This paper interrogates the fundamental anti-Blackness of model minority discourses and how they are embedded in structures of anti-Blackness and settler colonialism through a genealogical examination of the contradictory history of the “Black model minority” within the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute’s Indian Program. This program educated both Black and Indigenous students throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and purposefully made racialized comparisons between groups. I read this history through present day scholarship on the model minority myth in relation to anti-Blackness and settler colonialism. I argue that the “Black model minority” at Hampton was predicated on upholding slavery through defining it as an educational project and that slavery and settler colonialism are intimately linked through pedagogy. This narrative of the Black model minority demonstrates that slavery and land dispossession were framed as pedagogic by industrial education institutions. Ultimately, this work questions the idea of “valuing education,” which is present in model minority discourses across many contexts, and how it is complicated by this history.

Throughout the twentieth century, Black immigrants from the Caribbean attained greater socioeconomic status than African Americans. Although Black immigrants remain an understudied population, recent studies show that Afro Caribbeans continue to outperform African Americans in the labor market. Given that these groups share a set of racialized physical features, some contend that this gap highlights the role of cultural attributes in the manufacture of Black ethnic and Black-White racial disparities. In this study, I investigate the degree to which cultural attributes associated with a specific form of the model minority hypothesis are responsible for disparities between African Americans and Afro Caribbeans. I use data from the National Survey of American Life in order to test for the relative roles of work ethic, economic autonomy, oppositionality, family structure and function, and racial attitudes in the manufacture of disparate labor market outcomes between African Americans and Afro Caribbeans. I find mixed support for the idea that Afro Caribbeans constitute a model minority vis-à-vis African Americans and that differences in model minority attributes are only partially responsible for these labor market disparities. My findings suggest that racial inequality will not be undone if the racially stigmatized and marginalized simply work harder and complain less about race and racism in the United States.

Amy Chua catapulted to fame in the United States with the publication of her bestselling World on Fire: How Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (2002) and a much-discussed Wall Street Journal excerpt from her next book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011). A wry account of a ‘Chinese’ mother's efforts, not all successful, to raise her two daughters to be high-achievers, Tiger Mother created some controversy owing to its critique of ‘Western’-style parenting and its perceived advocacy of a ‘Tiger Mother’ brand of parenting that drew on the author's own experience of being raised by Chinese-Filipino immigrant parents in America. Not only did Battle Hymn generate heated discussion in America about the stereotyping of Asian-Americans as ‘model minority’; it also tapped into American anxieties about the waning of U.S. power in the wake of a rising China, while provoking spirited responses from mainland Chinese women looking to raise their children in ‘enlightened’ ways. This article follows Amy Chua's career as an ‘ethnopreneur’ who capitalises on her claims of ‘Chineseness’ and access to ‘Chinese culture.’ Drawing on localised/provincialised, regional, and family-mediated notions of Chineseness, Chua exemplifies the ‘Anglo-Chinese’ who exploits – and profits from – national and cultural differences within nations as well as among Southeast Asia, the U.S., and China in order to promote particular forms of hybridised (trans)national identities while eschewing the idea of mainland China as the ultimate cultural arbiter of Chineseness.

I examine how and why the social construction of Asian Americans has changed from coolie to model minority over the last century. I examine the role of the U.S. government in creating policies that systematically select particular types of entrants to the United States. Federal immigration policy privileges high-skilled workers, and a disproportionately large number of Asian immigrants are granted the status of lawful permanent resident by the federal government on the basis of employment preferences. U.S. immigration policy thus creates a selection bias, favoring Asian immigrants with high levels of formal education and social standing. I also consider the consequences of this selection bias for the construction of racial tropes and Asian American identity, and argue that the normative content of the dominant tropes of racial identity is critical in establishing the incentives and costs of identifying with racial and ethnic groups. Immigration policy, and the selection biases it may engender, is an important factor in how those tropes are constructed and experienced. Racial identity should, and does, vary as a function of the unique histories of migration, labor market demands, and shared experiences for people classified by race.