Assimilation, Model Minority Myth, and the Visual

The ideal Asian American is an identification created by white supremacy to deracialize Asians, pit minorities against each other, and create racialized hierarchies within Asian communities based upon the embodiment of whiteness both domestically and internationally. Consequently, all Asian communities remain in an interstitial space as Alien, Oriental, Other, and Foreign. Yet, some Asian communities remain “white enough” to receive a temporary pass. Both Black Americans and Asian Americans are subjected to the same procedure of identification within the colonial imaginary, “a process defined as the internalization of the other” according to Diana Fuss.¹ In other words, Fuss argues that the creation of the Self depends upon grappling with the duality of the Other as knowable yet entirely distant. Yet, the model minority myth, formulated as a deserved gift, situates Asian Americans as privileged and while negating the racism they experience, creates an opposition between them and other minorities, specifically Black Americans, through their undeservedness of the same gift. This example demonstrates how the colonial imaginary maintains power according to its psychical infiltration of Western dichotomous distinctions, ultimately distilled to human/non-human, modern/non-modern, and Western/non-Western. The psychical implications of assimilation and the deserved gift or temporary pass enforced upon Asian Americans remain a crucial site of inquiry to understand how racial identification and subjection function within the colonizer’s ability to dream of and enact their violent repression, and therefore, how it can be imagined otherwise.

We are accustomed to thinking of power as external and “pressing on the subject from the outside,” however, as Butler demonstrates, power is also internalized, forming the subject both externally and internally. Butler writes, “power imposes itself on us, and, weakened by its force, we come to internalize or accept its terms. What such an account fails to note, however, is that the ‘we’ who accept such terms are fundamentally dependent on those terms for ‘our’ existence . . . Subjection consists precisely in this fundamental dependency on a discourse we never chose but that, paradoxically, initiates and sustains our agency.”² The Asian American, situated within the model minority myth, exemplifies Butler’s notion of the internalization of white supremacist power. Asian Americans, existing as the model minority, therefore must internalize the external pressure of white supremacy to fit into the image created by the colonial conception of the ideal minority within the United States. In other words, Asian Americans only exist through the model minority myth; otherwise, they are just Asians within America.

Butler explains that through Althusser’s ideology, “the subordination of the subject takes place through language,” otherwise known as a form of interpellation.³ Althusser’s infamous example is of the interpellation enacted when a police officer shouts “Hey you!” and Frantz Fanon critiques this interpellation through its necessary racialization as the police officer, acting on behalf of white supremacy and its systems, calls forth the subject according to their embodiment of race corporeally, in Fanon’s case, Blackness. Asian Americans experience interpellation through its visuality, the images presented through US media illustrating the value contributed by Asian Americans to American society, or in other words, how assimilation and the internalization of white supremacy lead Asian American identity to become structured by its valuable stereotypes. For example, as seen in the 1996 TIME Magazine cover that pictures six Asian American students next to the title “Those Asian-American Whiz Kids,” the ideal Asian American is prosperous and high-achieving in school, thereby able to climb the socioeconomic ladder to embody the American Dream.⁴ The magazine cover is a violent spectacle enforcing the stereotype desires of white supremacy onto young children dressed in popular 1990s American attire. This is not to say that the children should necessarily be wearing traditional dress, as that would also perpetuate a violent spectacle, but the image is especially eerie in its conflation of the Asian colonial subject with monetary and societal value, which although campaigned as benefiting Asian Americans as well, solely furthers the agendas of white supremacy and racial capitalism. Capitalizing on the stereotype of economic and educational success attributed to Asian Americans, the model minority subject psychically abandons their cultural and racial identity and replaces it with the internalized image of the Asian American, despite their continued embodiment of race, or that materialized identification which constitutes their forever otherness.

Following Butler’s theorization of “passionate attachment,” the Asian American becomes a political subject through the universal, primordial desire to survive, which is commonly referenced in psychoanalytic theory as the child’s passionate attachment to the mother. To survive is commonly associated with existence; therefore, the primordial desire to survive corporeally, as seen through childhood, becomes conflated with one’s social survival as the child grows up and encounters political subordination according to identifications. For Asian Americans, the process of passionate attachment and political subordination does not follow the standardized, linear model provided by classical psychoanalytic theory. Whether immigrants, migrants, first-gen, or US-born citizens, the Asian American condition is one of exile, in-betweenness, and spatiotemporal fluidity. Asian Americans, therefore, experience this process at various stages in their life, distorting psychoanalytic models of power, subordination, attachment, and identification through their racialization and delineation of the specificity of the processes’ time and space. Asian American existence is dependent upon social survival within white supremacy, exemplifying Butler’s statement, “Moreover, the desire to survive, ‘to be,’ is a pervasively exploitable desire. The one who holds out the promise of continued existence plays to the desire to survive.”⁵ The Asian American, therefore, as a political subject with a passionate attachment to white supremacy—as the system in which their survival/existence is facilitated through—also experiences ambivalence, another key aspect of Butler’s theorization. Ambivalence is a condition experienced by Asian Americans when faced with their duality as the model minority. Their ontology as a model colonial subject also entails their enforcement of colonization, exemplifying Butler’s notion of ambivalent autonomy as well as Emily S. Lee’s elucidation of the illusionary positive status attributed to model minority subjects.⁶ In other words, their duality consists of being both the colonizer and the colonized simply through their positioning as ontologically opposing other racial minorities.

