The Racialized Experiences of Asian American Teachers in the US

Applications of Asian Critical Race Theory to Resist Marginalization

Jung Kim, Betina Hsieh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367686420
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000485158
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

Drawing on in-depth interviews, this text examines how Asian American teachers in the US have adapted, persisted, and resisted racial stereotyping and systematic marginalization throughout their educational and professional pathways.

Utilizing critical perspectives combined with tenets of Asian Critical Race Theory, Kim and Hsieh structure their findings through chapters focused on issues relating to anti-essentialism, intersectionality, and the broader social and historical positioning of Asians in the US. Applying a critical theoretical lens to the study of Asian American teachers demonstrates the importance of this framework in understanding educators' experiences during schooling, training, and teaching, and in doing so, the book highlights the need to ensure visibility for a community so often overlooked as a "model minority", and yet one of the fastest growing racial groups in the US.

This text will benefit researchers, academics, and educators with an interest in the sociology of education, multicultural education, and teachers and teacher education more broadly. Those specifically interested in Asian American history and the study of race and ethics within Asian studies will also benefit from this book.

Chapter 1 Introduction Framing the Experiences of Asian American Educators

DOI: 10.4324/9781003138389-1

While Asian Americans are the fastest growing racial minority group in the United States (López et al., 2017), Asian Americans’ experiences continue to be under-researched and misunderstood, particularly in K-12 education. The experiences of Asian Americans, as both teachers and students, are often either left out of educational conversations or are essentialized in ways that minimize their unique and diverse experiences in US classrooms and overlook the impact of white supremacy on their personal and educational trajectories. Asian Americans now make up 5.7% of the country and are projected to reach over 9% by 2060 (Vespa et al., 2020). Ironically, while one could argue that there is a growing demographic imperative to look more closely at this under-studied, under-appreciated group, statistics have previously been used to erase the issues and concerns impacting this group. Historic race-exclusionary laws kept numbers low for a long time, shifting this group to the blanket “other” in various demographic graphs and figures, and this was used to imply that there simply weren’t enough Asian Americans to bother studying.

To this end, this book argues for both a need to study the experiences of Asian Americans as numbers grow and its importance regardless of the numbers. It emphasizes the importance of examining the educational experiences of Asian Americans, given the increasing demographic of Asian American students, the consistently small percentage of Asian American teachers (2.5%, Snyder et al., 2019), the historical erasure of Asian Americans from discussions of race and racism in American education, and the near invisibility of Asian Americans in American educational curriculum. It also provides nuance and texture to the wide diversity of Asian American experiences and moves away from a simplistic, one-dimensional view.

Despite the prominent roles that Asian Americans have played in several landmark educational equity court cases, disaggregated data and research that demonstrate the diversity of Asian Americans, and significant underperformance for several Asian American subgroups, discussions of Asian Americans still largely focus on predominant stereotypes like the yellow peril (Lee, 2015; Takaki, 1998), Model Minority Myth (Chou & Feagin, 2015; Poon et al., 2016), and the perpetual foreigner (S.J. Lee, 2009; Tuan, 1998). These frameworks portray all Asian Americans as a monolithic group of high-achieving students who speak accented English and will never quite be American. Encompassing many diverse ethnic and linguistic subgroups, immigration circumstances, and identities, the Asian American label is a complex and multifaceted one, one that is both a racial and political identity—but ultimately one that is meant to be a powerful sociopolitical one (Philip, 2014) that encompasses these differences.

Research on Asian American Teachers

As the general population of the United States has been growing rapidly more diverse, there has been a significant lag in matching that growth within the teaching force. While 51% of students are students of color, only 20% are teachers of color (Snyder et al., 2019). The extant body of literature on teachers of color has examined the reasons more people of color don’t go into teaching, their experiences in a predominantly white occupation (Goodwin et al., 2008) and as social justice advocates (Kohli & Pizarro, 2016; Quiocho & Rios, 2000), and their high levels of attrition. There are several studies that have also examined the ways in which teacher education has tried to ameliorate this problem (Achinstein & Ogawa, 2011; Cheruvu et al., 2015; Kohli, 2012).

