Identity and Stereotypes

Asian Names

Names hold tremendous importance in many cultures. They can be a way to honor ancestors, convey religious meanings, and/or carry forward histories that might otherwise be lost. Therefore, one’s name is often an important part of one’s identity. Yet many students who do not have European or Biblical names are often teased and subjected to constant mispronunciation; in some cases, teachers and/or peers will impose a different name on them to use and respond to at school. We hope that by emphasizing both how important it is to learn to correctly pronounce students’ names and how harmful it can be if you don’t, we can prevent future generations of students from dealing with the demeaning and painful naming practices that we and many others have faced in school.

Stereotypes of Asian Americans

Asian Food as Stinky and Weird

 Foods typically associated with Asian, Latine, and African cultures are often viewed as “weird” or “strange” compared to mainstream European foods, which are understood as “normal” and “American.” If the goal of a classroom/campus is to cultivate a culture of mutual respect, educators should be attentive to ways that students (and adults!) might insult or demean someone’s food. Some educators have taken up slogans like “Don’t yuck my yum!” to encourage a positive attitude toward foods that may be enjoyed by some students but not by others. While it’s not necessary to insist that everyone like everything, it is important to let students know that, just because they don’t like something, this doesn’t mean it’s reasonable to insult someone who does enjoy it. And being unfamiliar with a particular food doesn’t make it weird. When students view unfamiliar foods as strange or gross, educators can present these situations as opportunities to try new things and learn about other cultures. While we are framing this as a student issue, we want to recognize that plenty of adults are close-minded when it comes to food, too—those lunchbox moments continue to occur in the teacher’s lounge and at school potlucks!

Making parallels across cultures and food traditions can help explain why certain foods and ingredients are common to some groups of people but not others. This practice supports the understanding of widespread styles of food preparation that simply use different ingredients. As the United States’ population has diversified, so too have culinary options. Several picturebooks offer educators opportunities to plan structured conversations about Asian foods, such as The Invisible Boy (Ludwig, 2013), The Day You Begin (Woodson, 2018), and Lunch from Home (Stein, 2022). Below, we offer books that spotlight specific Asian foods that are culturally specific but have parallels to other culinary traditions. 

Recommended Children’s Literature to Honor Asian Foods
The Model Minority

Asian American youth are often considered to be ideal students who exhibit good behavior and excel academically. This stereotype, while seemingly positive, has insidious roots. First, one must recognize that immigration from Asia was almost entirely banned from 1917 until 1952 (see Chapter 3 for details). The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 allowed large-scale immigration from Asia to the United States for the first time; however, there was a notable preference for immigrants who were considered highly skilled professionals. That is, people who held graduate degrees and worked in high-demand sectors, such as medicine, engineering, and technology, were more likely to get visas to the United States. Thus, when Asian immigrants began to arrive in large groups in the late 1960s, many of these new arrivals were disproportionately highly educated and largely English-speaking. Although their visa and residency status often meant that these workers received less pay than their U.S.-born counterparts, professional Asian immigrants nonetheless were able to earn wages that quickly positioned them as middle class. Research shows that highly educated parents invest time, money, and other resources in supporting their children’s academic success (Hill et al., 2004; Lee & Bowen, 2006; Perna & Titus, 2005; Stanton-Salazar, 2011; Yosso, 2005).

An immigration system that prefers highly educated workers is not the only reason why Asian Americans are considered the model minority. A second cause is rooted in social shifts during the Cold War and anti-Blackness in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement. As the struggles for Black civil rights intensified in the 1950s and 1960s, Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Moynihan published what became known as the Moynihan report in 1965. Moynihan wrote that the fundamental problem of economic and social inequality was rooted in non-traditional or “broken” family structures of low income Black communities. This racist narrative persists today. Although not mentioned in the report, Asian Americans—specifically Chinese and Japanese families—were held up in contrast to Black families, as an example of how racial inequalities could be overcome by people of color in the United States. This image of Asian American families and their children’s academic success in popular publications like U.S. News and World Report and on the cover of Time Magazine was promoted on purpose as the United States government struggled to improve their international image during the violence of the Civil Rights Movement and the Cold War.

