"An Asian Without A's Is a Sin": "Smart Asians" and Their Racialized School Experience

• In Event: Sheraton Roundtable Session 17
  In Roundtable Session: “American Dream Is a Lie”: New Scholarship on the Cultural (Re)production of “Success” and “Failure”

Abstract

Objective: Asian American students have been characterized as the “model minority” due to their extraordinary academic achievement. This study illuminates the K-12 experiences of ten high-achieving East-Asian students, and problematizes the model minority myth of “smart Asians who are good at math and hard-working.” The study findings suggest that “being good at math" (or not) became a privilege system at school that concretized Asian students’ racialized “smart” identities through the tracking system. And, the fear of failure became prevalent in these students’ everyday discourse of struggle to “work harder”.

Framework, Data, and Modes of Inquiry: Data collection for this fifteen-month ethnographic study included semi-structured interviews, participant observations, and informal conversations. Ten families from Taiwan and China, including ten second-generation public high school seniors and seventeen first-generation parents, were recruited from predominantly Chinese immigrant suburban communities in the Northeastern United States. Using an “identity-in-practice” model that draws from the notion of self-reauthoring (Holland et al., 1998), I document the interactive effects of the public school tracking system and immigrant parents’ engagement with it shaped these students’ racialized learning identities (Martin, 2009).

Informed by this framework, I define cultural practices (e.g., “working harder”) as locally-produced activities carried out in response to the institutional structures (Nasir & Hand, 2006). Further, I conceptualize students’ discourses of struggle in their high-track classes in mathematics as spaces of (re)authoring a new sense of self. Analyzing students’ struggle to maintain their “smartness,” this study documents how the public school tracking system combined with the model minority stereotype to mediate and thicken Asian students’ academic identification and ultimately served as symbolic violence (Bourdieu, 1977).

Conclusion: The findings suggest that the curricular tracking system in math served as powerful symbols that not only intensified high-achieving Asian students’ racial group consciousness but also localized the widely-circulating pattern of the model minority stereotype in students’ everyday life at school. Surrounded by “most people are Asians,” the highest-track math classes provided a racialized social space for Asian students’ learning identification, mobilized by the fear of in-group failure as a “disgrAsian” (i.e., a disgraceful Asian).

Significance: This study broadens questions about racial inequality and the “achievement gap” in public schools by studying the systematic production of “success” for some groups that ultimately remain marginalized and silenced. Studying how success is produced is crucial for understanding how the American neoliberal public education system functions to perpetuate racial inequality by offering a comparison to studies of the production of failure. This study argues that mathematics becomes an artifact and a tool for high-achieving Asian students, accumulated first by early but limited math knowledge from home, followed by the institutionalized effects of the tracking system, and students’ struggle and effort to maintain an in-group “Asian” identity in the racialized school tracking system. This unique finding allows for a deeper understanding of the production of inequity through the public education system.

Author

• Shelley Yi-Jung Wu, Rutgers University