ideologies across the globe.
Under neo-liberal capitalism, education and the way that we teach our youth has
become central to politics. Our current system has encouraged a culture of self-
absorption, consumerism, privatization and commodification. Civic culture has been
badly undermined while any viable notion of shared citizenship has been replaced by
commodified and commercial relations. What this suggests is that important forms of
political and social domination are not only economic and structural, but
also intellectual and related to the way we learn and teach.
One of the great challenges facing those who believe in a real democracy, especially
academics and young people, is the need to reinvent the language of politics in
order to make clear that there is no substantive and inclusive democracy
without informed citizens.
Democracy demands questions It is imperative for academics to reclaim higher
education as a tool of democracy and to connect their work to broader social
issues. We must also assume the role of public intellectuals who understand
there’s no genuine democracy without a culture of questioning, self-
reflection and genuine critical power.

As well, it’s crucial to create conditions that expand those cultures and public
spheres in which individuals can bring their private troubles into a larger
system.
It’s time for academics to develop a culture of questioning that enables
young people and others to talk back to injustice. We need to make power
accountable and to embrace economic and social justice as part of the mission of higher
education. In other words, academics need to teach young people how to hold politicians
and authority accountable.

79
All generations face trials unique to their own times. The current generation of young
people is no different, though what this generation is experiencing may be
unprecedented. High on the list of trials is the precariousness of the time — a time in
which the security and foundations enjoyed by earlier generations have been largely
abandoned. Traditional social structures, long-term jobs, stable communities and
permanent bonds have withered in the face of globalization, disposability and the
scourge of unbridled consumerism.
Social contract shrinking This is a time when massive inequality plagues the planet.
Resources and power are largely controlled by a small financial elite. The social contract
is shrinking: war has become normalized, environmental protections are being
dismantled, fear has become the new national anthem, and more and more people,
especially young people, are being written out of democracy’s script.
Yet around world, the spirit of resistance on the part of young people is coming
alive once again as they reject the growing racism, Islamaphobia, militarism and
authoritarianism that is emerging all over the globe.
They shouldn’t be discouraged by the way the world looks at the present moment. Hope
should never be surrendered to the forces of cynicism and resignation.
Instead, youth must be visionary, brave, willing to make trouble and to think
dangerously. Ideas have consequences, and when they’re employed to
nurture and sustain a flourishing democracy in which people struggle for
justice together, history will be made.
Youth must reject measuring their lives simply in traditional terms of wealth, prestige,
status and the false comforts of gated communities and gated imaginations. They must
also refuse to live in a society in which consumerism, self-interest and violence function
as the only viable forms of political currency.
These goals are politically, ethically and morally deficient and capitulate to the bankrupt
notion that we are consumers first and citizens second.
Vision is more than sight Instead, young people must be steadfast, generous, honest,
civic-minded and think about their lives as a project rooted in the desire to create a
better world.
They must expand their dreams and think about what it means to build a
future marked by a robust and inclusive democracy. In doing so, they need
to embrace acts of solidarity, work to expand the common good and collectivize
compassion. Such practices will bestow upon them the ability to govern wisely
rather than simply be governed maliciously.
I have great hope that this current generation will confront the poisonous
authoritarianism that is emerging in many countries today. One strategy for doing this is
to reaffirm what binds us together. How might we develop new forms of solidarity? What
would it mean to elevate the dignity and decency of everyday people, everywhere?
Young people need to learn how to bear witness to the injustices that
surround them. They need to accept the call to become visionaries willing to

80
create a society in which people, as the great journalist Bill Moyers argues, can
“become fully free to claim their moral and political agency.”

81
 AT Reformism
Deconstructing the model minority myth is a prereq to
beneficial Asian American policy
Li 5 (GUOFANG LI, professor at MSU, “Other People’s Success: Impact of the “Model
Minority” Myth on Underachieving Asian Students in North America”, 2005
https://msu.edu/~liguo/file/KEDI%20Journal-Guofang%20Li%202005%5B1%5D.pdf,
DOA: 6/26/17)//AK
**edited for ableist language
The threat of the “model minority” myth to the advancement of Asians in
North America operates at both macro and micro levels. As mentioned earlier,
the “model minority” label has two layers of meanings: Asians are minorities
acceptable to and yet different from whites in the racial formations of the
society; and Asians serve as visible models for other less motivated racial
groups in proper behaviors, attitudes and work ethic. At a macro level, these
meanings serve two functions. One is that they disguise the fact that Asians
experience racism and discrimination (Lee, 1996; Suzuki, 1989). According to Lee
(1996) and Suzuki (1989), the model minority image places Asians in a
precarious position that they do not have any problems and do not need any
social services or the system does not need to change for Asians at all. Such
silencing often hinders Asian Americans’ collective struggle for social justice
and disempowers them from actively fighting for their equal rights. The other
function is that the representation of Asians as the model minority maintains
the existing social order and racial hierarchy. It is argued that the
stereotype has been used to support the status quo of white superiority and
the ideologies of meritocracy in that other minority groups ought to be able to succeed as
well without affirmative action or any other institutional change. It takes the
attention off the white majority by pitting the Asians against the other
disadvantaged minority groups such as the Blacks and the Hispanics. As Lee
(1996) notes, “while Asian Americans and African Americans are fighting among
themselves, the racial barriers that limit Asian Americans and African Americans remain
unchallenged” (p. 9). In recent years, it is reported that the term “model minority”
created resentment towards Asians not only from other minority groups, but also from
members of the majority culture who came to believe that Asian students drive up the
grade curve, dominate the competitive honors and scholarships, and crowd out places for
whites in the classroom and workplace (Rohrlick, Alvarado, Zaruba, & Kallio, 1998;
Suzuki, 2002).
At a micro level, the “model minority” stereotype is believed to have many
negative consequences. First, research shows that it misleads policy makers to
overlook [dismiss] issues concerning Asian students and their needed
services. Studies on instructional support for Asian English-as a-Second-Language
(ESL) students (e.g., AAPIP, 1997; Rohrlick, Alvarado, Zaruba, & Kallio, 1998; Wan,
1996) found that the model minority myth leads many to believe that Asian
students will succeed with little support and without special programs and
services (e.g., ESL support and bilingual education) with which other minorities are

82
provided. Many school districts often do not properly categorize Asian students and
therefore do not receive funds that are available to serve their language needs. Most
Asian students receive limited amount of English as a second language instruction and
are placed in mainstream classes that do not offer special support to help them
understand the instruction. According to AAPIP (1997), although 73% Asian Pacific
eighth graders were language minorities, only 27% were recognized as such by their
teachers.
Research also shows that the popular image of successful, high achieving
“model minorities” often prevents teachers and schools from recognizing
the instructional needs and the psychological and emotional concerns of
many underachieving Asian students. AAPIP (1997) documents that there exists
an invisible crisis concerning the educational needs of Asian American students in K-12
system. The most significant barriers include three major areas. 1) Language and
literacy. Students’ lack of proficiency in reading, writing, and speaking skills is often
neglected, and there are insufficient bilingual resources and support for students’ first
language development and maintenance. 2) School and curriculum. Most schools do not
have curricula appropriate to educating multicultural and multilingual student
populations; and teachers and administrators generally do not have training to
understand Asian cultures and languages. 3) Support for families and for youth
development. Schools rarely have ties to Asian community organizations that can help
meet students’ and families’ needs.

83
ATs

84
 AT “Asian American activism in the Civil Rights
Movement”
Asian American leaders in the Civil Rights Movement were too
assimilated by white culture to lead movements – proves
assimilation deradicalizes us
Kobayashi 99 (FUTOSHI KOBAYASHI, member of Department of Educational
Psychology the University of Texas at Austin, “Model Minority Stereotype
Reconsidered”, 9/1999 http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED434167.pdf, DOA:
7/10/17)//AK
In reality, there was no "Asian American" concept before the 1960s (Chan &
Hune, 1995). The concept of "Asian American" was imposed upon diverse and
different people from Asia by the dominant group in America during the
1960s (Lee, 1996). The dominant Anglo group was originally people who
immigrated from England in the seventeenth century. As time went by, however, the
dominant group incorporated Irish, Swedish, German, French, and other
European immigrants because they shared physical characteristics similar
to Caucasians (McLemore & Romo, 1998). In this paper, the author uses the term
"dominant people" to indicate an artificially created category of people whose ancestors
immigrated from Europe.
There are several possible reasons for the emergence of the term of "Asian American" in
the 1960s. Chen and Hawks (1995) and Cho (1997) explained that during the upheaval of
the civil rights movements during the 1960s, the media was looking for some positive
ethnic group to cover. Asians, a group that was largely quiet and
uncomplaining, became the focus of media attention in hopes that other
minority groups would be discouraged from joining the protest movement
(Walker-Moffat, 1995). Lee (1996) has explained that Asian Americans themselves also used the term "Asian American" in order to combat racism. In other words,
Asians in America also needed the unifying force term "Asian American" in order to fight racism, because each individual ethnic group was too small to fight it

The image portrayed in the media of Asian Americans was that, as a

effectively alone.

whole, they were a quiet and uncomplaining minority because there were
also some Asians involved in the Civil Rights movement. Jensen and Abeyta
(1987) stated that Asian activists could not produce as successful a protest
movement as Blacks and Hispanics did because of their lack of successful leaders.
Potential leaders of the protest movement were almost always married to
Whites and had "become white in every aspect but color" (Jensen & Abeyta,
1987, p. 410). According to them, because potential leaders of this protest
movement were all too assimilated into the Caucasian culture, they could
not understand the real sufferings of ordinary Asians.

