Robert G. Lee makes a series of important arguments in his work “Asian Americans in Popular Culture” however the common thread running through them is his assertion that the model minority myth was constructed in direct retaliation to the Civil Rights movement and this image was carefully constructed by white America to keep Asian Americans “politically silent and ethnically assimilable.”
He supports this thesis with evidence from a US News article that read, “At a time when it is being proposed that hundreds of billions be spent on uplifting Negroes and other minorities, the nation’s 300,000 Chinese Americans are moving ahead on their own with no help from anyone else.” (p.151) Not only did this vilify the African American community by painting them as needy, it backed Asian Americans into a corner. They could no longer ask for help from the government now that they had a reputation of self-starting to uphold. Not only that but the government had also made it very clear in the Cold War era that it had the military power to incarcerate entire ethnic groups and would use that power if necessary. The threat of social and political rejection kept the Asian American community quiet, allowing the model minority myth to continue to be played out.
The image of Asian Americans was also carefully controlled in media, where the overtly sexualized Asian woman was repeatedly shown as docile and subservient, something to be protected not feared. This stereotype is shown in Sayonara, which features the War Bride character who is saved by the White American Soldier. Lee explains how these films not only follow the Pocahontas narrative, which classifies women as a commodity to be won rather than individuals, it also creates the dangerous notion that “unlike the men who struggle over the meaning of tradition, the women use it or ignore it as it suits their purpose.” (p.178) Thus suggesting that to truly assimilate, the ethnic minority must abandon tradition for the sake of the “modern”.
This argument is very much still prevalent today, as the model minority myth holds strong in America, especially in schools. The vicious cycle of high expectations for and within the Asian American community remains a political tool in the world of Affirmative Action and admissions expectations that I learned about in Writing 39C. Many of the students in my class had come from Asian countries and described their experience of having to work twice as hard as their non-Asian counterparts while still not being accepted into the same schools based purely on their race and the demographic requirements of the universities. This raises the question of whether stereotypes that have been formulated and perpetuated for decades can ever truly be eradicated, and what steps are needed in order to do so.