Asian American Racialization &
Model Minority Logics in Linguistics
Joyhanna Yoo, Cheryl Lee,
Andrew Cheng & Anusha Ànand
With increased discussions of racial justice in academia, linguistics has had to con-
tend with long-standing issues of inequality. We contribute to these conversations
by considering historical and contemporary racializing tactics with respect to Asians
and Asian Americans. Such racializing tactics, which we call model minority logics,
weaponize an abstract version of one group to further racialize all minoritized groups
and regiment ethnoracial hierarchies. We identify three functions of model minori-
ty logics that perpetuate white supremacy in the academy, using linguistics as a case
study and underscoring the ways in which the discipline is already mired in racial-
izing logics that differentiate scholars of color based on reified hierarchies. We urge
language scholars to reject a superficial multiculturalism that appropriates embod-
ied difference while perpetuating injustices under an inherently white supremacist
framework. For those dedicated to greater racial justice in the discipline, we offer
actions to critically reflect on and help dismantle existing racializing logics.
Despite popular understandings of the so-called model minority as a sim-
ple set of stereotypes, scholarship in Asian American studies has shown
that the invocation of Asians as a model minority functions as a relation-
ally racializing tactic that reinforces white supremacy on multiple scales.1 Asian
Americans have historically been racialized relative to the imagined Black-white
racial dichotomy in the United States; così, their treatment as a model minori-
ty reifies ideologized racial hierarchies and obfuscates the ways that racialization
processes are mutually constitutive of one another.2 Following scholars who con-
ceptualize the model minority as an inherently relational concept, we use the term
model minority logics, a decision that both rejects the flattening of racialization to a
series of stereotypes and refuses the strategic positioning of Asians for the further-
ing of white supremacy. By model minority logics, we mean the racializing tactics
whereby the model minority–an abstraction of minoritized groups whose rela-
tionship with the nation-state becomes historically resignified–is weaponized to
further racialize all minoritized groups and regiment ethnoracial hierarchies.
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© 2023 by Joyhanna Yoo, Cheryl Lee, Andrew Cheng & Anusha Ànand Published under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial 4.0 Internazionale (CC BY-NC 4.0) license https://doi.org/10.1162/daed_a_02022
Model minority logics are laid bare when institutions of higher education leave
the work of racial equity to minoritized individuals under a framework of “inclu-
sion,” uncritically defined. In the study of language, this tactic obscures the ma-
terial and psychological ways that racialization pervades our places of work and
training by reinforcing the quotidian mechanisms of white supremacy. For the
purposes of our discussion, we focus on three functions of model minority logics
as they relate to the racialization of Asian Americans in linguistics. Primo, modello
minority logics position Asian Americans as socially proximal to whites.3 Second,
they strategically weaponize the racial visibility of Asian Americans and other mi-
noritized groups by contrasting these groups’ respective historical and contem-
porary struggles for social equality as discrete and disconnected. Finalmente, they de-
fine inclusion in extremely narrow terms: namely, through numerical counting
and neoliberal academic success.4 In defining these functions, we underscore not
only the implications for how Asian American linguistic practices are studied (O
non), but also the sociopolitical stakes of eschewing a superficial multiculturalism
whereby “justice” is always conditional and relegated to a distant future.
In linguistics, minoritized language varieties and the people who use them are
frequently argued to be “included” if they merely appear in a syllabus, a course
catalog, or a research project.5 Sociolinguistic research, in particular, has tend-
ed to rely on distinctiveness-centered models whereby language varieties are as-
cribed to specific and discrete groups of people.6 Yet this process is itself driven by
a specific linguistic ideology, one that often conflates nonhegemonic language va-
rieties with racial visibility. The result is that the linguistic practices of groups per-
ceived to lack a distinct “ethnolect,” including Asian Americans, remain under-
theorized. Infatti, Asian American language use has received little attention from
linguists; furthermore, the theorization of racial and ethnic varieties of English
in the United States–specifically, what counts as legitimate language–is in need
of radical reconsideration.7 After all, the assumption that a particular group must
use a corresponding variety effectively homogenizes racialized groups and often
obscures the way people actually use language. An examination of the historical
and contemporary racialization of Asian Americans thus reveals how their per-
ceived language use–and the study thereof–continues to be animated by hege-
monic ideologies that reify a white listening subject and hence reinforce white su-
premacist frameworks that racialize groups unevenly.8
We begin by offering some contextualization for our collective musings that
inspired and informed this essay. In January 2021, the Annual Meeting of the Lin-
guistic Society of America (LSA), the largest and perhaps most important aca-
demic conference for linguists, featured the most programming by Asian and
Asian American linguists in its history, including some of the first panels on inter-
disciplinary approaches to studying Asian and Asian American linguistic practic-
es. Although the meeting was virtual, it had originally been scheduled to take place
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152 (3) Summer 2023Joyhanna Yoo, Cheryl Lee, Andrew Cheng & Anusha Ànand
in San Francisco, a city of historical significance to Asian migration to the Unit-
ed States and the birthplace of the nation’s first school of ethnic studies.9 Among
our various panels, we organized a special session entitled “Room at the Table:
Locating Asian Identity in Linguistics and the LSA,” featuring crossdisciplinary
and intergenerational scholarship.
This session was long overdue, like other perpetually late discussions of racial
justice in linguistics.10 Our collaboration was motivated by the need to contin-
ue critical conversations surrounding race as a social reality that affects our lives
within and beyond academia. Prior to the session, there were few, if any, spaces for
us to openly discuss our racializing experiences as Asian American linguists. Espe-
cially given the exigencies of global events unfolding in 2020 E 2021, events that
led to increased threats and violence against Asian Americans, we craved commu-
nity and solidarity, not only to share the latest research, but to have sustained con-
versations about Asian American linguists’ racial positioning within our field. Noi
wanted Room at the Table to lay the groundwork for a scholarly coalition of Asian
American linguists within and beyond the LSA.