85
 AT Term “Asian American” = Homogenizing
Our use of “Asian American” is not meant to paper over
differences but rather serve as a term accessible to all Asian
Americans as an affirmation of their belonging in this country in
opposition to model minority and forever foreigner rhetoric
Cheung 17 (DANIEL MINYOUNG CHEUNG, editor in chief of the Asian American
Policy Review, “Becoming Authentically Asian American”, 4/17/17
http://www.hksaapr.com/2017/04/foreword/#_edn1, DOA: 7/20/17)//AK
“There was a time when the term ‘Asian American’ was not merely a
demographic category, but a fight you were picking with the world.”[1]
We live in turbulent political times, and whether we are looking for it or not, a fight
seems to be brewing.
This fight, however, is not new. The term now used to describe the Asian American
community—and the namesake of this journal—reclaimed the political identity of a
people who had been rendered historically and culturally invisible.
Sometimes, this invisibility was literal, as in the case of the invisible Chinese
railroad workers standing in the margins at Promontory Point.[2] At other times, the
invisibility was sociocultural. Asian Americans are the Perpetual Foreigner,
and the “race so unlike our own,” whose struggles are masked by the tired
myth of the model minority, which is used to wedge other minority groups
against one another.[3]
Neil Gotanda describes this phenomenon as “citizenship nullification”—the
denial of full citizenship and ownership of the American story.[4] The earliest
people of Asian origin to arrive in North America was a group of Filipino sailors who
landed on the California coast in 1587—decades before the arrival of the Mayflower in
Massachusetts.[5] Asian migrants began arriving in large numbers in the 1830s and
1850s, and by the latter half of the nineteenth century, sadly familiar nativist hostilities
led to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882—which would remain good law
for eighty-three years.[6] Chae Chan Ping v. U.S.—the so-called “Chinese
Exclusion Case”—decided in 1889, is today being cited as precedent for the
idea that any ban on immigrants, no matter how discriminatory, is within
the power of the executive branch.[7] When it comes to racial discrimination, there
is nothing new under the sun.
And yet there is great hope in our history as well. The conscious memory of the
Asian American political identity began in the 1960s and 1970s, driven
largely by student activists who were inspired by the Black power and anti-Vietnam
War movements. This period saw the coming together of diverse communities
with different histories under the umbrella of Asian America, the birth of
Asian American Studies, and the awakening of scores of activists who have
continued to define what this movement could be. As one history puts it:
“Challenging stereotypes about Asian ‘passivity,’ and rejecting the exoticism and
racism of ‘oriental’ labels, Asian American activists mobilized this new

86
consciousness to demand an end to racist hiring practices, biased school
curricula, demeaning media stereotypes, residential discrimination, and the
gentrification of historically Asian American neighborhoods.”[8] We would
do well to draw inspiration from this history.

87
 AT Gender
Asian American movements are not mutually exclusive with
anti-patriarchal resistance – 1970s prove
Maeda 16 (Daryl Joji Maeda, associate professor at the University of Colorado, “The
Asian American Movement”, 2016
http://americanhistory.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.001.0001
/acrefore-9780199329175-e-21, DOA: 7/12/17)//AK
**edited for ableist language
The Asian American movement addressed gender and women’s issues in both
its domestic and international agendas. Many local “Serve the People” programs
attended to the needs of women and families, including provision of food, clothing, and
healthcare. Asian American women’s organizing has been best studied in Los Angeles,
where the Asian Women’s Center offered childcare, counseling, and education and Asian
Sisters identified the dual causes of drug abuse among young Japanese American women
as racism, which made them feel inferior by enforcing white norms, and sexism, which
devalued them within their own communities.7 IWK and WMS stressed in their
community work that traditional Asian gender roles oppressed women by
subjugating them to fathers and husbands, but criticized in equally
vociferous terms the system of capitalism that exploited women as
wageworkers and unpaid domestic laborers.
On the international front, the Asian American movement’s critique of the Vietnam
War took on a decidedly gendered perspective. The war’s effect on women
numbered among the movement’s chief objections, as it noted that the war
encouraged American GIs to view [think of] all Vietnamese women, and by
extension all Asian women, as prostitutes. Conversely, the movement
developed a great admiration for Vietnamese women, who personified
principled resistance to U.S. imperialism. A drawing published in Gidra, of a
peasant woman with a baby in one hand and a rifle in the other,
emblematized the belief that women could be revolutionary fighters as well as
nurturers. Asian American women also drew inspiration from Vietnamese women whom
they met in person at two conferences held in Canada in 1971, at which the Vietnamese
women enthralled North American audiences with their explanation of their struggle for
self-determination and their staunch resolution to achieve victory.8
Like their sisters in nearly all of the New Left and Power movements of the 1960s and
1970s, Asian American women battled sexism and male chauvinism, which
sought to pigeonhole them as caretakers and support workers rather than
recognizing them as leaders, public speakers, and intellectually talented theorists.
However, women founded or co-founded AAPA and AAA and rose to leadership
positions in KDP and IWK. Even when critiquing the sexism of the Asian
American movement, women remained firmly entrenched within it because
they understood the interlocking nature of racism and sexism. Even when
carving out women-only spaces, they urged their brothers in the movement

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to reform their attitudes and practices and join in a shared fight to
eliminate the overarching formation of racism, sexism, and class
exploitation. For example, the International Hotel Women’s Collective, formed by
women participating in the I-Hotel struggle as parts of other organizations, called out
men who sexualized and patronized women and sought to build both women’s
consciousness and leadership skills. In a missive explaining the collective’s purpose, its
members invited men to “support us in our goals by building relationships of mutual
respect,” which they signed, “With love, your sisters.”9 Thus, despite its significant
flaws, the Asian American movement served as an arena in which women
developed as activists and honed their abilities as leaders.

Asian Americans are diversifying – the growing fluidity of our

subjectivities is inclusive towards gender movements
Osajima 98 (KEITH OSAJIMA, Professor and Director of the Race and Ethnic
Studies Program at the University of Redlands, “Pedagogical Considerations in Asian
American Studies”, 1998 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/14533, DOA: 7/8/17)//AK
**edited for ableist language
To counter the hold of reductionist, homogenizing paradigms, Asian
Americanists identify a number of ways to expand and add complexity to
how we think about Asian America. Peter Kwong, for example, revisits the call
for more attention to class dynamics. 17 He argues that a focus [End Page 274] on class
will help us to see and understand the conflicts between the “uptown”
middle- and upper-class Asians and the “downtown” working-class Asians.
18 Patricia Limerick adds that attention to class would deepen our understanding
of relations between racial groups. We would have to “reckon with the events of
1933, when Mexican agricultural workers went on strike against Japanese berry growers
. . . who were themselves working hard against the unjust disadvantages of the California
Alien Land Law.” 19
Along similar lines, we see discern expansion of Asian American studies in the
area of gender issues. The work on Asian American women is substantial
and growing. Recently, this work has been augmented by a focus on issues of
sexuality and queer studies. This is an important breakthrough, bringing
into view [thought] topics that have been “regularly shrouded in particular
forms of silence in the Asian American community.” 20 Central to work in
this area are feminist and postmodern theoretical insights that examine
how our subjectivities and identities are socially constructed within
contexts of powerful discourses that define and shape social reality. Rather
than treat identity as a fixed, singular entity, Asian Americanists working here
urge us to see [think] how our identities are multiple and fluid, situated and
heterogeneous.

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 AT Educational Futurism
The Asian American child is constructed as a threat to the future
– the model minority myth recreates their impacts
Thananopavarn 14 (Susan Thananopavarn, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of
English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
“Negotiating Asian American Childhood in the Twenty-First Century: Grace Lin’s Year of
the Dog, Year of the Rat, and Dumpling Days”, 2014 pages 106~107, DOA: 7/16/17)//AK
The idea of the “model minority” continues to haunt mainstream
perceptions of Asian Americans in the United States. As Asian American theorists
have observed, this stereotype is primarily one of containment: it describes qualities of
docility and acceptance of American cultural norms and of minority status within
American society. Yet it is also an indicator of national anxieties about what Lisa Lowe
calls the “unfixed liminality of the Asian immigrant—geographically, linguistically, and
racially at odds with the context of the ‘national’” (19). Like the older idea of the “yellow
peril,” the model minority speaks to the fears that dominant society has constructed
around a supposedly inassimilable other. For Asian Americans, often viewed within the
United States as perpetual foreigners, these fears are tied not only to the civil rights
demands of other minority groups within the United States, but also to U.S. economic
anxieties with respect to Asia.1

In the twenty-first century, the myth of the model minority is increasingly

embodied by the figure of the Asian American child, who has become a focal
point for U.S. concerns about the emerging dominance of Asia (particularly
China) in the global economy. News outlets frequently compare children’s test
scores in Asia and the United States as indicators of the regions’ economic
futures, and the anxiety created by these comparisons is reflected in popular
considerations of Asian American children and whether or not they “out-
perform” white children in school. Recent examples of this “Asian panic” include the
media firestorm that followed the publication of Amy Chua’s memoir Battle Hymn of the
Tiger Mother (2011) and a 2011 viral YouTube rant by a white student at UCLA
complaining about “hordes of Asian people” invading the campus. In the first case, a
memoir and parenting guide claiming the superiority of “Chinese parenting” over
“Western parenting” sold over a million copies in its first few months of publication and
unleashed a tremendous and polarized response across the United States. In the second,
a racist YouTube clip denouncing the presence of Asians and Asian
Americans on a university campus not only garnered more than a million hits
worldwide (many of which, undoubtedly, were critical), but, as scholar Mitchell James
Chang observes, was posted with the kind of impunity that suggests that “her
opinions were not just abruptly contrived by a single student gone wild, but
actually emerged from a broader educational context . . . whereby Asians are
negatively racialized.” In both cases, Asian American children and students
are portrayed in competition with white students in a zero-sum game for
increasingly scarce U.S. jobs and resources. Their educational achievement
is not only taken as a given, but is considered solely as a factor of race,
rather than along with other categories such as class, education of parents, or

90
geographic location within the United States. Such media portrayals reinforce
previous stereotypes of Asian Americans as the yellow peril and the model
minority, a threat by virtue of their (race-based) educational success.

