Model Minority
Stereotypes don't tell the whole story. Leah Kim shares her experience with being put in a box, and explores why this everyday practice of mindfulness is paramount to us moving towards a better world for all.
By Leah Kim
There were several reasons why it took me over a year to share my piece on Quiet Racism.
For starters, I am generally terrified of confrontation. When I am bothered by something in my personal life, I am much more likely to quietly seethe and fume on my own, shoot dirty looks, and give the cold shoulder than to verbalise what I’m feeling and to actually engage with the other person.
I am also overly dependent on the approval and agreement of others. This is something I am getting better at reconciling. We are all different people with different perspectives and I am realising that I actually learn much more from speaking and listening to people who don’t think or see things like I do.
I was worried that by sharing my personal stories of and thoughts on racism, it would seem as though I was attempting to claim that what I’ve gone through is remotely comparable to what Black people have gone through and continue to go through. I was worried about being invalidated and not taken seriously. I was worried about being told things like, “Oh come on, it’s not that bad for Asians,” or “Well, what about how racist YOU KOREANS are?”, both of which were indeed said to me in response to my essay.
“A Model Minority does not cause trouble. We do not ruffle feathers. We do not complain. We do not challenge authority.”
What I’ve realised about these reasons underlying my hesitation is that it is all rooted in the Model Minority mentality. A Model Minority does not cause trouble. We do not ruffle feathers. We do not complain. We do not challenge authority.
We do not have a voice.
I was never explicitly taught that I could and should act in accordance with the expectations of being a Model Minority. Unlike Black parents who have to sit their children down and explain to them why it’s important that they always keep their hands visible any time they’re confronted by the police, Asian parents don’t sit us down and explain how we can be considered the good minority group. They don’t need to. We absorb it from observing their actions. We come to understand it from how we are portrayed, or completely not portrayed, in media and in the cultural narrative of our country. We are reminded on a daily basis simply from how we are interacted with.
Growing up, many of my school peers did not even know that Korea was a country. “You’re from Korea? Is that in China?” These kinds of questions confused and frustrated me. “No, I’M from HERE. I was born in Chicago,” I would think indignantly. Another too frequent observation that was made was about my English being really good. “No sh*t,” I would think, “it’s my first language.”
The 1988 Olympics being held in Seoul gave my motherland more visibility. Still, I am regularly assumed to be Chinese, whether by offensive catcalls I sometimes get on the street, punctuated by self-impressed shoutouts of “Ni hao ma!”, or a well-meaning acquaintance who recently said, “Oh your baby will be a Libra! But how does it work in Chinese astrology?”
I am still bothered by the fact that when I was filling out medical forms while living in the UK, there was no correct box I could check for my race. When I asked, “Should I just write Other?”, the midwife responded, “Can you just check Chinese? How about Malaysian? Singaporean?”
Seemingly small omissions like this have impacted my understanding and assumption of how I am seen (or not). When I recently went for a pregnancy checkup and I was asked about my race, I replied, “Asian.” The woman, wanting further details, asked, “Asian-what?” and, confused, I answered, “Asian… American?” She clarified, “I mean, what kind of Asian?” I was so surprised that it even mattered that I basically could not hear her actual question.
This is why when Trump refers to the Coronavirus as the China Virus and Covid-19 as Kung Flu, it sends the message that all Asian people are the cause of the pandemic, regardless of our specific racial identity, and regardless of the outright absence of scientific accuracy in his vitriol. When hate crimes increased as a result, they increased against all Asian groups. How quickly our protective status as the Model Minority evaporated when it stopped serving the system of White Privilege.
“The underlying problem is not about one group versus another.”
Trump’s racist rhetoric aside, Asians have not been considered a threat in America. While this offers us a protection that Black people are unjustly not afforded, it also minimises our worth and our humanity and it reinforces the power of White Privilege. It is an attempt to dumb us down into submission, stifle our voices, and confuse us into thinking that perhaps the fight against racism is not one we should get involved in because we haven’t really been affected.
The idea of the Model Minority is that if we keep our heads down, do our work, and stay out of everyone’s way, we will have the opportunity to take part in the American Dream. We won’t be red-lined out of nice neighbourhoods and we won’t be violently apprehended by the police for a minor traffic violation. We also won’t really be seen or taken seriously, but, at least we’ll be allowed a more carefree existence in America. Our country’s biased systems of media and education reinforce all of this by showing us the world through a White lens. It pits People of Color against each other: Do you want to be considered a model or a problem?
