The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority by Ellen D. Wu

★★★½

I'm an Asian American. When I was in college (a couple decades ago), I didn't even know that Asian American Studies was a thing. If I had taken any classes in it, I imagine this is the kind of book I would have read for class (though this particular book, published in 2013, wasn't available back then).

While absolutely informative, I also found this book to be academic and dense. I'd give 4-plus stars for the content, but maybe 3-minus stars for readability, which averages out to something like 3.5 stars.

This book focuses on the Chinese and Japanese experiences, as those have been the most visible Asian ethnicities in U.S. history, and they are the populations around which the model minority emerged. Going into this book, I had a working knowledge of major pieces of Chinese and Japanese American history as separate and distinct events, but this book - for the first time I have encountered - studies Japanese internment alongside the Chinese Exclusion Act. During World War II, when the U.S. allied with China to fight Japan, Japanese Americans suffered from their assumed allegiance to their ethnic country of origin, while Chinese Americans benefited from the same assumption.

After WWII, integration became even more complicated as U.S.-Japan relations were strained and Communism took hold in China and threatened to spread throughout East Asia. Both Japanese and Chinese Americans loudly declared their support for American ideals, but at the same time, there was value on the international stage in promoting cultural plurality in America, to show that America truly was a place of equal opportunity, regardless of race.

Both groups were cast as "assimilating Others," capable of being culturally American despite clearly being racially distinct. Asian Americans were definitely not white, but also definitely not black, and the model minority was consciously created as a "simultaneously inclusive and exclusive reckoning" (p. 9) of Asian Americans as part of the national identity. Asian Americans themselves engaged in self-stereotyping, eager to "dislodge deeply embedded 'yellow peril' caricatures." (p. 6) It was a conscious effort to align themselves with white middle class Americans, and to separate themselves from African and Mexican and Filipino Americans (despite sharing common experiences of oppression), thereby upholding white supremacy in the process. Inevitably, the model minority became a wedge that divided Asian Americans from other minority groups seeking equal rights, particularly African Americans.

Personally, I would have liked to learn more about the model minority in the post-1960s era - the time in which I've lived and have first-hand experience - but this time period is only discussed briefly in the Epilogue, which touches upon the "repudiation of the model minority and its assimilationists origins...[as well as how activists] deliberately inverted the trope of non-blackness and instead embraced affinities with" other racial minorities. (p. 247)