91
 AT Disability
Our scholarship isn’t mutually exclusive – though Asian
American and disability studies have been at odds in the past,
modern developments prove they’re mutually beneficial
Wu 15 (CYTNHIA WU, Assistant Professor of American Studies at the State University
of New York, Buffalo, “DISABILITY”, 2015 http://keywords.nyupress.org/asian-
american-studies/essay/disability/, DOA: 7/20/17)//AK
The field of Asian American studies has seen a recent surge of scholarship
that addresses disability. A Modern Language Association convention panel, a
special issue of Amerasia Journal, and several monographs—-all appearing in the past
few years—-together mark this acceleration of interest. Although ethnic studies was,
at first, somewhat slow to initiate dialogue with disability studies, the
conversations that scholars have generated of late speaks to the shared
intellectual and political commitments of these fields. Disability studies was
founded in the 1990s in ways that reflected the cultural changes in the wake
of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. The legislation—-which prohibited
discrimination based on ability status and mandated reasonable accommodations
in education, employment, public facilities, and commercial services for disabled
people—-actualized a long effort on the part of activists that began during the
civil rights era. Disability studies, as a discipline in the humanities, differentiates
itself from the fields of rehabilitation medicine (such as physical therapy or
occupational therapy) by locating its critique within the social and built
environments that create incapacitating barriers for disabled people. Instead of developing therapies to normalize people, the field focuses on the
social justice implications of unequal access. Consequently, it adopts a methodology that privileges the cultural meanings of physical, sensory, and neural
difference rather than treatment and cure. Despite the presence of disability—-as evidenced in the linguistic record—-as a social and cultural entity from the mid-
-1500s onward, it was not until the advent of modernity that differences marked by ability status were regarded and handled in the manner that is familiar to us
now. The standardizing discourses and practices associated with empiricism, urbanization, and industrialization occasioned a shift from a society where human
variation was integrated into everyday life to one where forms of intervention and control—-linguistic, educational, spatial, medical, and legal—-were leveled upon
disabled people (Bogdan 1990; Davis 1995; Trent 1995; Baynton 1996; Reiss 2008; Schweik 2010; Rembis 2011; Nielsen 2012). The historical effects of this
segregation, forced or coerced therapy, juridical abuse, and cultural erasure are what activists and scholars are still attempting to expose and redress today.

This framework—-which posits disability as difference that demands

accommodation in the form of institutional change rather than assimilation
and integration—-would be familiar to scholars of race. The emergence of
ethnic studies as an academic discipline in the late 1960s and early 1970s
took place in tandem with concurrent social movements outside of the
academy that challenged racism, class inequality, and militaristic imperialism. The
various racial liberatory movements and the opposition to the Vietnam War marked a
departure from the Cold War conformity of the previous generation. The rise of a
sustained panethnic and cross--racial Asian American movement during
this era privileged a heteropatriarchal—-and, by extension, a nondisabled—
-subject. The early activists attempted to generate their critiques of social inequality by
appealing to standards of normative masculinity. The disavowal of gender and sexual
difference in cultural nationalist politics has been well documented in Asian American
studies. However, the lack of a corresponding body of work that unpacks ableism in
Asian American cultural nationalism is striking, given how closely the discourses of
gender, sexuality, and disability are intertwined. Correspondingly, disability
studies has faced critiques of its white normativity (Bell 2006). Its areas of
inquiry and the demographic composition of its practitioners have assumed

92
a whiteness that marginalized scholars who maintained intellectual
commitments to race. Nevertheless, there are a few seminal texts where we
can see the earliest examples of disability and race/ethnicity overlapping
and/or mutually constituting each another (Gilman 1985; Gilman 1996; Kraut
1995; Garland--Thomson 1997). This methodology extends itself more explicitly in the
work that follows (James and Wu 2006; James 2007; C. Wu 2012; Ho and Lee 2013;
Minich 2013). The challenge for scholars as this line of inquiry moves
forward, especially in the field of Asian American studies, is to explore how
these interpretive lenses can be repurposed to go beyond—-but not transcend—
-a predictable archive. Such an approach might follow the dictum that we
acknowledge but not hierarchize the tension between seeing matters of political
difference as particular to social minorities and seeing difference as integrated into the
universality of human experience (Sedgwick 1990) or the proposition that we evacuate
the subject of analysis altogether and define our field by mode of critique (Chuh 2003).
Examples of recent work that performs these analytical maneuvers include
a literary critical examination of fiction responding to the neocolonial ties
between the United States and India that were exposed after the 1984 Union
Carbide gas leak in Bhopal (Jina Kim 2014). The workings of multinational corporations,
which cheapen some lives in return for the comfort of others, force a reconsideration of
the logic of disability activism and disability studies in the global North. Also notable is a
study of how contemporary concepts of toxicity are transposed onto historically
sedimented anxieties about a transnational Asia (M. Chen 2012). Fears about racialized
contaminants arise out of the ambivalence that North Americans hold about the
movement of bodies, objects, and capital alike across national borders. These are some of
the possibilities that future work on disability may conjure in the field of Asian
American studies.

93
 AT Capitalism
We don’t preclude interrogating neoliberalism – examining how
the model minority myth diverts attention from the state is
better than a race-less class analysis
Patel 14 (RUSHIKA V. PATEL, Director at the University of Michigan - Flint,
“NEOLIBERAL GLOBALIZATION, RACISM AND EDUCATION: THE MODEL
MINORITY THESIS IN EDUCATION POLICY”, 2014
https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/49804/Rushika_Patel.pdf?sequ
ence=1, DOA: 7/17/17)//AK
The second reason my research is significant is that it engages debates on the
relationship between racism and Neoliberalism in education with reference
to how both the racial supremacist and Neoliberal agendas are able to access
the model minority discourse to move forward their policy regimes. To this
end, my research reinterprets existing arguments about the model minority
and the role that Asians, and discourses about Asians, play in the global
scramble for power and capital through an analysis of educational policy
research. Neoliberal education policy reform in the US is embedded in
competitive processes with Asia, and China and India in particular, on the one
hand, and the idealization of Chinese and Indian students to the detriment of
other students of color, in US higher education in particular, on the other hand. This
contradictory politics and discourse is used to justify the retreat of social
welfare policies within the US on the one hand and the recruitment of lower cost,
highly skilled labor from China and India on the other hand (Prashad, 2012).
This model minority dialectic is also a form of fear mongering amongst people in the US
that “Asians are taking over” domestic jobs and seats within educational institutions,
particularly higher education. This fear displaces the responsibility of the State
towards “its” subjects, and filters it through racism onto Asians in a divide
and exploitation logic. While the discourse of Neoliberalism is the discourse
of democracy, inclusion and social justice, Neoliberalism, vis a vis the model
minority discourse, supports policy initiatives that abandon claims for
equality, freedom, access, inclusion, participation and social reorganization
and support the rise of nationalist and neoliberal policy regimes both
domestically and internationally.

Analysis of capitalism as a totalizing force fails sans discussions

of race and identity
Lam 15 (KEVIN LAM, Assistant Professor of Urban and Diversity Education at Drake
University, “Theories of Racism, Asian American Identities, and a Materialist Critical
Pedagogy”, pages 99~100 http://www.jceps.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/13-1-
5.pdf, DOA: 7/21/17)//AK

94
As I have made clear throughout this paper, my interrogation of “race,” “race
relations” paradigm, and the politics of identity are done so in my (our
collective) desire to theoretically and politically advance the conversation—a
conversation that is very necessary at this moment in time. It is at this moment
in time, where capitalism as a totalizing force, has a stranglehold on the majority
of the world’s population. Here in the U.S., the ever-widening gap between the rich and
the poor continue to grow. In engaging this discourse, it is not my intent to take
away from the social, cultural, and historical significance of said social
movements—grounded in the blood, sweat, and tears (and sometimes lives)
of our comrades of the last few decades. In fact, I am indebted to these
liberation struggles in the U.S. (and around the world). What I am hoping to do
(as a site of analysis and point of departure) is to offer something critical,
something personal, and hopefully something useful—as an organic Asian American
intellectual, U.S. ethnic studies scholar, critical pedagogue, but foremost—a political
refugee and working-class subject (products of both U.S. imperialism and capitalism). To
be sure, capitalism as the totalizing force the world has ever known does not
see the color line, national line, or the identity line.

