Dion Lim, a journalist with KGO-TV/ABC News, has covered violence against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders during the pandemic. She explains how the model minority myth came to be and why she doesn’t take it as a compliment. There are so many pressures that come with these expectations.
Here are comments
I just hate how when someone says, “oh, you’re smart because you’re Asian.” There will be Asian/Asian-American people who are smart or not smart. By tagging on the “because you’re Asian” at the end of it, it feels like my hard work is being taken for granted. That it was something expected of me and that came naturally. Not only that, being smart doesn’t and shouldn’t refer to only math skills. So, like other people, smartness comes within or with the person, not by ethnicity.
Declaring a model minority is a divide and conquer method. Praise and reward one group while criticizing punishing the other group(s). That keeps them from joining forces together to gain overall equality for everyone.
Some of those stereotypes I had somewhere in the back of my mind during my stint working as a black teacher in south east asia… Trust me Asians also struggle with math as any other race in the world, difference is environment and family enforce it on them in a very strict way to be better than everyone academically (this is actually a thing to admire to some degree but too much pressure end up producing depressed individuals)… The more you travel the world the more you realize stereotypes are nothing but a bunch of B.S with racist origins.
4 Comments