Asian American racialization, racial capitalism, and the threat of the model minority

Abstract

This paper argues for an Asian American racialization that takes seriously the political economy of racial capitalism. To do so, it first discusses the racial category of Asian American, and then take up the myth of the Model Minority as the defining form of Asian American racialization in education. This paper then connects the Model Minority to the tropes of Yellow Peril and Orientalism, arguing that our shortcomings of understanding Asian American racialization generally, and in education specifically, require us to develop a different theory of Asian American racialization that is not wholly confined within the boundaries of the United States. Following the racial political economy of Day (2016), this paper then discusses a conceptualization of Asian American racialization as that of abstract and efficient alien labor, and points to the ways this explains how Asian Americans have been used within racial dynamics in the U.S. This paper concludes with a discussion of the implications this reconceptualization of Asian American racialization for the construction of the Model Minority in education.