95
Answers

96
Policy

97
 Cede the Political
Critique cannot rely simply on withdrawal but must have a
praxis to engage the state to succeed – not doing so cedes the
political to the right
Mouffe 9 (CHANTAL MOUFFE, prominent Belgian political theorist, “The
Importance of Engaging the State”, 2009 pages 233~237, DOA: 7/14/17)//AK
In both Hardt and Negri, and Virno, there is therefore emphasis upon ‘critique as
withdrawal’. They all call for the development of a non-state public sphere. They call
for self-organisation, experimentation, non-representative and extra-parliamentary
politics. They see [think of] forms of traditional representative politics as
inherently oppressive. So they do not seek to engage with them, in order to
challenge them. They seek to get rid of them altogether. This disengagement is,
for such influential personalities in radical politics today, the key to every political
position in the world. The Multitude must recognise imperial sovereignty itself as the enemy and discover adequate means of subverting its power.
Whereas in the disciplinary era I spoke about earlier, sabotage was the fundamental form of political resistance, these authors claim that, today, it should be
desertion. It is indeed through desertion, through the evacuation of the places of power, that they think that battles against Empire might be won. Desertion and
exodus are, for these important thinkers, a powerful form of class struggle against imperial postmodernity.

According to Hardt and Negri, and Virno, radical politics in the past was dominated by the notion of ‘the people’. This was, according to them, a unity, acting with
one will. And this unity is linked to the existence of the state. The Multitude, on the contrary, shuns political unity. It is not representable because it is an active
self-organising agent that can never achieve the status of a juridical personage. It can never converge in a general will, because the present globalisation of capital
and workers’ struggles will not permit this. It is anti-state and anti-popular. Hardt and Negri claim that the Multitude cannot be conceived any more in terms of a
sovereign authority that is representative of the people. They therefore argue that new forms of politics, which are non-representative, are needed. They advocate a

withdrawal from existing institutions. This is something which characterises

much of radical politics today. The emphasis is not upon challenging the
state. Radical politics today is often characterised by a mood, a sense and a
feeling, that the state itself is inherently the problem.
Critique as engagement I will now turn to presenting the way I envisage the form of social criticism best suited to radical politics today. I agree with Hardt and
Negri that it is important to understand the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. But I consider that the dynamics of this transition is better apprehended
within the framework of the approach outlined in the book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001).
What I want to stress is that many factors have contributed to this transition from Fordism to post-Fordism, and that it is necessary to recognise its complex
nature. My problem with Hardt and Negri’s view is that, by putting so much emphasis on the workers’ struggles, they tend to see this transition as if it was driven
by one single logic: the workers’ resistance to the forces of capitalism in the post-Fordist era. They put too much emphasis upon immaterial labour. In their view,
capitalism can only be reactive and they refuse to accept the creative role played both by capital and by labour. To put it another way, they deny the positive role of
political struggle. In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics we use the word ‘hegemony’ to describe the way in which meaning is
given to institutions or practices: for example, the way in which a given institution or practice is defined as ‘oppressive to women’, ‘racist’ or ‘environmentally
destructive’. We also point out that every hegemonic order is therefore susceptible to being challenged by counter-hegemonic practices – feminist, anti-racist,
environmentalist, for example. This is illustrated by the plethora of new social movements which presently exist in radical politics today (Christian, anti-war,
counter-globalisation, Muslim, and so on). Clearly not all of these are workers’ struggles. In their various ways they have nevertheless attempted to influence and
have influenced a new hegemonic order. This means that when we talk about ‘the political’, we do not lose sight of the ever present possibility of heterogeneity and
antagonism within society. There are many different ways of being antagonistic to a dominant order in a heterogeneous society – it need not only refer to the
workers’ struggles. I submit that it is necessary to introduce this hegemonic dimension when one envisages the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. This
means abandoning the view that a single logic (workers’ struggles) is at work in the evolution of the work process; as well as acknowledging the pro-active role
played by capital. In order to do this we can find interesting insights in the work of Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello who, in their book The New Spirit of
Capitalism (2005), bring to light the way in which capitalists manage to use the demands for autonomy of the new movements that developed in the 1960s,
harnessing them in the development of the post-Fordist networked economy and transforming them into new forms of control. They use the term ‘artistic critique’
to refer to how the strategies of the counter-culture (the search for authenticity, the ideal of selfmanagement and the anti-hierarchical exigency) were used to
promote the conditions required by the new mode of capitalist regulation, replacing the disciplinary framework characteristic of the Fordist period. From my point
of view, what is interesting in this approach is that it shows how an important dimension of the transition from Fordism to post- Fordism involves rearticulating
existing discourses and practices in new ways. It allows us to visualise the transition from Fordism to post- Fordism in terms of a hegemonic intervention. To be
sure, Boltanski and Chiapello never use this vocabulary, but their analysis is a clear example of what Gramsci called ‘hegemony through neutralisation’ or ‘passive
revolution’. This refers to a situation where demands which challenge the hegemonic order are recuperated by the existing system, which is achieved by satisfying
them in a way that neutralises their subversive potential. When we apprehend the transition from Fordism to post- Fordism within such a framework, we can
understand it as a hegemonic move by capital to re-establish its leading role and restore its challenged legitimacy. We did not witness a revolution, in Marx’s sense
of the term. Rather, there have been many different interventions, challenging dominant hegemonic practices.

It is clear that, once we envisage social reality in terms of ‘hegemonic’ and

‘counter-hegemonic’ practices, radical politics is not about withdrawing
completely from existing institutions. Rather, we have no other choice but to
engage with hegemonic practices, in order to challenge them. This is crucial;
otherwise we will be faced with a chaotic situation. Moreover, if we do not engage with

98
and challenge the existing order, if we instead choose to simply escape the state
completely, we leave the door open for others to take control of systems of
authority and regulation. Indeed there are many historical (and not so historical)
examples of this. When the Left shows little interest, Right-wing and authoritarian
groups are only too happy to take over the state.
The strategy of exodus could be seen as the reformulation of the idea of communism, as it was found in Marx. There are many points in common between the two
perspectives. To be sure, for Hardt and Negri it is no longer the proletariat, but the Multitude which is the privileged political subject. But in both cases the state is
seen as a monolithic apparatus of domination that cannot be transformed. It has to ‘wither away’ in order to leave room for a reconciled society beyond law, power
and sovereignty. In reality, as I’ve already noted, others are often perfectly willing to take control. If my approach – supporting new social movements and
counterhegemonic practices – has been called ‘post-Marxist’ by many, it is precisely because I have challenged the very possibility of such a reconciled society. To
acknowledge the ever present possibility of antagonism to the existing order implies recognising that heterogeneity cannot be eliminated. As far as politics is
concerned, this means the need to envisage it in terms of a hegemonic struggle between conflicting hegemonic projects attempting to incarnate the universal and to
define the symbolic parameters of social life. A successful hegemony fixes the meaning of institutions and social practices and defines the ‘common sense’ through
which a given conception of reality is established. However, such a result is always contingent, precarious and susceptible to being challenged by counter-
hegemonic interventions. Politics always takes place in a field criss-crossed by antagonisms. A properly political intervention is always one that engages with a
certain aspect of the existing hegemony. It can never be merely oppositional or conceived as desertion, because it aims to challenge the existing order, so that it
may reidentify and feel more comfortable with that order.

Another important aspect of a hegemonic politics lies in establishing

linkages between various demands (such as environmentalists, feminists, anti-racist
groups), so as to transform them into claims that will challenge the existing
structure of power relations. This is a further reason why critique involves
engagement, rather than disengagement. It is clear that the different demands that exist in our societies are often in
conflict with each other. This is why they need to be articulated politically, which obviously involves the creation of a collective will, a ‘we’. This, in turn, requires
the determination of a ‘them’. This obvious and simple point is missed by the various advocates of the Multitude. For they seem to believe that the Multitude
possesses a natural unity which does not need political articulation. Hardt and Negri see ‘the People’ as homogeneous and expressed in a unitary general will,
rather than divided by different political conflicts. Counter-hegemonic practices, by contrast, do not eliminate differences. Rather, they are what could be called an
‘ensemble of differences’, all coming together, only at a given moment, against a common adversary. Such as when different groups from many backgrounds come
together to protest against a war perpetuated by a state, or when environmentalists, feminists, anti-racists and others come together to challenge dominant models
of development and progress. In these cases, the adversary cannot be defined in broad general terms like ‘Empire’, or for that matter ‘Capitalism’. It is instead
contingent upon the particular circumstances in question – the specific states, international institutions or governmental practices that are to be challenged.

Put another way, the construction of political demands is dependent upon the specific
relations of power that need to be targeted and transformed, in order to create the
conditions for a new hegemony. This is clearly not an exodus from politics. It is not
‘critique as withdrawal’, but ‘critique as engagement’. It is a ‘war of position’
that needs to be launched, often across a range of sites, involving the coming together of
a range of interests. This can only be done by establishing links between social
movements, political parties and trade unions, for example. The aim is to create a
common bond and collective will, engaging with a wide range of sites, and often
institutions, with the aim of transforming them. This, in my view, is how we should
conceive the nature of radical politics.

