what purpose do you think the "model minority myth" serves? and why use asians (as broads as that term is) for this purpose?
i'm always a bit perplexed that people have the idea that the media (especially entertainment media) has this type of sinister agenda...isn't the easier explanation that this country is/was built to the advantage & service of white supremacy (this is a loaded term historically- but i think of this playing out in the world today as more of a strong bias) by default, therefore white people just generally don't have to or want to, put themselves in another person's skin and consider what their experiences are, ever; and you can see this with how some were bugging out about the luke cage netflix series being "too black" and not being able to relate (even in the culture at large with the whole kaepernick thing), whereas minorities all have to, to some extent, consider/deal/wrestle with whiteness both in media & real life in ways i'm not sure would even occur to most white folk...
i have to believe it is more out of their historical position of self centeredness, this oblique kind of disinterest/ignorance still persists, and that most non white representations rarely move beyond stereotypical roles...we tend to get their understanding of our (all minorities) stories rather than the nuanced distillation that comes from having 1st person experience...
if you think about translating one language to another, meanings rarely translate exactly 1:1, there are phrases,sayings, words, that just don't have equivalents; something is almost always lost. i think of much of entertainment is an attempt to translate and make digestible for white consumption, combine this with the FACT that entertainment media always catches wreck when they get it wrong with respect to finding the balance between respecting the source & trying to introduce/make palatable slightly unfamiliar non white stories to the (white) masses (i.e. this new bruce lee film, even eddie huang's own show - he disowned, basically it claiming they were white-washing his life), it feels like this could be remedied by included more diverse voices in decision making roles though even with the best most official representers for every ethnicity, there will be times even they won't get everything totally right, and people tend criticize those folks as not being "for the cause" or sellouts...
which brings me back to asking about this idea of being a "banana," i've never heard that term before...but its meaning is pretty obvious, and i would assume it would only be used by asians; would it be considered a serious insult and how common/pervasive is its use? and is their some set behaviors that would qualify/disqualify one being "asian," maybe it is more ethnically specific to groups, chinese, hindu, thai, etc.?
It was engineered to portray Asians as the "best" minority, giving them a false sense of entitlement. But this has some damning effects.
For one, Asians are less likely to give a damn about issues that effect other POC. I know quite a few folks who are Asian that identify as Republican and chalk up police brutality to, "Well, he/she resisted arrest" and whatnot. I'm not saying this is applicable to all, but I've definitely witnessed this first hand. You can see the solidarity between Black and Asian groups prior to the rise of the model minority myth through historical retrospectives.
Second, it creates division and self-loathing within the Asian-American community. The folks who've made it, so to speak, look down on those who don't. I think what I've found is that so many Asian immigrants truly believe in the American Dream; the thing is that so many factors contribute to one's economic status and the way the system is built, it's really hard for immigrants to ascend past their economic standing.
Going off of that, people generally assume that Asian folks have it the "easiest" out of all minority groups. Simply not the case. You can point to immigrants from China, Korea and Japan and say, "All Asians are successful" but Asia is much bigger than those three countries (Well Asia doesn't really exist, but that's not the point of this conversation). The Vietnamese, Hmong, Laotians, etc. are all scattered across the Midwest facing economic struggles but people wouldn't generally know that because of a lack of representation in the media. Aside from that, you don't have to be dirt poor to be struggling. I'm very privileged and grateful that I came from an upper middle class family but growing up as a very small minority in a town with few like us, I dealt with racism from others damn near everyday.
Perhaps the most notable harm the Model Minority myth accomplishes is the destruction of our histories of oppression and solidarity. We never learned about how the Japanese were kept in internment camps in the U.S. during WWII, and I would consider that one of the more well known events in Asian American history. And I guarantee you most folks wouldn't even know about that event either if you asked them right off the top. Very few curriculums (if any) will mention the hardships of living in America during the 19th/20th century or the solidarity between Blacks and Asians prior to the Model Minority myth. Here's a few examples:
- Civil Rights movements helped end racist immigration laws against South Asians.
- In the late 1960s, Asian Americans were part of the Third World Liberation Strikes in Berkeley that launched the Black Power movement and inspired the Yellow Power movement.
- Asian American activists like Grace Lee Boggs and Yuri Kochiyama worked hard to build interracial solidarity and worked closely with leaders like Malcolm X.
I drew some of this from previous knowledge and from this article. Give it a read if you can:
http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/04/dismantle-model-minority-myth/
You brought up some good points though. I reckon that it is both - the media is sinister and doing its best to uphold white supremacy, even if they are completely unaware of it.
