Model minority and Detroit Blue

Model minority

The term model minority refers to a racial or ethnic minority that despite past prejudice and discrimination is able to achieve great success economically and socially. The minority subgroup emerges as the “main character of a success story” about how a disadvantaged group overcomes those disadvantages and achieves prosperity. Typically, the term model minority has been used in the United States to refer to Asian Americans generally or, more specifically, Japanese Americans, Asian Indians, and Korean Americans. (Takagi P.16)

The alleged prosperity of the model minority is usually measured in terms of economic success, educational attainment, cultural contributions, political participation, and other forms of incorporation to the larger national community, such as exogamy or inters marriage. The minority group is a “model” because its members set an example for other groups to follow. The term has been put to controversial uses, particularly because it foists responsibility for a group's success, failure, and recovery from historical discrimination on the shoulders of the group itself, rather than the larger society. Credit for the term's coinage is usually attributed to a January 9, 1966, article in New York Magazine, titled, “Success Story: Japanese American Style. (Rothenberg P.45)

With the rise of the neo-conservatism generally associated with the 1980s, the model minority became an especially noteworthy site of ideological contestation. That era saw the rise of a backlash against the social justice measures that grew out of the Civil Rights Movement. (Angelo p.12)Model minorities were used as evidence of the needlessness of affirmative action and the arrival of meritocracy. Indeed, affirmative action and welfare were seen as an affront to the ideals of meritocracy, which are seen as the core beliefs upon which U.S. civilization was built. (Grace P.13) Model minority, on the other hand, only seemed to make more dramatic the power of those core beliefs because a deserving group thrived in the face of adversity, with no apparent help—and in some cases outright harm—from the government and the larger society. (Li P.12)

While assertions of the actual existence of model minorities may have become less feasible and more nakedly interested, the idea of model minorities lives on as neo-conservatism has led to neoliberals, particularly with the ascendance of globalization. Under cold war neo-conservatism, subgroups have overcome historical discrimination to participate on the presumably level playing field of U.S. civilization. Under neoliberal globalization, the new world order is a leveled playing field—or ...