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 Reformism
The Asian American Civil Rights Movement proves that
institutional engagement is possible and productive
Maeda 16 (Daryl Joji Maeda, associate professor at the University of Colorado, “The
Asian American Movement”, 2016
http://americanhistory.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.001.0001
/acrefore-9780199329175-e-21, DOA: 7/12/17)//AK
The Asian American Movement was a social movement for racial justice,
most active during the late 1960s through the mid-1970s, which brought
together people of various Asian ancestries in the United States who
protested against racism and U.S. neo-imperialism, demanded changes in
institutions such as colleges and universities, organized workers, and sought to
provide social services such as housing, food, and healthcare to poor people. As one
of its signal achievements, the Movement created the category “Asian
American,” (coined by historian and activist Yuji Ichioka), which encompasses the
multiple Asian ethnic groups who have migrated to the United States. Its founding
principle of coalitional politics emphasizes solidarity among Asians of all
ethnicities, multiracial solidarity among Asian Americans as well as with
African, Latino, and Native Americans in the United States, and
transnational solidarity with peoples around the globe impacted by U.S.
militarism.
The movement participated in solidarity work with other Third World peoples in the
United States, including the Third World Liberation Front strikes at San Francisco State
College and University of California, Berkeley. The Movement fought for housing rights
for poor people in the urban cores of San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, Seattle,
and Philadelphia; it created arts collectives, published newspapers and magazines, and
protested vigorously against the Vietnam War. It also extended to Honolulu, where
activists sought to preserve land rights in rural Hawai’i. It contributed to the larger
radical movement for power and justice that critiqued capitalism and neo-imperialism,
which flourished during the 1960s and 1970s. Keywords: Asian American Movement,
racial justice, housing rights, neo-imperialism, anti-capitalism, Vietnam War
By 1968, Asian immigrants and their descendants had been in the United States for over
a century and had engaged in various forms of resistance to racism for many decades.
However, the particular ideologies and forms of activism that characterized the “Asian
American movement” only emerged with the dawn of Third World movements for power
and self-determination in the late 1960s. Previously, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino,
Korean, and Asian Indians participated in divergent forms of political organizing. Class-
based politics aimed to gain better wages and working conditions; homeland politics
attempted to bolster the international standings of their nations of origins or free them
from colonial rule; assimilationist politics attempted to demonstrate that Asians were
worthy of the rights and privileges of citizenship. None of these forms built a sense of
common cause among Asian immigrants of different ethnicities, and homeland politics
even exacerbated tensions. In the early to mid-1960s, a number of Asian Americans
participated individually in various New Left movements—including the Free Speech

100
Movement, Civil Rights movement, and anti-Vietnam War movement—that did not
directly address Asian American issues. In contrast to these earlier forms of political
activism, the Asian American movement emphasized Asian collectivity, arguing that
Asians of all ethnicities in the United States shared a common position of subjugation
due to anti-Asian racism, and furthermore, that Asians in the United States should
oppose U.S. imperialism abroad, especially in Asia. Drawing influences from the Black
Power and antiwar movements, the Asian American movement forged a
coalitional politics that united Asians of varying ethnicities and declared
solidarity with other Third World people in the United States and abroad. Segments
of the movement struggled for community control of education, provided
social services and defended affordable housing in Asian ghettoes,
organized exploited workers, protested against U.S. imperialism, and built
new multiethnic cultural institutions. By the end of the 1970s, the contours of the
movement shifted dramatically enough to mark an end to the Asian American movement
per se, though certainly not an end to Asian American activism.1
Origins The Asian American movement grew out of two of the most significant social movements of the 1960s: the Black Power and anti-Vietnam War movements.
Unsatisfied with insistence on inclusion and civil rights, the Asian American movement demanded self-determination and power both for Asians in the United
States and in Asia. The Red Guard Party of San Francisco provides the clearest example of how engaging with Black Power helped Asian Americans build an
understanding of their own racial positioning in the United States. The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, established in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale,
rose to prominence as the vanguard organization among radicals of color by the late 1960s. The Panthers melded radical politics with racial pride, advocating
community control over institutions such as education and law enforcement in black ghettos and demanding fair housing and employment, while celebrating the
aesthetics of black people, black bodies, and black culture. This powerful mélange of ideas impacted Chinese Americans in the ghetto of San Francisco Chinatown,
which suffered from substandard education, housing, social services, and employment opportunities, but an overabundance of police brutality. When a group of
young people who congregated regularly at the Legitimate Ways pool hall on Jackson Street began to discuss how to address these conditions, the Panthers took
notice, visiting the pool hall, inviting the Chinatown youth to study sessions on political theory, and urging them to form an organization. The Red Guard Party that
arose was named after Mao’s youth cadre and largely mirrored the Panthers’ ideology and language, but with key adaptations. Where the Panthers advocated
power for “black” people, the Red Guards demanded it for “yellow” people, a sign that the largely Chinese American Red Guards had adopted a racial, rather than
ethnic rubric. Minister of Information Alex Hing articulated the commonalities shared by blacks and Asian Americans, who both experienced racism and
exploitation in the United States, and argued that the Panthers’ example of directly providing social services (such as the free breakfast program) provided a viable
model for Chinatown. Across the Bay, in Berkeley, a graduate student named Yuji Ichioka, who would go on to be an influential historian, coined the term “Asian
American” when he co-founded the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA) as an explicitly pan-Asian organization in 1968. Seeking Asian Americans with
progressive leanings, Ichioka and co-founder Emma Gee pored through the roster of the antiwar Peace and Freedom Party, identifying all individuals with Asian
last names and inviting them to join the new organization. AAPA thus included Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino Americans, both American-born and immigrants,
from the mainland and Hawaii. AAPA advocated for Asian American solidarity to counter racism and imperialism and declared its camaraderie with other people
of color in the United States and abroad. Richard Aoki, undoubtedly the most colorful member of the group, served as a Field Marshal of the Black Panther Party
prior to helping to form AAPA. On the East Coast, the formation of Asian Americans for Action (AAA), in 1969, demonstrated again how the Asian American
movement drew together the influences of Black Power and the antiwar movement. Two longtime leftist Nisei (second generation Japanese American) women,
Kazu Iijima and Minn Masuda, noted approvingly that the anti-racist and anti-imperialist politics preached by Black Power advocates like H. Rap Brown were also
accompanied by a strong dose of racial pride. They saw Black Power as an antidote to the pro-assimilationist fever that had struck many Japanese Americans after
their experiences in concentration camps during World War II. They sought ways to convey this sense of pride to the next generation in their own community.
Significantly, Iijima’s son Chris urged them to reach out to all Asians, regardless of ethnicity. Iijima and Masuda’s recruitment strategy resembled Ichioka’s in that
they organized within the antiwar movement by approaching every individual Asian they spotted at Vietnam protests. The best-known AAA member was Yuri
Kochiyama, whose legendary radicalism formed through her relationship with Malcolm X, whom she counted as a personal friend. Because it arose from
encounters with Black Power and antiwar protests, the Asian American movement eschewed the Civil Rights framework in favor of pursuing self-determination for
Asian Americans and all other Third World people in the United States, and opposing what it deemed to be a genocidal, anti-Asian war in Indochina.

Activism on Campus A radical coalitional impulse characterized the Asian

American movement from its inception onward, driving it to create multiethnic
Asian organizations and pursue alliances with other people of color. The movement’s
actions aimed at revolutionizing higher education, clearly displayed this
emphasis on building solidarity. Asian Americans participated in student
strikes at San Francisco State College (1968–1969) and Cal Berkeley (1969), in both
cases as members of Third World Liberation Fronts (TWLF) (although the Berkeley
version was inspired by its counterpart at SF State and shared its ideals, there were no
organizational ties between the two).2 Students at the largely commuter campus of San
Francisco State were politically active throughout the 1960s, protesting
against the war, capital punishment, government repression, and racial
discrimination. Perhaps most importantly, students operated tutoring and
recruitment programs for youth in neighborhoods such as the predominantly
black Fillmore, the Mission, and Chinatown. In the spring semester of 1968, three Asian
American organizations—AAPA (discussed above), Intercollegiate Chinese for Social

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Action (ICSA), and Pilipino American Collegiate Endeavor (PACE)—joined the Black
Student Union, Latin American Student Organization (LASO), and Mexican American
Student Confederation (MASC) to form the TWLF. The largely Japanese American
members of the San Francisco chapter of AAPA, which shared the anti-racist and anti-
imperialist politics of the original Berkeley chapter, worked on community issues such as
opposing urban redevelopment in Japan town. At the ICSA office on Clay Street,
members tutored Chinatown youth and recruited them to apply for college. PACE
members located their office in the Mission district, where they recruited Filipino high
school students and community members to State and organized within the community.
Like the other members of the TWLF coalition, all three of the Asian American groups
sought to connect the college to the community, increase access for their community
members, and transform the meaning of a college education.

