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It’s 2024: Let’s Cut the “Model Minority” and “White Adjacent” BS
Asians and white privilege, Part 1
Nearly all of us have wondered at one point or another if we belong to any given group, society, nationality — whatever. It’s just the human condition.
But this is perhaps even more true of Asians growing up in the US, once referred to as a “melting pot.” Sometimes we feel like the bones tossed out of the pot. That goes for many Asians, but particularly those of my generation, the late Boomer or so-called Generation Jones cohort. We were young children when the Civil Rights Act and the Nationality and Immigration Act were passed: thus was Jim Crow ended (at least officially) and Asians finally allowed to immigrate to the US. We were mostly in our teens when — which was extended to a month by George H.W. Bush in 1990 and formalized by Congress in 1992.
Oh, by the way, it was the 1980s when the term “model minority” really took off — even though it was first coined in the late 1960s, not too long after I was born. The new term for us is now “white adjacent.” (In fact, I learned that on Medium.)
But how far have we really come?