In definitiva, the session unearthed more questions than answers, as well as dis-
agreements among participants. Who, exactly, is included in “Asian America”?
Within linguistics, why is racial inclusion seen as primarily an issue for sociolin-
guists, and doubly so for sociolinguists of color, and why do some linguists push
back against issues of social justice as “not linguistics”? In the months that fol-
lowed, we held introspective critiques and discussions about our event. Crucially,
we asked, what forms of belonging were we invoking when calling for “room at
the table”? Did the session take a step toward dismantling dominant tropes that
racialize, and thus harm, Asian Americans, or did it merely perpetuate them by
creating another siloed space for marginalized scholars? Notably, the metrics
for racial diversity used by the LSA in 2021 collapse important differences among
Asian groups: Asian and Pacific Islander members are considered one large de-
mographic category, with no accounting for the axes of difference of nationality
and ethnicity, let alone disability, genere, sexuality, and class. Besides the short-
comings of this kind of ethnoracial classification, the Linguistic Society of Amer-
ica neglected to amplify our numerous programs, including those entities within
the organization explicitly dedicated to uplifting minoritized scholars and their
lavoro. For us, the unresolved questions on Asian racialized experiences in linguis-
tics that emerged from our Room at the Table session revealed how we are racial-
ized as “the model minority” and at times erased altogether in the discipline.
Amid our conversations, we witnessed and grieved tremendous violence and
loss, including assaults on Asian people in the United States and globally in the
wake of COVID-19 and the racialized and gendered violence of the March 2021
shooting in Atlanta, Georgia.11 These episodes of violence reverberated in our
communities, and we incurred additional violence through institutional and in-
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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesAsian American Racialization & Model Minority Logics in Linguistics
terpersonal silences regarding them, which forced us to reckon with the (Di)val-
uation of our work and our very selves within our own discipline. Così, we write
with deep skepticism toward the dominant models of inclusion in the neoliberal
academy, which have repeatedly failed us, and we assert the urgency of theoriz-
ing Asian American racialization in the midst of both spectacular and everyday
violences.
We also write as Asian Americans, a label we acknowledge as fraught and in
need of constant problematizing. Our decision to use this term here is both an in-
sistence on its historical signification of political unity and a refusal to foreground
our ethnic or other affiliations, lest we reproduce ahistorical understandings of
racialized groups and unduly personalize our critiques of the discipline.12 Fur-
thermore, while our ethnic identities and the histories they represent are impor-
tantly diverse, these cannot be known a priori by readers. Given the long-standing
disregard for the histories of minoritized peoples in the United States, coupled
with the pervasiveness of hegemonic ideologies about Asians in the academy, we
cannot assume readers will take stock of each author’s multiple positionalities,
the histories they index, and these histories’ varied, fraught, and ongoing rela-
tionships to U.S. empire. Scholars of Asian American studies have critiqued not
only the shifting historical terms of inclusion but also the obfuscation of violence
by way of that very same inclusion. Put differently, inclusion of some Asian Amer-
icans becomes a proxy for other forms of exclusion, both of Asian Americans and
of other minoritized subjects.13
We thus present this essay as a holistic product of conversations, not of indi-
vidually produced parts. In the sections that follow, we detail the historical for-
mation of the model minority trope, discuss its pervasiveness in the study of lan-
guage, and provide some productive paths toward disentangling our discipline
from dominant frameworks that continue to racialize and marginalize us.
A sian Americans’ marginal and conditional existence in the United States
has been shaped by the cyclical and interdependent reinventions of yel-
low peril and model minority discourses. With historical origins trac-
ing back to centuries-old Orientalist imaginaries, yellow peril discourse emerges
from a violent nineteenth-century white populist backlash against Asian migrant
laborers throughout the Americas and projects a racialized Asian figure that is dis-
eased, treacherous, and perpetually foreign.14 The creation of this threatening yel-
low body laid the foundations for modern U.S. citizenship and immigration laws
and this figure was further repurposed for the circulation of American military
propaganda, which helped justify the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans
during World War II.15 Having emerged from the world wars as a definitive glob-
al superpower, the United States emboldened its imperial campaign throughout
Asia and the Pacific while declaring a cold war against communist states. Along
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152 (3) Summer 2023Joyhanna Yoo, Cheryl Lee, Andrew Cheng & Anusha Ànand
with this new American self-image as a global savior and perpetuator of free and
liberal capitalist democracy emerged the figure of the good and passive Asian sub-
ject: the model minority.
