Diversity Equity Inclusion Topic: Model Minority

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Asian American Books & Read-Alouds:

(CHINESE) Uncle Peter’s Amazing Chinese Wedding by Lenore Look & Yumi Heo

(KOREAN) Dear Juno by Soyung Pak (author) & Susan Kathleen Hartung (illustrator)

(KOREAN) Bee-Bim Bap! By Linda Sue Park (author) & Ho Baek Lee (illustrator)

(JAPANESE) Suki’s Kimono by Chieri Uegaki (author) & Stéphane Jorish (illustrator)

(INDIAN) Hot Hot Roti for Dada-ji by Farhana Zia (author) & Ken Min (illustrator)

(FILIPINO) Cora Cooks Pancit by Dorina K. Lazo Gilmore (author) & Kristi Valiant (illustrator)

(CAMBODIAN) A Path of Stars by Anne Sibley O’Brien 

Transcript for Podcast Lesson on Model Minority with Dr. Wu

Jenny Woo: Welcome to 52 Essential Conversations. I'm Jenny and I'm sitting next to Judy Tzu-Chun Wu who is a professor and chair of the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She received her PhD in US History from Stanford University and previously taught for 17 years at Ohio State University. Her research and teaching focus on analyzing intersecting social hierarchies such as those based on race, gender, sexuality, and citizenship. She is particularly interested in understanding how individuals form identities and navigate social and equalities. She has authored multiple books including Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era. Her current book projects explore the political career of Patsy Takemoto Mink, the first woman of color U.S. Congressional Representative and the cosponsor of Title IX. Welcome, Judy.

 Judy Wu: Thank you so much. I'm excited to participate in this conversation.

Jenny Woo: On this topic of implicit bias, when I saw your work, I said I must interview her and I'm really curious about your definition of what Model Minority means.

Judy Wu: I think this question about how Asian Americans or Chinese Americans are perceived in this country are very much shaped by this idea of the model minority of being model minorities and that idea assumes that they are the best among all the marginalized groups, which automatically pits them against other marginalized groups particularly African-Americans, Chicano Latinos, and American Indians. The assumption is that for Asian-Americans that they have worked hard, they have strong families and that they have achieved educational success, economic success, and they have done so without having to advocate for change and without having to have government intervention. 

Judy Wu:  And the idea of the model minority really upholds this idea of the United States is a meritocracy a place where anybody around the world can come in, and if they work hard, they will achieve success. This representation really erases systematic discrimination in races as well. The activism that Asian American communities have engaged in.

Jenny Woo: That's a great definition and it puts the onus on the individual: "well you know so-and-so can do it and this is how it's done. If you just put in more effort and time this American dream is going to arrive." Tell me more about your involvement in this. How how did you personally decide that this is your vision, and this was important for you.

Judy Wu: I am an immigrant, so I came to the United States when I was 6 with my family and we grew up in where I grew up in Spokane, Washington, which is a predominately white community. And I definitely felt like an outsider. Like a lot of immigrants, my family experiences downward mobility. My parents were more professionals in Taiwan but in the United States they worked really long hours in restaurants and convenience stores, and they relied on family labor. I grew up helping my parents run these family stores and just experiencing being made fun of or feeling like an outcast because of language or food or cultural practices. And I didn't really initially have this the language or the concepts to understand what we were experiencing until I went to college and became exposed to ethnic studies classes. Taking classes on Afro-American literature or Latino politics and advocating for Asian record studies classes so that we could learn about each other's histories and cultures and understand where we fit within the United States and how our very presence in many ways challenges fundamental ideas about what it means to be American.

Jenny Woo: Tell me more about where we fit. This checking off the box and creating our own box is such a hot debate these days given the political context. As a parent and an educator, what do you say to your students or your children?

Judy Wu: I teach Asian American Studies at UC Irvine and I really emphasize that Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders have a very ambivalent relationship to the U.S. nation. 

