Race Assessment

 Here is the assessment for race, please answer each question COMPLETELY.

Please submit it by the start of our class on monday.

Race Lesson 8 (2-day Lesson): The Effects of Racism on Whites: Earning Wages of Whiteness Can Kill You (Metzel's Dying of Whiteness)

SCHEDULE NOTE:

Tomorrow, Wed Dec 2 - Asynchronous day 

Racism and Whites

With the understanding that racism exists, we will now turn our attention to specific racial groups.  Just like people are unique and dynamic, so is each racial group.  Racism affects each group differently.  Surprisingly, even whites can be affected negatively by racism towards nonwhites.  One person studying the effects of racism on whites is Jonathon Metzel, a sociologist, and a medical doctor.   

Dr. Jonathon Metzel, Sociologist and Medical Doctor

Jonathan Metzel is a sociologist and a medical doctor who explores the connection between racism and the negative effects on society including and especially whites.  In his book, Dying of Whiteness, Dr. Metzel finds that the life expectancy of white Americans has gone DOWN for three years in a row, 2015, 2016 and 2017.  (This was even before the Covid-19 pandemic)   The last time that life expectancy went down in the US for three years in a row was a hundred years ago because of World War I and the influenza outbreak of 1919.  The reasons are surprisingly related to race.

Just to clarify, Metzel's book is about politics, but it is not an indictment of one political party.  It is about (as the title says) the specific politics of racial resentment, that is, using bias against minorities to achieve specific political outcomes.  This does not mean an entire political party.  It is a specific set of policies that help to explain why Americans who are white have been dying earlier on average for three years in a row: 2015, 2016, 2017.  This has not happened in 100 years.  And it is almost unheard of in the developed world.  Life expectancy should be going up.

If you read the last 2 pages of the reading (18-19), Metzel explicitly states that,
It is not liberal or conservative politics in general, but a specific type of politics:

"It is best to avoid knee-jerk assumptions that more money or health care are automatically good....There are far too many examples of liberal or Democratic initiatives that result in poor health for minority and low-income populations...When politics demands that people resist available health care, amass arsenals, cut funding for schools, or make other decisions that are perilous, this is literally asking people to die for their whiteness." 

I argue that the way forward requires a white America that strives to collaborate rather than dominate, with a mind-set of openness and interconnectedness that we have all-too-frequently neglected. 
This is not to suggest that everyone become a Democrat - far from it.  Rather, our nation urgently needs to recognize how systems of inequality we build and sustain aren't benefitting anyone...."

Chris Hayes had Dr. Metzel as a guest on his podcast called Why Is This Happening?

For today's lesson, please click on Stitcher here and listen to the interview.  The transcript is available here in case you want to read along while you listen, or in case you simply prefer to read the interview instead of listening.  But you can also listen to the podcast on Apple here and on   If you listen to the interview, it runs for about 50 minutes so this will be a two-day lesson.  Note that this is just an interview with Metzel.  For a full understanding of Metzel's findings, see his book, Dying of Whiteness.

Here is the episode embedded:


Here is a preview of the interview:

Trigger Warning:  **This conversation explores death by suicide and gun violence**

Life expectancy in America has gone down three years in a row. You might expect to see shorter life expectancies in the aftermath of war or famine — to witness it in an industrialized nation in the middle of an otherwise prosperous era, however, is unprecedented. It is a distress signal that something has gone horribly wrong. 

Jonathan Metzl traced that distress signal to its origin and found something remarkable. He writes that the policies promising to Make American Great Again, policies rooted in centering and maintaining the power of whiteness, are shortening the lives of the white Americans who vote for them. From supporting conceal carry to cutting social services, Metzl explores just what policies white voters are willing to risk their lives for. 

Anne Case and Angus Deaton (mentioned in Metzel's book) detail the rising death rate for whites without a college education.  Here is an explanation from the Brookings Institution.  And here is Deaths of Despair, a 2020 book that Case and Deaton wrote as a follow up to their ground-breaking 2015 study.

Here is the Google form to fill out while you read the transcript/listen to the interview.  I also embedded the questions into this version of the transcript.

1. What did Metzl find about the difference between Tennessee and Kentucky and how did that affect life expectancy?

2. What did Metzel find that differed between Missouri and Connecticut that contributed to the declining life expectancy of whites in Missouri?  What did he find?

3.  How has the motivation for gun ownership changed over the last 20 years?  How is this misguided?


Metzel found that many whites did not want to talk about "whiteness".  Instead, they talk about "the real America" or "regular people" or identities like that.  However, by not seeing the connection to whiteness, they don't see risk factors.

Sociologist Robin DiAngelo speaks about this in her book,
What Does It Mean to Be White?: Developing White Racial Literacy.  

Here is a Seattle Times article DiAngelo wrote that explains her work.

Below is DiAngelo speaking on NBC News about how whites misunderstand race, including not seeing race.



4.  How does "whiteness" factor into the high death rate?



Dying of Whiteness during the Covid-19 Pandemic

And as a follow-up to Metzel's book, just two years later, a global pandemic hits the US.  But many Americans see the health measures being suggested by the government as an infringement on their rights.  They showed up en masse to protest in Michigan - and almost like they were planted by Metzel, they showed up with confederate flags and guns to protest health measures meant to keep the country safe.  See this article in the Michigan Advance that details the racism, guns and anti-health protest.

