Dr. Janelle Wong featured in WaPo Article on Democratic Presidential Candidate Andrew Yang’s Use of Stereotypes
The following is an excerpt from the Washington Post article,“Good at math? Work hard? Some Asian Americans bristle at Andrew Yang’s use of stereotypes.”, published on September 16, 2019 by Amy B Wang.
“While it’s certainly dangerous to deploy stereotypes, Andrew Yang is also breaking stereotypes by seeking the presidential nomination,” said Janelle Wong, a professor of Asian American studies at the University of Maryland. “It puts even more pressure on him to discuss the ways in which race has mattered for who he is today, including beyond being good at math.”
Many Asian Americans chafe at the “model minority” stereotype. On its face, the image is supposedly a positive one — of immigrants who work unusually hard, enjoy math and are professionally successful.
But it ignores outside factors that helped shape those perceptions and erases the realities of Asian Americans with different experiences, scholars say, while also glossing over the ways in which the model-minority myth has been used to harm other minority groups, by suggesting they are somehow less impressive in comparison.
Wong said when Chinese people were recruited to come to the United States as railroad and agricultural workers in the late 1800s, there was no talk of their work ethic or accomplishments. Chinese immigrants were often treated with suspicion and discrimination; in 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act became the first federal law to prohibit immigration based on race.
As U.S. immigration policy opened up in later decades, the focus was on family reunification, skilled laborers and those fleeing wars or unrest in their native countries.
“East Asians in particular were recruited based on skills, and then they were able to sponsor family members who were also highly educated,” Wong said. “That’s when we started to see things change more systematically.”
By the 1990s, there was an increase in international students from Asia and H-1B visas granted to Asian immigrants. “It’s not a cultural trait of Asians — it’s really our immigration policies,” Wong said. “And that translated into this stereotype of the model minority, when in fact it’s our immigration laws and the [fact that the] biggest predictor of getting a college degree is parents’ education and income.”