Absent the theorization of how racial capitalism underscores the model minority myth the aff is wrong and does not account for the violent structures Asians in the US face

There is an established literature about the racialization of Asian Americans1 in education and its dominant form, the Model Minority (see, e.g., Lee, 2009; Yi et al., 2020). Much of this literature has challenged stereotypes as well as advanced our understandings of Asian American educational life and the positioning of Asian Americans relative to other racial groups. However, I have found our educational theorization has been inadequate for us to fully account for why the racialization of Asian Americans allows us to be positioned and used as Model Minorities. In this paper, I seek to address this conceptual shortcoming by arguing for an Asian American racialization that takes seriously the political economy of racial capitalism (Brown & De Lissovoy, 2011; Chang, 1985; Kelley, 2017; Leonardo, 2012). To do so, I first discuss the racial category of Asian American, and then take up the myth of the Model Minority as the defining form of Asian American racialization in education. I go on to connect the Model Minority to the tropes of Yellow Peril and Orientalism, arguing that our shortcomings of understanding Asian American racialization generally, and in education specifically, require us to develop a different theory of Asian American racialization that is not wholly confined within the boundaries of the United States. Following the racial political economy of Day (2016), I then discuss a conceptualization of Asian American racialization as that of abstract and efficient alien labor, and point to the ways this explains how Asian Americans have been used within racial dynamics in the U.S. I conclude with a discussion of the implications this reconceptuali- zation of Asian American racialization for the construction of the Model Minority in education. Relative to other racial categories, “Asian American” is a recently constructed identity, one that consolidated amid U.S. wars in Korea and Vietnam, the burgeoning Civil Rights movement in the U.S., anti-colonial liberation movements around the world, and shifts in U.S. immigration policies that allowed for a new wave of Asian immigrants post-1965. The term originated among community activist and college students in the late 1960s as part of radical movements for racial justice in the U.S. that included the Black Liberation movement and the movement for Ethnic Studies (Chang, 2017; Ishizuka, 2016). Before then, however, Asian Americans were either referred to as “Orientals” or they were called by their specific, individual national origins (Hong, 2020). In these ways, “Asian American” has always been an identity based on a kind of coalition politics, stitching together significant and far-ranging heterogeneity in politically powerful ways. In 2019 there were over 23 million people of Asian or mixed Asian descent in the United States (or, 5.9% of the total U.S. population) spread across 21 different officially named ethnic and national groups (American Community Survey, 2020). Listed alphabetically using the government’s terms, these include: Asian Indian, Bangladeshi, Bhutanese, Burmese, Cambodian, Chinese, Filipino, Hmong, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Laotian, Malaysian, Mongolian, Nepalese, Okinawan, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, Taiwanese, Thai, Vietnamese, “Other Asian, specified” and “Other Asian, not specified.” A Pew Research Center analysis found that 34% of Asian Americans self-identified as speaking only English at home (the number rises to 65% for those that are U.S. born) (Budiman & Ruiz, 2021), and the largest language groups are Chinese (17%), Hindi (13%), Tagalog (9%), and Vietnamese (7%) (American Community Survey, 2020). Other major Asian language groups include Bengali, Formosan, Gujarati, Hmong, Ilocano, Indonesian, Japanese, Laotian, Malayalam, Mon-Khmer or Cambodian, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu, among others (Chang, 2017). Even though the data illustrates significant heterogeneity within the racial category of Asian American, there are deeper levels of diversity within these groupings. For instance, the ethnic, national, and linguistic category of “Chinese” conceals as much as it reveals. The Han ethnic group officially makes up over 90% of the of Chinese population in China itself. While Mandarin is the official language of the country, there are at least 1,500 “dialects”—supposed off-shoots of Mandarin—that in reality are mutually- unintelligible languages that have less in common with each other than European languages have with each other (French, 2005). This linguistic (and ultimately cultural) diversity does not even include the other 55 non- Han ethnic Chinese minorities like the Uyghurs and Tibetans (Montefiore, 2013). Taiwan is also technically and officially designated as being part of “China,” but it has its own island indigenous peoples (Nesterova, 2019), and the island has experienced different waves of migration from “mainland” China under