Challenging Racial Wedges in Education

By Anonymous / Winter 2020

Racism has always played an integral role in limiting equality in America. Many minority groups constantly face derogatory slurs, unfair treatment and injustice from the community. These injustices typically start at a very young age and stem from a system that is designed to educate American citizens, the American education system. Personally, growing up in the American education system where I was the minority, and a first generation student was socially and mentally tough. As a minority, I was constantly facing racism and discrimination, and as a first generation student, my parents didn’t fully comprehend the struggles that I was going through with regards to navigating a complicated American education system. Many of my challenges stemmed from a single discriminatory idea, being labeled as part of a model minority. Being a part of a group of minorities labelled the model minority, put stress and pressure on me to achieve the best grades in class while being placed in an environment that isolated me.

However, Asians were not always labelled as the model minority. Back in the late 1800s and 1900s, when Asians were first starting to immigrate to America, they were seen as vermin. There were many political cartoons that depicted Asian immigrant workers living with rats in garbage like conditions. At that time Asians were not deemed as the ideal group of minorities. In the social hierarchy they were at the bottom with the rest of the colored minorities. At the end of World War II, America realized that it needed to strengthen its diplomatic relations with Asian countries like Japan that had the capabilities to become a super power and prevent the spread of communism. Therefore, the American government started to create a narrative where Asian immigrants were seen as the minority group that was able to successfully assimilate into American culture, and the model minority myth was born, and continues to define and shape the lives of many first-generation Asian Americans.

When you are asked to navigate in a society where you are the minority, you don’t have much power. You are expected to just go with the flow. That's what it felt like for me growing up in the American education system where the majority of everyone in my elementary and middle school were white and there were only a handful of Asian American students in a school of almost 500-600 students. When I first entered elementary school I got my first taste of what it felt like being a model minority. The other students were always interested in me and my culture. They’d often ask about the type of food I ate and about my Hindu beliefs. Since I was introverted I was often afraid of these conversations and wouldn’t talk much about it. This led to me being more introverted in class, and afraid to ask any questions I had about any topics we were learning in class. Which snowballed into me falling behind in my classes; however my teachers and the other students always had this idea that I always knew the answer to any math related question. Many time students would ask me how I did so well on our multiplication tests, but in reality my scores would be similar to the average score. I didn’t really understand it at that time, but everyone expected me to be good at math just because I was Asian American.  

Since I was a first generation student, navigating the American education system was complicated and created an isolating experience for me. My parents had a very limited knowledge of it, so it was up to me to learn how to go through elementary school, middle school, high school, and college by myself. However, as a child, like any other kid, my priority was never school; all I ever wanted to do was play and hangout with my friends. This led to many fights between me and my parents and made navigating the education system even more complicated and isolating than it needed to be. With all of this going on I still was required to help out my parents around the house. Being new to America, my parents had to pick up several jobs. Often times this would mean that they would be working from 8 am to 8/9pm nearly every day, and sometimes they’d be gone on the weekends. This meant that it was up to me to finish common chores around the house (vacuuming, hanging up the clothes, washing the dishes, etc.) by myself. Additionally, I’d have school work to finish up too, and teachers in middle and high school didn’t really take into account that I had all these other household responsibilities too. So most of the time I wouldn’t have time to complete assignments and would have to turn in half completed assignments. As a result of all of this, my grades wouldn’t do too good, and my parents would blame me for not working hard enough. However, they wouldn’t see all the stress, mental anxiety and isolation that the education system caused me.

The American education system brought out the term, model minority and let it prevail as a dominant ideology throughout society. The term idealizes Asians as an ideal group of minorities that prevailed and put an expectation on us to be smart and hardworking. In high school, this meant that I was always expected to have the highest grades, and be the one that would know the answer to all the questions. In reality this was not the case, and oftentimes I could see a hint of frustration on my teachers’ faces when I’d get an answer wrong in class. This type of behavior put additional stress on me to go above and beyond just learning the material. The teachers would often expect exceptional projects from me, and when another minority group student (not from an Asian American background) put in hard work and turned in a project just as good as mine, they’d often receive a few points off. These types of subtle actions put into perspective how broken the educational system can be, and how a social hierarchy can form in a system that was meant to be fair and equal for all.

On the surface the education system doesn’t look like it's broken. Everyone in it doesn’t complain about it at all, instead it seems that many students are content with it. But all that is an illusion. Society has found a way to mitigate the voice of those that are truly suffering in the education system. When students complain that the education system is broken society responds by stating that students aren’t putting in enough hard work. This type of response shifts the burden of blame from the inequality of the education system to the students and it enhances the ideologies of individualism. Furthermore, they’ll say that hard work is always rewarded and the education system operates on the principle of meritocracy. However, they fail to realize that meritocracy only benefits the privileged group, which in this case are the wealthy and upper middle class white students. Minorities and those that fall in lower social classes fail to benefit from meritocracy. This is because many of them have other tasks that take priority over studying for 6-7 hours a day. For example, I had to do household chores after school that would take up to 2-3 hours. Additionally, those that live in poorer neighborhoods may go to underprivileged schools and won’t have the same fair opportunities to succeed in the same way as the wealthy students who go to prep schools and have enough money to pay for tutors and college prep.

