Model minority, also overachieving minority or overrepresented minority refers to a minority ethnic, racial, or religious group whose members achieve a higher degree of success than the population average. It is most commonly applied to ethnic minorities. This success is typically measured in income, education, and related factors such as low crime rate and high family stability.
In the United States, the term is associated with Asian Americans, primarily Chinese, Vietnamese, Filipino, Indian, Japanese, Korean Americans.. In the Netherlands, the comparable status is primarily associated with Indo people also known as Indies Dutchmen or Dutch Indonesians, the largest minority group in the country.
Generalized statistics are often cited to back up their model minority status such as high educational achievement and a high representation in white collar professions (jobs such as medicine, investment banking, management consulting, finance, engineering, and law).
A common misconception is that the affected communities usually hold pride in their labeling as the model minority. The model minority stereotype is considered detrimental to the Asian Pacific American (APA) community, because it is used to justify the exclusion of needy APA communities in the distribution of assistance programs, public and private, and understate or slight the achievements of APA individuals. Furthermore, the idea of the model minority pits minority groups against each other by implying that non-model groups are at fault for falling short of the model minority level of achievement and assimilation.
The model minority label relies on the aggregation of success indicators, hiding the plight of recent first-generation immigrants under the high success rate of more established Asian communities. While communities of Asian Americans that have been in the US for 3-4 generations are generally wealthier, immigrant communities of Asian Americans will experience great poverty.
Read more about Model Minority: Background, Germany
Famous quotes containing the words model and/or minority:
“If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this: in portrait painting to put on canvas something more than the face the model wears for that one day; to paint the man, in short, as well as his features.”
—James Mcneill Whistler (1834–1903)
“For those parents from lower-class and minority communities ... [who] have had minimal experience in negotiating dominant, external institutions or have had negative and hostile contact with social service agencies, their initial approaches to the school are often overwhelming and difficult. Not only does the school feel like an alien environment with incomprehensible norms and structures, but the families often do not feel entitled to make demands or force disagreements.”
—Sara Lawrence Lightfoot (20th century)