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Thx Ike! “Indiana University officials are considering whether to keep the name of a longtime school trustee on a gymnasium following a student newspaper article about 1940s letters in which he advocated racial segregation.”
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Even by the New York Post’s low standards, this is a ridiculously homophobic piece of crap of an article.
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“North Carolina’s attorney general declared three former Duke University lacrosse players accused of sexually assaulting a stripper innocent of all charges on Wednesday, ending a prosecution that provoked bitter debate over race, class and the tactics o
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“MSNBC has canceled its simulcast of CBS Radio’s “Imus in the Morning” following a long line of advertisers pulling their support of the show yesterday and today. “
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Imus’s producer: “If the N.B.A. were peopled by a bunch of Romanians, we’d be making fun of Romanians. To not satirize someone just because of their race, I think that would be patronizing and racist in itself.”
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“The cop allegedly assaulted a Sikh American man while yelling racial epithets, right in front of his wife and six-year-old child…All this, because Mr. Nag parked a van with expired tags in his own driveway.”
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Thx Tereza! ” the University of Florida voted to deny Jeb Bush an honorary degree, citing concerns about some of Bush’s education initiatives, including his dismantling of affirmative action programs in the state”
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Thx Tereza! “It’s not as convenient to hate the corporations or the politicians, to do something about the political negligence towards the regulation of the American companies, when there’s the “other” right in front of us, easy to pick out by ear and by
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Thx Ananser! “The suit alleged that FedEx Express discriminated against its African-American and Hispanic workers by passing them over for promotion, paying them less than white workers and treating them unfairly in evaluation and disciplinary proceedings
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Thx Ananser! “the black boys at Brookside, are set apart, in a way, by a special mentoring program that pairs them with black teachers for one-on-one guidance outside class, extra homework help, and cultural activities during the school day.”
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“When dealing with the issue of diversity (or lack thereof), we should zoom in on the board rooms, not just the shows. Change has to start at the executive level, among the people who set the high earnings bar for the bottom line.”
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Thx Gang Shik! “fuels a zero tolerance for failure. Many Asian Americans suffer this Model Minority affliction everyday, some have taken their lives as they are unable to stack up to this racial pecking order where we MUST be at the peak of our game.”
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“”Imus is no different from “haters on black talk radio who regularly praise and play Louis Farrakhan tapes.” I am not aware of any black talk radio haters who have the audience Imus does. And I’m not living in a culture of Black Supremacy, either.”
Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of
ren. wrote:
re: man pleads guilty in attack on prof.
This won’t make me very popular with the Asian Americans and probably means I won’t get invited to the stereotype theme-party but I have to voice some concerns about the model minority mythos. First off I don’t see it applying to this guy in the article, nothing in this article hints at the high pressures and expectations set upon Asians. If he was being pushed to achieve academic greatness, he sure as hell wasn’t involved. What was the super-expectation for this guy? A minimum 2.0GPA at Umass-Lowell? That’s understandably rough. Perhaps I’d agree if this guy had a 3.9 and the teacher didn’t give him a 4.0 and so he stabbed her in the neck with a knife. Then I would assume he had a zero tolerance for failure as you call it. But a 2.0 is not breaking anyone’s ass. The point is, he didn’t look to be engaging in hard-work period. You’re worried about this guy striving for the peak, but I don’t think he even bothered to show up at the base of the mountain. I’m not sure this guy is the proof positive for showing the negative effects of the model minority status.
Why an affliction? Why is he automatically branded a victim? Is it inappropriate to consider the possibility that higher education was not this dude’s forte? Perhaps his family is well educated, but that doesn’t indicate he’s intelligent… and it clearly doesn’t show if you figure stabbing your teacher in the neck with a weapon is a reasonable response to being unable to compete intellectually with the fam.
Secondly, he was Asian and not Asian American. Does he really suffer from this model minority affliction? Considering he was here on visa, does he really comprehend the model minority ideology (an American Invention) such that he might embody it, or do Asian Americans just attribute this to him anyways? I live with Chinese grad students and they don’t really comprehend the typecast. I attempted to explain the unfair pressure to be academically successful and they looked at me with a puzzled look: one part “stop whining” and one part “we’ve had this pressure since elementary school”. They don’t attribute this “fair/unfair” qualification to pressure, it’s just a part of their lives if you’re striving to be an academic. Considering the Asian Internationals that I know, who could academically wipe the floor with the best Asian Americans, I’m under the impression that they face incredible pressure and don’t see it as the stigma that we do.
This isn’t to say that I don’t have problems with some issues surrounding the model minority mythos. But being Asian American, I’ve had this term beaten into my head (by other Asians go figure) to the point where I have this Pavlovian response to foam at the mouth at first mention. Apart from people telling me to hate this term, they don’t really go into explaining what constitutes “fair” pressure . If the model minority term creates false expectations, then what praise could you give to Asians who do succeed that in no way establishes any expectations that are unachievable or prove damning to their self-image?
Posted 13 Apr 2007 at 7:12 pm ¶
Jay wrote:
I’m under the impression that they face incredible pressure and don’t see it as the stigma that we do.,
I don’t think it’s the same type of pressure. The main difference between International students and domestic ones is probably that international students can afford to place all their time into their work (and thus there’s probably quite a few who are terrible at teaching – something that professors are supposed to do, supposedly.) The majority I know already have family when they arrive.
On top of that, these communities tend to be tight-knit and impossible to fit into unless you know the language of the country of origin for the community.
So an average Asian-American experience or what have you would be very foreign to them.
But then again, “good at math” isn’t the whole of the model minority myth anyway. “good at math but crappy at speaking and leading and not very edgy” is the model minority myth.
Which is probably why you have trouble articulating the problem.
Posted 13 Apr 2007 at 10:37 pm ¶
ren. wrote:
Jay
I’m sorry, what’s the difference in the pressure that international Asians face compared to Asian Americans? I didn’t understand that whole “terrible at student teaching – professors hijacked by research biased institutes of higher learning” thing?
Somehow I figured the problem was with me. That’s so refreshing to know. I was afraid it was just some ambiguous and often empty slogan propagated by some kind of overzealous groupthink, but knowing I’m the culprit, you’ve put me at ease. Before I accept the blame and admit my inability to communicate those core issues of model minority, let me just quell any unfair generalization of my international roommates.
It’s not like I’m engaging in charades and she has to decipher what I’m trying to say. Chances are we wouldn’t have chosen to live together and confide with each other daily if communication was that much of a hindrance and my attempts at conversing consistently went awry. While I make no defense of my intelligibility, I will defend my roomie’s capacity to comprehend. And considering her expertise is in writing the questions that go into standardized tests (GRE, LSAT), her comprehension of English is a tad better than you might figure and probably better than most Americans. So don’t try and chalk up her incredulous attitude toward the model minority “affliction” as merely something lost in translation, she just might not find it viable. That’s not to say model minority doesn’t mean anything for Asian Americans, just that it might not be attributable to Asians unlike what the article suggests.
But thanks for pointing out the whole “crappy at speaking and leading and not very edgy” core points of the model minority myth. As an Asian American it’s news to me and by the time I’m 30 I hope to comprehend these core principles. But I believe the author of the article was approaching the story purely in the context of pressure to succeed. While I agree that passivity is definitely a troubling issue among Asian Americans, it really isn’t made an issue in regards to this article, thus my not mentioning it. So… should the model minority affliction apply to international Asians in America on visa as the article suggests or should it not?
Posted 14 Apr 2007 at 7:40 am ¶