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:
“Research shows clearly that parents who have modeled nurturant, reassuring responses to infants’ fears and distress by soothing words and stroking gentleness have toddlers who already can stroke a crying child’s hair. Toddlers whose special adults model kindliness will even pick up a cookie dropped from a peer’s high chair and return it to the crying peer rather than eat it themselves!”
—Alice Sterling Honig (20th century)
“What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvelous and awful, good and evil.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)