To bolster the image of its imperial project as benevolent, the United States
resignified its historical relationship to Asian subjects both domestic and abroad
through a series of key legislative acts. IL 1965 Hart-Celler Act abolished nation-
al origins quotas, and the Refugee Act of 1980 institutionalized refugee resettle-
ment in the United States, leading to a mass increase in migration from across
Asia.16 Importantly, IL 1965 legislation systemically privileged family reunifica-
tion and professional and skill-based labor, and thus previously dominant racial
formations of Asians in the United States–as marginal workers, suspicious for-
eigners, and the like–were quickly eclipsed by new ones. The demographics of
Asian America shifted in dramatic ways that appeared to validate their image in
the media as self-reliant, highly educated, and apolitical. Previously antagonized
as political enemies or expendable laborers, select Asian groups became the face
of the ethnic minority who had “made it” within American society despite his-
torical injustices. This discourse additionally came to be employed to dismiss and
disparage civil rights protests spearheaded by Black Americans alongside their
Latinx, Indigenous, and Asian allies. Yet even as these newer model minority dis-
courses gained public traction, the specter of the yellow peril and other Oriental-
ist tropes persisted in casting Asian Americans as perpetually foreign threats of
dubious loyalty. Exclusion and vilification of entire groups have occurred repeat-
edly in the decades since, including acts of violence and accusations of terrorism
against people racialized as being of Middle Eastern, North African, and South
Asian descent following the 9/11 attacks, anti-Asian hate crimes in the wake of
COVID 19, and the U.S. Department of Justice’s China Initiative, which falsely ac-
cused Chinese researchers of espionage.17
T he ideological positioning of Asian Americans as “honorary whites” is
based on selective and heavily skewed images of Asian American econom-
ic and educational achievements that circulate across institutional and
dominant media channels. Sociologist Mia Tuan’s foundational study showed
how different Asian American communities strategically articulate their identi-
ties with respect to institutional whiteness.18 Two early examples of Asians argu-
ing for white status in U.S. legal cases–Ozawa v. United States and United States v.
Bhagat Singh Thind–point to the historical connections of whiteness to legal per-
sonhood, citizenship, and material advancement.19 Both Ozawa and Thind were
ultimately determined to be legally nonwhite on the basis that they did not con-
form to whiteness as it was “popularly understood,” decisions that reveal the in-
stitutionalized discursive processes through which whiteness is made unavailable
to certain bodies in order to maintain white supremacy.20
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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesAsian American Racialization & Model Minority Logics in Linguistics
In the context of contemporary higher education, model minority logics in-
visibilize Asian-raced bodies by approximating them with whiteness while exag-
gerating their racial visibility as evidence of campus diversity.21 The notion that
students of Asian descent are sufficiently represented on college campuses often
relies on the practice of problematically lumping together different ethnic groups,
economic backgrounds, and national statuses when gathering demographic sta-
tistics.22 Even more egregiously, the “Asian” category in many campus climate
surveys includes groups with different racialized histories and relationships to in-
stitutions of higher education, such as “Middle Eastern” (when not categorized
as white), “Pacific Islander,” and “international.”23 This aggregation results in a
picture of satisfied Asian American students–alongside white students, who are
consistently the most satisfied in campus climate surveys–while downplaying
race-based marginalization and the need for any specialized resources. Numbers
are used to account for campus climate as well as to establish eligibility for the fed-
eral designation of “Minority Serving Institution” and, hence, increased federal
finanziamenti. Following the logic that numbers equate diversity, universities frequent-
ly use promotional material featuring racialized bodies.24 Thus, while numbers
are used to erase diversity across Asian students’ experiences by collapsing ethnic
difference, a visual emphasis on embodied difference fortifies an illusion of insti-
tutional diversity and inclusion.
The racial positioning of Asians as honorary whites fuels linguistic ideologies
whereby second- and later-generation Asian Americans are seen as linguistically
and culturally assimilated to middle-class white norms. Inoltre, racial ideolo-
gies that construct Asian Americans as model minorities who approximate white-
ness are linked to language ideologies that imagine Asian Americans as necessar-
ily speaking “Standard English”–itself an ideological construct–and lacking a
racially distinct variety of English.25 By the same token, Asians who speak other
ethnolectal varieties are frequently seen as engaging in linguistic and cultural ap-
propriation, if not linguistic minstrelsy.26 Such linguistic processes cannot be di-
vorced from broader processes of Asian racialization in the United States.
We frequently find evidence of such racial positioning in linguistics depart-
ments and professional organizations when Asian students are not considered
“underrepresented” in professionalization activities, at departmental events, E
even by granting agencies geared explicitly toward students of color. Per esempio,
a diversity workshop at an elite research university, billed as supporting under-
represented and marginalized students, identified its groups of interest as “Black,
Brown, and international.” Besides the wholesale omission of Indigeneity, Questo
language performs various types of erasure simultaneously: the disparate needs
of different kinds of international students, the needs of Asian students who are
not international, and the overlapping identities of some Asian students, who
may also identify as Black and/or Brown. The explicit omission of Asian Amer-
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152 (3) Summer 2023Joyhanna Yoo, Cheryl Lee, Andrew Cheng & Anusha Ànand
ican students reproduces the erroneous notion that this group is sufficiently rep-
resented and resourced, like their white peers. Such language in antiracist efforts
in our field only fuels the systemic exclusion of Asian bodies through which white
supremacy maintains its hegemony.
Inoltre, the treatment of Asians as honorary whites necessarily collapses
the difference between Asian international and Asian American students. Despite
these groups’ differences and similarities (not to mention individuals who do not
fit neatly into either category), national status does not prevent the racialization
of Asians. Additionally, Asian Americans are frequently recruited to take part in
xenophobic practices against Asian immigrants through differentiating and dis-
tancing tactics such as the creation of “fresh off the boat” stereotypes and the
policing of “nonstandard” language practices, even as the racialization of Asian
nationals continues to affect Asian Americans.27 In higher education, Asian stu-
dents are frequently characterized as bookish and overly competitive, and Asian
international students in particular are represented as culturally disfluent hordes,
a framing that renews yellow peril discourses of old.28 Such pervasive xenopho-
bic comments about, open suspicion of, and discomfort with Asian international
students–especially, in recent years, Chinese students–shifts the blame onto stu-
dents, rather than onto the decades-long project of accelerated privatization and
commercialization of institutions of higher education.29
From its earliest beginnings, the figure of the model minority has made
and remade Asian bodies into perpetually imminent threats. As we have
noted, Asian students are strategically and often intentionally rendered ei-
ther hypervisible or invisible within academic institutions in order to fulfill par-
ticular white hegemonic narratives. The construction of white public spaces (come
as in schools) is contingent on the processes through which non-white bodies are
made invisible, yet made hypervisible when they transgress normative white ex-
pectations of belonging.30 Thus, IL (In)visibility of racialized Asian bodies de-
pends on the situated context in which they are evoked. Within racializing dis-
courses, everyday activities such as studying for a test or playing a musical instru-
ment are constituted and denaturalized as alien or strange when carried out by
Asian subjects.31 In performing such denaturalized activities, Asian students are
then fundamentally made hypervisible as a model minority. In sum, the racializa-
tion of Asians in the United States relies on the discursive construction of excep-
tional figures like the model minority, whose visibility shifts based on the needs
of white supremacy.
