Stereotypes Of Asian Americans

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Oftentimes in America, we like to put labels on minority groups and categorize them. We take a large group of people (either by race, gender, religion, etc.). and put them into a very broad group and create stereotypes and generalizations about them. Stereotypes such as the model minority stereotype that Asian Americans often get put in can be harmful to other minority groups, but others as well. These stereotypes can take away one's individuality, and make them act the way society wants them to act. This way of thinking can also discount the struggles and hardships that minority groups in America face each and every single day just to survive. That is why, the categorization, and generalization of minority groups in America is a practice that …show more content…
It is because of this way of thinking that oftentimes Asian Americans are forgotten about when talking about social change and racial justice in America. Nguyen explains, “Unlike the engineers and doctors who mostly came from Hong Kong, Taiwan, China and India—the model minority in the American imagination—many Hmong refugees arrived from a rural life in Laos devastated by war.” (Ngyuen, 11) Many Americans don’t understand the persecution and struggle that Asian Americans went through in their home country. Instead, because of the model minority stereotype that we have, we only associate Asian Americans with success and triumph, and have no idea about their struggles.Due to the lack of awareness and knowledge about the Hmong refugees that Ngyuen references, their problems are never faced and conquered. They will continue to go unnoticed and unheard. Garland-Thompson draws parallels to this feeling and explains why movements for disabled people haven’t been able to gain traction. One answer is that we have a much clearer collective notion of what it means to be a woman or an African-American, gay or transgender person than we do of what it means to be disabled.” (Garland-Thompson, 5). There is a better understanding of the struggles of African Americans and women in this country than there is for disabled people, and therefore disabled people movements are often …show more content…
Garland-Thompson talks about this in her piece on speaking about disabled people. She says, “They” [the outside public] merely seem to be people to whom something unfortunate has happened, for whom something has gone terribly wrong.” (Garland-Thompson, 6). People that are not affected by disability don’t understand all the different disabilities, or what happened to a person with disability. They only understand the stereotypes and generalizations that we as a society have made for people with a disability. The same can be said for the Asian American community. When Covid-19 began to spread around the world, Asian Americans began to take the “blame” because it was understood that the virus came from China. In Ngyuen’s text, he provides a quote from Cathy Park Hong that says, “We don’t have coronavirus. We are coronavirus.” (Ngyuen, 7). It is because of the practice of generalizing every ethnic group in America that Americans are programmed to think like this. We can’t see each individual person for who they are, but for what they look like and represent. This way of thinking further fuels racism in America, and causes minorities to be easy targets in times of
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