Combining guns, a Confederate flag and protesting health.  Guns, racism and ignoring government health experts all contribute to the lowering of whites' life expectancy.

Proud Boys a self-identified sexist and racist group supports policies that will result in premature death for thousands of white Americans.

The protesters brought AR-15 rifles with scopes and muzzles, along with other weapons and assault gear.  Most gun deaths in the U.S. are suicides followed by accidental deaths.  These men are advocating for premature death by implicitly supporting guns and explicitly supporting ignoring medical professionals.  Both will lower life expectations for white Americans.  And the pandemic has driven gun sales to an all-time high.

Dr. Oz was on Fox News with Sean Hannity to say that "opening schools is 'appetizing' because it may only cost us 2-3% in terms of mortality." That is 1.7 million students dying!

5.  How are the freedom protests during the Covid-19 quarantine an example of Metzel's findings?

The NY Post also reported about the protest.

NPR covered the protest as well.


6.  Any questions about how racism affects Americans who are white?  Anything you want to know more about?

For more about Metzel's book see the link to his introduction and the guide below:

Here is the introduction to Metzel's book.
Pgs 2-3
As a sociological study, what methods does Dr. Metzel use?  (pg 2 and 6)
What is the paradox that he finds?  What are some examples from the reading?
Is Trevor an example of the paradox? Why?  Why not?

Pgs 4-5
What was Trevor explicitly and implicitly dying from?
How was Trevor's situation an example of Du Bois' "wages of whiteness"?
What are "white 'ways of life'"?

Pgs 6-9
How does gender play a role?
What are the five trends (evidence) that influence Dr. Metzel's overall claim?
What are the threats to white authority?

A host of conservative political movements brought fringe agendas into mainstream politics

One example of conspiracy theory politics which attempted to use race to raise doubts and fears about President Obama is that if elected in 2012, he would institute Sharia law in the United States and destroy democracy:

Here is one website detailing the claim and disputing it:

Another example is the following book published during the Obama administration which tried to cast President Obama as a Muslim terrorist.  From Wikipedia, 

"throughout the Obama administration, McCarthy promoted views about the Obama administration's advancement of a "Sharia Agenda", arguing that radical Islamists were working with liberals within the United States government to subvert democracy in the West.^{[15][16][17][18][19]  "}

1. 15  results, search (2010-12-07). How Obama Embraces Islam's Sharia Agenda (Bklt ed.). 45 S: Encounter Books. ISBN 9781594035586.
2. 16  ^ results, search (2010-05-25). The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America (1st ed.). New York: Encounter Books. ISBN 9781594033773.
3. 17  ^ "Andrew McCarthy's Defense of McCarthyism". Mother Jones. Retrieved 2018-09-23.
4. 18  ^ Testimony of Andrew C. McCarthy Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Oversight, Agency Action, Federal Rights and Federal Courts Hearing on: "Willful Blindness: Consequences of Agency Efforts to Deemphasize Radical Islam in Combating Terrorism" June 28, 2016.
5. 19  ^ Foundation, The Bradley. "In Encounter Broadside, Andrew McCarthy tells how Barack Obama embraces Islam's sharia agenda > The Bradley Foundation". www.bradleyfdn.org. Retrieved 2018-09-23.

 

And this website details the dogged claims that President Obama was a Muslim who was not born in the United States who was anti-American.

It should be noted that during the 2008 primary election, the Clinton campaign engaged in the same politics of racial resentment when they circulated a photo of Mr. Obama visiting Africa and wearing traditional garb as an attempt to paint him as unAmerican.

Threats to white authority.

There are numerous examples that show the use of racism throughout the Obama administration, including this article from NBC news here.

Ian Haney Lopez is a constitutional law professor from University of California Berkley.  His book shows how racism has been used subtly since Richard Nixon and the "Southern Strategy".  This subtle racism is sometimes called dog whistles - phrases that only register with some people who are tuned in to hear them.  For example, a politician can say, "welfare costs too much taxpayer dollars" and a neutral person would hear simply that paying money to the poor is expensive.  But to those who believe that the poor are mostly black, this phrase says that Americans who are black are taking advantage of tax payer dollars.

Michael Tesler shows how, in the years that followed the 2008 election—a presidential election more polarized by racial attitudes than any other in modern times—racial considerations have come increasingly to influence many aspects of political decision making. These range from people’s evaluations of prominent politicians and the parties to issues seemingly unrelated to race like assessments of public policy or objective economic conditions. Some people even displayed more positive feelings toward Obama’s dog, Bo, when they were told he belonged to Ted Kennedy. More broadly, Tesler argues that the rapidly intensifying influence of race in American politics is driving the polarizing partisan divide and the vitriolic atmosphere that has come to characterize American politics.