On one hand, the model minority is frequently invoked to signify a rosy por-
trait of American multiculturalism and class mobility, thus denying U.S. institu-
tional culpability in systemic anti-Black racism. D'altra parte, the model mi-
nority readily shifts into a threat to whiteness when Asian bodies are perceived as
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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesAsian American Racialization & Model Minority Logics in Linguistics
too exceptional and too numerous, as exemplified in cases of suburban whites po-
sitioning their new Asian American neighbors as toxic and unwelcome, or com-
plaints of the over-encroachment of Asian bodies on college campuses.32 Tenuous
yet evocative, the figure of the model minority exemplifies how perceived racial
visibility in academic spaces becomes a powerful and quantifiable device for in-
stitutional actors to reaffirm a white supremacist hierarchy, in particular through
the essentialist logics of affirmative action and diversity, equity, and inclusion ini-
tiatives. One of the ways racial visibility is weaponized is through the tokenization
of Asian faculty, who, like other faculty of color, are often given a heavier burden
to serve, mentor, educate, and succeed compared with their white colleagues. Fac-
ulty of color who experience tokenism tend to respond to their situations using
various strategies of (In)visibility, including socially withdrawing from their col-
leagues in order to cope with negative environments, working harder to counter
their experiences of exclusion, and disengaging completely from their research.33
Inoltre, tokenized professors, especially women of color, may feel a dispropor-
tionate amount of responsibility and substantial social pressure to serve as de facto
role models for students of color, an unspoken labor that is rarely included in job
descriptions and seldom contributes to one’s tenure and promotion portfolio.34
Nel frattempo, Asian and Asian American graduate students in linguistics are fre-
quently rendered hypervisible when recruited to participate in extractive research
that continues a long history of colonial linguistic projects: this is the double-
edged sword of belonging to a minoritized community.35 For example, it is not
uncommon for non-Asian mentors and faculty to advise their Asian and Asian
American graduate students to study a particular language or linguistic phenom-
enon based on their perceived ethnolinguistic connection to the language com-
munity. In these cases, the junior scholar’s actual field of study, research interests,
and ethnic background are neglected in the face of their advisor’s agenda. Cru-
cially, instances in which Asian Americans are invisibilized, hypervisibilized, O
tokenized due to their racial background are never simply isolated interpersonal
conflicts, but a fundamental part of the construction of broader racial hierarchies
in the United States. More than just regrettable incidents of individual stereotyp-
ing, these microaggressions contribute to a framework of systemic and strategic
structural exclusion that began centuries ago and continues today.
The weaponized positioning of Asian students’ bodies in the mainstream
media additionally attests to the model minority logics already at play in high-
er education. That is to say, the ideological perception of Asian Americans as the
model minority precedes any one discursive event in which it is reproduced and
made communicable. These discourses are then institutionally privileged and
amplified by school boards, educational authorities, and media outlets, as nota-
bly demonstrated by the ongoing national controversy over affirmative action.36
Within mainstream discourses, Asian Americans are essentialized and predeter-
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152 (3) Summer 2023Joyhanna Yoo, Cheryl Lee, Andrew Cheng & Anusha Ànand
mined as model students while their own voices and perspectives are simultane-
ously silenced and erased.37 Hence, the media portrayal of a highly selective group
of Asian Americans becomes a proxy for all Asians’ positionality in the academy.
This ideological work flattens inter- and intragroup differences among Asians,
and also pits Asian Americans against other minoritized subjects.38 If whiteness is
the standard for inclusion in the academy, and its ideological counterpart, Black-
ness, a signifier of exclusion in the academy, Asian American experiences of ra-
cialization demonstrate that inclusion is often fraught and conditional.
Inoltre, racialized perceptions about Asian Americans refract onto ideolo-
gies about Asian American language use and linguistic practice in general. Fun-
damentally, contemporary conceptualizations of race and language in the United
States come from a dynamic process of conaturalization that regiments social for-
mations and maintains white supremacy.39 The overdetermination of racial visi-
bility in and through language accordingly relies on entrenched racial formations,
recognizable and typified in figures such as the perpetual foreigner or the model
minority. These seemingly conflicting forms of racialization of Asian Americans
underscore an unsettling raciolinguistic tension: that Asian Americans are treat-
ed in some instances as non-English-speaking foreigners and in others as “linguis-
tically white,” inauthentic, or deficient speakers of Asian languages, particolarmente
when measured against “real” native speakers.40 In essence, raciolinguistic ideol-
ogies about Asian Americans as speakers of accented or “broken” English, Yellow
English, or of only Asian languages draw substantially from the social position-
ing of Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners.41 At the same time, perceptions
about Asian Americans as assimilated speakers of “standard” American English
depend on the racialized image of Asian Americans as honorary whites. The lin-
guistic practices of Asian Americans are simultaneously perceived as sufficient yet
deficient, authentic yet inauthentic.