distinct circumstances that add complexity to that identity (Chang, 2017). Similar histories and complexities exist for most Asian nations. India has a mix of castes, religions, ethnicities, nation-states, languages, and indigen- ous peoples (Oommen, 2004). Japan has indigenous populations of the Ainu people, and it has control of the island of Okinawa—itself a former sovereign kingdom of indigenous island peoples that now struggles against military occupation, environmental degradation, and the colonizing powers of both the United States and Japan (Hibbett, 2019; Murphy-Shigematsu, 2004). The Philippines fundamentally consists of indigenous peoples with multiple languages that were colonized by both Spain and the United States (Herrera, 2015). Indeed, it is important to remember that most Asian Americans have either descended or immigrated directly from countries that, like the Philippines, have struggled with the legacies of colonization and imperialism: the Dutch and Portuguese colonized Indonesia; The British colonized the Malayan peninsula, parts of China, and India; France colonized Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos; and Japan occupied all or parts of many East and Southeast Asian nations during World War II (Yang, 2015). As such, in addition to histories of communities with linguistic, ethnic, religious, class, caste, and indigenous diversity, most Asian Americans have lineages that, somewhere in their past, connect with terrible legacies of colonization and imperialism from foreign powers, colonization of indigenous peoples internally, and imperialist wars. The varying conditions of Asian immigration also matter greatly. For the majority of the current Asian American population, immigration to the United States has largely been structured by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which gave preference to those that already held educational degrees and who had professional skills. The Pew Center estimates that over 98% of Asian Americans either immigrated or are descendants of immigrants after 1965. Current immigration policy gives first preference to immigrants who have immediate family who are permanent residents in the U.S. and second preference to educated professionals. Wealthy immigrants also have the option of investing in U.S. businesses (in the amounts of either $900,000 or $1.8 million) in order to immigrate. On average, spread across both permanent and temporary work visas, over 60% (over 490,000) of the immigrants to the United States per year from 2017 to 2019 have been from Asia. Many of these visas include the H-1B visa, which is the visa heavily used by the technology sector, as well as by investors, bankers, and the entertainment industry (Watsky et al., 2020). These policies and practices have contributed directly to the fact that in 2019, 58.2% of Asian Americans held a bachelor’s degree (United States Census Bureau, 2020). However, in sharp contrast to these more highly educated and wealthier immigrants, refugees from Southeast Asia and their familial networks also make up a sizable and important portion of the Asian American population, and the data about their experiences tells a much different story. The peoples of Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, including the Khmer and Hmong, have been resettled in the United States, fleeing persecution in their home countries after the U.S. military incursion in Southeast Asia ended. This refugee resettlement began in 1975 and has resulted in over 1.1 million refugees being relocated to the U.S. across three decades. More recent Southeast Asian immigrants have arrived almost solely through visas for family or employment, and currently there are over 2.5 million total Southeast Asian Americans, comprising 14% of the broader Asian American community (SEARAC & AAJC Los Angeles, 2020). Nationally, almost 1.1 million Southeast Asian Americans are officially designated “low income,” with 460,000 of those living in poverty. Hmong Americans are one of the poorest groups in the country, with 58% low income and 26% officially living in poverty. For comparison, these rates are essentially double that of white Americans, and they are on par with that of Black Americans. We know that income correlates strongly with educational attainment, and this remains consistent with Southeast Asian Americans. For instance, 2011–2015 data from California (where the high- est concentrations of Southeast Asian Americans live) shows that almost 30% of Southeast Asian Americans have not earned a high school diploma, with Cambodian Americans having the highest rate of 34%. While the total percentage of Asian Americans who hold a bachelor’s degree is over 50%, only 25% of Southeast Asian Americans hold the same degree. Laotian Americans have the lowest rate of higher-education degree attainment (14%), followed closely by Hmong Americans and Cambodian Americans, both at 17% (SEARAC & AAJC Los Angeles, 2020). The conditions faced by Southeast Asian American refugee immigrants vs. that of more privileged and elite Asian American immigrants illustrate a broader trend: As of 2018, Asian