Dr. Carol Anderson is a history professor from Emory University who has research and published about the reaction of whites to black civil rights gains.  She calls the backlash by whites reacting to black gains "white rage" as detailed in her history book at the left.  Below is a summary of her claim:
"Since 1865 and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, every time African Americans have made advances towards full participation in our democracy, white reaction has fueled a deliberate and relentless rollback of their gains. The end of the Civil War and Reconstruction was greeted with the Black Codes and Jim Crow; the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision was met with the shutting down of public schools throughout the South while taxpayer dollars financed segregated white private schools; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 triggered a coded but powerful response, the so-called Southern Strategy and the War on Drugs that disenfranchised millions of African Americans while propelling presidents Nixon and Reagan into the White House, and then the election of America's first black President, led to the expression of white rage that has been as relentless as it has been brutal.
Carefully linking these and other historical flashpoints when social progress for African Americans was countered by deliberate and cleverly crafted opposition, Anderson pulls back the veil that has long covered actions made in the name of protecting democracy, fiscal responsibility, or protection against fraud, rendering visible the long lineage of white rage." 

Here is a funny take from comedian Hari Kondabolu about the growing threat to white authority:

Below are some other examples of political fringe messages or conspiracy theories that paint Obama as un-American:

Examples of fringe political campaigns trying to capitalize on racial resentment: 

Tea Party Patriot ads that were distinctly anti-Asian featuring fictional Chinese executives speaking Mandarin and boasting about how much land they bought in Missouri.
Local nbc affiliate reported on the story here.
Asian community leaders spoke out about the ads here.


Middle and lower-income people experienced negative effects from white backlash policies.

 Welfare backlash tied to white fear of declining status published in the Journal of Social Forces from Rachel Wetts, a Ph.D. student in sociology at UC Berkeley. “This research suggests that when whites fear their status is on the decline, they increase opposition to programs intended to benefit poorer members of all racial groups.”
The findings, published in the journal Social Forces, highlight a welfare backlash that swelled around the 2008 Great Recession and election of Barack Obama.

More whites than any other race use the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), but the Trump administration is proposing cuts.  How might this be evidence of Dr. Metzel's claim?

Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton's (Nobel Prize winner) study, Mortality and Morbidity in the 21st Century, explains the decreasing life expectancy among whites available at the Brookings Institution here.
"Case and Deaton find that while midlife mortality rates continue to fall among all education classes in most of the rich world, middle-aged non-Hispanic whites in the U.S. with a high school diploma or less have experienced increasing midlife mortality since the late 1990s. This is due to both rises in the number of “deaths of despair”—death by drugs, alcohol and suicide—and to a slowdown in progress against mortality from heart disease and cancer, the two largest killers in middle age."


Pg 10  How does white backlash politics influence whites to vote?

Arlie Hochschild's Strangers in their Own Land 

At the 2017 National Council for the Social Studies annual conference, I had the privilege of helping to facilitate a three-session symposium on the teaching of high school sociology.  Our keynote speaker was Arlie Russell Hochschild.  Dr. Hochschild is a professor emeritus of sociology at UC Berkley.  She is a renowned ethnographer.  At NCSS 2017, she spoke about her most recent work, Strangers In Their Own Land; Anger and Mourning on the American Right.

What I found most intriguing in her book was the concept of the "deep story", or a story that shapes the way people feel.  It doesn't matter if the story is real or true or not.  What matters is that the story is believed to be true so people shape their feelings and actions as if it were real.  Dr. Hochschild's idea is explained on NPR's Hidden Brain, 

In her new book, Strangers in Their Own Land, sociologist Arlie Hochschild tackles this paradox. She says that while people might vote against their economic needs, they're actually voting to serve their emotional needs.Hochschild says that both conservative and liberals have "deep stories" — about who they are, and what their values are. Deep stories don't need to be completely accurate, but they have to feel true. They're the stories we tell ourselves to capture our hopes, pride, disappointments, fears, and anxieties.

Pg 11-14  What states does Dr. Metzel focus on? What issues in each state?

Dr. Harel Shapira's research from University of Texas Austin highlights the way that gun schools teach gun owners to embrace guns.  See a brief clip of his explaining his research here.

In Missouri, policy went even further than Dr. Shapira's research by passing a law allowing permitless carrying of guns,
Missouri now joins Idaho, West Virginia and Mississippi as one of four states to adopt “permitless carry” in 2016, bringing the total number of US states to 12. Missouri Democrats strongly opposed the law, calling it a “perfect storm” that would cause fatal shootings—already a more common cause of death in Missouri than car accidents.

Media Matters highlights the many ways that NRA ads try and use fear to influence voters here.

And this story from Quartz about the way NRA ads promote a generalized and vague us vs. them conflict.  One ad that drew the most criticism is here.

Pg 15-16  What type of racism is Dr. Metzel most focused on in the reading?

Pgs 16-18 Why is "whiteness" an important consideration in Dr. Metzel's research?

Here is Robin DiAngelo speaking about the importance of acknowledging race.

Lesson 8a: Dying of Whiteness Asynchronous

Asynchronous Lesson

Dr. Jonathon Metzel, Sociologist and Medical Doctor

As both a sociologist and a medical doctor, Metzel explores how racism is especially harmful toward whites.  In his book, Dying of Whiteness, Dr. Metzel finds that the life expectancy of white Americans has gone DOWN for three years in a row, 2015, 2016 and 2017.  (This was even before the Covid-19 pandemic!)   

As you read or listen, think about what is harmful to whites and why?

Read the transcript

or

Listen to the podcast on Apple here or on Stitcher here. 