These paradoxes not only reveal the discrepancies within essentialist logics of
language and race, but also point to the partiality and subjectivity through which
raciolinguistic ideologies emerge and are strategically employed across social con-
texts. Within the discipline, such tensions shape the way Asian American language
is studied while the weaponization of (In)visible language behavior in the project
of racialization has ramifications in the broader context of academia as well. IL
linguistics of Asian America is consequently a necessary locus for a critical exam-
ination of race and racialization, including interrogating the overdetermination of
already racialized embodied markers and other ostensibly visible cues.
F inally, model minority logics depend on, and in turn reify, a narrow version
of inclusion that relies on numerical representation and neoliberal valua-
zione. As argued above, Asians are linked to whiteness through their relative-
ly large numbers on some campuses, a form of representation that is legible to uni-
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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesAsian American Racialization & Model Minority Logics in Linguistics
versities through the terms of institutional diversity and inclusion.42 However, COME
we have also discussed, the accounting and aggregating of bodies is a mechanism
by which Asian bodies are invisibilized. As scholars of critical race studies, ethnic
studies, and cultural studies have noted, pushing for numerical diversity reflects
the liberal multiculturalism of higher education, not the radical forms of diversity
and challenges to hegemonic epistemologies championed by student movements
of the 1960s and 1970s.43 By treating greater numbers as the ultimate goal of inclu-
sion, institutions flatten the differences between historically marginalized groups
and mask intragroup needs.44 When the term minority loses its valence as a signifier
of ethnoracial political coalitions and becomes solely about enumeration, inclu-
sion can be wielded to increase diversity for diversity’s sake, but not to address sys-
tems of racial injury. Under this definition of minority, institutions and individuals
alike celebrate Asians as part of a shallow neoliberal multiculturalism while deny-
ing the need to support them institutionally.45 Some examples include decontextu-
alized exhibitions of Asian scholars’ research or highlighting the presence of Asian
bodies in universities’ advertising materials. Such practices have been found to po-
sition the minoritized group outside of the national collectivity and to hail multi-
culturalism as a consumable good while ignoring the racism that undergirds it.46
Another related and equally narrow understanding of inclusion enabled by
model minority logics involves neoliberal advancement in the form of (some)
Asian American economic and academic successes, which are not the same as so-
cial equality.47 In the context of higher education, high Asian American student
enrollment numbers do not amount to greater feelings of belonging or fewer in-
stances of racial injustice on college campuses.48 In fact, the very trope of the mod-
el minority and its insistence on economically informed academic success has been
shown to take a psychological toll on Asian American students and scholars by set-
ting up racialized behavioral expectations while minimizing the everyday traumas
inflicted upon them.49 This reality affects how Asian Americans are treated in the
classroom, as well as the kinds of teaching, research, and leadership opportunities
for which they are considered. When we, the authors, have advocated for more re-
sources and greater institutional support as Asian Americans, for instance, we have
been told to be more humble and accommodating in the face of authority and hier-
archy. We have also frequently been pressured to align ourselves along a single as-
pect of our identities (such as being a woman or being queer) at the cost of erasing
our Asian identification.
In sum, linguistics maintains a façade of inclusion through the presence and
labor of Asian American students and faculty, and through research practices that
tokenize and essentialize them, as discussed earlier. Tuttavia, the discipline has
neither addressed the roots of ethnoracial exclusivity nor provided sufficient av-
enues of recourse for ongoing experiences of racism or institutional disenfran-
chisement. Displays of our talents and of the products of our labor do not solve
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152 (3) Summer 2023Joyhanna Yoo, Cheryl Lee, Andrew Cheng & Anusha Ànand
racism or dismantle white supremacy, but perpetuate a logic that claims that we
are and will continue to be satisfied with simply being mentioned and in the room
rather than by a genuine and sustained pursuit of justice and equality.
W e have discussed how Asians in the United States have been rendered
malleable within historical and contemporary racial formations, giv-
ing rise to model minority logics, which position Asian Americans
strategically for the furthering of white supremacy and the oppression of people
of color. Inoltre, we identified model minority logics as an essential racializ-
ing project for the maintenance of institutional norms. Within linguistics and the
academy writ large, model minority logics ideologically position Asians in prox-
imity to whiteness, weaponize the racial visibility of Asian-raced peoples for in-
stitutional gain, and advance narrow, uncritical definitions of inclusion. Having
highlighted the ways that model minority logics have detrimental effects on Asian
American linguists, we now offer some pathways to begin to disrupt these pro-
cesses of racialization at the departmental and institutional levels.
