Academic Profiling: Latinos, Asian Americans, and the Achievement Gap

5 “They Just Judge Us by Our Cover”: Students’ Everyday Experiences with Race

C H A P T E R F I V E “They Just Judge Us by Our Cover” Students’ Everyday Experiences with Race Once the Star-Spangled Banner is done, the two large screens at the side of the stage show a mock news broadcast. A student of Asian background, Tanya Song, is the news reporter and tells the viewers of a reported crime. Unaga, the chief investigator, is a young man of Asian background that shows up on the screen speaking English in an exaggerated East Asian accent. Initially, he says some nonsense words like “Mitsibishi.” His demeanor is frantic, and Tanya seems to want to laugh at his exaggerated accent. —Field notes, Mai Thai, May 23, 2008 The opening of the school’s final rally of the year encapsulates the racialized climate permeating SCHS and shaping everyday experiences. Organized by a student group and attended by students and staffulty, this rally used music, dance, and the quoted storyline to announce awards such as Most Improved Students, Salutatorian, Valedictorian, and Club of the Year. Like schools across the nation, it publically congratulated students who have been able to fulfill dominant expectations of schooling. In so doing, it reinforced the power-evasive discourses detailed in chapter 1 and the beliefs of individualism and meritocracy. The disparate resources influencing academic success were ignored. The assumption is that individual talent and work ethic are solely responsible for academic success. Similarly, by beginning with the Star-Spangled Banner and mocking accents and Asian immigrants in particular, this rally reproduced an assimilationist imperative that maintains the racial/ethnic hierarchies undergirding students’ relationships and perceptions. 164 “ T H E Y J U ST J U D G E U S BY O U R C OV ER ” Shifting from a focus on the macro and meso factors fueling a socially constructed academic hierarchy at SCHS that position middle-class and upper-middle-class Asian Americans as a group at the top and workingclass Latinas/os at the bottom, this chapter centers the narratives of students to understand how they experience and enact these dynamics in their relationships in ways that foster both academic and social hierarchies . Whereas Asian Americans are perceived as “smart” and expected to outperform their classmates academically, they are often positioned near the bottom of a social hierarchy. The results are differential experiences of invisibility on campus. Relative to one another, academically, Latinas/os may be underestimated and not seen, while socially, Asian Americans may be forgotten. As with the many intersecting factors influencing an academic hierarchy , the dynamics shaping a social hierarchy are equally as complex. In particular, students’ narratives highlight the significance of two dominant ideologies linked to the cultural deficiency perspectives and the silence surrounding whiteness detailed in chapter 1. They are at the crux of these hierarchies and maintain White supremacy: an assimilationist imperative and a “model minority” myth. An assimilationist imperative expects all to integrate into U.S. society by acquiring the English language and middle-class U.S. values and traditions. While this imperative has fluctuated during the past century—from justifying Americanization programs through the 1950s to the continual debates surrounding English-only practices, bilingual education, and immigration, it has been a mainstay in the United States. Oftentimes underlying it is the belief of Anglo superiority where the Spanish language, Asian languages, and those who speak these languages are perceived as inferior to the English language and U.S.born residents. The “model minority” myth has worked in tandem with this imperative by positioning Asian Americans as the example for successfully adapting to the United States. Within this construct, Asian Americans are depicted as hard working, passive, compliant, and malleable in opposition to Latinas/os and African Americans (see Espiritu 2000). Asian Americans are positioned as “good” students and “proper” members of immigrant groups who presumably follow school expectations relative to Latinas/os and African Americans who are deemed “bad” (Lee 2005, 5). Yet, on the other hand, Asian Americans are often cast as social outsiders who are “forever foreigners” (Tuan 1998). As Nazli Kibria describes, as part of this construction, “Asian American students are often stereotyped as overly studious and socially awkward nerds who raise the grading curve and so make life difficult for everyone else” (2002, 133). Thus there is a “ T H E Y J U ST J U D G E U S...