Americans had the greatest in-group income inequality in the U.S. (Kochhar & Cilluffo, 2018). There are almost 1.7 million undocumented Asian immigrants, and many have limited English skills. These highly vulnerable populations face housing insecurity and are often relegated to low-wage jobs. Such conditions contribute greatly to 25% of the Asians in New York City and just over 26% of those in Boston living in poverty (Yee, 2021). These kinds of economic class divi- sions are consistent with those that have existed between different Asian American groups and within individual groups historically (Kwong, 1996; Lan, 2011; Lee, 2009; Lew, 2006). The heterogeneity with the racial category of Asian American highlights an important contradiction within the category itself. There is power to be found in the stitching together of a community based on a kind of coalitional politics. If we can say that the Asian American exists as a unitary category, then we can feel the strength in those numbers. However, the broadness of the category does us a disservice because it also masks significant cultural, political, and material fractures within our community as well. The construction of Asian Americans as the Model Minority is built on a similar contradiction, simultaneously upholding the idea of Asian Americans as a monolithically successful group while hiding the diversity of material realities we face. The Asian American educational model minority The Model Minority has been the defining form of racialization for Asian Americans in education. It is the idea that Asian Americans, as a racial group, have been able to overcome any obstacles to succeed educationally, professionally, and racially—making them a “model” racial group to which all other racial groups should aspire (Poon et al., 2016; Yi et al., 2020). The term “model minority” first appeared in popular media in 1966, where in January of that year, the New York Times published an article entitled, “Success Story: Japanese-American Style.” That story was followed that December with a U.S. News and World report article, “Success Story of One Minority in the US” (Lee, 2009). In the 1980s, popular media expanded this view to include Southeast Asian Americans among the examples of Asian American “Whiz Kids” reaching academic success (Lee, 2009; Osajima, 1988). In the 1990s, Korean Americans were upheld as hardworking immigrants with strong families, and in 2006, a prominent columnist for the New York Times lauded Asian American students for being so successful (Lee, 2009). In 2012, a Mercury News headline read, “Asian Workers Dominate Silicon Valley Tech Jobs,” and a 2017 New Yorker column ended by arguing that Asian Americans were one of the most “prosperous, well-educated, and successful ethnic groups in America” (Sullivan, 2017, n.p.) because their hard work, education, and family structure enabled them to overcome a history of discrimination. In 2021, Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley addressed a Korean American nominee for a judicial post, by remarking, “If I’ve learned anything from Korean people, it’s a hard work ethic. And how you can make a lot out of nothing....So I congratulate you and your people” (Pfannenstiel, 2021, n.p.). The Model Minority was a crafted narrative of successful Asian American assimilation doubling as an argument either that racism did not exist in the U.S. or that racism could be overcome through hard work and the right cultural values. In turn, this narrative racialized Asian Americans in the form of an attack on other racial groups for their supposed inability to overcome structural racism and even as an attack against Asian Americans themselves as they struggled to meet the norms established through this identity formation (Lee, 2009; Suzuki, 1977). In education specifically, propagators of the myth of the Model Minority typically treat Asian American students as a monolithic, homogenous group, pointing to their scores on standardized tests, high school graduation rates, college attainment rates, acceptance rates into elite universities, and levels of college degrees as proof of the myth (Lee, 2009; Poon et al., 2016; Yi et al., 2020). Some of the most robust responses to the myth of the Model Minority in education have critically analyzed it through tracing its history, use, and impact within the context of Asian American racialization in the United States, particularly through critical lenses of intersectionality and trans- nationalism (Chang, 2017; Coloma, 2006; Iftikar & Museus, 2018; Yi et al., 2020). Much of this work empirically examines the material conditions and experiences of Asian Americans, paying particular attention to the hetero- geneity within the category itself. For instance, Buenavista et al. (2009), Lee (2005, 2006, 2009), Lew (2006), Louie (2001), Ng et al. (2007), Pang et al. (2003), and Wing (2007), among others, have done important research into the ways that socioeconomic class, gender, ethnic subgroup, cultural capital, and generation of immigration have produced varying educational out- comes and relationships to schooling—including