Primo, the undertheorization of race in linguistics has left a theoretical void for
understanding how language shapes and racializes Asians and Asian Americans
and their communicative practices. Given its intimate links to Western colonial
histories of studying the “other,” linguistics must be in meaningful conversa-
tion with scholarship on race and racism in critical race and ethnic studies and
adjacent disciplines. Tuttavia, we caution against simplistic appropriations of
insights from studies of race into contemporary linguistics, which remains con-
spicuously white, U.S.-centric, and colonial. Despite sustained moves within the
social sciences toward reflexive and decolonizing practices, linguistics has been
slow to equip itself with the necessary tools to engage with its own complicity in
histories of racism and colonialism. This failure is particularly egregious given
that linguistics departments across the United States may recruit minoritized stu-
dents, who are then confronted with largely inequitable conditions in academic
and intellectual spaces.50 Thus, we urge faculty to work actively and collabora-
tively with minoritized scholars–especially prospective and currently enrolled
students–to reshape the very infrastructure of academic programs that contin-
ue to exclude and marginalize them. This work should always be done with equi-
table compensation. We call for continued reflexivity in the field and for a fore-
grounding of the whole scholar, which includes a sociopolitical interrogation
of the purpose of linguistics research. Despite such steps, the inclusion of Asian
American subjectivities and epistemologies must always contend with academic
institutions’ propensity to subsume radical scholarship into a colonial structure
of knowledge-making that ultimately reifies white hegemony.51
As linguists invested in racial justice, we must drastically improve the recruit-
ment and retention of Asian American linguists in a way that reflects a deep under-
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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesAsian American Racialization & Model Minority Logics in Linguistics
standing of the diversity of Asian America. As we have noted, Asians’ numerical
representation is often used to promote an illusion of institutional diversity. How-
ever, since numerical diversity is not synonymous with racial equity, we advocate
for an approach that interrogates this version of inclusion and seeks to use alterna-
tive frameworks. Such efforts also require a thoughtful consideration of resources
and their allocation in a way that does not compete with or draw false equivalen-
cies with other minoritized groups. Departments and professional organizations
should evaluate their current metrics for racial inclusion and subsequently devel-
op or improve outreach programs for Asian Americans with active and appropri-
ately compensated input from past and current students. Departments may also
find that their undergraduate and graduate students of color are already laboring
in grassroots initiatives to improve diversity and inclusion at the departmental or
university level, efforts that should also be meaningfully compensated.
In the realm of mentorship, faculty would do well to consider the ways they
actively invisibilize their students of Asian descent, ignore differences among
groups, and lack general understanding of Asian diasporic experiences. As we have
discussed, seemingly benign actions (and inactions) from institutional agents are
reinstantiations of model minority logics that continue to racialize and thus harm
minoritized students. We urge individuals with institutional power to consider
the direct ways they might work to make Asians legible as people of color in their
realms of influence and to ensure that they receive the institutional support they
need. Mentorship also entails familiarity with existing campus resources for Asian
students and faculty, as well as creative measures to partner with departments and
campus centers to make these available to linguists. For students in particular, IL
dearth of Asian mentors in linguistics may be rectified in part by acknowledging
that many Asian scholars study language outside the purview of what is tradition-
ally considered linguistics; when we expand our field’s horizons and strengthen
interdisciplinary and collaborative scholarship, the entire discipline benefits by
creating new research possibilities and opportunities for mentorship.52
Even as we continue to grapple with and critique dominant frameworks of in-
clusion in linguistics, we ardently reject the liberal multiculturalist model in which
our very embodied presence and the knowledge we produce are co-opted under the
guise of diversity: a framework of inclusion that also, in and of itself, inherently ex-
cludes. We are especially wary of the ways that institutional inclusion blandly mas-
querades as racial justice. Invece, we look to the political project of Asian America:
at once insurgent, anticolonial, and global. We thus urge the discipline to embrace
a deeply relational politics rooted in historical and comparative understandings of
race that refuses the interchangeability of minoritized groups. This work will re-
quire the learning and unlearning of histories that inform how we approach the
study of language. We take these enmeshed histories seriously as we continue to
envision a different linguistics in the pursuit of racial justice.
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152 (3) Summer 2023Joyhanna Yoo, Cheryl Lee, Andrew Cheng & Anusha Ànand
about the authors
Joyhanna Yoo (she/they) is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthro-
pology at Harvard University and a sociocultural linguist whose work examines lan-
guage, race, and gender from an ethnographic lens, particularly in mediatized con-
texts. Her research takes a semiotic approach to the study of language with a focus
on transnational Korean popular culture and its consumption in Mexico and the
stati Uniti. In 2023–2024, they will be the Pony Chung Korean Studies Fellow at
Korea University, and in fall 2024, they will be Assistant Professor of Anthropolo-
gy at California State University, Sacramento. She has published in journals such as
Signs and Society and Gender and Language.
Cheryl Lee (she/her/她) is a Taiwanese American doctoral student of linguistic
anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research interests
include the linguistic anthropology of education, translanguaging and translingual-
ism, and Asian American heritage language ideologies and practices. Her disser-
tation work applies ethnographic and semiotic methodologies to examine identi-
ty, materiality, and affect in Japanese-Mandarin language classrooms in Taiwan.
In 2023–2024, she will be a Taiwan Studies Lectureship Graduate Fellow at Na-
tional Taiwan Normal University. She has published in Working Papers in Education-
al Linguistics.
Andrew Cheng (he/him) is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of
Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. His enthusiasm for language was shaped by having grown up in
the linguistically and racially diverse Bay Area (Ohlone land/California). He has
published in journals such as American Speech, Journal of Linguistic Geography, Amerasia
Journal, and Bilingualism: Language and Cognition.
Anusha Ànand (she/her) received her Master of Arts in Linguistics from the Uni-
versity of South Carolina. She is a South Asian American sociocultural linguist
whose academic work has focused on mediatized, stereotypical performances of
South Asian “accented” Englishes, as well as the raciolinguistic ideologies under-
girding discourses surrounding international students at predominantly white in-
stitutions in the United States. Her nonacademic work examines the ideologies of
race and gender built into digital voice assistants.
endnotes
1 Mia Tuan, Forever Foreigners or Honorary Whites? The Asian Ethnic Experience Today (Nuovo
Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Ellen D. Wu, The Color of Success: Asian
Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
2015); and erin Khuê Ninh, Passing for Perfect: College Imposters and Other Model Minorities
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2021).
2 Claire Jean Kim, “The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans,” Politics & Società 27 (1)
(1999): 105–138, https://doi.org/10.1177/0032329299027001005.
3 Min Zhou, “Are Asian Americans Becoming ‘White?’” Contexts 3 (1) (2004): 29–37,
https://doi.org/10.1525/ctx.2004.3.1.29.