From my personal experience, racism and discrimination can be seen as the main problem in the education system. They always portray America to be perfect, and never really teach about the inequalities that exist or existed before. For example, I remember being taught about the colonization that occurred to the West, but most of it was in a positive context. The textbooks would emphasize about the usable land that was present in the West, but would never explain about the process that drove the Native Americans off their land and into reservations. On the other hand, they’d teach about the Indian caste system and how badly it affected society. This made it seem that America was always doing good, and that all other nations were always making bad policies, had corruption, and everyday civilian life was subpar. Being a south Asian American, this would feel like it singled me out in front of my whole class and put the blame directly on me. The teachers nor the textbooks never acknowledged that India got rid of their caste system and are working for a better future; therefore, to all the students it seemed like India was a backwards country with broken laws. Additionally, the American education system fails to acknowledge the American caste system they had with slaves being at the bottom, then the indentured white servants, then the free white immigrants and the wealthy at the top. A country that fails to teach about its own wrongdoings can never accept and learn from its mistakes. Instead they’ll make terms like model minority that create another invisible caste system even within the minority groups, favoring one group over another.

When immigrants come to America they don’t come here with much. They’ll have a handful of dollars that they saved up, but other than that they don’t anything. There is no property, wealth, or family/friends waiting for them here. My parents told me that they came to America because it was portrayed as a wealthy country that would help them become rich; however once they got here they realized that it was all a hoax. They didn’t have anything and to work minimum wage jobs just to gather enough money to allow my dad to take a training course to try to get a better job. Many immigrant families experience the same thing, and they can’t afford to live in the nice wealthy areas where the schools are top rated. As a result, many immigrant families are forced to send their students to poorer schools that don’t have the funds to supply an equivalent education as the ones that the wealthier students will receive from wealthier neighborhoods. Then when Americans label us as the model minority they fail to recognize the hard work and sacrifices we made to get there and fail to recognize the struggles that the other immigrant groups are going through.

Society has also found a way to make atomize minorities and prevent one another from coming together. By assigning the term model minority to Asians, many other minority groups grew to resent Asians. Essentially, the term model minorities conveys the idea that other minority groups can work up and join the middle class without any assistance from the white society. On an NPR article about the model minority myth Kat Chow has said “Minimizing the role racism plays in the persistent struggles of other racial/ethnic minority groups — especially black Americans” (Chow). This puts the blame on Asians for making it in society. As a result other minority groups will hate Asians, and serves as a method that draws us against one another and atomizes us. Furthermore, society fails to recognize that certain races are treated worse making it harder for certain minority groups to make it to the middle class. For example, African Americans in the United States have been facing racism and oppression ever since the 1600s; which is far longer than the Asian immigrants. Centuries and centuries of oppression and racism towards African Americans have created a society that will automatically treat any African American as a second-class citizen and push them to the bottom of any social hierarchy. For example, in my high school (which was located in the part of the city where the middle class lived) contained about 5-10 African Americans out of 2000+ students. That represents less than 0.1% of the high school population, yet in the United States about 20% of the population is African American. If we were living in a fair society, my high school should have an African American student population of about 20%. However, the racist ideologies that our ancestors put in place continue to govern and break apart society.

As a society we need to come together and find a solution to end the injustice occurring in the education system. This starts with first abolishing the term model minority. The term model minority continues to atomize us. We need to realize that we are all minorities and accept that any inequality done to one of us is an inequality done to us all. This starts by redistributing funding equally to all public schools. The following infographic shows that the number of public schools in the United States that contain low income students.

From the image you can see that the highest concentration of low income students is in the South where there continue to be large amounts of racism. Furthermore, the national average of low income students is 51%, and the government should be alarmed at this number. More than half the nation is low income and it should show the government that they are failing to support the majority of the citizens.

Politicians might complain that we, as a nation, don’t have the funds to increase the education budget without increasing taxes and placing a larger burden on individual families. However, there is one place that the government can draw money from without affecting the lives of hundreds of millions of American citizens. Take a look at the 2020 budget that the Trump administration constructed.

More than 50% of the American budget is going to Defense. This means that the American military can waste more money on building prototypes with a pure singular purpose: to destroy. In fact Lockheed Martin, a private company that builds weapons/vehicles for the American military, has been building the next generation of jet fighters for America over the past 10 years. The government is expected to pay around $1.5 trillion dollars over the lifetime of the jet fighter. In a time where there are no wars, is it really necessary to waste trillions of dollars on a vehicle that we may never use. Can we not find better ways to spend that money by helping the homeless, helping immigrants assimilate into American society or educating the next generation of students?

As funding for public universities declines universities are turning to private corporations for donations. As a result many universities are sacrificing the needs of students for the needs of corporations. Take a look at this chart that shows the funding that public universities receive.

Over the last 10 years federal funding has remained stagnant however corporate funding has increased. This causes universities to start appealing to corporations and farming as much talent as they can from public high schools. When these universities go to “farm” racist ideologies like model minority will be prevalent in their minds and they’ll choose Asian Americans over other minority groups reinforcing the model minority ideology. Furthermore, these universities, on their way to please corporations, will put unnecessary stress on students to achieve exceptional performance.