Death of a myth: Lessons in Cross Racial Solidarity
Lots of myths have been proven wrong over the years, yet do not seem to disappear from the American narrative. Myths such as: you can kill a virus (you can’t). Lightening can’t strike in the same place twice (lightening doesn’t care). Or primitive humans and dinosaurs crossed paths (just about 65 million years between us). Other myths have sustained and are a part of the American education system.
One myth I hope has seen its final demise is the Model Minority Myth (MMM). This myth has caused significant harm to the concept of BIPOC (Black Indigenous and People of Color) solidarity. Before COVID, the MMM pervaded both the cultural cosmology and historical myths in the United States. Asians were largely invisible in American history. Chinese American laborers built the Transcontinental railroad, traveling thousands of miles away from family, blasting through rock inch by inch, risking health and safety for the completion of a historical task. You would not know that by looking at this photo.
“An estimated 15,000 Chinese migrants worked on the Central Pacific Railroad. However, they were paid less than white railroad workers and were not invited to the ceremony.” Gordon H. Chang
From the incarceration of Japanese Americans to erasing the presence of Punjabi farmers in California by denying them land rights, the project of erasure and invisibility is powerful. This was consistent until the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s, when the government enacted historic legislation to outlaw discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, and later sexual orientation and gender identity. In the post Civil Rights era, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act abolished quotas based on ethnicities and attract skilled labor to the United States. Skilled labor largely came from Japan, India, China with ‘professionals’ from engineering, medicine and technology. These migrants undoubtedly benefitted from caste and class privilege to be able to attain an education and skill set that merited legal migration to the United States. This created a post-colonial era Human Capital Migration (or Brain Drain). The 1965 Act allowed for companies to hire these skilled laborers, let them settle in the suburbs, allow them to buy homes (a benefit not available as easily for Black and Indigenous people in the US).
This set up was critical in genesis of the MMM. Asians were set up with jobs, allowed to live in white communities and send their children to white schools. Because of the system of residential segregation, those schools had more resources. The message to access these benefits was clear, keep your head down, stay quiet and you will benefit from proximity to whiteness. Suffer racism quietly, give your children non-cultural names, stop eating your native food and you can live the white-American dream. Meanwhile, Black and Latinx were recovering economically from over 90% of their history in chattel slavery or American apartheid. They were healing while dealing with white flight and the impact of racial redlining. Indigenous communities were losing their children to US government-sanctioned residential boarding schools designed to destroy families and steal land that was theirs by citizenship and birthright.
Over the next three decades, the MMM grew and fueled itself. In a way, it was self-fulfilling. With access to good schools, affirmative action benefits and households not devastated by family separation and structural racism, these selected Asians thrived. The Asians rendered invisible, left out of the MMM, were undocumented, refugees or trauma victims. Our Black, Indigenous and Latinx sibilings were told, through policy and media narratives “see this ‘minority’ has it figured out”. They don’t demand things or constantly remind us of our deeply sordid history. Instead of acknowledging the harm of systemic racism and settler colonialism, once again we were brought into familiar stock stories: the American dream and the idea of a meritocracy. Work hard and you can achieve anything.
There are some hidden stories that were important in countering this narrative, but they never made it to our mainstream collective memory of history. Black, Asian and Latinx activists have been collaborating since the 1960s, specifically as part of the revolutionary Black Panther movement.
“The Panthers understood that racism against Japanese Americans and Asian Americans was linked to black liberation, and that these communities were both oppressed by white supremacy.” Diane Fujino
The movement to address structural racism is best fought with cross-ethnic solidarity that looks at the liberation of all under the tenets of White Supremacy Culture. Critical race theorists have been discussing the ‘ordinariness’ of racism for many years, citing that that if we do not address how it is a part of our everyday culture (seen in either/or thinking, perfectionism, worship of the written word etc) we will never dismantle it.
This cannot happen without a wildly cross-ethnic, cross-racial and intersectional movement of peoples. Bobby Seale, Black Panther co-founder said “Racism and ethnic differences allow the power structure to exploit the masses of workers in this country, because that’s the key by which they maintain their control.” There are examples of this type of solidarity in action: After a spur of hate crimes against Asian Americans in Oakland, the city offered more police. In support of their Black and Brown counterparts, the members of the Chinese Progressive Association refused, understanding the impact of more police on their BIPOC siblings. And yet, these concealed stories are really not part of the mainstream narrative in the United States. This is NOT to erase the ways we have harmed each other in the future and continue to do so, but to continue to elevate how we can be in deep conspiracy and solidarity with one another. Yet, the more pervasive narrative is one that claims one group of BIPOC is a model and others are not.
Until COVID. Even without the narrative of the former president, the origins of the virus in Asia have blasted the believers of MMM into another space. The problem with being designated as a ‘model’ in a group means that position is precarious. Proximity to whiteness is not the way. Deep, cross-racial solidarity is. As the model minority myth finally dies, we can begin our journey in healing our previous, current and future generations. Until then, if you really want to believe in a myth, Flintstones is streaming on Hulu. MWC Death #modelminoritymyth #BIPOCSolidarity #AmericanHistory
