"Work Smart and Work Hard": Crafting Neoliberal Model Minorities at an Asian American Supplementary Academy

• In Event: Destabilizing the Ideal Neoliberal Subject: An Examination of Educational Institutions, White Supremacy, and Meritocracy

Abstract

Ethnic supplementary academies (called hagwons in Korean) have recently gained more scholarly attention as sites that circulate social and cultural capital among Asian immigrant families (e.g., Lee & Zhou, 2015). This paper builds upon this literature to consider the role of hagwons within the current neoliberal moment, which regards education as a scarce, private good for which families must compete. Relatedly, the paper considers how an increasingly savvy professional class of Asian immigrants employ hagwons to access elite status through education (e.g., Ong 1999). Drawing from a larger ethnography, I investigate how one hagwon in the Chicago suburbs shaped middle class Korean American families’ educational strategies by privileging neoliberal approaches rooted in a White professional class habitus.

This paper engages Rhee’s (2013) concept of the Neoliberal Racial Project (NRP) to inform its analysis. The neoliberal regime has created an ideological shift from understanding education as a public good to imagining families as private consumers making choices in a marketplace (e.g., Apple, 2006; Bartlett et al., 2002). Rhee joins critical race scholars’ insistence that neoliberalism be analyzed as a racialized/-ing process, arguing that neoliberalism “reproduces and reshapes racial subjects” (Rhee, 2013, p. 562). The NRP builds upon the model minority stereotype to reify the ideal neoliberal Asian subject: a productive, self-governing individual who reinforces the racial hierarchy. Additionally, I draw upon organizational habitus to analyze how this hagwon participates in the NRP. Expanding upon Bourdieu’s original conceptualization of habitus, McDonough (1998) and others understand organizational habitus as the race- and class-based “dispositions, perceptions, and appreciations transmitted to individuals in a common organizational culture” (Horvat & Antonio, 1999, p. 320).

This paper draws upon data from an ethnography of two Korean American community-based spaces in the Chicago suburbs: Hangeul Korean School and a hagwon I call Ascend Tutoring Center (ATC). From October 2015 to January 2017, I regularly observed classrooms and informal spaces; conducted 55 semi-structured interviews with youth, parents, and staff; and collected archival documents. Data sources include fieldnotes, interview transcripts, background questionnaires, demographic data, and site documents.

The data show that ATC privileged a White professional class habitus that encouraged an entrepreneurial and self-sufficient orientation to education. Simultaneously, the hagwon positioned Asian American families as passive, overly competitive, and mechanistic Others who needed to emulate White professional class habitus to be successful. Through its curriculum and services, ATC sought to coach families and youth to become self-reliant, well-informed consumers who would have expansive choices on the college marketplace; in the words of co-founder Louis Heo, ATC taught its clients how to "work smart and work hard.” While this process allowed students some access to dominant cultural capital, it also reproduced Asian Americans’ neoliberal racial subjectivity as productive and self-governing racial subordinates. The findings suggest that while some Asian immigrant families with class privilege – like those in my study – may reap certain rewards when they consent to the rules of the NRP, the tools of neoliberalism work differently for and demand more from racialized subjects.

Author

• Eujin Park, Stanford University