significantly lower educational performance for working class students and students from specific Asian American subgroups. Additionally, most scholars point to the significant impact of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which gave preference to those Asian immigrants that already held educational degrees and who had professional training and skills, which is important in explaining the high number East and South Asian Americans with bachelor’s degrees and other markers of educational attainment, but also important in explaining the educational attainment of their children (Lee, 2009; Watsky et al., 2020). In turn, these analyses have been used to both highlight the material diversity of Asian American educational experiences and deconstruct the ways that a homogenous understanding of the category of “Asian American” invisibilizes the difficult realities faced by many Asian Americans (Budiman & Ruiz, 2021; Chang, 2017). However, it is also important to understand that the stereotype of the Model Minority also racializes Asian Americans as a threat, where the very same stereotypes that are used to uphold us are also used against us. As Okihiro (2014) explains: The Asian work ethic, family values, self-help, culture and religiosity, and intermarriage—all elements of the model minority—can also be read as components of the yellow peril. Asian workers can be “diligent” and “slavish,” “frugal” and “cheap,” “upwardly mobile” and “aggressive,” while Asian families and communities can be “mutual aid” and “self-serving” institutions, “inclusive” and “exclusive” groupings, “multicultural enclaves” and “balkanized ghettoes.”... “Models” can be “perils,” and “perils,” “models” despite their apparent incongruity. (pp. 141–142) History underscores Okihiro’s point, because the depiction of Asian American as a successful Model Minority also made Asians a threat to white America and white entitlement to resources. For instance, in the early 1980s, white fears about the rise of the Japanese automobile industry contributed to a bout of anti-Japanese racism, including the murder of Vincent Chin (a Chinese American) by two white autoworkers in Detroit. In the late 1980s, a white gunman opened fire on a California elementary school, killing five and wounding 32 school children, all of whom were of Cambodian or Vietnamese descent (Chang, 2021). In the 1980s and 1990s Asian American students were framed in popular media as “surging” like a “tidal wave” into top universities (Osajima, 2005, p. 221), and graffiti like “Stop the Asian Hordes” appeared at UC Berkeley. White university stu- dents also expressed resentment at the increased presence of Asian national and Asian American students at this time, joking that MIT (the Massachusetts Institute for Technology) was short for “Made in Taiwan” and that UCLA (the University of California Los Angeles) stood for “University of Caucasians Living Among Asians” (Osajima, 2005). Amid exaggerated reports of Chinese espionage in the U.S. in the 1990s, Chinese American scientist Wen Ho Lee was targeted as a potential spy, fired from his job, and jailed by the U.S. government despite a lack of evidence and the fact that he had been a well-educated, long time, trusted employee of a U.S. Defense lab (Wang, 2007). In the aftermath of the 192 W. AU September 11, 2001 bombing of the World Trade Center, many racist and nationalist Americans ignorantly associated Sikh turbans and dark skin with terrorism—resulting in a rash of attacks against the South Asian American community at the time and contributing to a gun massacre of 6 by a white supremacist at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin in 2012 (Chang, 2021; United Sikhs, 2019). More recently, in the context of China’s ascent as a global economic power, an increase in anti-Chinese rhetoric by then- President Donald Trump, and amid the Covid-19 global pandemic which most likely began in China (Devlin et al., 2021; Salcedo, 2021), the U.S. experienced a massive spike in anti-Asian hate crimes during 2020–2021, the majority of which have targeted Asian women in particular (Jeung et al., 2021; Yellow Horse et al., 2022). Research also shows us that the Model Minority has similarly operated as a threat within education. For instance, the construction of the Asian American Model Minority student has been used against non-white students. The stereotypical Asian American Model Minority student is supposed to be obedient, quiet, studious, and “good,” put in extra hours of work, value education, get high test scores and grade point averages, and attend elite universities (Lee, 2009; Okihiro, 2014). This “model” then gets used, for instance, against African American students who are subject to stereotypical anti-Black constructions of being lazy, uncaring, unintelligent, educational failures with disciplinary problems (Dumas, 2016a, 2016b). As an empirical embodiment of this relational use of the Model Minority threat, research has found that for some Asian American college students, stronger internalization of the Model Minority stereotype predicted stron- ger feelings of