So how would you explain all this to children? You can remind them that any group of people will be diverse in a number of ways, and use your own classroom as an example. One’s race or ethnicity does not determine their abilities, just as their gender or religion does not determine them. And if young people can understand that, then they will understand how silly it is to think that we would use blanket statements like “model minority” to describe a group that is linked primarily by their origin from a massive continent. Students should be aware of how and why this stereotype emerged, and then have opportunities to consider who benefits from it and who is harmed. The adage “You can’t judge a book by its cover” is particularly useful in this case—students shouldn’t make assumptions about someone based on their race or ethnicity, and that includes assumptions about one’s intellect or language abilities. It’s as simple as that, and once they know it, they can spread the word to others!

Recommended Children’s Literature to Disrupt the Model Minority Stereotype
“Yellow Peril” and “Dusky Peril”

Unlike the contemporary model minority stereotype, which became pervasive in the last 40 years, the idea that Asian immigrants are a “Yellow Peril” or “Dusky Peril” has a much longer history. “Yellow Peril” is a term frequently associated with East Asian immigrants that became popular in the 1800s, while “Dusky Peril” specifically refers to South Asian immigrants who arrived in the early 1900s. In both cases, “peril” invokes “a potential ‘at your own risk’ danger of injury or death” (Tchen & Yeats, 2014, p. 11), conjuring feelings of fear and alarm. 

German Kaiser Wilhelm II is believed to have coined the term “Yellow Peril” when he claimed to have dreamt about Buddha on a dragon thunderstorm that approached Europe (Tchen & Yeats, 2014). In 1895, he commissioned artist Hermann Knackfuss to illustrate his dream, which represented the Asian threat against white Christian Europe. Fittingly, the lithograph was titled “Peoples of Europe, Defend Your Holiest Possessions,” as shown here:

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Thus, “Yellow Peril” became shorthand for the threat that the Chinese newcomers allegedly posed to white Americans and was widely used in newspapers leading to and after the Chinese Exclusion Act. The most famous Yellow Peril character is Dr. Fu Manchu, the villain in crime novels published by British author Sax Rohmer beginning in 1913. Dr. Fu Manchu bears a resemblance to Ming the Merciless, a villain in the Flash Gordon comic strips of the late 1930s. Similar representations were used to vilify Japanese during World War II, as exemplified by the buck-toothed and slanted eye figures found in the political cartoons illustrated by Theodore Geisel, also known as beloved children’s author Dr. Seuss:

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The phrase “Dusky Peril” was part of a headline in an issue of the Puget Sound

American from 1906 that asked, “Have we a Dusky Peril?” with the subheadline, “Hindu hordes invading the state.” Similar to the language used against Chinese immigrants in the previous century, the article describes “more than a dozen swarthy sons of Hindustan” and warns that these “worshippers of Brahma, Buddha, and other strange deities of India may soon press the soil of Washington” (para. 1). The article later details the threat of these laborers (who were actually Sikhs, not Hindus) to the economic advancement of white laborers and describes them as “diseased” and “undesirable” (yet also “remarkably fine-looking”—racism is weird) (para. 15). In this way, the same fear-mongering prejudice used against Chinese immigrants in California in the late 1800s was recycled against the South Asian immigrants in Washington state decades afterward. Over a century later, these stereotypes returned. In 2001, after the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, South Asian Americans were viewed as undesirable and threatening. 

