Page 90 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

74 Ethnicity

plays a more significant role than ethnicity in determining academic
success. More Asian Americans than in the past belong to the educated
professional classes because of immigration policies. Restrictions on immi-
gration in the twentieth century have meant that fewer working - class and
more highly educated professional - class Asians have been allowed into the
United States. The very competitive culture of achievement in this new
immigrant group, not any innate ethnic trait or essence, accounts for
their children ’ s success. Like professional - class Whites, educated Asian
American professionals have access to better schools. When one controls
for socioeconomic background and educational level, there is in fact no
difference between Whites and Asian Americans in regard to educational
achievement.
Yet since the 1960s, and in response to the arguments many made then
that endemic racism prevented especially African Americans from advanc-
ing in American society, Asian American have been presented by conserva-
tives as a “ model minority ” who are different from African Americans in
their level of achievement. This model minority of passive, industrious,
non - troublemakers disproves the claim that conservative racism prevents
African Americans from advancing out of widespread poverty, and they
confi rm the conservative belief that only individual initiative accounts for
social standing. That ethnic argument is only true, however, of the profes-
sional class amongst Asian Americans. A greater percentage of Asian
Americans than of White Americans live in poverty. In addition, although
Asian Americans complete more years of schooling than Whites on average,
they earn less income than comparable Whites, and they are comparatively
under - represented in positions of power and authority in American poli-
tics and business. In other words, the model minority is truly a minority
even within the Asian American ethnic group, and they are only model
until they reach the workplace. There, the same conservative practices of
exclusion and subordination that led to the construction of the cultural
myth of the model minority as a way of blaming victims of racism for their
own victimization turn on that very model minority. They become like the
very Blacks whose exclusion they inadvertently helped to justify.
The cultural images by which we “ know ” other ethnic groups always
do injustice to those groups simply by virtue of how such representations
have to work. They cannot be as complex, as differentiated, or as specifi c
as the ethnic group itself. Indeed, even by imaging those ethnic others as
a “ group, ” one begins the process of misrepresenting them. All ethnic
groups are also divided internally by class and income level. Most are also