Lesson 9.2 Racism and Americans with Asian heritage

SCHEDULING NOTE: Tomorrow is an asynchronous day

Resources for Understanding Racial Groups in the U.S.

A Brief History of Racism toward Specific Groups in the U.S.

Sociologist Robin DiAngelo's book, What Does It Mean to Be White?  is a terrific book for anyone wanting to be more racially literate.  Racism and Specific Racial Groups, Chapter 17 of her book,  is all about the different histories and discriminations against specific racial groups.  She does a great job of succinctly explaining the social, historical and political contexts that affect each group.  

A Brief Overview Racial Terminology

Additionally,  UW Madison professor Pamela Oliver's website is really helpful.  Dr. Oliver has made a list of terms that explains the history and nature of racially-based terminology.  Her post is continually updated here, but she also posted a PDF version of this essay on SocArXiv.

Part 1:  Early Discrimination against Americans with Asian heritage

The Asia Society's Center for Global Learning documents the long history of discrimination here:

• 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act—the only United States law to prevent immigration and naturalization on the basis of race—which restricted Chinese immigration for the next sixty years.
• 1899-1903 U.S. war in the Philippines results in 200-thousand to a million or more Filipinos killed, mostly from disease caused by the upheaval of the war.
  (For more info Scene on Radio podcast season 4 episode 9 about race and democracy
  

  
  

  " America’s involvement in the Philippines, though, may be the most grossly under-discussed chapter in U.S. imperialism, and in the nation’s bloody war history.  After the United States decided that it would end its war with Spain not by liberating but by annexing the Philippines, not surprisingly, Filipino nationalists disagreed and fought with the United States. And this began a war that lasted years, and arguably over a decade. It's the second longest war in U.S. history. And it's a war that was deeply one-sided in terms of the death counts.  Forty-two hundred U.S. soldiers died. compared to estimates of up to three quarters of a million."

  

 

• 1905 San Francisco School Board segregates schools, declaring, "Our children should not be placed in any position where their youthful impressions may be affected by association with pupils of the Mongolian race."
• 1913, CA passed Alien Land Law which barred Asians from owning land. 
• 1917 when Congress declared that India was part of the Pacific-Barred Zone of excluded Asian countries. 
• By 1924, with the exception of Filipino "nationals," all Asian immigrants, including Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and Indians were fully excluded by law, denied citizenship and naturalization, and prevented from marrying Caucasians or owning land.

Additionally, remember what we learned about Supreme Court decisions affecting Americans with Asian heritage:

• 1889  Chae Chan Ping v. United States  (Limited rights for Americans who had Chinese ancestry.)
• 1883 Pace v. Alabama (miscegenation law allowed criminalizing interracial marriage - not overturned until 1967!)
• 1922 Ozawa v. U.S.. (Japanese are not white, see also here)
• 1923 Thind v. U.S.  (If you don't seem white, you are not and all Hindus are not white.)
• 1927 Lum v. Rice (Citizens who are Chinese don't have the right to attend white schools.)
• 1944 Korematsu v. U.S.  (Americans can be held in prison or concentration camps because of their ethnicity and without due process.)

Google Form for this lesson is here.

1.  Identify some of the ways that Americans perceived as Asians have been discriminated against.

Americans with Asian Heritage Fight for Civil Rights

All of the discrimination means that Asian-American success was severely limited by racism.  Structural racism prevented Asian immigrant success in the U.S. and that had to be changed before Asian-Americans could thrive.  Asian-Americans did not stay silent in this fight.  They had to fight for equality.  Many Asian Civil Rights leaders worked with the Black Panthers (see the picture below from Giant Robot Magazine's (1998) history of the yellow power movement.

• Richard Aoki learned and worked with the Black Panther Party (though later became an FBI informant).  NPR story here.
• Yuji Ichioka and Emma Gee created the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA) and changed the pejorative label of "orientals" to Asian-Americans.  Ichioka's legacy is here.  
  

• Yuri Kochiyama worked so closely with Malcolm X that she held Malcolm X in her arms after his assassination.  NPR story here.  People's History here.

(above) Yuri Kochiyama holds the head of Malcolm X after his assassination.

And (below) here is Mrs. Kochiyama with the grandson of Malcolm X.

ThoughtCo has a history of the Asian-American Civil Rights movement, the "Yellow Power Movement".

And this article from LA Mag details Gidra, the Asian activist newspaper from 1969-1975.

2.  Is the Asian-American Civil Rights movement surprising to you?  Does it change how you think about the success that Americans with Asian heritage have had?

The Creation of  "Model Minorities"

There were three significant factors that played a role in creating the "model minority" myth surrounding Americans with Asian heritage:

• Because of geopolitics like the Vietnam war, the Korean War and the threat of communist China, it made political sense to embrace the Asian-American cause.  This way the U.S. could show Asian countries how great the U.S. was and try to win over their nationals. 
• As the civil rights movement gained momentum for non-whites in the U.S., one way that to prevent a larger coalition of Asian-Americans and African-Americans from fighting for civil rights together was to embrace Asian-Americans while resisting African-Americans.  
• Finally, the 1965 immigration law changed immigrant quotas from a place-based system to a merit-based system which opened the U.S. to highly educated and skilled immigrants from Asia.