There are empirical examples of Asian American institutional

engagement – the 1974 Confucius Plaza protests prove
AAFE ND (ASIAN AMERICANS FOR EQUALITY, pan-Asian organization, “Our
History”, http://www.aafe.org/who-we-are/our-history, DOA: 7/21/17)//AK
For Asian Americans for Equality, it all began in the streets of Chinatown in 1974.
Moved to action by a developer who refused to hire Asian workers for the
massive Confucius Plaza construction project, local activists raised their
voices, staged months of protests and finally prevailed. In so doing, they
created a powerful grassroots movement that has endured for four decades.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, tumultuous national and world events were having a
profound effect on Manhattan’s Chinatown. After strict immigration quotas were lifted
in 1965, a large number of Chinese immigrants poured into the historic
neighborhood, remaking the traditional ethnic enclave. Already difficult
living and working conditions — including overcrowding and exploitation by
employers — became worse in a community that had always been neglected
by City Hall. At the same time, the Asian civil rights movement was gaining momentum,
partially inspired by the black civil rights campaigns of the ’60s. Many young,
idealistic New Yorkers of Chinese descent, some of them radical leftists, began
focusing on Chinatown’s many troubling issues and decided the time had come
to demand equal rights and equal access to city services.
Throughout Chinatown, the injustices at Confucius Plaza were causing great outrage.
The DeMatteis Corp., in charge of building the government-funded project,
rejected pleas from the youthful activists, then known as Asian Americans for
Equal Employment, to honor the city’s fair- hiring policies. Protests began May 16
and continued to pick up momentum through the fall. Picketers carried signs with
slogans such as, “The Asians built the railroad; Why not Confucius Plaza?” Dozens were
arrested.
A June 1 New York Times report noted, “The meticulously organized protest, similar to
those that have been taking place at sites in black and Latino areas for 11 years in the

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city, is something new to Chinatown. While residents have often complained of
discrimination and short-changing on city services, public protest has been rare.”
Reflecting on the dramatic events of 40 years ago, AAFE Executive Director Chris Kui
says protest among New York Asians wasn’t just rare, it was unheard of at that time. “I
remember the Asian community was afraid to speak up about issues they faced… lack of
access to equal employment or services.”
DeMatteis Corp. eventually relented, agreeing to hire 27 minority workers,
Asians among them. It was a major victory for the community and
immediately established Asian Americans for Equal Employment as an
organization that people could rely on when they had nowhere else to turn.
The volunteers established an office in Chinatown, which quickly became a
resource center for tenants facing harassment, those encountering
immigration issues and workers being mistreated. There were more protests,
too, against illegal sweatshops and deplorable conditions in local garment factories.

Specifically, Asian engagement in the law can lead to social

change
Liu 7/23 (GOODWIN LIU, California Supreme Court justice, “There are more Asian
American lawyers than ever — but not in the top ranks”, 7/23/17
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-liu-asian-american-lawyers-20170723-
story.html, DOA: 7/23/17)//AK
For most of our nation’s history, Asians were excluded from the legal profession. But
much has changed in recent decades. From 1985 to 2005, Asian Americans were
the fastest growing minority group in the bar. Today, there are more than
50,000 Asian American lawyers, compared with 10,000 in 1990. More than
7,000 Asian Americans are now studying law, up from 2,300 in 1986.
And yet, Asian Americans have made limited progress in reaching the top ranks of the profession. Although Asian Americans are the largest minority group in big
firms, they have the highest attrition rate and rank lowest in the ratio of partners to associates. Asian Americans comprise 6% of the U.S. population, but only 3% of
federal judges and 2% of state judges. Three out of 94 U.S. attorneys in 2016 were Asian American; only four out of 2,437 elected district attorneys in 2014 were
Asian American. These data may partly reflect Asian Americans’ relative newcomer status and lack of seniority in the legal profession. But there are other
challenges as well. A new study that a team of Yale law students and I co-authored, which included a national survey of more than 600 Asian American lawyers,
found that Asian Americans identify lack of access to mentors and contacts as a primary barrier to career advancement. Notably, 95% of our survey respondents
had no parent with a law degree. Law is unfamiliar terrain to many Asian American families, including mine. The first lawyer I ever met was my congressman, the
late Robert T. Matsui, who sponsored me to be a page in the U.S. House of Representative. If it weren’t for Bob, I’m not sure I would have considered law or
become a judge. In addition, over half of our survey respondents said they “sometimes” or “often” experience implicit discrimination in the workplace. Some
reported incidents in which colleagues or court personnel did not recognize them as lawyers. Female attorneys, in particular, reported being mistaken in court for
the translator, court reporter, paralegal, client or even a client’s girlfriend. Although Asian Americans are regarded as having the “hard skills” required for
competent lawyering, they are often thought to lack “soft skills.” Our survey respondents said they are perceived as hard-working, responsible and careful, but not
as empathetic, assertive or creative. Asian Americans are stereotypically the “worker bees” in law firms; many struggle in promotion processes that involve
subjective criteria such as likability, gravitas and leadership potential. As one survey respondent said, “Somehow I am the only one staying back to cover the team
assignments when the others went out for yoga and wine.” Our study also found that few Asian Americans went to law school in order to gain a pathway into
government or politics. Compared with other racial or ethnic groups, Asian Americans gravitate toward law firms and business settings, and they are least likely to
work in government early in their careers. Few become top prosecutors, elected officials or judges.

Greater penetration into public leadership roles is critical if the growing

number of Asian American attorneys is to translate into greater influence
throughout society. With issues such as immigration, education, voting rights and
national security in the headlines, the quality of our public policies depends on
everyone having a seat at the table, including Asian Americans.

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Public service is also important to dispelling the stereotype of Asian
Americans as perpetual foreigners. Bob Matsui was 6 months old when he and his
family were incarcerated at Tule Lake as part of the internment of people with Japanese
ancestry during World War II . Despite that experience, or perhaps because of it, Bob
entered public service and left no doubt about the love and loyalty he felt toward his
country.
There is no single way to create a more inclusive legal profession. But the first step is
awareness. Asian Americans have often been neglected because of their small
numbers, and monitoring progress is essential in law firms and other institutions
where lawyers work.
Beyond that, senior attorneys of all ethnic groups can be more intentional in mentoring
Asian American colleagues. In addition to Bob, I have been fortunate to have mentors
from various backgrounds, including the two federal judges for whom I clerked. The
common denominator was that they took a sustained interest in my career and were
willing to use their wisdom, contacts or clout to help me.
We also have to change perceptions of the roles that Asian Americans can
play in our society. Having watched countless episodes of the television series “Law &
Order,” I am struck that this popular portrayal of the American justice system never
seemed to cast an Asian American as an attorney or a judge. The only regular Asian
American character was a forensic scientist.

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K Links

105
 Anti-Blackness
Assertions to move on from the black-white binary are bad –
they don’t work and distract from the root cause of blackness
Sexton 10 (JARED SEXTON, associate professor at UC Irvine, “Proprieties of
Coalition: Blacks, Asians, and the Politics of Policing”, 2010
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0896920509347142, DOA: 7/10/17)//AK
In the post-civil rights era USA, the demand for paradigm shift with respect to racial
theory is a defining characteristic of political culture. 7 We are told in a variety of
tones that race matters are no longer, if ever they were, ‘simply black and
white’. At best, the focus of a black-white dualistic analysis is deemed inadequate to
apprehending the complexity of racial formation in the wake of post-1965 immigration
and the rise in rates of interracial dating and marriage since the landmark Supreme
Court ruling in the case of Loving v. Virginia (1967). At worst, the Procrustean tendency
is deemed politically stunting insofar as it precludes a ‘discussion of the colors in the
middle, now inexorable parts of the Black/white spectrum’ (Cho 1993: 205). There is
already a considerable literature in the social sciences and humanities which details
those vexed positions that are ‘neither black nor white’ (Sollors 1997), encompassing not
only the articulation of emergent multiracial or ‘mixed race’ identity claims (Daniel
2002; J.M. Spencer 1997; R. Spencer 1999), but also critique and political mobilization
among Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, Chicano/as, Latino/as, and American Indians
(Aguilar-San Juan 1994; Gracia and De Greiff 2000; Jaimes 1991). 8
However, the notion of an ‘endemic’ black-white model of racial thought is
something of a social fiction – one might say a misreading – that depends upon a
reduction of the sophistication of the paradigm in question. Once that
reduction is performed, the fiction can be deployed for a range of political
and intellectual purposes (Kim 2006). In addressing the call to displace the
black-white paradigm, we may recognize that its purported
institutionalization indicates more about the enduring force of anti-
blackness (Gordon 1995, 1998) than the insistence of black scholars, activists or
communities more generally. 9 When broaching the ‘explanatory difficulty’ (Omi and
Winant 1993: 111) of present-day racial politics, then, one wonders exactly who and what
is addressed by the demand to go ‘beyond black and white’. One finds a litany of
complicating factors and neglected subjects, but it is accompanied by a
failure to account cogently for the implications of this newfound complexity.
The recently appointed Dean of the Wayne State University Law School, Frank Wu, has
written: ‘“beyond black and white” is an oppositional slogan … it names itself
ironically against the prevailing tradition … It is easy enough to argue that
society needs a new paradigm, but it is much harder to explain how such an
approach would work in actual practice.’ (Wu 2006: xi) It is harder still to
explain why such an approach should be adopted. In fact, the
implementation of the ‘new paradigm’ of racial theory seems unfeasible
because it does not – and perhaps cannot – develop a coherent ethical
justification as an attempt to analyze and contest racism. Taken together, these
ambiguities beg a key question: what economy of enunciation, what rhetorical

106
distribution of sanctioned speaking positions and claims to legitimacy are produced by
the injunction to end ‘biracial theorizing’ (Omi and Winant 1994: 154)?
In pursuing this question, consider the following provocation by another noted legal
scholar, Mari Matsuda (2002), offered at a 1997 symposium on critical race theory at the
Yale Law School: When we say we need to move beyond Black and white, this
is what a whole lot of people say or feel or think: ‘Thank goodness we can get
off that paradigm, because those Black people made me feel so
uncomfortable. I know all about Blacks, but I really don’t know anything
about Asians, and while we’re deconstructing that Black-white paradigm,
we also need to reconsider the category of race altogether, since race, as you
know, is a constructed category, and thank god I don’t have to take those
angry black people seriously anymore’ (Matsuda 2002: 395).