The population group never quite achieves being regarded as simply American . . . Hence for Asian Americans, the stereotype of the model minority—even if taken to be purely positive—does not necessarily set the parameters for an uncontested positive historico-racial schema. The embodiment of Asian Americans is quite ambiguous because of the interaction with several other meaning structures. Moreover, the visibility of Asian American embodiment ensures the unavoidability of these meaning structures on an everyday basis.⁷

Ultimately, the ambiguity, or psychical ambivalence, towards Asian American autonomy and embodiment of race is precisely what positions model minority status as mythical and illusionary, or as put by Lee, “the stereotype functions to freeze the colonized, the other, as different, but yet entirely knowable.”⁸

Crucial to the identification of the Asian American subject is Donald Moss’s discussion of the “not me” possession, that being the standardization of transparent objects of perception.⁹ Whereas transparency is theorized as the act of looking through the subject/object to a standardized set of claims attributed to hatred; “Homophobia, racism, and misogyny construct the other as a transparent object. Definitive knowledge about it is available through immediate apperception . . .”¹⁰ Psychoanalysis renders objects as opaque, denouncing the “epistemological immediacy” of hatred, and rather, centralizing how “knowledge comes only through sustained contact, through a mix of theoretically mediated inference and experience.”¹¹ Psychoanalysis methodology sensorally and corporeally enacts phenomenological frameworks that necessitate sustained experience as crucial in epistemological methodologies that resist “fixed, natural hierarchies”¹² and investigate how hatreds are systemic and materially-based identifications. Hatred, enacted by white supremacy, renders the object’s “no,” or refusal of said identification, as “transparent and dismissable on its face.”¹³ As Moss explains, the “no” is overridden through the habituated “readings” of the visual by the eye that reaffirms natural hierarchies; “such readings yield—or, more precisely, affirm—the presence of fixed, natural hierarchies . . . The project is not constructive, but reconstructive. As such, guided not by an idea but by a perception, the reader can process these objects with a sense of unshakable certainty.”¹⁴ I argue that the images surrounding Asian American representation that enact the model minority myth, such as the TIME magazine cover, similarly reaffirm the externally perceived positionality of Asian Americans within natural hierarchies as well as the internalized perception of their historico-racial schema.

As Moss discusses, the “not me” possession is a “privileged status” attributed to those who benefit from white supremacy.¹⁵ The habituated “readings” of Asian Americans as beneficiaries of white supremacy, as those who maintain the privileged status of “not me,” only serve to reinforce the epistemological methodology of hatred. Hatred, reinforcing Western dichotomous divisions, results in hatred between minority groups, hatred of Asian Americans by whites due to their “honorary white” status, and Asian Americans’s hatred of themselves. As explained by David Haekwon Kim, Asian Americans often experience generational shame and self-revision as their affectual response to the ontological space they inhabit in-between “honorary white” and “forever foreigner.”¹⁶

Exemplified through the archival zine We are Still Here: A Digital Scrapbook of Asian Resilience (2021), created by Gabrielle Widjaja (Gentle Oriental), despite the ambivalence, ambiguity, and violence attributed to the in-between space occupied corporeally and psychically by Asian Americans, therein lies resilience and intergenerational strength. Created due to the rise of anti-Asian hate in the United States, Gentle Oriental, alongside collecting family photos and stories, crowd-sourced responses to a single question posted on her Instagram story: “Tell me why you’re proud to be Asian.” Exhibiting either one or two photos and a short written statement, each page is dedicated to one Asian American, collectively creating an archive that exhibits the psychical implications of assimilation and white supremacist power amidst reviving spatiotemporal cultural memory. Page 20 is dedicated to Kelsey Chin (China) who recounts the taste of her grandmother’s “special soup” mixed with her mother’s offering of Carvel’s ice cream cake; “that flavor to me is my childhood, and my mother and grandmother’s sacrifices in America.”¹⁷ Chin’s recollection of taste and its psychical ability to bridge together the “forever foreigner” (cultural soup) and the “honorary white” (Carvel’s ice cream cake) demonstrate a form of resistance against the visual interpellation/subjugation of Asian Americans. Chin shows how harnessing other aspects of the sensorium in memory reconstruction, besides vision, proactively trains the psyche to decolonize the habituated “readings” of Asian American identification. 