anti-Blackness and stronger opposition to affirmative action programs (Yi & Todd, 2021). Additionally, as opposed to being a “positive” stereotype that helps Asian American students, the myth of the Model Minority is in fact a racist stereotype that is used threateningly against Asian American students themselves (Chang, 2017; Iftikar & Museus, 2018; Yi et al., 2020). For instance, we know that several Asian American subgroups (e.g., Filipinx Americans and Southeast Asian Americans) are invisibilized by the Model Minority stereotype, leading to their educational needs being overlooked or ignored (Buenavista et al., 2009; Lee, 2005, 2006). Additionally, Asian American students who do not fit the Model Minority stereotype often silence themselves (Lee, 2009), face feelings of inadequacy and self-hate (McGee, 2018; Yi et al., 2020), and experience strong feelings of either being an impostor (Cokley et al., 2013) or an inauthentic Asian (Luthar et al., 2021). Asian Americans also suffer internalized racism due to the Model Minority and other stereotypes (Hwang, 2021) and demonstrate higher levels of psychological distress and an unwillingness to seek help REVIEW OF EDUCATION, PEDAGOGY, AND CULTURAL STUDIES 193 from others (Gupta et al., 2011; Kim & Lee, 2014). Importantly, the Model Minority stereotype also operates as a form of political threat against Asian Americans, because it effectively casts the legacies of radical resistance and activism that exist in our communities as “not really” Asian American since those legacies don’t match the constructed Model (Ishizuka, 2016; Liu et al., 2008; Maeda, 2009). The constructed Asian American Model Minority student has also been used against White students. As noted above, there is a history of white students complaining about too many Asian American students universities (Dong, 1995; Osajima, 1988), and more recent research confirms that white students still feel that Asian Americans are overrepresented in higher edu- cation (Cabrera, 2014). Other research has found that the Model Minority stereotype increased the likelihood of Asian American college students being viewed by White peers with resentment, envy, and as a threat (Ho & Jackson, 2001), and that White college students disdain Asian students for what they perceive as working too hard (Lin et al., 2005). One study of high school students in California also points to Whiteness being associated with “lower-achievement, laziness, and academic mediocrity,” while Asianness is, “linked with high achievement, hard work, and academic success” (Jimenez & Horowitz, 2013, p. 864). The perceived threat that “successful” Asian American students pose to White students highlights how, ultimately, the myth of the Model Minority partially upends a hege- monic racial-educational order that is supposed to privilege whites above all others (Allred, 2007). In doing so, the threat of the Model Minority— historically and in education—is in many ways a manifestation of the expression of all anti-Asian racism in the United States since the 1800s: Yellow Peril. Yellow Peril is the idea that Asian immigrants globally, and in this case Asian Americans domestically, represent a foreign threat to take over the United States and displace White “Americans” in areas of employment, education, and access to other valued resources, as well as a threat to dis- place Western Civilization with the barbarism of the “Orient” (Day, 2016; Okihiro, 2014). Ultimately, Yellow Peril is based in Orientalism (Said, 1978), a European imperialist binary typology that designates the West as the Occident and the East as the Orient. Within this paradigm, the Occidental represents civilization, cleanliness, goodness, justice, progress, Christianity, and cultural superiority. Conversely, the Oriental is considered to be the opposite: backward, heathen, barbaric, uncivilized, inferior, dirty, scary, and, importantly, alien (Day, 2016; Lee, 2015). To the Occidental, the Oriental represents a constant threat of degenerate hoards threatening to overwhelm the “civilized” West (Said, 1978). The “Oriental” is gendered too, because Orientalism frames Asian women as sexually exotic and particularly lascivious and excludes Asian men from the social construction of Western masculinity (Day, 2016; Lee, 1999). Even though Said’s (1978) original analysis mainly focused on the European construction of Western and Southern Asia, the concept of the Oriental evolved into an expression of Western views of all of Asia and Asians (Iftikar & Museus, 2018; Ngai, 2000). Additionally, early Chinese immigration to the North America set the stage for an “American Orientalism” that, “homogenized Asia as one indistinguishable entity, positioned and defined the West and the East in diametrically opposite terms, and used those distinctions to claim American and Anglo American superiority” (Lee, 1999, p. 239). In many ways, this requiring Asian labor on the one hand, and then finding that labor as threatening on the other, has always been the racial contract (Mills, 2014) for Asian Americans. Early waves of Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean, and