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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesAsian American Racialization & Model Minority Logics in Linguistics
4 erin Khuê Ninh, “The Model Minority: Asian American Immigrant Families and Intimate
Harm,” Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies 1 (2) (2014): 168–173,
https://doi.org/10.15367/kf.v1i2.38.
5 In sociolinguistics, language variety or simply variety refers to differences in speech pat-
terns, Per esempio: dialect, register, and general style. General American English is one
of many varieties of English. For more on varieties in sociolinguistics, see Braj B. Kachru,
Yamuna Kachru, and Cecil L. Nelson, eds., The Handbook of World Englishes (Malden,
Massa.: Blackwell Publishing, 2006).
6 Richard Bauman and Charles L. Briggs, Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Poli-
tics of Inequality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Elaine W. Chun
and Adrienne Lo, “Language and Racialization,” in The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic
Anthropology, ed. Nancy Bonvillain (Abingdon-on-Thames, England: Routledge, 2015),
220–233.
7 Adrienne Lo and Angela Reyes, “Introduction: On Yellow English and Other Perilous
Terms,” in Beyond Yellow English: Toward a Linguistic Anthropology of Asian Pacific America, ed.
Adrienne Lo and Angela Reyes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3–20.
8 Jonathan Rosa and Nelson Flores, “Unsettling Race and Language: Toward a Raciolin-
guistic Perspective,” Language in Society 46 (5) (2017): 621–647, https://doi.org/10.1017/
S0047404517000562.
9 Karen Umemoto, “‘On Strike!’ San Francisco State College Strike, 1968–69: The Role
of Asian American Students,” Amerasia Journal 15 (1) (1989): 3–41, https://doi.org/10
.17953/amer.15.1.7213030j5644rx25.
10 Anne H. Charity Hudley, Christine Mallinson, and Mary Bucholtz, “Toward Racial Jus-
tice in Linguistics: Interdisciplinary Insights into Theorizing Race in the Discipline and
Diversifying the Profession,” Language 96 (4) (2022): 200–235, https://doi.org/10.1353/
lan.2020.0074.
11 Anne A. Cheng, “The Dehumanizing Logic of All the ‘Happy Ending’ Jokes,” The Atlantic,
Luglio 5, 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/03/atlanta-shootings
-racist-hatred-doesnt-preclude-desire/618361.
12 Yen L. Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1992); and Helen Zia, Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of
an American People (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000).
13 Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, N.C.: Duke
Stampa universitaria, 1996); and Simeon Man, Soldiering through Empire: Race and the Making
of the Decolonizing Pacific (Berkeley: Stampa dell'Università della California, 2018).
14 Erika Lee, “The ‘Yellow Peril’ and Asian Exclusion in the Americas,” Pacific Historical
Review 76 (4) (2007): 537–562, https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2007.76.4.537.
15 Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004); and Beth Lew-Williams, The Chinese Must Go:
Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Cambridge, Massa.: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 2018).
16 The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, Pub. l. No. 89-236, 79 Stat. 911 (1965); E
Refugee Act of 1980, Pub. l. No. 96-212, 94 Stat. 102 (1980).
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152 (3) Summer 2023Joyhanna Yoo, Cheryl Lee, Andrew Cheng & Anusha Ànand
17 Vijay Prashad, Uncle Swami: South Asians in America Today (New York: The New Press,
2012); Refugee Act of 1980; and Lok Siu and Claire Chun, “Yellow Peril and Techno-
Orientalism in the Time of COVID-19: Racialized Contagion, Scientific Espionage, E
Techno-Economic Warfare,” Journal of Asian American Studies 23 (3) (2020): 421–440,
http://doi.org/10.1353/jaas.2020.0033.
18 Tuan, Forever Foreigners or Honorary Whites?
19 Erika Lee, The Making of Asian America: A History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015).
20 Philip Deslippe, “United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 1923” in 25 Events That Shaped Asian
American History: An Encyclopedia of the American Mosaic, ed. Lan Dong (Santa Barbara, Ca-
lif.: ABC-CLIO, 2019), 157–172.
21 Robert T. Teranishi, “Asian American and Pacific Islander Students and the Institutions
that Serve Them,” Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning 44 (2) (2012): 16–22, https://
doi.org/10.1080/00091383.2012.655233.
22 Bach Mai Dolly Nguyen, Mike Hoa Nguyen, Jason Chan, and Robert T. Teranishi, IL
Racialized Experiences of Asian American and Pacific Islander Students: An Examination of Campus
Racial Climate at the University of California, Los Angeles (Los Angeles: National Commission
on Asian American and Pacific Islander Research in Education [CARE], 2016).
23 Many campus climate survey questions implicitly link historically racialized groups
(such as AAPI students) and nationality. Per esempio, in this survey from Wichita State
Università, one of the questions posed is: “What is your race, ethnicity, or internation-
al origin?” Hanover Research Group, “Climate Survey Analysis: Prepared for Wichita
State University,” November 1, 2016, https://www.wichita.edu/academics/facultysenate/
documents/Climate_Survey_Analysis_-_Wichita_State_University.pdf.
24 Bonnie Urciuoli, Neoliberalizing Diversity in Liberal Arts College Life (New York: Berghahn
Books, 2022).
25 Lo and Reyes, “Introduction: On Yellow English and Other Perilous Terms”; E
Rosina Lippi-Green, “Language Ideology and Language Prejudice,” in Language in the
USA: Themes for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Edward Finegan and John R. Rickford (Camera-
ponte: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 289–304.