Judy Wu: Before we were model minorities, we were aliens and eligible for citizenship or we were nationals because the United States had colonized places like the Philippines or different parts of the Pacific Islands. We were actually excluded from the nation. It didn't matter how long people had been in the country, but they can never become U.S. citizens under the category of alien and eligible for citizenship or they were unequally incorporated so they were not aliens but they were not citizens either.

Jenny Woo: That position of being marginalized and excluded that still persists even though there is now the representation of model minority. So when the United States engages in economic competition with Asian countries--when engages in wars in Asian countries those fears about Asia or this idea of Yellow Peril recurs and so I think the current day position being made of minorities in some ways still carries with it this fear of yellow peril that we are somehow better and more competitive that we can be a threat. Whether it's in schools whether it's in the economy, whether it's national security, I think schools are a particularly important site for trying to understand and navigate some of those racial tensions. Our population within schools are so diverse now. And sometimes the curriculum hasn't quite caught up to the diversity of the student population. I see efforts by schools to do so to really think about the diverse histories of people who are here but sometimes they're not as well equipped addressing those issues. And so those tensions can either continue to simmer or they can be exacerbated, or they can be addressed within schools as well.

Jenny Woo:  I'm really curious as far as what's addressed within schools, and what you think in that sense. But I'd love to share a little bit of my personal background on this topic. I immigrated to the United States, to Texas when I was almost 10, not knowing a single word of English or alphabet, and trying to fit in.

Jenny Woo: I really struggled, and I really tried. And I remember the first day of school there was a math problem. Of course, this is very stereotypical because we had learned more math earlier and more intensively in China. I raised my hand and used my fingers to give it a number and that maybe only a couple of numbers that I really just learned. And over the years I was one of the two Chinese students in the ESL class at the time. But later on, I begin to notice this tension within myself of trying to cover what I was really good at, so that I can fit in. But in other senses, using those values to show that I'm good at something by standing out. This tension--if that also carries within schools and for other students. So now going back to the question: how do we address this in schools? What can we do? What are some of your thoughts?

Judy Wu: Yeah, I think the pressure or assumption of being model minorities is very much experienced by Asian-American students. So sometimes they're a subject of resentment because other groups feel like: "well how are they able to succeed? Apparently so easily that it's somehow inherent to their culture or to their group." And then, there are also students in which learning doesn't come naturally. Right. And even if they are of Asian-American background they're assumed to succeed but they struggle whether it's with math or science or with language. And in some ways, they're seen as disappointments because they're naturally assumed to be culturally and educationally successful. And that can cause real issues because maybe the school does not provide intervention support programs for those students because they don't recognize that they need that it can cause issues of mental distress among the students. And I definitely see that even at the college level. People having difficulties with sleeping, with family community pressures. It is there's a host of issues that arise because there are assumptions of Asian kids being out of minorities. In terms of what can be done, I think to really consider the needs of and of those students not as a cultural group or as a racial group. But in terms of what they need to succeed educationally.

Jenny Woo: That's a great point. And there are certainly specific language or questions that I can think of that parents might ask or even comparisons: "So and so you know is doing this and why aren't you doing it?" that type of thing really sets the pressure and frames the sense of normalcy and that is really individually based and contextually defined then as a cultural group. So now let's put on the parent hat, what are some things you've learned as a parent raising children in today's age that the difficulties that you have noticed them encountering? How do you mitigate that?

Judy Wu: It's interesting because my children who are now 11 and 15, they grew up part of the time in Ohio, which is a very different demographic compared to Orange County.

Judy Wu: And we also spent a year in Germany and so they've been in different types of educational environments, and the neighborhood I lived in Ohio was a very close-knit when we would go to the neighborhood library and the librarians all knew the names of our children. But at the same time, it was rather relatively racially homogenous. I remember when I first gave birth to my older son and we were just taking a walk around the neighborhood. Someone came up and said oh he's China or they might have even said it's China. It was just was not a kind of cultural understanding about how to address a child or a parent of an Asian child.

