Transcript for:
Lecture on Model Minority Myth

What do people mean by the phrase model minority myth? And what's your view of that meme? You know, I'm constantly getting in trouble for this on this topic, and it's so frustrating. So I think what people mean is they're referring to Asian-Americans. And the idea is that, you know, Asians, number one, are so diverse. This term Asian-American includes super poor Cambodian-Americans and, you know, Hmong-Americans, but also Chinese and Japanese. and the complaint is, like, when I published this Tiger Mom book, people just didn't get it because it was sort of this, it was supposed to be kind of a satirical memoir, but they're, you know, about this super strict Chinese mom, and they're like, oh, she's entrenching the stereotype of the model minority, meaning this minority that works really hard, and they do math, and they play violin, and they're automatically successful. And the complaint is if you just generalize and say, all Asians are fat. Number one, you miss how many Asian Americans are really poor and struggling. And number two, you don't acknowledge the kinds of discrimination against the Asian Americans face. And so that's kind of the way that argument goes. I sort of object to its overuse this term because while I acknowledge it, this is definitely a problem. I never I never like it when it's like, oh my gosh, you, you know, you, um, like if some Asians, so in this book, the triple package, I actually write about how. Chinese Americans are among the most successful groups in America, along with Indian Americans, but also along with Nigerian Americans and Cuban Americans. This moment in history, in terms of really crude metrics like per capita income, education, corporate representation. And immediately there was like, how can you say that? You're just re-entrenching the model minority stereotype. And I'm like, you know, to me, it's like more facts, the better, you know, let's get the information out there. And the question is why, why are some groups, why do we have this statistic? We can unpack it and see that, look, actually other Asian Americans aren't doing so well. And what's even more interesting, Goldman, if you it's very, very much about the immigrant experience. So Asian Americans, if you take these aggregate statistics, they there are these glass ceiling problems like they don't especially East Asian Americans don't do great, like at the highest corporate levels. but their SAT scores are something like 140 points above the national medium. But what's interesting is if you break out the Asian-Americans so that you have first generation, that is, these are the immigrants, and then the immigrants'kids, and then the grandkids of the immigrants, the third generation. What's fascinating is by the time you get to the third generation, they do not outperform any Americans. You know, so what I... What I find interesting is that shows it's not something genetic in Asian Americans. It's not something natural in them. And it's not even cultural in the sense that it's like they carry it around with them. But a lot of it is very much about the immigrant experience. And it's generational. This kind of drive and motivation fades, usually by the third generation in almost any immigrant group. Yeah, no, that accords with everything that I've seen with my eyes in my own family, and I think accords with a lot of people's experiences. Are you from an immigrant family? On my mother's side, immigrated from Puerto Rico. Interesting. Yeah. Her parents immigrated. So she was, I used to joke that she was a tiger mom. She was, just looking at you, but we don't have to go there. Yeah. So I think with the model minority myth, I think there's another element that is motivating the resistance to your discussion in the triple package where you talk about various different ethnic groups. You mentioned Nigerians, Chinese, and so on and so forth. To point out the success of any particular ethnic group. It seems to many people to be saying that racism doesn't exist against ethnic groups that are less successful, or that what explains racial or ethnic disparity is something other than the one allowable explanation, which is systemic racism. And part of this is just a function of how coarse our discourse about this subject is. We talk about races. For example, Asians, when I've seen polling that indicates most quote unquote Asians don't identify as Asians, they identify as, you know, the particular country. And but the more you begin to study actual ethnic groups, which is how sort of how most people live. You began to see how normal it is to see large disparities between groups that to an outsider might look the same, and therefore discrimination may not be the primary explanation for disparate outcomes. So how do you see what your research, how your research... what implications it has for the wider discussion of racial disparity that has been ongoing, but it's especially pressing today. Yeah. You know, when we wrote this book, The Triple Package, you know, it did well, but oh my gosh, we got so much blowback. And this is the story of my life. Like, I don't think I've written a book that hasn't been wildly controversial. And I never quite get it because I feel like, should you really read this book? You know, it says, look, we did the research and we're looking at why at this moment certain groups are doing better than others. And while it's not genetic, we show that, again, it's not like certain it's all one race. We actually show that so many Caribbean Americans and Nigerian Americans are at the very top of the list for outperforming whites, actually.