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 Psychoanalysis
Defining identity in opposition to Whiteness is bad – it reifies
Whiteness as the master signifier
Seshardi-Crooks 2K (Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, Assistant Professor of English at
Boston College, Massachusetts, “Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race”,
2000 pages 7~9, DOA: 7/10/17)//AK
I argue that the inaugural signifier of race, which I term Whiteness,
implicates us all equally in a logic of difference. By Whiteness, I do not mean
a physical or ideological property as it is invoked in “Whiteness Studies” 5
or a concept, a set of meanings that functions as a transcendental signified.
By Whiteness, I refer to a master signifier (without a signified) that
establishes a structure of relations, a signifying chain that through a process
of inclusions and exclusions constitutes a pattern for organizing human
difference. This chain provides subjects with certain symbolic positions
such as “black,” “white,” “Asian,” etc., in relation to the master signifier.
“Race,” in other words, is a system of categorization that once it has been organized
shapes human difference in certain seemingly predetermined ways. We will therefore
have to see how this symbolic structuration is related to visibility. This is where Lacanian
theory will be especially useful.
As a system of organizing difference, race is very distinctive in relation to other forms of
organizations such as caste, ethnicity and nation. It is distinctive as a belief structure and
evokes powerful and very particular investments in its subjects. Consider the peculiar
intensification of racial identification and racial discourse even as the scientific
untenability of race is ever more insisted upon by scientists and anthropologists. Even
though it has now become commonplace to utter rote phrases such as “race
is a construct” or “race does not exist,” etc., race itself shows no evidence of
disappearing or evaporating in relevance. It is common sense to believe in
the existence of race. Why do we hold on to race? What is it about race that is
difficult to give up?
I suggest that race should be understood in its particularity as something that is neither totally like sexual difference, which is indeterminate and exceeds language,
nor purely symbolical or cultural like class or ethnicity. Race resembles class in that it is of purely cultural and historical origin, but it is also like sex in that it
produces extra-discursive effects. From a certain perspective, it seems marked on the body, something inherited like sex; from a Lacanian perspective, one might
even suggest (erroneously) that it seems to exceed language. The signification of class belonging, so long as it is purely a category of economic discrepancy, can be
manipulated by its subjects. But the minute class makes a claim to inheritance through the language of “stock” and “blood,” it lapses into “race,” and this is true for
all other categories of group identity. Scratch the surface of culture or ethnicity, and race will appear underneath it all to found its essence. 6 Race is historical and
material as well, but unlike class it is not at all malleable. It is assumed that one cannot change one’s accent and clothing and thereby change one’s race. We cannot
change it because race is supposedly inscribed on one’s body. 7 Does that mean that it is simply a fact of nature? Is phenotype a transcendental category? In
response, I suggest that we should ask why we invest in the notion of phenotype. Why do we feel that we must necessarily insist on the evidence of our eyes? We
may venture one kind of an answer using Teresa Brennan’s (1993) analysis of modernity. In History After Lacan, Brennan presents an extended psychoanalytic and
materialist critique of what she terms the foundational fantasy of modem societies: a psychotic fantasy that by conceiving of the subject as the origin, cause, and
end of knowledge wreaks incalculable havoc upon the environment. Such a fantasy presupposes an entirely self-contained and autonomous subject that is
characterized by the dominance of the narcissistic ego, severed from all forms of inter-subjectivity. Perhaps we can consider race itself as a symptom of what
Brennan terms the “ego’s era,” when objectification and dominance of others and of the environment are paramount. Among the many insights she offers about the
historicity of such a subject of knowledge, Brennan suggests that the dominance of the visual is a symptom of such “social psychosis”: “Visualization, whether in the
form of hallucination or visual perception, observes difference rather than connection” (ibid: 12). One consequence of such an intensification of visual difference is
borne out in Lacan’s reworking of the Hegelian dialectic in relation to the signifier and the look. She writes: the imaginary process of fixing the other is not only
confined to seeing; it also involves naming. More accurately, naming is part of how the other is seen, as well as being part of the way out. In sum, when the master
becomes the master, identified with and as a namer-shaper, released into and through a cultural linguistic tradition, the master simultaneously directs aggression
towards the one who is seen to be passified. But this leaves the passified in a position where they are dependent (at the level of the ego) on the image they receive
from the other. (Brennan 1993:60) According to Brennan, modernity is characterized by the objectification of an other in support of one’s narcissistic fantasy. This
“imaginary fixing,” she implies, also bears a relation to the symbolic order. By seizing the apparatus of a regimented look, Brennan argues, one takes possession of
the nominal function of language. 8 Language in this schema is engaged in the service of the ego and the foundational fantasy of self-containment. In relation to
“race,” however, we may well invert this argument. I suggest that it is the symbolic order of racial difference itself that governs seeing, rather than the reverse. We
believe in the factuality of difference in order to see it, because the order of racial difference is an order that promises access to an absolute wholeness to its
subjects— white, black, yellow or brown. The relation of fantasy to the symbolic order of race must be construed somewhat differently. The fantasy of wholeness, of
being, that the signifier holds out is not a case of narcissistic misrecognition, but is a fundamental fantasy that determines the trajectory of the subject of “race.”

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Thus visuality in the realm of race should be understood as functioning in support of and as a defence against the fantasy of a totalized subject. My argument is that
this fantasy of wholeness, which the signifier offers to the subject of race, is entirely predicated on sexual difference. Briefly, my point of departure is the Lacanian
view that sexual difference is in the Real (and not, as feminists have understood it, in the symbolic). This Lacanian axiom alludes to sex as that which escapes or
confounds language, which view, as Joan Copjec has pointed out, is the guarantee, not of the subject’s incompletion, but her “sovereign incalculably” (1994:208).
Whiteness, I am suggesting, attempts to install itself in this place of linguistic contradiction— of being— where the subject fades from meaning. Such an attempt to
totalize and inflate the subject can only produce anxiety. Visual difference then rescues the subject from such anxiety by reinstalling difference. To elaborate: in
Lacan’s theory, the order of sexual difference, which acknowledges male and female, is organized around the non-reciprocity of man and woman. Sexed
reproduction here is but the failure of Oneness that is poorly compensated for by the heterosexuality. It is an order that is predicated on the impossibility of
representing the sexual relation. Lacan’s aphorism “there is no sexual relation” turns on the asymmetry and nonreciprocity of the sexes. Sexual difference is
marked by the impasse of signification, and the impossibility of gratifying desire, of love as jouissance. 9 It is missing a signifier that can organize male and female
in a binary relation. In the article entitled “The subjective import of the castration complex,” published in Scilicet, we read that “the difference between the sexes
introduces a non-representable instance which is found to coincide with the point of failing that the subject encounters in the signifying chain” (Lacan, FS: 119). As
Joan Copjec puts it: “Sex is the stumbling block of sense” (1994:206); she further adds: When…sex is disjoined from the signifier, it becomes that which does not
communicate itself, that which marks the subject as unknowable. To say that the subject is sexed is to say that it is no longer possible to have any knowledge of him
or her. Sex serves no other function than to limit reason, to remove the subject from the realm of possible experience or pure understanding. This is the meaning,
when all is said and done, of Lacan’s notorious assertion that “there is no sexual relation”: sex, in opposing itself to sense, is also, by definition, opposed to relation,
to communication. (1994:207) The claim that sex is in the Real pertains to the Freudian notion that there is only one libido, meaning that there is no psychic
representative of the opposition masculine-feminine. The essence of castration and the link of sexuality to the unconscious both reside in this factor— that sexual
difference is refused to knowledge [savoir], since it indicates the point where the subject of the unconscious subsists by being the subject of nonknowledge. (FS:
120) I am suggesting two things: first, the order of racial difference attempts to compensate for sex’s failure in language; second, we must not therefore analogize
race and sex on the sexual model of linguistic excess or contradiction. The signifier Whiteness tries to fill the constitutive lack of the sexed subject. It promises a
totality, an overcoming of difference itself. For the subject of race, Whiteness represents complete mastery, self-sufficiency, and the jouissance of Oneness. This is
why the order of racial difference must be distinguished from, but read in relation to, sexual difference. If sex is characterized by a missing signifier, race, on the
contrary, is not and cannot be organized around such an absence— a missing signifier— that escapes or confounds language and inter-subjectivity. Race has an all-
too-present master signifier— Whiteness— which offers the illegal enjoyment of absolute wholeness. Race, therefore, does not bear on the paradigm of failure or
success of inter-subjectivity on the model of the sexual relation.