Here is evidence to support the claims above:

Jeff Guo of the Washington Post interviewed Ellen Wu, author of the book Color of Success.  The interview is available here:
The real reasons the U.S. became less racist toward Asian Americans: Washington Post analysis

...according to a recent study (2016) by Brown University economist Nathaniel Hilger, schooling rates among Asian Americans didn't change all that significantly during those three decades [1950s, 60s, 70s].  Instead, Asian Americans started to earn more because their fellow Americans became less racist toward them.
How did that happen? About the same time that Asian Americans were climbing the socioeconomic ladder, they also experienced a major shift in their public image. At the outset of the 20th century, Asian Americans had often been portrayed as threatening, exotic and degenerate. But by the 1950s and 1960s, the idea of the model minority had begun to take root. Newspapers often glorified Asian Americans as industrious, law-abiding citizens who kept their heads down and never complained. 

Some people think that racism toward Asians diminished because Asians "proved themselves" through their actions. But that is only a sliver of the truth. Then, as now, the stories of successful Asians were elevated, while the stories of less successful Asians were diminished. As historian Ellen Wu explains in her book, "The Color of Success," the model minority stereotype has a fascinating origin story, one that's tangled up in geopolitics, the Cold War and the civil rights movement.

From NPR, 'Model Minority' Myth Again Used As A Racial Wedge Between Asians And Blacks'

[Promoting the myth of the Model Asian minority] showcase a classic and tenacious conservative strategy, Janelle Wong, the director of Asian American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, said in an email. This strategy, she said, involves "1) ignoring the role that selective recruitment of highly educated Asian immigrants has played in Asian American success followed by 2) making a flawed comparison between Asian Americans and other groups, particularly Black Americans, to argue that racism, including more than two centuries of black enslavement, can be overcome by hard work and strong family values."

"It's like the Energizer Bunny," said Ellen D. Wu, an Asian-American studies professor at Indiana University and the author of The Color of Success (excerpted here). Much of Wu's work focuses on dispelling the "model minority" myth, and she's been tasked repeatedly with publicly refuting arguments like Sullivan's, which, she said, are incessant. "The thing about the Sullivan piece is that it's such an old-fashioned rendering. It's very retro in the kinds of points he made."

 

From CNN, The truth about Asian Americans' success (it's not what you think) by Jennifer Lee, August 4, 2015 

Based on a survey and 140 in-depth interviews of the adult children of Chinese, Vietnamese and Mexican immigrants in Los Angeles -- fellow sociologist Min Zhou and I explain what actually fuels the achievements of some Asian American groups: U.S. immigration law, which favors highly educated, highly skilled immigrant applicants from Asian countries. Based on the most recent available data, we found that these elite groups of immigrants are among the most highly educated people in their countries of origin and are often also more highly educated than the general U.S. population.

Take Chinese immigrants to the United States, for example: In 2010, 51% were college graduates, compared with only 4% of adults in China and only 28% of adults in the United States. The educational backgrounds of immigrant groups such as the Chinese in America -- and other highly educated immigrant groups such as Korean and Indian -- is where the concept of "Asian privilege" comes in.
When highly educated immigrant groups settle in the United States, they build what economist George Borjas calls "ethnic capital."
This capital includes ethnic institutions -- such as after-school tutoring programs and after-school academies -- which highly educated immigrants have the resources and know-how to recreate for their children. These programs proliferate in Asian neighborhoods in Los Angeles such as Koreatown, Chinatown and Little Saigon. The benefits of these programs also reach working-class immigrants from the same group.
Ethnic capital also translates into knowledge.
In churches, temples or community centers, immigrant parents circulate invaluable information about which neighborhoods have the best public schools, the importance of advance-placement classes and how to navigate the college admissions process. This information also circulates through ethnic-language newspapers, television and radio, allowing working-class immigrant parents to benefit from the ethnic capital that their middle-class peers create.
Our Chinese interviewees described how their non-English speaking parents turned to the Chinese Yellow Pages for information about affordable after-school programs and free college admissions seminars. This, in turn, helps the children whose immigrant parents toil in factories and restaurants attain educational outcomes that defy expectations.
The story of Jason, a young Chinese American man we interviewed, is emblematic of how these resources and knowledge can benefit working-class Chinese immigrants. Jason's parents are immigrants who do not speak English and did not graduate from high school. Yet, they were able to use the Chinese Yellow Pages to identify the resources that put Jason on the college track.
There, they learned about the best public schools in the Los Angeles area and affordable after-school education programs that would help Jason get good grades and ace the SAT. Jason's supplemental education -- the hidden curriculum behind academic achievement -- paid off when he graduated at the top of his class and was admitted to a top University of California campus.
This advantage is not available to other working-class immigrants.

From the American Psychological Association,
Hyper-Selectivity and the Remaking of Culture: Understanding the Asian American Achievement Paradox by Lee and Zhou

From Contexts,
How hyper-selectivity drives Asian Americans’ educational outcomes
by Jennifer Lee

Hyper-selectivity benefits all members of an immigrant group, because these groups are more likely to generate “ethnic capital,” which manifests into ethnic institutions like after-school academies and SAT prep courses that support academic achievement. The courses range in price tags (some are freely available through ethnic churches), so they are often accessible to the children of working-class Chinese and Korean immigrant parents. Hence, the hyper-selectivity of an immigrant group can assuage a child’s poor socioeconomic status (SES) and reduce class differences within an ethnic group. In turn, this produces stronger educational outcomes than would have been predicted based on parental SES alone.

