Tag: minority

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Beneath the model minority image

Asian immigrants to the U.S. often bring more education and achievement with them than other groups, providing a head start that contributes to the “model minority” stereotype.

UC Irvine professor Jennifer Lee writes about the role of “hyper-selectivity”  in The Society Pages: “Recent admissions figures to the country’s most competitive magnet high schools and elite universities seem to provide evidence of “Asian American exceptionalism.” Among the students offered admission to New York City’s Stuyvesant High School this year, 9 were black, 24 Latino, 177 white, and 620 Asian. Student admissions for Bronx Science included 489 Asians, 239 whites, 25 blacks, 54 Latinos, and 3 American Indian/Alaskan Natives.

“At elite universities like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, Asian Americans typically comprise just under one-fifth of the entering classes, while in the prestigious public universities of the University of California system, they make up 43% of the undergraduate student body at Berkeley and 55% at UC Irvine. At 13% of California’s population and 5.5% of the U.S. population, Asian Americans are an undeniable presence in higher education.

“Pundits like David Brooks, Charles Murray, and “Tiger Mother” Amy Chua have invoked the cultural values argument to explain Asian Americans’ exceptional educational outcomes. That is, their exceptional outcomes aren’t exceptional for Asian Americans: they are the result of one racial group’s hard work, discipline, grit, integrity, and living the “right way.”  While these cultural values are positive, it is worth remembering that less than a century ago, Asians were described as illiterate, undesirable, and unassimilable immigrants, full of “filth and disease.” As “marginal members of the human race,” they were denied the right to naturalize, denied the right to intermarry, and were residentially segregated in crowded ethnic enclaves. They were even, in the case of Japanese immigrants, forced into internment camps.

“So how did the status of Asian Americans change so dramatically in less than a century?

I provide a four-part argument that bridges research in immigration, race, and social psychology to identify some mechanisms that support the “Asian American exceptionalism” construct.

  1. Hyper-Selectivity: Unlike their predecessors, contemporary Asian immigrants are, on average, a highly educated, highly selected group.
  2. Positive Stereotypes and “Stereotype Promise”: Hyper-selectivity has produced positive stereotypes of Asian Americans, which, in turn, can generate “stereotype promise”—that is, being viewed through the lens of a positive stereotype can enhance performance.
  3. Self-fulfilling Prophecy: Third, the enhanced performance of Asian Americans supports the “Asian American exceptionalism” construct. Now we’ve got a self-fulfilling prophecy.
  4. Reproduction of Inequality: These processes operate to reproduce inequalities at the high end of the educational distribution. Continue reading “Beneath the model minority image”
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White bias in US fertility care

After the recent U.S. elections, several conservatives remarked that “traditional America” was on the decline, largely due to new voter demographics. But American medical science doesn’t seem to be bending over backwards to help minority families have children––quite the opposite. As reported in today’s Huffington Post by law professor Jim Hawkins, “

“People who study the fertility business have been concerned for years over the fact that racial minorities utilize fertility treatments at a lower rate than whites. Continue reading “White bias in US fertility care”

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A different kind of poll

Ok, so we are all fed up with polls about the election. Check this out from Slate: “Poll Finds Majority of Americans Are Racist.”  As Daniel Politi summarizes, “In the four years since the United States elected the country’s first black president, a majority of Americans express outright prejudice toward blacks. Perhaps even more surprising though is that the numbers have slightly increased since 2008. A full 51 percent of Americans explicitly express anti-black prejudice, up from 48 percent in 2008, according to the Associated Press. When an implicit racial attitudes test is used the number increases to 56 percent, compared to 49 percent four years ago. The AP surveys, which were carried out by university researchers, ultimately found that President Obama could lose a net 2 percentage points of the popular vote due to anti-black attitudes. Continue reading “A different kind of poll”