Chapter 5: Acceptably Unbecoming: Model Minority Myth & Asian Sexuality
"Maybe the journey isn't so much about becoming anything. Maybe it's about un-becoming everything that isn't really you, so you can be who you were meant to be in the first place." - Paul Coelho The model minority was introduced by Sociologist William Peterson in 1966 to describe the success of Japanese Americans ability to achieve success that other minority groups didn't. It was a concept adopted by Ronald Reagan and the right wing to characterize AAPI (Asian American Pacific Islander) as smart, wealthy, and compliant compared to the "welfare queens" of the Black & Brown communities, ignoring the fact that if it wasn't for the Civil Rights Movement and the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965, the vast majority of AAPI immigrants wouldn't be here. Because most of us arrived after 1965, Asians collectively didn't experience Jim Crow, housing discrimination, and lynching. Racism was largely a Black/White problem; the "Americ...