Here are a few results from Lee and Zhou's publications available in JSTOR.  They are shorter journal articles that highlight segments of their later published book (mentioned above).

From Inside Higher Ed
The Asian American Achievement Paradox

Here are presentation slides from Lee and Zhou.

From Columbia University,
hyper-selectivity and Asian racial mobility by van c. tran

Asian Americans Advancing Justice resists efforts that use Asian-Americans as a wedge against affirmative action.

3.  How did U.S. immigration law contribute to Asian-Americans becoming labeled as model minorities?

4.  How did global politics contribute to Asian-Americans becoming labeled as model minorities?

Why the Model Minority Myth is Harmful

Although on average Asian Americans have a higher median income and higher educational level than all racial groups in the US, they face implicit bias in their own ways.  It should be noted that the higher average level of income and education hide the wide disparities within the Asian American community.  Thinking about Asian Americans as a model minority is an overgeneralization that hides important realities about implicit biases both in the Asian American community and in other communities.

First,  here is a post from the Society Pages that explains how the model minority myth makes Asian stereotypes more acceptable in society.   Here is a clip of the skit from the daily beast.  

How Good Are the Asians?  Refuting Four Common Myths about Asian Americans, from the journal Phi Delta Kappan in 2009

See this article from the Winter 2004 Contexts:

This 2009 research published in the Annual Review of Sociology explains that many laws, and racial resentments changed in the second half of the 20th century which allowed more opportunities for Asian Americans, but the successes of Asians on average hide wide disparities that still exist.

This article published by Kevin Kumashiro, dean of the School of Education at the University of San Francisco highlights findings that were published in the Journal of Higher Education.

"Research in higher education shows that class and ethnicity shape Asian-Americans’ post-secondary decisions, opportunities and destinations. The model minority stereotype, in fact, begins to break down when we look at the data by ethnicity and class. While Chinese-Americans and Indian-Americans do have high rates of educational attainment, it’s a different story for Southeast Asian-Americans.Southeast Asian-Americans have among the lowest educational attainment in the country (e.g., fewer than 40 percent of Americans over the age of 25 of Laotian, Cambodian or Hmong descent have a high school diploma). Compared to East Asians (Chinese, Korean, Japanese) and South Asians (Indian, Pakistani), Southeast Asians in the U.S. are three to five times more likely to drop out of college. Southeast Asian-American students struggle with high rates of poverty and are often trapped in programs for English learners, which fail to prepare them for college. But this diversity among Asian-Americans is often lost in conversations about the “Asian disadvantage.” As a result, the interests of the most vulnerable Asian-Americans are not represented by anti-affirmative action rhetoric."

And this working paper by Nathanial Hilger writing for the National Bureau for Economic Research shows

"US immigration policy generated positive selection of Asians both into migration and family formation, that Asians likely experienced similar or worse prejudice and legal discrimination than blacks living in CA before the 1960s, and that all of the harshest forms of legal (though not necessarily de facto) discrimination against non-white minorities in CA disappeared during the period 1943-59."

From the LA Times March 28, 2018 implicit bias affects hiring of Asian Americans:

"Asian Americans think an elite college degree will shelter them from discrimination. It won't."

by Jennifer Lee (@JLeeSoc), a professor of sociology at Columbia University and Karthick Ramakrishnan (@karthickr), a professor of public policy at the UC Riverside.

"In numerous interviews with corporate leaders, we learned that Asian Americans are less likely to be seen as leadership material, and are thus given fewer opportunities to advance and succeed. Part of this is based on stereotype. Asians are often viewed as smart, diligent, focused, quiet and technically competent — traits that make them desirable employees, but not desirable leaders. So strong are these stereotypes that even when Asian workers take creative risks, supervisors may still prefer to promote someone else."

From the Asian American Advancing Justice institute in Washington DC also addressing implicit bias and job promotion:

"While many Asian Americans have high educational attainment and work in professional fields, some encounter a glass ceiling that blocks their professional advancement.  This often takes the form of perceptions that Asian Americans have poor communication skills or that they are passive and lack leadership potential. Reliance on stereotypes should not continue to pose barriers to advancement in the workplace."

From the Asian American Achievement Paradox, different groups of Asians were disparately shaped by more than their own will to succeed:

A Russel Sage 2015 publication authored by Jennifer Lee, professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine and Min Zhou, professor of sociology at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and the University of California, Los Angeles.

"While pundits ascribe Asian American success to the assumed superior traits intrinsic to Asian culture, Lee and Zhou show how historical, cultural, and institutional elements work together to confer advantages to specific populations. An insightful counter to notions of culture based on stereotypes, The Asian American Achievement Paradox offers a deft and nuanced understanding of how and why certain immigrant groups succeed.