The rationale of racial difference and its organization can be understood as a Hobbesian one. It is a social contract among potential adversaries secured to
perpetuate singular claims to power and dominance, even as it seeks to contain the consequences of such singular interests. The shared insecurity of claiming
absolute humanness, which is what race as a system manages, induces the social and legal validation of race as a discourse of neutral differences. In other words,
race identity can have only one function— it establishes differential relations among the races in order to constitute the logic of domination. Groups must be

Race identity is about the sense of

differentiated and related in order to make possible the claim to power and domination.

one’s exclusiveness, exceptionality and uniqueness. Put very simply, it is an

identity that, if it is working at all, can only be about pride, being better,
being the best. Race is inextricably caught up in a Hobbesian discourse of social
contract, where personal (or particular) interest masquerades as public good. Sexual
difference, on the other hand, cannot be founded upon such a logic. The values attached
to male and female are historically contingent as feminists have long suggested, but
power cannot be the ultimate cause of sexual difference. Racial difference, on the other
hand, has no other reason to be but power, and yet it is not power in the sense of
material and discursive agency that can be reduced to historical mappings. If such were
the case, as many have assumed, then a historicist genealogy of the discursive
construction of race would be in order: Foucault not Lacan, discourse analysis not
psychoanalysis. But race organizes difference and elicits investment in its
subjects because it promises access to being itself. It offers the prestige of
being better and superior; it is the promise of being more human, more full,
less lacking. The possibility of this enjoyment is at the core of “race.” But
enjoyment or jouissance is, we may recall, pure unpleasure. The possibility of
enjoyment held out by Whiteness is also horrific as it implies the
annihilation of difference. The subject of race therefore typically resists race as mere
“social construction,” even as it holds on to a notion of visible, phenotypal difference.
Visible difference in race has a contradictory function. If it protects against a lethal
sameness, it also facilitates the possibility of that sameness through the fantasy of
wholeness. Insofar as Whiteness dissimulates the object of desire, 10 any
encounter with the historicity, the purely symbolic origin of the signifier,
inevitably produces anxiety. It is necessary for race to seem more than its historical
and cultural origin in order to aim at being. Race must therefore disavow or deny
knowledge of its own historicity, or risk surrendering to the discourse of exceptionality,
the possibility of wholeness and supremacy. Thus race secures itself through visibility.
Psychoanalytically, we can perceive the object cause of racial anxiety as racial visibility,

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the so-called pre-discursive marks on the body (hair, skin, bone), which serve as the
desiderata of race. In other words, the bodily mark, which (like sex) seems to be more
than symbolic, serves as a powerful prophylactic against the anxiety of race as a
discursive construction. We seem to need such a refuge in order to preserve the
investment we make in the signifier of Whiteness. Thus race should not be
reduced to racial visibility, which is the mistake made by some well-meaning and not-so-
wellmeaning advocates of a color blind society. Racial visibility should be understood as
that which secures the much deeper investment we have made in the racial
categorization of human beings. It is a lock-and-key relation, and throwing away the key
of visibility because it happens to open and close is not going to make the lock
inoperable. By interrogating visibility we can ask what the lock is preserving, and why.
The capacity of visibility to secure an investment in identity also distinguishes race from
other systems of difference such as caste, class, ethnicity, etc. These latter forms of group
identity, insofar as they cannot be essentialized through bodily marks, can be easily
historicized and textualized. Nothing prevents their deconstruction, whereas in the case
of race, visibility maintains a bulwark against the historicity and historicization of race.
(In fact, Brennan suggests that the “ego’s era” is characterized by a resistance to history.)
It is this function of visibility that renders cases of racial passing fraught and anxious.
My contention that the category of race is inherently a discourse of supremacy may seem
inattentive to the advances that our legal systems and liberal social ideologies have made
precisely in relation to “racism” and “racist” practices. Modern civil society refuses to
permit its subjects the enjoyment of supremacist rhetoric, the rhetoric of exceptionality,
by distinguishing between race and racism. It draws this distinction between a supposed
ontology (the study of physical or cultural differences) and an epistemology
(discriminatory logic) in the name of preserving a semblance of inter-subjectivity. Race,
it suggests, is a neutral description of human difference; racism, it suggests, is the
misappropriation of such difference. The liberal consensus is that we must do
away with such ideological misappropriation, but that we must “celebrate
difference.” It is understood as a “baby and the bath water” syndrome, in which the
dirty water of racism must be eliminated, to reveal the cleansed and beloved
“fact” of racial identity. This rather myopic perspective refuses to address the
peculiar resiliency of “race,” the subjective investment in racial difference, and the
hyper-valorization of appearance. It dismisses these issues or trivializes them because
race seems a historical inevitability. The logic is that people have been constituted for
material and other reasons as black and white and that this has had powerful historical
consequences for peoples thus constituted. Whether race exists or not, whether race and
racism are artificial distinctions or not, racialization is a hard historical fact and a
concrete instance of social reality. We have no choice, according to this reasoning, but to
inhabit our assigned racial positions. Not to do so is a form of idealism, and a groundless
belief that power can be wished away. In making this ostensibly “pragmatic”
move, such social theorists effectively reify “race.” Lukács, who elaborated
Marx’s notion of reification in relation to the commodity form in History and Class
Consciousness, is worth recalling here: Its basis is that a relation between people takes
on the character of a thing, and thus acquires a ‘phantom objectivity,’ an autonomy that
seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental
nature: the relation between people. (1923:89) To arrest analysis of race at the point
where one discerns and marks its historical effects is to reproduce those very relations of

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power that one intends to oppose. It is to render race so objective that it is impossible to
conceive human difference or inter-subjectivity anew. Modern civil society engages
in such reification because ultimately its desire is to keep the dialectic
between races alive. It must thus prohibit what it terms “racism” in order to
prevent the annihilation not so much of the “inferior” races but of the
system of race itself. This is how the system of “desiring Whiteness”
perpetuates itself, even in the discourses that are most pragmatically aimed
against racism. The resilience and endurability of race as a structure can thus be
attributed to its denials and disavowals. On the one hand, it is never in the place that one
expects it to be: it disavows its own historicity in order to hold out the promise of being
to the subject— the something more than symbolic— a sense of wholeness, of
exceptionality. On the other hand, as a social law, it must disavow this object in order to
keep the system viable and to perpetuate the dialectic: the race for Whiteness. Exploring
the structure of race requires a toleration of paradox, an appreciation of the fact that it is
an inherently contradictory discourse, and a willingness to see beyond relations of power
in order to mine the depth of subjective investment in it.

The subject can never become its symbolic identity – pursuit of

it fails because of the lack between the symbolic identity and
reality
McGowan 13 (TODD MCGOWAN, Associate Professor at the University of Vermont,
“Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis”, 2013 pages
123~124, DOA: 7/10/17)//AK
Ideology produces normality by establishing symbolic identities for subjects
to embody. In fact, the fundamental gesture of all ideology is the construction
and perpetuation of symbolic identity. Symbolic identity offers the subject a
stable answer to the question of identity that emerges with subjection to the
signifier. With an identity, the subject can feel itself at home within the inherently
alienating structure of the social order and relieved of the burden of its own existence.
This is why Jean-Paul Sartre links any affirmation of identity to bad faith. In the act of
identifying myself with a symbolic identity, I become who ideology wants me
to become and thereby deny my freedom — that I am never identical to what
I am. Bad faith accepts symbolic identity as accurately defining the subject,
and thus it produces a subject without any awareness of its own role in
constituting and taking on this identity.
But as Sartre notes in Being and Nothingness, true bad faith is impossible. No subject
can perfectly inhabit its symbolic identity. That identity inevitably remains
an answer that doesn't fully satisfy the subject. My symbolic identity
confronts me as an object that I am not. According to Sartre, "If l represent myself
as him, I am not he; I am separated from him as the object from the subject, separated
by nothing, but this nothing isolates me from him. I can not be he, I can only play at
being him; that is, imagine to myself that I am he."6 No matter how much I try to
become one with a symbolic identity, I cannot traverse the barrier of

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nothing — that is, the barrier of my own activity —in order to achieve
identification. Every symbolic identification is a failed symbolic
identification.
This failure of symbolic identity is not simply a logical failure. It is also necessary for the
ideological role that symbolic identification plays. Ideology needs symbolic identity to
fail in order to produce subjects oriented toward the process of symbolic identification
and concerned with completing this identification. This is the essential paradox:
while symbolic identity marks the subject's immersion into ideology, this
immersion must remain incomplete if it is not to undermine itself and
produce a subject free from ideological pressure. If symbolic identification
were successful and the subject were to immerse itself completely in the
identity, the subject would cease to experience this identity as a problem to
be worked through. Fully assuming a symbolic identity subverts the ideological work
that identification does. The subject's abnormality —its failure to coincide perfectly with
its identity — is the very thing that keeps it tied to normality.
If normal subjectivity requires a degree of abnormality in order to function, this
complicates both the critique of normality and the celebration of deviations from the
norm. The norm doesn't dominate through impressing its stamp of sameness on
everything but through allowing for some degree of difference. Deviations from the norm
do not subvert its power; they enhance it. To celebrate these deviations is ipso facto to
succumb to the very logic that one hopes to oppose. Depicted in this way, there seems to
be no way out of ideology's trap. If ideology, as Robert Pfaller claims, needs "a gesture of
negation for it to function/' one inevitably plays into its hands.7

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