Areeba Kamal

“You're Asian, of course you're good at math!”

This is the statement that Hannah Zhang, a sophomore at Columbia University, says she heard constantly growing up.

“I’m Chinese American, studying economics at an Ivy League school, good at piano, class valedictorian from high school. I guess you could say I fit the model minority myth,” she says.

“My aspirations are not culturally programmed. I have struggled with anxiety, fought with my parents about my future and faced microaggressions growing up in rural America," Zhang says.

Katie Zdunek, a journalism major at Western Kentucky University, agrees.

“These stereotypes negate individual needs, talents, and experiences. It's demeaning!" Zdunek says.



According to the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (WHIAAPI), a lack of disaggregated data about this fast growing racial demographic has given rise to the model minority myth — the notion that the majority of AAPIs have already accomplished the "American dream."

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Overarching social perceptions portray AAPIs as self-sufficient, highly educated and upwardly mobile. Yet, in actuality, several subgroups within the AAPI community continue to face unmet needs and barriers to academic and professional success.

One in three AAPIs has limited English proficiency, while 50% of all AAPI students in higher education attend community colleges. Due to a persisting taboo around seeking help for mental illnesses, AAPIs also have a low utilization rate for mental health services among all minorities.

To create greater awareness about the diversity of the AAPI population and draw attention to the needs of underserved AAPI subgroups, WHIAAPI has launched an online data portal that consolidates all government information on AAPIs into one Web location. The portal is easily accessible by anyone and searchable by theme, language, race, and ethnic group.

“(This) marks an important milestone for better understanding and responding to the complex needs of AAPIs,” says Kiran Ahuja, executive director at WHIAAPI.

Many AAPI students have enthusiastically welcomed this new wealth of data about their community. “This data portal proves that AAPIs are large, diverse and composed of multiple stories, experiences, and values,” says Belinda Lei, an international politics major in her second year at Georgetown University.

Unfortunately, the model minority myth remains deeply ingrained in every sphere of contemporary society — so much so that members of the community itself believe it to be true, says Sunny Huang, an AAPI student and sociology major at Lehigh University.

“The model minority myth prevented my mother from recognizing that she had a mental illness. It made my brother and I believe that we had to excel at everything we did, when that is an impossible expectation for anyone to meet,” says Huang.

Jennifer Tran, a senior at University of Texas at Austin, agrees. “I was frustrated with the way I had to constantly prove to other people that I was far more than the stereotype,” she says.

Katie Roberts, a photojournalism major at Western Kentucky University, agrees. “I was adopted by a white American woman when I was three months old. I am more than my skin color; I am a daughter, a sister, a student, a photographer, an American.”

This alienation may be deepened by AAPI students’ failure to connect with other students of color, says Eng Gin Moe, a junior at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.

“White students view me as part of the minority, but different communities of color may not include AAPIs like me in conversations about diversity and disenfranchised populations,” says Moe.

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As policymakers continue to bank on the model minority myth, government and institutional policies are falling short of bridging gaps in access for AAPI subgroups, says Jenny Lu, a senior studying media studies and political science at University of California, Berkeley.

“Academic scholarships geared towards ‘minorities’ often fail to recognize AAPIs. Low-income AAPI families remain invisible, as do subpopulations such as Southeast Asian refugees from war-torn countries,” Lu says.

This can be particularly damaging for the Pacific Islander community, where unmet educational needs are particularly high. Statistics show that only 1 in 7 Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders has a college degree. In addition, Pacific Islanders have among the highest unemployment rates of all racial or ethnic groups.

“We are commonly disregarded in this huge ‘AAPI’ category. People only see Asian American — they don't even know what ‘PI’ means,” exclaims Veronica Zamani, a junior studying politics, public policy and education at the University of California, Los Angeles.

With the launch of the AAPI portal, AAPI students feel the time is ripe for the model minority myth to be abandoned once and for all in favor of representative statistics on their community.

“The statistics highlighted by (the AAPI portal) prove that the model minority myth is inaccurate and harmful. We cannot continue to hide underrepresented AAPIs under skewed statistics,” says Lei.



Areeba Kamal is a junior at Mount Holyoke College.

This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.