Despite the interest in exploring issues for teachers of color, Asian American teachers continue to be left out in significant ways from this larger body of research. Looking over the last several decades, there is a surprising dearth of research on the recruitment and retention of Asian American teachers, as well as their experiences in the classroom. There are a few studies that have looked at the reasons Asian Americans may or may not pursue teaching in larger numbers (Goodwin et al., 2006; J.A. Gordon, 2000; Kim & Cooc, 2020a; Pang, 2009; Philip, 2014; Rong & Preissle, 1997). Reasons have ranged from parental beliefs that pushing their children to pursue more “objective” fields like medicine may protect them from issues of racism to teacher and counselor beliefs that Asian American students are naturally better at STEM fields (Lee et al., 2017). Other studies have looked at the ways in which Asian American teachers encounter preservice teacher education programs that are not centered on their experiences or needs and how they can even be marginalizing (Brown, 2014; Goodwin et al., 2006; Nguyen, 2012; Sheets & Chew, 2002).

Once in the classroom, Asian American teachers face racial and gendered microaggressions (Endo, 2015; Nguyen, 2012; Philip, 2014; Sue et al., 2007). They encounter students, colleagues, and parents who continue to see them as perpetual foreigners and are seen as “Asian experts” expected to speak for all Asian diasporic peoples despite their own background and nationality (Choi, 2018; Pang, 2009). Other times they are seen as being less qualified to teach certain subjects (Nguyen, 2012; Subedi, 2008), like those outside of STEM. Notwithstanding these challenges, researchers have also found how Asian American teachers work toward social justice in their professional and personal lives and tend to have greater critical consciousness (Chow, 2017; Kim & Cooc, 2020b; Philip, 2014; Quiocho & Rios, 2000; Rodríguez & Kim, 2019).

This book moves to add to the existing body of work on Asian American teachers. Many of the studies listed are smaller qualitative studies focusing in on the experiences of a handful of participants in a single region. This national study involves over 40 participants spanning different ethnicities, teaching levels, regions, levels of expertise, and contexts, to name a few. We hope that by providing a robust array of voices from the Asian American teaching force, we will be able to highlight some of the ongoing issues for Asian Americans, both as students and educators, and contribute to the ongoing educational improvement for all.

The Polarizing Binaries of Asian American Representation

While the Model Minority Myth (MMM) is currently the prevailing racial lens through which many Asian Americans are regarded, this stereotype is a relatively recent evolution of Asian “otherness” in American society. For most of US history, in fact, Asian immigrants and Asian Americans have been portrayed as foreign invaders, diseased and dangerous to American society (Lee, 2015)—echoes of which we still see today. We situate our examination of Asian American teachers’ educational experiences in this chapter by first unpacking several interrelated Asian American archetypes, showing how these racialized views of Asian diasporic peoples in North America have led to polarizing themes of hypervisibility and invisibility, otherness and proximity, danger to America and symbol of the “American Dream.”

Yellow Peril and the Perpetual Foreigner

In mid-March 2020, at a televised national press conference, the then US President called COVID-19 “the Chinese Virus,” a trend which continued throughout the subsequent months of social distancing caused by the coronavirus pandemic (Margolin, 2020; Tavernise & Oppel Jr., 2020). In the electoral campaign of that same year, both major presidential candidates launched anti-Chinese ads which stated, “China is killing our jobs and now killing our people” and that (former) President Trump “rolled over for the Chinese” in his response to the virus (Hvistendahl, 2020). While official statements from both parties blamed the Chinese government and showed appreciation for Asian Americans, there was a concurrent rise in reports of anti-Asian prejudice, xenophobia, discrimination, and documented hate crimes against Asian American adults and youth (STOP AAPI Hate, 2020; Anti-Defamation League, 2020). These incidents demonstrate the power and enduring impact of the yellow peril and perpetual foreigner discourses, two racialized castings used to highlight Asian American “otherness” and hypervisibility.

