Model Minority

While many point to Asian-Americans and ultimately Japanese-Americans as examples of successful minorities in America, the fact remains that although they may be prosperous in terms of economic stability, compared to that of other minority groups, they are nowhere close to equality. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s played a major role in the transition of Japanese Americans views. Japanese and Chinese entrepreneurship as well as their high education rates were used as proof that colored people were able to assimilate and succeed in America (JACL, 5). This was unfair to Asian-Americans and African-Americans alike, but especially cruel to Japanese-Americans as the theory has marginalized Japanese-American internment and efforts as scapegoats …show more content…
The assimilation of course, did not have very altruistic motives as it was used as a method to realign attention to black civil rights. The first time the term “model minority” was publicly realized was in an article, “Success Story, Japanese-American Style” by sociologist William Peterson in 1966, stating that “The Japanese on the contrary [to blacks], could climb over the highest barriers our racists were able to fashion in part because of their meaningful ties with an alien culture” (Peterson, 9). In the article, Peterson fails to acknowledge the efforts of Japanese-American intern’s forced assimilation and gives all credit to the fact that Japanese-Americans kept a connection to Japanese culture. Furthermore, the model minority theory is misleading and contradicting in nature as Peterson cites the 1959 median Japanese-American income and how it was only $322 lower to that of a white-American income, in order to argue that Japanese-Americans are close to ’equality’ with