26 Mary Bucholtz and Qiuana Lopez, “Performing Blackness, Forming Whiteness: Lin-
guistic Minstrelsy in Hollywood Film,” Journal of Sociolinguistics 15 (5) (2011): 680–706,
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9841.2011.00513.x; and Elaine W. Chun, “Ironic Black-
ness as Masculine Cool: Asian American Language and Authenticity on YouTube,"
Applied Linguistics 34 (5) (2013): 592–612, https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amt023.
27 Shalini Shankar, Desi Land: Teen Culture, Class, and Success in Silicon Valley (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 2008).
28 Qin Zhang, “Asian Americans Beyond the Model Minority Stereotype: The Nerdy and
the Left Out,” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 3 (1) (2010): 20–37,
https://doi.org/10.1080/17513050903428109.
29 Jing Yu, “Lost in Lockdown?: The Impact of COVID-19 on Chinese International Student
Mobility,” Journal of International Students 11 (S2) (2021): 1–18, https://doi.org/10.32674/
jis.v11iS2.3575; and Jenny J. Lee and Charles Rice, “Welcome to America?: Interna-
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30 Sara Ahmed, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” Feminist Theory 8 (2) (2007): 149–168,
https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700107078139.
31 Ju Yon Kim, The Racial Mundane: Asian American Performance and the Embodied Everyday (Nuovo
York: New York University Press, 2015).
32 Adrienne Lo, “‘Suddenly Faced with a Chinese Village’: The Linguistic Racialization of
Asian Americans,” in Raciolinguistics: How Language Shapes Our Ideas about Race, ed. H. Samy
Alim, John R. Rickford, and Arnetha F. Ball (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016);
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33 Isis H. Settles, NiCole T. Buchanan, and Kristie Dotson, “Scrutinized But Not Recog-
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34 Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, Yolanda Flores Niemann, Carmen G. González, and Angela
P. Harris, eds., Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia
(Boulder, Col.: Utah State University Press, 2012).
35 Joseph Errington, “Colonial Linguistics,” Annual Review of Anthropology 30 (1) (2001): 19–
39, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.30.1.19; and Nicté Fuller Medina, “‘We
Like the Idea of You But Not The Reality of You’: The Whole Scholar as Disruptor of
Default Colonial Practices,” in Decolonizing Linguistics, ed. Anne H. Charity Hudley, Chris-
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36 Claire J. Kim, “Are Asians the New Blacks?: Affirmative Action, Anti-Blackness, and the
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37 On June 29, 2023, the United States Supreme Court outlawed race-conscious college ad-
missions (affirmative action) nationwide. See Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President
& Fellows of Harvard College (2023); and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of
North Carolina (2023). See also Claire Wang, “Affirmative Action Debate Ignores Asian
American Community College Students,” NBC News, ottobre 8, 2020, https://www
.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/affirmative-action-debate-ignores-asian-american
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What We Thought’: San Francisco Students Weigh in on School District Controver-
sies,” KQED, April 3, 2021, https://www.kqed.org/news/11867918/no-one-was-asking
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38 Kim, “The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans.”
39 Rosa and Flores, “Unsettling Race and Language.”
40 Lauretta S. P. Cheng, Danielle Burgess, Natasha Vernooij, et al., “The Problematic Con-
cept of Native Speaker in Psycholinguistics: Replacing Vague and Harmful Terminol-
ogy with Inclusive and Accurate Measures,” Frontiers in Psychology 12 (2021), https://doi
.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.715843; and Lo and Reyes, “Introduction: On Yellow English
and Other Perilous Terms.”
41 Stephanie Lindemann, “Who Speaks ‘Broken English?’ U.S. Undergraduates’ Percep-
tions of Non-Native English,” International Journal of Applied Linguistics 15 (2) (2005): 187–
212, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1473-4192.2005.00087.x; and Jung-Eun Janie Lee, “Repre-
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nia, Santa Barbara, 2006).
42 Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham, N.C.:
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43 Kandice Chuh, The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities “After Man” (Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 2019); and Roderick A. Ferguson, The Reorder of Things: IL
University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2012).
44 Kim, “Are Asians the New Blacks?"
45 Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); and Yu, “Lost in Lockdown?"
46 Inmaculada M. García-Sánchez, “Language Socialization and Marginalization,” in The
Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology, ed. Bonvillain, 159–174; and Justin Grinage,
“Singing and Dancing for Diversity: Neoliberal Multiculturalism and White Episte-
mological Ignorance in Teacher Professional Development,” Curriculum Inquiry 50 (1)
(2022): 7–27, https://doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2020.1754114.
47 Ninh, “The Model Minority.”
48 Nguyen, Nguyen, Chan, and Teranishi, The Racialized Experiences of Asian American and
Pacific Islander Students.
49 David L. Eng and Shinhee Han, Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psy-
chic Lives of Asian Americans (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2019); and Kim, IL
Racial Mundane.
50 Joseph Errington, Linguistics in a Colonial World: A Story of Language, Meaning, and Power
(Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007); and Jenny L. Davis and Krystal A. Smalls,
“Dis/Possession Afoot: American (Anthropological) Traditions of Anti-Blackness and
Coloniality,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 31 (2) (2021): 275–282, https://doi.org/
10.1111/jola.12327.
51 Ferguson, The Reorder of Things; and Ofelia García, Nelson Flores, Kate Seltzer, et al., “Re-
jecting Abyssal Thinking in the Language and Education of Racialized Bilinguals: UN
Manifesto,” Critical Inquiry in Language Studies 18 (3) (2021): 203–228, https://doi.org/10
.1080/15427587.2021.1935957.
52 Anne H. Charity Hudley and Nelson Flores, “Social Justice in Applied Linguistics: Not a
Conclusione, But a Way Forward,” Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 42 (6) (2022): 144–
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