The Dismal Paradox of the Model Minority Myth: Korean New-Immigrant Youth’s Experiences, Coping Strategies, and Reproduction of Racial Prejudice

• In Event: Counterstories of the Model Minority Myth

Abstract

This multi-regional and mixed-methods study explores the paradoxical effect of the model minority myth on recent Korean immigrant youths’ peer relationships in racialized American schooling contexts and their internalization of the racial stereotypes. Based on critical race theory and the model minority myth, this study traces the unpretentious voices of recent Korean immigrant students (n = 63) struggling to make sense of their (unexpected) racial experience in school and searching for a strategy to cope with the challenge. Findings indicate that the majority of the Korean immigrant youths faced various forms of racial discrimination ranging from explicit bullying to subtle exclusion/rejection by their “mainstream American” peers. They found themselves subject to two inter-related, yet false stereotypes against Asians as “perpetual foreigners” and “model minority.” The former depriving them of rights to be heard and fully accepted by peers, the latter led them to silence their negative schooling experiences, even the most explicit form of racial bullying, and to internalize the idea that they, as good students, should never complain. They interpreted that experiencing such racial discrimination was a natural process since they were newcomers and did not speak English well enough. Some placed the blame on themselves and chose to make more academic investment hoping the racism would end when they became academically successful and spoke English more fluently. Others, who did not fit into the ideal image of model minority, experienced a sense of helplessness, anxiety, and lowered self-esteem. Most Korean youths gradually withdrew their initial hope to build positive and meaningful peer relationships with those who they believe are the mainstream Americans (White students). However, the Korean immigrant students also actively searched for a strategy and/or collective identity in order to minimize their feeling of racial marginalization. They constructed their own comfort zone with other recent Korean immigrants or immigrant/transnational students of other racial and ethnic backgrounds because they shared bonds of sympathy and empathy about their marginal status. Ironically, the Korean immigrant youths tended to favorably accept the model minority myth and tried to fulfill its expectations. This ideology, which once made the Korean youths silence their racial experience, turned into an ideological tool for them as they tried to reclaim the sense of their ethnic pride and individual agency. Interestingly, in urban school contexts that present a sizable number of Korean student population, the Korean youths developed a sense of ethnic solidarity based on the model minority myth and even claimed their ethnic superiority, an ironic and disturbing development of another racial prejudice against other racial and ethnic student groups.

Authors

• Yoonjung Choi, Ewha Womans University

• Jae Hoon Lim, University of North Carolina - Charlotte