The idea of the Model Minority is a lie that ultimately perpetuates White Privilege. It is a method of control, a way to keep all People of Colour down. Systemic Racism has specific ways of disempowering specific racial groups. Speaking generally, one way to consider how this plays out is to note that Black people are over-policed, Latinx people are targeted for deportation, Middle Eastern people are assumed to be terrorists, and Asian people are effectively told to stay invisible. Stories are then told around these injustices in order to rationalise them: that Black person broke the law, that Latinx person was an illegal immigrant, that Middle Eastern person hates Americans, so you, Asian person, you just stay in your place and run your dry-cleaning shop and we’ll leave you alone.
During the riots in 1992 Korean Americans received very little aid or protection from police authorities, due to their low social status and language barriers. Many Koreans rushed to Koreantown after Korean-language radio stations called for volunteers to guard against rioters. Many were armed, with a variety of improvised weapons, handguns, shotguns, and semi-automatic rifles.
The idea of the Model Minority is bullsh*t. It should only take remembering the LA Riots of 1992 to recognise this. What started as a protest against the acquittal of the four police officers who beat Rodney King escalated into a battle of minority groups who were left to their own devices with no law enforcement presence. It was as if we minority groups were being puppeteered by the powers of White Privilege. I also can’t help but think that the myth of the Model Minority was at play when the Asian officer steadfastly chose to literally look the other way as George Floyd was murdered. Whether he thought his actions would be protected because he’s a police officer or because he’s a “good, non-threatening” minority or whatever else was possibly going through his mind as he chose complicity, something had conditioned and perhaps blinded him to the fundamental difference between right and terribly wrong.
In addition to the basic truths that all human beings are equal and that racism is wrong, we have to know that there is no safety in being one type of minority versus another. Being considered the Model Minority is a fake privilege. It makes us pawns of the system. It is disempowering. It perpetuates racism.
One of the messages I received after posting my earlier piece was from a man whose children are mixed-race Chinese and Armenian. He wanted to make the point that there are racist Asian people too, citing a Chinese person who used a derogatory term with one of his children as well as Korean people he grew up with who used derogatory terms about Black, White, and Japanese people.
Saying ‘all lives matter’ is like seeing firefighters putting out the fires of a burning house and claiming, ‘But what about my house?’ when your house isn’t even on fire.”
His point was that racism is not just among white people and I absolutely know that this is true. Just as there are racist and anti-racist white people, there are racist and anti-racist non-white people, including asians. There are many more silently complicit people of all colours who have claimed colourblindness but are now waking up to the fact that not only is it impossible to not see colour but to hide behind this idea at best indirectly perpetuates inequality.
The underlying problem is not about one group versus another. As the brilliant Emmanuel Acho says in the Oprah Conversation on Apple TV, “We’re all in the fight of Oppression. This is a collective fight of People of Colour. I’m not in a fight of Black vs. White. I’m in a fight of Good vs. Evil, the Oppressed vs. the Oppressor. It’s not just a Black/White thing. It is a Truth, Morality, Goodness, Equality thing.”
The Black Lives Matter movement is not just about Black people or even just about People of Colour. I can understand why it might be confusing at first, because I myself was confused when the phrase initially surfaced back in 2013. I literally said, “But don’t all lives matter?” My friend had to spell it out for me: “All lives will only matter when Black lives matter. Saying ‘all lives matter’ is like seeing firefighters putting out the fires of a burning house and claiming, ‘But what about my house?’ when your house isn’t even on fire.”
It’s all connected. Racism against you is racism against me, and vice versa. Injustice against one person is injustice against all of us as humanity. We must see, speak, and act from empathy. We must take the hate that we’ve received and the traumas, whether big or small, that we’ve endured and transform it all into one collective, empowered voice. We must admit that we see colour and then we must work to embrace what we see, because only then can we truly be open, understand, appreciate, and, ultimately, love each other for real.
LEaH KIM
Leah writes about mental health, motherhood, and being human. As a pregnant, full-time mom, spare time is challenging to come by, but she loves creating a cozy home, growing flowers and veggies in her garden, and baking bread from scratch.
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