Asian Americans are often stereotyped as the “model minority.” Their sizeable presence at elite universities and high household incomes have helped construct the narrative of Asian American “exceptionalism.” While many scholars and activists characterize this as a myth, pundits claim that Asian Americans’ educational attainment is the result of unique cultural values. In The Asian American Achievement Paradox, sociologists Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou offer a compelling account of the academic achievement of the children of Asian immigrants. Drawing on in-depth interviews with the adult children of Chinese immigrants and Vietnamese refugees and survey data, Lee and Zhou bridge sociology and social psychology to explain how immigration laws, institutions, and culture interact to foster high achievement among certain Asian American groups."

From PRI, Asians face implicit bias in their healthcare:
A University of Chicago Research Study showed that

"More than half of Asian Americans with Type 2 diabetes don’t even know they have it. That compares to one in four Americans with the disease overall who are unaware. Even though the American Diabetes Association changed its screening guidelines for Asian Americans, a large number are still going unscreened....That difference is so significant that two years ago, the American Diabetes Association changed the screening guidelines to recommend Asians are screened for diabetes at a lower body mass index, but that didn’t necessarily result in more screenings, according to Elizabeth Tung, a physician at the University of Chicago. She recently wrapped up a study looking at the disparities in diabetes screening between Asian Americans and other adults.

What we found was that Asian Americans were the only racial and ethnic group that was consistently screened less than other racial and ethnic groups,” Tung says. “We found that overall, Asian Americans had 34 percent lower odds of being screened than whites.”

Educationally, teachers will call home less for Asian students.
This article from the Atlantic highlights research by Hua-Yu Sebastian Cherng, a sociologist and an assistant professor of education at New York University's Steinhardt school.

"Cherng’s statistical analysis found sharp contrasts in how math and English teachers communicate with parents from different racial, ethnic, and immigrant backgrounds, reflecting many existing stereotypes of black, Latino, and Asian American students....Cherng attributed this to the “very implicit, really deep bias” that certain kids “get math” and certain kids don’t...teachers were less likely to contact immigrant Asian parents about academic and behavioral struggles. Only 5 percent of math teachers and 9 percent of English teachers communicated with parents of first- and second-generation Asian students about misbehavior. And less than 5 percent of English teachers contacted parents of first-generation Asian students who rarely do homework, which was 10 points less than the frequency of contact with the parents of their third-generation white counterparts."

The Perpetual Foreigner Stereotype

Another aspect of racism that is hidden by the model minority stereotype is the perpetual foreigner syndrome.  If someone is perceived as being Asian, there is an assumption that they are a foreigner and not really American.  In some cases, the person's ancestors may have been in the U.S. for generations.  Chinese immigration has been happening since the 1850s.  Frequently the perpetual foreigner syndrome manifests itself in questions like, "Where are you from? Where are you really from?"

This 2011 article from the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology details the implications for ethnic minorities facing perpetual foreigner syndrome.  It includes a comparison of Asian and Latino/as.

This article in the Johns-Hopkins News Letter (2017) explains the frustrations of a 5th generation American who is still asked "Where are you really from?"

Here is an article from Quartz critical of a 2016 segment on The O'Reilly Factor of Fox News which not only promoted the perpetual foreigner stereotype, but a host of others as well.

5.  Identify at least two reasons why being considered model minorities is harmful to Americans perceived as Asian.


BONUS SECTION:  RACISM DURING COVID-19

Disease exposes discrimination

https://thesocietypages.org/trot/2020/03/10/disease-exposes-discrimination/

Fears about the current coronavirus, or COVID-19, have revealed rampant racism and xenophobia against Asians. Anti-Asian discrimination ranges from avoiding Chinese businesses to direct bullying and assaults of people perceived to be Asian. This discriminatory behavior is nothing new. The United States has a long history of blaming marginalized groups when it comes to infectious disease, from Irish immigrants blamed for carrying typhus to “promiscuous women” for spreading sexually transmitted infections.

From Stacy Torres, an assistant professor of sociology in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at UC San Francisco and Xuemei Cao, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University at Albany, State University of New York in USA Today (2020) Coronavirus on college campuses: Fight fear and racism along with the outbreak.  If anyone can give you a disease, everyone is potentially a threat and your enemy. Crises such as coronavirus test social trust as well as science.

Matthew Lee, a health policy researcher published Coronavirus fears show how 'model minority' Asian Americans become the 'yellow peril' (2020)

While viruses and other pathogens do not discriminate between hosts based on race, ethnicity, nationality or immigration status — stigma and misinformation certainly do.

When Xenophobia Spreads Like A Virus from NPR (2020), 

...anti-Asian discrimination has ... manifested in plummeting sales at Chinese restaurants, near-deserted Chinatown districts and racist bullying against people perceived to be Chinese.
We asked our listeners whether they had experienced this kind of coronavirus-related racism and xenophobia firsthand. And judging by the volume of emails, comments and tweets we got in response, the harassment has been intense for Asian Americans across the country — regardless of ethnicity, location or age.

GOP minority leader in the House called the virus "the Chinese virus":

 

From Time Magazine, Trump's 'Chinese' Virus Is Part of a Long History of Blaming Other Countries for Disease (March 20, 2020)

...one part of President Donald Trump’s reaction to coronavirus has remained consistent. More than a week after he prompted outcry by retweeting a supporter who called the novel coronavirus the “China virus,” photos from Trump’s Thursday press briefing about the virus showed that “corona” had been crossed out and replaced with “Chinese.” The President and his team have defended the use of that language—despite the World Health Organization making a point of not naming the disease after the place where the outbreak began, and despite advocates arguing that such terminology fuels the risk of hate crimes against people of Asian descent, who have already reported a surge in discrimination.