In the film I Am Not Your Negro (2016), James Baldwin and director Raoul Peck’s depiction of Blackness in America is constituted upon the white imaginary conception of the other and also the psychical blindness of white Americans which causes objects of perception to be transparent. The object of perception is overdetermined by the white American when they are faced with the eternal fear of their incoherence, or fragmentation. According to Baldwin, through the transparency and overdetermination of the other, in this case, the Black subject, white Americans are able to avoid fragmentation, and therefore, the fear attributed to it;

. . . we must realize this, that no other country in the world has been so fat and so sleek, and so safe, and so happy, and so irresponsible, and so dead. No other country can afford to dream of a Plymouth and a wife and a house with a fence and the children growing up safely to go to college and to become executives . . . A great many people do not live this way and cannot imagine it, and do not know that when we talk about “democracy,” this is what we mean. 

White Americans enact an “epistemological ignorance,”¹⁸ which allows them to dream (hence the American Dream), while Other Americans, confronted with their political subjugation, passionate attachment, and hatred to white supremacy as a transparent object, can only imagine, hence the importance of the decolonial imaginary. For white Americans, the American Dream is a fantasy, yet it is made materially possible through white supremacist systems that enable them to be “so happy, and so irresponsible.” Accompanying Baldwin’s narration stated above are old Kodak pictures of the traditional American nuclear family posed next to a white picket fence. Page 108 of We Are Still Here is dedicated to May Nguyen (Vietnam) and features a photograph of seven of her family members from multiple generations on a stroll outside. Nguyen’s photograph, materializing Asian Americanness, stands in stark contrast to the Kodak photo featured in the film’s book as she states, “‘Nuclear’ family includes everyone: aunties, uncles, cousins, grandparents, adopted siblings and anyone else who we decide is family . . . ”¹⁹ Nguyen’s family, despite not visibly resembling the white nuclear family, is equally American. The photograph is not a marker of assimilation or the model minority, but rather, exemplifies Asian American values and culture based upon multigeneration knowledge and memory, collectivity, generosity, and love that is shown through observable actions, not words.

According to Erin Chan (Hong Kong), in comparison to American reality TV and its perpetuation of white imaginary declarations of love, “Being Asian means that I’ve experienced love in a different way than I see on TV. I don’t get hugs or cute cards or phrases like ‘I love you’ or ‘Hi, sweetheart.’ It’s: Ordering that one dish at the Chinese restaurant every single time because I asked for it once, when I was 8.”²⁰ Transparent objects subjected to visual interpellation hold the power to imagine otherwise and in the same way that Baldwin’s narration exemplifies how being Black within America gifts him a way of seeing, as Serena Yang (China) states, “I am proud of my Chineseness, of what it allows me to see . . . ”²¹ Ultimately, the psychical violent repression that enables the Kodak photo to exist, is the site in which the Other American is able to imagine otherwise through acceptance, collectiveness, and the multigenerational memorialization of Gentle Oriental’s back cover “& Here we Will Stay.” 

1. Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (Routledge, 1995), 4.
2. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford University Press, 1997), 2.
3. Butler, Power, 2.
4. Yoojin Shin, “The Woes of the Model Minority: The Dual Existence of Asian-Americans in the United States,” Berkeley Political Review – UC Berkeley’s Only Nonpartisan Political Magazine, Nov. 2, 2019
5. Butler, Power, 7.
6. Emily S. Lee, “Model Minority,” 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology (Northwestern University Press, 2019), 232-33.
7. Ibid., 233.
8. Ibid., 234.
9. Donald Moss, Hating in the First Person Plural: Psychoanalytic Essays on Racism, Homophobia, Misogyny, and Terror (Other Press, 2003).
10. Ibid., xxvi.
11. Ibid., xxvi.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., xxvi-xxvii.
15. Ibid.
16. David Haekwon Kim, “Shame and Self-Revision in Asian American Assimilation,” Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race (State University of New York Press, 2014), 111.
17. G. Widjaja, WE ARE STILL HERE: A Digital Scrapbook of Asian Resilience (2021).
18. Charles W. Mills, “Epistemological Ignorance,” 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology (Northwestern University Press, 2019).
19. G. Widjaja, WE ARE STILL HERE: A Digital Scrapbook of Asian Resilience, 108.
20. Ibid., 118.
21. Ibid., 109.