Comments on "Unraveling the 'Model Minority' Stereotype"

The reading this week by Stacey J. Lee, “Unraveling the ‘Model Minority’ Stereotype” was really interesting to me. As I read I learned a lot of new things that I hadn’t before about the students at Academic High, the different view that Korean-Asian’s had and even the reasoning for name changing. I really enjoyed Lee’s work here and I think it can enlighten its readers to the many changes and struggles that are going on with these different groups.

One idea that really resonated with me was the idea of these subcategories within students’ ethnicities. As Lee points out there are Korean-identified, Asian-identified, Asian new wave-identified, and Asian American-identified (Lee, 2009, p. 26). Although they are all Asian, each group has specific traits and characteristics that make them uniquely different. This reminds me of when I was in high school and my school had a large population of Black students. There was a huge assumption that they were all Haitian, but that was not true at all and once I talked to one of my friends about it I learned that they, as a group, would rather be called Black because they are not all Haitian. I had just assumed because of what I had heard, but once I went looking for the information I wanted I learned something new about my classmates. It is fascinating to see how many different ethnicities are really there rather than lumping them all together as one. As the book talked about this, and how Korean’s thought that they were above other Asian groups I thought back on my days in high school and was able to make that connection of the different subcategories.

Another topic that Lee mentions is the fact that many Asian students will change their name to something more westernized. This was interesting to me because I was just thinking about this after my classroom observation last week. As I sat watching a freshman English class, one of the international students was named Joe. That may have very well been his real name, but coming from another country it did not seem likely to me. This could be the explanation, he may have changed his name so that it was not made fun of or butchered or any number of reasons. I wish I had the chance to ask him about it. I understand the reasoning for it, but it really is too bad that students feel like they should change their name. It is too bad that so many other students would make fun of someone for their name. I think because my name is important to me, for small reasons, I feel like everyone should be proud of their name. These students may be very proud of their given name, but just find it easier to give another so that they do not have to deal with all the explanations. I guess it just depends on the person and what they want to do.

Overall this reading was really insightful and (at least for me and my group) will be very helpful on the group project. I really like Lee’s approach and her different ideas on the topic. I feel as though this is a book that many can learn from because there is so much that people don’t know about these stereotypes and the issues they can bring up.