South Asian immigrants were, each in their turn, used as cheap labor by white industrialists to work the railroads, mines, farms, canneries, and sawmills, among others. Then, again each in their turn, these communities were systematically targeted as threats to white America because of their labor, through racist arguments that “Orientals” were morally and culturally depraved, dirty, conniving, uncivil- ized, and ultimately unassimilable to whiteness. Historically this resulted in a series of laws excluding Asians from immigration and land ownership, violent white mob attacks on each of these Asian immigrant groups, the burning of Chinatowns and the lynching of Chinese workers, and the incarceration of Japanese Americans and transfer of most of their farms to white agribusiness during WWII (Lee, 2015; Lye, 2005). In contemporary times, we’ve witnessed similar impulses with the above-mentioned periods of anti-Asian attacks. From the early Chinese Coolies working on the rail- roads to the “high tech coolies” (Wang, 2007) we see now, Asian Americans have been valued for their productive labor (hard labor historic- ally and intellectual labor now) and then treated as an Oriental, Yellow Peril threat for that same productive labor—resulting in anti-Asian propa- ganda, restrictive laws, incarceration, and/or violence. However, we still have not full theorized what it is about Asian American racialization that has historically positioned us in such a threatening way. To do so requires we revisit theories of Asian American racialization. Toward a transnational Asian American racialization Historically, Asian American racialization has generally been theorized as being constructed within the paradigm of Black/White power relations in the United States, essentially arguing that Asian American positionality is contingent upon a foundation of anti-Black racism (Bonilla-Silva, 2002; REVIEW OF EDUCATION, PEDAGOGY, AND CULTURAL STUDIES 195 Day, 2016; Kim, 1999; Lye, 2008). One important example that has been used widely is that of Kim (1999). In Kim’s triangulation, Asian Americans are minoritized as non-white but placed in position of privilege relative to Black Americans such that, “White supremacy has pushed [Asian Americans] down, and anti-Blackness has provided the floor beneath which they cannot fall” (Kim, 2018, p. 10). Bonilla-Silva (2002) similarly maps Asian Americans onto a Black/White field, where he suggests that some Asian American subgroups can be classified as “Whites,” some as “Honorary Whites,” and others as “Collective Blacks” (p. 4). Likewise, Ong (1996) discusses how within the context of a Black/White racial discourse, some Asian American subgroups, like successful Chinese Americans, have been ideologically Whitened while others, like working class Cambodians, have been ideologically Blackened. To be clear, there is truth and power in these conceptions since we know that anti-Black racism has been central to racial formation generally in the United States (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995). We also know that the racial formation of Asian Americans has taken place in the context of anti-Black racism, as evidenced in the ways that the Model Minority Stereotype has been wielded against Black people (Chow, 2017) and as evidenced in anti-Black racism amongst some Asian Americans (Yi & Todd, 2021). However, even as the above statements hold true, what I am arguing here is that there are aspects of Asian American racialization that exceed the explanatory power provided by a framework of racialization defined only by a Black/white field based purely on anti-Black racism in the U.S. (Day, 2015, 2016; Lye, 2008; Ng et al., 2007). The central problem with this “Asian American analogical dependency” (Lye, 2008, p. 1735) on anti-Blackness is that it describes “Asian ostracism as deriving from a white-supremacist ideology that has already been put in place by the contradictions of a slave republic” (p. 1733). Further, as Day (2016) explains, such an approach “constrains our ability to elaborate the specificity of Asian racialization that isn’t merely a by-product of a founda- tional antiblackness” (p. 23).2 That is to say, if Asian American racialization is solely built on a foundation of anti-Black racism, then it not only limits how we can understand it on its own terms (Ng et al., 2007), it also leaves significant gaps in explaining aspects of that same racialization. One critical gap is that anti-Asian racism in the U.S. cannot be explained entirely through a lens of foundational anti-Blackness. Rather, as discussed above, anti-Asian racism in the U.S. is built on an ideological legacy that includes Orientalist racialization of Asian Americans as both alien and a threat (a threat, I have argued here, exists within the Model Minority stereotype and Yellow Peril). Asian American racialization thus in part arises from the European imperialist project of Orientalism—a project that, while linked to the enslavement of African peoples through White suprem- acy and systems of empire, originated outside of the Americas. In this sense, while anti-Asian racism in the U.S. is in part born of domestic racial formations clearly connected to anti-Blackness, it is also carries with it a fundamental, underlying conception of Asian Americans that is also trans- national in origin. We therefore cannot fully explain or understand anti- Asian racism if our analysis is kept strictly within the theoretical confines of the continental U.S. As Day (2016) explains: ...