Model Minority Myth

History of Asian American Stereotypes

Although the current and most common stereotype of Asian Americans that exists in the United States is the model minority myth, stereotypes about this population have evolved through numerous changes since the first wave of Asian immigrants in the mid-1800s. These stereotyped images have included the “pollutant,” the “coolie” (i.e., an unskilled Asian laborer), the “deviant,” the “yellow peril,” the “gook” (i.e., used to describe North Vietnamese soldiers during the Vietnam War), as well as the model minority.

Political and economic issues have largely influenced the evolution of Asian American stereotypes. Asian immigrants were often portrayed in the media as the pollutant, coolie, and deviant during the 1800s and 1900s. These Asian stereotypes originally evolved from White Americans' feelings of threat and invasion by Chinese immigrants during the unstable and depressed economy between the 1870s and 1890s. Because of their willingness to work for lower wages, Chinese immigrants were used as scapegoats, often facing attacks for sending money made in the United States back to their families in China and becoming work competitors with small American farmers and workers. Eventually, the yellow peril terminology was coined by journalists to warn White Americans that the Chinese and Japanese were going to take over the United States and destroy their civilization; thus, the press depicted Asians as irrational, dark, and inassimilable.

The yellow peril stereotype was extended to other Asian groups as the wars with Japan, Korea, and Vietnam evolved. At the same time, the restrictions on the immigration of Asian women and the bans on miscegenation contributed to the image of “asexual” Asian men. Therefore, Asian men were often depicted as either hypermasculine and dangerous or as impotent and sexually undesirable in popular fiction and movies. During the wars, the use of comfort women by the Japanese military in Asia contributed to the stereotypes of Asian women as exotic and promiscuous. The U.S. media also sexualized Asian women and depicted them as submissive, quiet, mysterious, or untrustworthy. Asian women also were portrayed to fall in love with White men rather than Asian men.

During the civil rights movement and Black Power movement in the 1960s, and possibly in reaction to these movements, the model minority stereotype first appeared in popular media in U.S. News and World Report in 1966; this was followed by similar articles in Newsweek in 1984 and Time magazine in 1987. Asian Americans were described as a racial minority group that had overcome hardship and discrimination through hard work and determination and were, therefore, set as an example for other ethnic minority groups to follow. Many have argued that the characterization of Asian Americans as a model minority was developed as a political propaganda against other racial minority groups by creating a racial triangulation between White Americans, Asian Americans, and African Americans, such that Asian Americans are triangulated as alien to White Americans but superior to African Americans. More specifically, it was used to place the blame of racism and social inequality in the United States onto the minorities themselves, suggesting that African Americans and Latinos/as did not have the intelligence or discipline for success that Asian Americans possessed and that other minority groups should try to be as well-behaved and obedient as Asian Americans. This marked the beginning of the model minority myth that would come to dominate the image of Asian Americans in the United States.

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