Model minority  

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Model minority refers to a minority ethnic, racial, or religious group whose members achieve a higher degree of success than the population average. It is most commonly used to label one ethnic minority higher achieving than another ethnic minority. This success is typically measured in income, education, and related factors such as low crime rate and high family stability. The term is often characterized as a myth which amounts to racial stereotyping.

In the United States, the term is associated with Asian Americans, primarily Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Indian and to a lesser extent, Vietnamese and Filipino Americans.

A common misconception is that the affected communities usually hold pride in their labeling as the model minority. Statistics are often cited to back up their model minority status such as high educational achievement, overrepresentation at Ivy League and other prestigious universities, and a high percentage of Asian Americans working in white collar professions (jobs such as medicine, investment banking, management consulting, finance, and law).

While some Asian Americans hold pride in the model minority image, the consensus in academia and the field of Asian American studies is that the Model Minority Myth is detrimental to the Asian Pacific American (APA) community, used to justify the exclusion of needy APA communities in the distribution of assistance programs, public and private, and understate or slight the achievements of APA individuals. Communities that are especially affected are South East Asian communities, e.g. Cambodian-American, and the Pacific Islander community, e.g. persons with origins in Guam and Micronesia; these communities have much lower education rates and higher poverty rates. Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino and Indian Americans are over twice as likely to graduate with a bachelor's degree than most members of other Asian-American groups. The Model Minority myth relies on the aggregation of success indicators, hiding the plight of recent first-generation immigrants under the high success rate of more established Asian communities.


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Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Model minority" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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