[T]he racialization of Asian Americans and Asian Canadians has unfolded as a parallel evolution of yellow peril to model minority.... This mirrored arc of Asian racialization, therefore, cannot be entirely attributable to an inherited legacy or second-order version of antiblack racism given the absence of a similar regime of plantation-based slavery in Canada ... To put it another way, a transnational framework contradicts an understanding of anti-Asian racism as solely derivative of a prototypical racialization of blackness. (p. 23) It is important to recognize that in the field of education Coloma (2006) does call for a turn toward transnationalism in Asian American racializa- tion, and that Iftikar and Museus (2018) also argue for a transnational Asian American racialization and do not reduce anti-Asian racism to anti- Black racism. However, despite these important advances, we still lack a more robust theory of the racialization of Asian Americans in education that attends to the role of Asian immigrant labor as part of global racial capitalism. Day’s (2016) theorization helps us do just that. Asian, alien, and abstract labor Day (2016) suggests a theorization of Asian racialization that is “translational but distinctively national” (p. 17) and directly linked to racial capitalism by proposing a different racial triangular framework for North America: Native, settler, and alien labor. This framing is critical because it enables us to understand what it is about the racialization of Asian Americans, as a Model Minority (and as Yellow Peril), that has positioned us to be used as a threat. The first two points of this triangular framework, Native and settler, are overall relatively consistent with other work in the area of settler-colonial studies, which generally seek to account for the col- onization of North America by Whites Europeans, the historical and ongoing processes of dispossession of indigenous peoples, struggles in the establishment and maintenance of indigenous sovereignty, and the main- tenance of a settler-colonial state (Coulthard, 2014; Tuck & Yang, 2012). However, Day’s (2015, 2016, 2021) work also departs from previous the- orizing of racialization in important ways. For instance, Day’s designation argues against categorizing Asian immigrants as settlers. Instead, Day (2016) suggests that, “[s]imilar to African Americans, Asians represented an alien labor force that mixed with Indigenous land to transform it into white property and capital” (p. 31). This is not to imply that Asian immi- grants are absolved of potential complicity with the settler colonialism, for as Saranillio (2013) explains: While migration in and of itself does not equate to colonialism, migration to a settler colonial space, where Native lands and resources are under political, ecological, and spiritual contestation, means the political agency of immigrant communities can bolster a colonial system initiated by White settlers. (p. 286) It is also important to note that Day (2016) recognizes that Hawaii is a specific case where several waves of Asian immigrant labor, combined with land ownership, has evolved into Asian Americans there assuming status as settlers (see also, Okamura & Fujikane, 2013; Saranillio, 2013). However, distinguishing the positionality of alien labor in North America as distinct from the settler recognizes that Asian immigrant labor exists as “willing or unwitting participants in a settler colonial structure that is driven to eliminate Indigenous people” (Day, 2015, p. 21), while also recognizing that “their racialized vulnerability and disposability supports a settler colonial project” (p. 21). To be clear, in grouping Black and Asian Americans together as alien labor, Day (2015, 2016, 2021) does not suggest that the racialization of Asian and Black Americans is equivalent or even similar. Day (2015) is expressly cognizant that this triangulation represents a significant departure from the Afro-pessimist arguments about the absolute primacy of anti- Blackness in all forms of racialization in the U.S., as well as arguments about enslaved Africans only existing as property and not also as labor (Bilge, 2020; Winnubst, 2020). Rather, Day (2016) argues that, “the diver- gent historical and economic contexts of Asian and African labor highlight the heterogeneity contained within an alien position” (p. 31). In an exten- sive treatment of this issue, Day goes on to discuss how Asian and Black alien labor in North America were treated in different ways specific to racial, economic, cultural, and historical contexts. Specifically, Day notes that Asian labor came to North America just as the economy built around chattel slavery began to decline in