Yellow peril is the idea that (East) Asian people are an imminent threat to (Western) American culture, livelihood, and society (Lee, 2015; Takaki, 1998). The yellow peril discourse emerged prominently, in the United States, in response to waves of Chinese and Japanese immigration in the mid-19^th and early 20^th centuries. At the time, these ideas manifested in characterizations in newspapers and other media sources of Chinese and Japanese immigrants as dirty, rat-like, and diseased. These sentiments led to riots and violence against Asian immigrants including the anti-Chinese massacre of 1871 in which 20 Chinese people were lynched in the streets of Los Angeles (Lee, 2015; Sandoval, n.d.), the largest mass lynching in US history. Anti-immigrant sentiments continued through discriminatory immigration policy including the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned Chinese immigration to the United States, and the Immigration Acts of 1917 and 1924, which established an “Asiatic Barred Zone” of immigration and a national origins quota system (Lee, 2015).

More recently, in the late 20^th century, the yellow peril manifested in the 1970s and 1980s as anti-Japanese sentiment rose in response to the rise in Japanese automobile and electronics manufacturing and the concomitant decline in the US economy and subsequent high unemployment rates. Japanese autoworkers were pitted as the scapegoats for the decline of the American auto industry, leading notably to the hate-crime killing of Chinese American engineer, Vincent Chin, in 1982 (Choy & Tajima-Pena, 1987; Lee, 2015).

In the early 21^st century, particularly under the Trump administration, in addition to rhetoric connecting the coronavirus’s impact in the United States with Chinese origins, discriminatory immigration and naturalization policies have been enacted. These policies include the suspension of H1-B, H2-B, J, and L worker visas which disproportionately impact Asian immigrant workers (Banerjee & Sengupta, 2020; Lu, 2020), harkening back to yellow peril and other nativist discourses. As noted, these actions came alongside a rise in anti-Asian discrimination, xenophobia, and violence targeting both Asian immigrants to America and Asian Americans.

While the yellow peril specifically was generated in response to East Asian immigration in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, the idea of all Asian Americans as “unassimilable aliens,” perpetual or forever foreigners (Takaki, 1998; Wu, 2014), extends beyond East Asians. The 1917 Immigration Act included: South Asian (India), Southeast Asian (Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia), and West Asian (Afghanistan and the Arabian Peninsula) countries in the Barred Asiatic Zone, areas from which no immigrants were allowed to enter the United States. Following laws and diplomatic agreements focused on Chinese and Japanese Americans, South Asians were targeted next, being labeled part of the “Hindu invasion.” The US Supreme Court’s 1923 ruling (US vs. Bhagat Singh Thind) that South Asians were not eligible for naturalized US citizenship (not reversed until 1946) led to largescale discrimination again South Asians, the denaturalization of previously naturalized citizens, and exclusion of South Asian workers from many professions.

Following a series of terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001, Muslim and Sikh Americans, many of whom are also Asian Americans (of South Asian origin), faced instances of racial violence, including murder, attacks on places of worship, and physical harassment and intimidation (Lee, 2015). The “Muslim Ban,” initially beginning in West As...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Authors
• Foreword from Dr. A. Lin Goodwin
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: Introduction: Framing the Experiences of Asian American Educators
• Chapter 2: Asianization and Educational Experiences of Racialization and Marginalization
• Chapter 3: Considering Asian American Transnational Contexts: Immigration, Generations, and Identities in Education
• Chapter 4: Reconstructive History: Missing Asian American Stories and Voices in American Curricula and Classrooms
• Chapter 5: Strategic (Anti)Essentialism: Balancing Ethnic Identity and Pan-Ethnic Solidarity
• Chapter 6: Intersectionality and Asian American Educators’ Experiences of Oppression along Multiple Axes of Their Identities
• Chapter 7: Commitment to Social Justice: Conscientization and Action
• Chapter 8: Story, Theory, Praxis: How Our Stories Can Change Our Classrooms
• Index