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Recommended Children’s Literature to Disrupt the Yellow Peril and Dusky Peril Stereotypes
Forever Foreigner

Asian Americans (and Latines) experience a distinct kind of racialized marginalization due to nativism and perceptions of foreignness (Ancheta, 2006). Nativism is a concept that first emerged in the mid-1850s with the creation of the Know Nothing political party. This group virulently opposed Catholic immigration, particularly from Ireland, and viewed it as a threat to U.S.-born Protestants. Nativism is a perspective that considers certain people as entitled to being in a place—in this case, white Protestants of European descent in the United States—while others are seen as not belonging and to be excluded at all costs. Nativism adopts an “us vs. them” mentality that is often leveraged against communities of color, those who adhere to faiths other than Christianity, and other groups that are viewed as undesirable or threatening to the dominant group.

With this in mind, scholar Mia Tuan (1998) argued, “Despite many Asian-Americans being longtime daughters and sons of this nation, some with lineages extending back to the 1800s, many people continually view and treat them as outsiders or foreigners within their own country” (p. 2). Tuan (1998) used the term “forever foreigners” to refer to this stereotypical and misguided idea that all Asian Americans are recently-arrived immigrants who do not know English and do not understand American customs. The forever foreigner stereotype rears its ugly head when Asian Americans are asked where they are from—because the presumption is that they couldn’t possibly be from here. Being a forever foreigner is inferred when an Asian American is complimented on the quality of their English or their lack of an accent. 

The forever foreigner stereotype works off the nativist assumption that being an American means that you are white, likely Christian, and born in the United States. It is reinforced by school curriculum, trade books, and popular media that center white families and characters who speak American English and attend church on Sundays. As schools are more segregated now than ever before, if those are the only examples of American life that students are surrounded by, then that is what they understand to be normal, and anything different seems weird and literally foreign.

Recommended Children’s Literature to Disrupt the Forever Foreigner Stereotype
Terrorist Threats

While the Dusky Peril established South Asian men as an invading threat in Washington state in the early 1900s, the Gulf War (1990–1991) and 9/11 (2001) terrorist attacks had far more widespread and long-lasting repercussions for South Asian Americans. These two events specifically positioned Muslims as violent extremists, despite the facts that Iraq invaded a Muslim nation (Kuwait) and that every religion has its share of zealots who adopt extremist interpretations that do not represent mainstream followers.

There are 1.9 million Muslims across the globe (making up a quarter of the world’s population) who prescribe to several different sects of Islam. Muslims wear a wide range of clothing and are not necessarily immediately identifiable based on their appearance. Religion is, after all, about spiritual beliefs, and not everyone wears outward religious markers. However, the image of Osama bin Laden after the 9/11 attacks—clad in a turban, wearing long flowy robes, and with a thick, unruly beard—became the image associated with Islamic terrorism. Turbans are not especially common headwear among Muslim men, although some followers of Shia Islam (the second largest branch, followed by 10–15% of all Muslims) and Sufism (a mystical practice of Islam) may wear them. They are more commonly worn by Sikhs (both men and women) and some Hindu men. Yet, because the name and image of bin Laden became synonymous with Islamic terrorism, in the days, months, and years that followed 9/11, Muslims and those perceived as Muslim—namely Sikhs and Hindus—faced tremendous physical and verbal harassment, including violence. 

This violence was not limited to adult men who wore turbans. Sikh, Hindu, and Muslim children faced an alarming amount of bullying in schools, from being called “terrorist” and “Osama” to experiencing physical assaults, in addition to social ostracism from their peers and school staff (Bajaj et al., 2016; Britto, 2001). Women wearing hijab (Islamic head coverings) have also been harassed and assaulted. Indeed, Islamophobia has become pervasive in U.S. society. But it isn’t simply a fear or phobia. Recent political rhetoric and a frightening number of acts of violence against Muslims and those perceived as Muslim demonstrate that Islamophobia as it exists today (indeed, since 9/11) is better described as a hatred of Islam, which manifests through hate speech, bullying, and violence that is viewed as justified.

Guides & Resources about Islam and Countering Islamophobia for Elementary Teachers
Recommended Children’s Literature to Disrupt the Terrorist Threat Stereotype

Yusuf Azeem is Not a Hero by Saadia Faruqi