While Trump may have his own political reasons for describing the virus as foreign, he’s also part of a long history of associating diseases with certain countries—a tradition that experts say has led to ethnic and racial discrimination, stymied efforts to effectively handle public health crises, and distorted public historical memory.

From Northwestern University's Daily Northwestern, Yunkyo Kim posted (2020)

Graffiti, handshakes and the “perpetual foreigner”: Asian Americans at Northwestern report alienation amid COVID-19.

From a 2018 article in the American Journal of Public Health, “Spanish Flu”: When Infectious Disease Names Blur Origins and Stigmatize Those Infected"  also available here.

Despite not originating in Spain, the 1918 influenza pandemic is commonly known as the “Spanish flu”—a name that reflects a tendency in public health history to associate new infectious diseases with foreign nationals and foreign countries. Intentional or not, an effect of this naming convention is to communicate a causal relationship between foreign populations and the spread of infectious disease, potentially promoting irrational fear and stigma. I address two relevant issues to help contextualize these naming practices. First is whether, in an age of global hyperinterconnectedness, fear of the other is truly irrational or has a rational basis. The empirical literature assessing whether restricting global airline travel can mitigate the global spread of modern epidemics suggests that the role of travel may be overemphasized. Second is the persistence of xenophobic responses to infectious disease in the face of contrary evidence.  To help explain this, I turn to the health communication literature. Scholars argue that promoting an association between foreigners and a particular epidemic can be a rhetorical strategy for either promoting fear or, alternatively, imparting a sense of safety to the public. (Am J Public Health. 2018;108:1462–1464. doi:10. 2105/AJPH.2018.304645)

ABC News:  

Asians facing discrimination, violence amid coronavirus outbreak

https://youtu.be/ljIuWWLHNlA

Wikipedia:

In the past, many diseases have been named after geographical locations, such as the Spanish flu (a misnomer, as it is generally agreed that the influenza did not begin in Spain^[1]), Middle East Respiratory Syndrome and Zika virus, but in 2015 the World Health Organization introduced recommendations to avoid this practice, in order to reduce stigma. In accordance with this policy, the WHO recommended the official name "COVID-19" in February 2020.^[2]

In early coverage of the outbreak, some news sources associated the virus with China in a way that contributed to stigma. The journal Nature later published an apology for this type of coverage.^[2][3] However, even after the majority of politicians had switched to avoiding stigmatizing language when referring to the virus, a minority continued.^[2]  

^{List of racist incidents around the world here:}

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_incidents_of_xenophobia_and_racism_related_to_the_2019%E2%80%9320_coronavirus_pandemic

In the NY Times (2020) Spit On, Yelled At, Attacked: Chinese-Americans Fear for Their Safety, "As bigots blame them for the coronavirus and President Trump labels it the 'Chinese virus,' many Chinese-Americans say they are terrified of what could come next."

From NPR (2020) Russell Jeung, a professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University, started tracking reports of harassment and even assault in places with large communities of Asian Americans on a new website he helped launch called Stop AAPI Hate.  In the site's first eight days, it received more than 650 reports of discrimination — largely against the Asian American community.

The Hill reports (2020) Attacks on Asian Americans skyrocket to 100 per day during coronavirus pandemic.  Representative Judy Chu said that reports of bigotry and hate crimes against Asian Americans have surged during the coronavirus crisis.

From the LA Times Op-Ed (2020), Trump’s racist comments are fueling hate crimes against Asian Americans.  Time for state leaders to step in.

After news of the coronavirus broke in January, Asian Americans almost immediately experienced racial taunts on school campuses, shunning on public transit and cyber-bullying on social media. When President Trump insisted on labeling the coronavirus as the “Chinese virus” in early March, these attacks became more virulent and common.

The FBI now warns of an increase of hate crimes against Asian Americans, but we’ve already experienced a surge. Since the Stop-AAPI-Hate website, a project of the Asian Pacific Planning and Policy Council and Chinese for Affirmative Action, launched on March 19 to track anti-Asian harassment, it has received more than 1,000 reports from people in 32 states detailing verbal abuse, denial of services, discrimination on the job or physical assaults.

From Buzzfeed, A Man Who Allegedly Tried To Kill An Asian American Family Because Of The Coronavirus Could Face Hate Crime Charges.

The incident is just one in a surge of racist attacks that Asian-Americans have faced during the coronavirus pandemic.

Newsweek reports (2020) Cynthia Choi, co-executive director of Chinese for Affirmative Action, a San Francisco-based advocacy organization, said she has talked to Asian-Americans who have been attacked in recent weeks, including a woman in San Francisco who was spat on in the street and yelled at by a stranger and blamed "for bringing the virus to the United States." An even more violent incident, she said, was that of a 12-year-old child in the Los Angeles area who had been taken to the ER after being beaten and told he'd introduced coronavirus to the country. "All of this as we are doing our part in a health emergency and caring for others," Choi said. "Now we have this added burden of feeling scapegoated."

6.  Any questions about history and racism regarding Americans perceived as Asians?