ERIC Number: EJ1154288
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2017
Pages: 19
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0013-1946
EISSN: N/A
Racialization, Schooling, and Becoming American: Asian American Experiences
Lee, Stacey J.; Park, Eujin; Wong, Jia-Hui Stefanie
Educational Studies: Journal of the American Educational Studies Association, v53 n5 p492-510 2017
Racial categories, inequalities, and hierarchies have shaped life in the United States since the formation of the country. For children and youth in the immigrant and second generations, schools are central sites of racialization. In this article, we focus on what the educational research suggests about the role of schooling in the racialization of ethnically diverse Asian immigrant and refugee groups in the United States. Specifically, we examine how schools have been implicated in the racialization of Asian Americans from immigrant families in the 20th and 21st centuries, as well as how Asian immigrant youth have used schooling to respond to the forces of racialization. Through policies of exclusion and segregation in schools, the state often positions Asian Americans as outside the realm of Americanness. Today, in addition to an ongoing image of Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners, we see racialization processes expressed in the "religification" of South Asian immigrant students and in the ideological Blackening of some Southeast Asian youth. At the same time, schools have often positioned Asian Americans as model minorities whose academic success is used to argue that US schools are meritocratic and to blame other students of color for their own academic challenges. Our review demonstrates that Asian immigrant students experience racialization in diverse and contradictory ways that intersect with other identities like class, religion, and ethnicity, making the notion of a single Asian American subject problematic. Although it may seem as though Asian Americans are not subjected to racism, due to the model minority stereotype and their relative racial privilege, our review of the literature clearly challenges this assumption. Rather than proof of the absence of racism, the model minority narrative arguably demotes Asian Americans to 2nd-class citizenship, which hinges on the approval of Whites.
Descriptors: Ethnic Stereotypes, Asian Americans, Immigrants, Refugees, Racial Bias, Educational Environment, School Role, Student Diversity, School Policy, Social Justice, Elementary Secondary Education, Higher Education
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Information Analyses; Reports - Research
Education Level: Elementary Secondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A