Model Minority (Myth?)

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3195710.pdf

I first heard the term "model-minority" in a Soc3AC I took a couple of summers ago. The class introduced the term to explain how some people were using Asian Americans to serve as a model of minority behavior and structure, in contrast to the other minorities, namely the African Americans and Hispanics, who they claimed to be underprivileged not because of a society that undermines minorities, but because of sometime inherent, genetic or otherwise, in these specific groups. I wanted to know more about how Asians and Asian Americans became a model-minority, having lived in that image my whole life, but the class only touched on this and moved on. About a month ago I came across an article called "A Model for Academic Success: The School and Home Environment of East Asian Students," which can be found by copying and pasting the above link. The article describes aspects of East Asian cultures which set up their children for academic success. Although two years removed, this article provided me some closure on that experience in sociology class. Since the sixth grade, I had attended large, highly-ranked public schools in San Francisco, where the majority of students were Asian. There were very few blacks and Hispanics at these schools. Influenced by popular culture, everyone, including myself, assumed and concluded this was the natural order of things. But are some cultures superior? They are superior only in that conform to the practices of the dominant group, the keys to social mobility. After reading in the reader "Beyond the model-minority stereotype: Voices of high- and low-achieving Asian-American students" (from the same academic journal as the above article) I heard, for the first time, stories of students who failed to "conform." Whether or not the model-minority is a myth, I can never again assume that we are all better prepared because of our background, that our culture is a factory that manufactures perfect, successful citizens.