Judy Wu: Also, my husband is not Asian-American, and so we've had encounters where people have asked if he was the parent of our child, who's been a phenotypically mixed, They just assume that the father could not possibly be the parent of the child. There's that type of just daily encounters I guess you can consider the micro-aggressions although I think when you experience that they don't feel like micro.

Judy Wu: And I think sometimes that is part of the children's reaction sometimes they're not.

Judy Wu: Sometimes children are really oblivious to racial difference. That doesn't mean they learn over time. In Orange County, it's a very different setting.

Judy Wu: There is a lot of different Asian-American communities. And that's one of the reasons why I was really excited about moving here. In the school districts where we're in, these are well-funded well-supported schools.

Judy Wu: And I don't know if the students are still having those types of conversations about race and racial difference in the classroom because even when there's a larger population, there could still be those types of conversations about differences. I'd like it when my kids form relationships with both people who look like them and who don't look like them. We come from different backgrounds, who can share their interests. I went on a field trip with my younger son. They went to Riverside. I can't remember the name of it but it’s kind of like an orange citrus museum and it documented the history of the orange industry in California. But it wasn't just like a kind of a great People's History of the Orange County know, the orange industry. It wasn't just the white Anglo pioneers that created it, but it was really also about the people of color, who worked in the fields who harvested the oranges.

 Jenny Woo: And that included Asian immigrants Mexican Americans. And it also talked about the ways in which the orange traveled around the world from southern China to end up in the United States. So, I really appreciate that type of history, which I think is a much more inclusive one, in terms of race, in terms of class, and in terms of having a global understanding of how we experience what we experienced today. I really appreciate those efforts in the school district and in public institutions and public museums.

Jenny Woo: These are such concrete examples of what we can do as educators and parents to really showcase this inclusion in terms of how we describe the history of something or even the creation of a product--all the players that have participated in it in different capacities. And it's interesting you mentioned earlier: we might be alert and some of these implicit biases the undertones of micro-aggression when our children are happily oblivious to that and so, my last question is: "when is the right time or if they're just oblivious and so inclusive themselves, is it necessary to highlight that? How do you deal with that? 

Judy Wu: That's a really great question. I think for some families it's not a choice. I think about the anti-black violence that has been committed by both the police and everyday citizens. And I think in those settings it will be very hard for the parents not to tell their children as soon as possible about what it means to be black in this society. You know I think I look for opportunities to try to engage with my kids. I can't remember which child it was coming home and talked to me about what they were learning in school in terms of the civil rights movement and segregation. But they described it as black people not wanting to be on the same bus or share resources like white people.

Judy Wu: And I don't think that's what the school was teaching them. But in their minds, that's what they got. I felt like I was "no no no. Let me explain segregation."

Judy Wu: Or my son recently was doing a project related to imperialism colonialism, and I think there's this liberal approach like let's talk about the benefits of imperialism, colonialism, and let's talk about the negative impacts. I'm like No. There are no positive impacts of imperialism colonialism at least for the people who've been colonized. There are more nuanced ways of thinking about it. But I think sometimes you just have to kind of call out.

Judy Wu: Racial hierarchy racial discrimination. And sometimes popular culture is a way to do this as well. When we lived in Ohio, there was a neighbor who's white and who had adopted an African American child. And Similar to I think was Kung Fu Panda 2 have come Fu Panda 3, where Po didn't realize that he was adopted but even though his father's a goose.

Judy Wu: My son's like "Oh! I didn't realize the child was adopted!" Right? In his mind, there doesn't need to be an explanation about the parent and the child having different racial backgrounds. In some ways, I like that that he doesn't assume that there's no biological connection. But it's also an opportunity to think about how we construct race or how do we define race. I think it's really important to try to engage in those types of conversations with children when there's an opportunity but also when there's a need. 

Jenny Woo: Well said. Thank you so much for your time, Judy.

Judy Wu: Thanks so much for the opportunity.

Jenny Woo: And thank you, for listening to 52 Essential Conversations.