Disaggregating the Model Minority

The model minority stereotype became popular in the 1960s and 1970s, the era of the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement. After the Immigration Act of 1965 and subsequent immigration laws removed limits on immigration from Asian countries and opened the doors to highly skilled foreign nationals, Asian Americans started being praised as apolitical, economically successful "model minorities" in contrast to African Americans, who were deemed "problem minorities". But, as you'll see in recent data from California, multiple subgroups within the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI or APIA) category resemble other nonwhite racial groups on important socioeconomic metrics – the model minority myth is a convenient fiction that rationalizes the status quo of inequalities within and beyond Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.