It was a niggling feeling, curdling in the pit of my stomach the way those feelings always do. There was a sense of wariness in the room when I spoke, and it took me longer than usual to overcome my audience's unease by smiling broadly and speaking openly. Later that night, I turned over their faces in my head. Why had my audience seemed so suspicious? Was it just that I was young, and female, in the way that those attributes have always undermined me in professional settings? No. This felt different.
For years, I have benefited from the Model Minority Myth - the stereotype that Asian (and let's be real, Asian-looking) people are quiet, submissive, smart, and hardworking. And yes, I got good grades in high school (was it worth it for the bullying though? I'm still undecided) and went to law school, just as my Asian Tiger mom had intended. Statistically, 51% of Asian Americans are employed in management, business, science, and arts occupations, and the median annual income of Asian American households is $73,060, compared with the U.S. average of $53,600. Similar statistics are observed in Australia, where high-performing Asians perpetuate a meritocratic neoliberal narrative in which hard work and personal ambition (not government welfare and protectionism) support the global competitiveness of the Australian economy. I know from my own experience that Asiatic features have contributed to employer perceptions of my non-threatening, hardworking nature.
It wasn't until I started traveling to Africa that I began to notice the sheen of Model Minority-ness melt away. All of a sudden, I wasn't the Quiet Achiever, or the Reliable Employee. I was the Unknown Oriental, perhaps here to sign a mining agreement or negotiate an exploitative property contract. I was instantly lumped into the same category as the loud, fast-talking Chinese men who stood before me in the immigration line at Maputo International Airport, laughing loudly at each other's jokes, spitting dismissively into the red soil as they made their way to waiting minivans. I was just another Unknown Oriental extracting natural resources from Feizhou.
The initial wariness with which locals in Windhoek, Lilongwe, and Maputo confronted me should not have been surprising, if I had done my research beforehand. Sino-African relations have a long and troubled history, although the effects of this engagement have become increasingly visible in the light of U.S. isolationism. As President Trump proceeds with plans to halve foreign aid, China’s Belt and Road Initiative is predicted to spend one trillion dollars on bridges, railways, and ports in Asia, Africa and beyond – more than seven times the amount spent rebuilding post-war Europe under the Marshall Plan. As part of this Initiative, China has provided USD 10 billion in no-strings loans to African countries, in stark contrast to the conditionality of Western aid. In this way, China hopes to cast itself as the leader of a "mutually beneficial" world order in which it "respects" the sovereignty of other nations, in implied contrast to the United States. Autocratic African regimes who view Chinese market authoritarianism as a successful blueprint for economic growth are now "liberated" from the old global dogmas of democratization, human rights, and good governance.
How China's deprioritization of human rights and financial support for repressive regimes is undermining the normative strength of the liberal-democratic model and contributing to "authoritarian diffusion" in Ethiopia, Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi and Tanzania is a completely separate can of worms that we won't unpack here. Suffice to say that Human Rights Watch is mad (justifiably so), and U.S. neglect (Nambia anyone?) is facilitating the decline of democratic norms. At a conference in Lilongwe last year, in a shiny new conference center built with Chinese money, holding a plate of slow-cooked goat, I received an earful of frustration and anger at the social impact of Chinese interference in the region. Poorly maintained infrastructure, illegal logging, deforestation, environmental degradation, water insecurity, and a concomitant decrease in hydroelectric power only scratched the surface of anti-Chinese sentiment in the local population. I began to realize that there was a deeper, more insidious reason why my appearance at workshops, conferences, and meetings had been greeted with wariness and suspicion. I realized, also, that there were dark racial undertones being attributed to me on the basis of my appearance, namely, the kind of racism against Africans that produced blackface at a Chinese gala; that is used to sell household products in China; and that contributed to Black Panther's lukewarm reception by Chinese audiences. I realized that the cultivation of productive working relationships would require the breaking down of damaging stereotypes. The Model Minority Myth doesn't exist in Africa. Quite the opposite.
That I should be confronted in Africa, for the first time in my life, by the absence of a privilege from which I have long benefited, is a sign both of my own ignorance, and also of the pervasiveness of the Model Minority Myth. I should have anticipated that China's growing sphere of influence in the region would have an impact on how my Asiatic features would be received. Of course, the arrival of foreign NGO workers is always accompanied by its own set of stereotypes, but this particular aspect I had not considered. I had foolishly expected that our work would speak for itself.
To be clear, this post is not a complaint but an account of my confrontation with a privilege I had never really acknowledged; a stereotype that had allowed me to sail through interviews at law firms but suddenly, on a new continent, felt like quicksand. And to reiterate, the Model Minority Myth is not a stereotype I support. Yes, I have benefited from it in the past because I can't change the shape of my nose, or my eyes, or the color of my hair (okay, I tried, but blonde highlights made me look really extra). But the deliberate elevation of Asian immigrant success stories in the U.S. in the 1960s was not borne of altruistic or humanistic intentions; it was deliberately conceived propaganda designed both to demonstrate the moral superiority of liberal democracy at the height of the Cold War, and to counter African-American demands for civil liberties by pointing to the "success" of other ethnic minorities. Surely, if Asian Americans could find success within The System, black poverty was merely a manifestation of inherent inferiority rather than systemic injustice and racial oppression?
The subjugation of other racial minorities inherent in the false idolatry of Asians as "model" immigrants is not the only negative consequence of the Model Minority Myth. The Myth itself inherently and perpetually casts Asian immigrants as "the Other", a group to be observed quietly in libraries but never viewed as part of the majority. Ironically, the "success" of these minorities is then used to fan alarmist discourses about the decline of White superiority; the kind of white fragility that has fueled xenophobic populism under Trump. In fact, the Model Minority Myth hides the complex reality of Asian immigration in the U.S. and elsewhere. Many Asian immigrant communities earn well below the median household income for all Americans, including Bangladeshi ($49,800), Hmong ($48,000), Nepalese ($43,500) and Burmese ($36,000). On average, Asian Americans are less likely to own homes, and experience persistent discrimination in housing, jobs, and at college. Suicide continues to be a leading cause of death among Korean American males, suggesting difficulties in accessing and seeking mental health services due to cultural stigmatization. In other words, being a racial minority still sucks. And cultural essentialism is still wrong.
China's growing influence in Africa has sparked important discussions about neocolonialism and the exploitative effects of globalization at a time when African states are still struggling to overcome the legacy of European colonialism, and African populations in the West still face structures of racial oppression inherited from slavery. We are far from living in a post-racial society, and nowhere is the evidence of this clearer than in the mass incarceration of African-Americans, racialized police brutality, and the xenophobic rhetoric of the current administration. So what will be the long-term impact of China's growing influence on the continent? More of the same racist exploitation and subjugation of earlier centuries, or Afro-Asian solidarity, a new chapter in South-South cooperation? How might false narratives about "model" minorities be used, again, to deny claims of systemic injustice against "non-model" communities by a racial majority?
Only time will tell.