Asian American Identity – Part III

Asian American Identity Problem: Stereotypes



Stereotypes are learned at an early age and disseminated through children’s books and the elementary school curriculum. Whatever information about Asian Americans they include is usually distorted and misleading. Instead of conveying accurate knowledge about Asian Americans, books and curricula more often than not promote misconceptions about them. According to the Asian American Children’s Books Project, which had been organized by the Council on Interracial Books for Children, an examination of sixty-six children’s books published between 1945 and 1975 revealed that, with one or perhaps two exception, they were, “racist, sexist, and elitist.” The eleven Asian American reviewers in the project concluded that “a succinct definition of the image presented would be: Asian Americans are foreigners who all look alike and choose to live together in quaint communities in the midst of large cities and cling to ‘outworn,’ alien customs” and criticized the books for failing “to depict Asian American culture as distinct from Asian culture or some ‘Oriental’ stereotype of it, or on the other hand, as distinct from the culture of white America.”

Among social scientists the question of whether stereotypes have a deleterious effect on people is an open one; among Asian Americans it is generally believed that they have had a profound psychic impact on them. Asian Americans have long known that stereotypes are detrimental: demeaning their dignity by denying them individually, undermining their identity by limiting their self-expression and self-development, engendering ambivalent feelings by instilling self-hatred. For a generation of Asian Americans, Ronald Tanaka’s poem “I Hate My Wife for Her Flat Yellow Face” (1969), captured the anguish of self-contempt stemming from humiliating self-images:

I hate my wife for her flat yellow face
and her fat cucumber legs, but mostly
for her lack of elegance and lack of
intelligence to judith gluck.