the 1830s. The flexibility provided by an immigrant workforce, as opposed to an enslaved one, “inoculated Asians from assuming the status of unfree labor” (p. 31). Indeed, as Jung (2008) observes, early Chinese labor was “viewed as a natural advancement from chattel slavery ... ” (p. 6). Day (2016) goes on to explain that historically “a logic of exclusion is the prerequisite for the recruitment of alien labor” (p. 34, original emphasis), but that exclusion has taken different forms for Asian and Black labor in North America. Whereas chattel slavery relied on segregation and 198 W. AU Jim Crow laws (forms of exclusion internal to the United States), Asian exclusion mainly took the form of border control and immigration policy (e.g. the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882), in what Day refers to as a “form of Jim Crow in a transnational context” (p. 32). Day further argues that because African Americans were not immigrants who could be subject to deportation, but also could not be biologically assimilated by White settlers, they were treated as an “undisposable alien labor population” (p. 33, ori- ginal emphasis) that could only be dealt with either by internal exclusion, “domestic social control” (p. 33), or death. Conversely, for Asian immi- grants, “the settler state produces a less fixed and more volatile racialization” (p. 33) that not only allowed for them to be controlled through immigration and exclusion at the border but also “inhibited Asian exposure to more sustained domestic logics of racial exclusion and elimination” (p. 33) faced by Blacks. Day’s (2016) overall point is, then, at least 3-fold. One is to emphasize the heterogeneity of racialization within the category of alien labor in a way to account for the specifically different treatments of Black and Asian labor in the United States. By extension, another is to suggest that this het- erogeneity is necessary to understand that the racialization of Asian alien labor cannot be fully grasped solely through a lens of “prototypical anti- blackness” (p. 31) because that racialization has been both national and transnational in nature. Third, is to explain that “the vicissitudes of Asian racialization are primarily shaped by the evolving economic landscape of settler colonialism within a global economy” (p. 31). This, in turn, orients us toward what Day argues is the fundamental framing for Asian racializa- tion in North America: an association with abstract labor. Abstract labor is a form of labor coined by Marx (1967) in Capital. Ever the dialectician, Marx argued that every commodity contains two types of labor within it—concrete and abstract—and that these two types of labor manifest in commodities in different, but related, ways. For Marx, concrete labor is connected to the production of use value within a commodity (how “useful” something is), and this in turn is connected to the qualitative value of a commodity (something being of high- or low-quality construc- tion). Abstract labor, on the other hand, is connected to the quantitative value in a commodity (how much something is “worth”), which can be measured in money. Understanding commodities as the expression of a dialectical unity between concrete and abstract labor is important in a Marxist analysis because it allows us to demystify the relations of capitalist production present in any commodity. Rather than separating the, “concreteness of labor, commodities, and nature, on the one hand, and the abstractness of money and finance, on the other” (Day, 2016, p. 14), a uni- fied view helps us see that overall value is not just generated by mysterious REVIEW OF EDUCATION, PEDAGOGY, AND CULTURAL STUDIES 199 forces of the market or controlled by far away financiers and investors, but instead is generated by workers and materials through a combination of the quality of what they produce and how long they take to produce it. In a Marxian view, then, efficiency—less time spent on production— becomes a key aspect for generating value, because the more efficient a worker is in production, the more value can be gained from the commod- ity. Day (2016, 2021) thus argues that abstract labor and efficiency are the key to understanding the racialization of Asians as alien labor in North America, where Asians have been associated with “the abstract dimensions of capitalism through labor time” (Day, 2016, p. 16) either as cheap or effi- cient labor. Day (2021) also clarifies how this association of Asianness with abstract labor helps us reframe the racialization of Asian American threat into one based on a form of productive efficiency that disrupts the relations of capitalist production, explaining that: ... [I]n North America, Asians have personified a destructive value regime rooted in the excessive efficiency of their labor, whether in conflicts between capital and labor against the backdrop of Reconstruction, or in fears over Japanese agricultural monopolies during the early-twentieth century, or in the evisceration of the US auto industry by Japanese competition in the 1980s....Moreover, the passage of neoliberal immigration reforms in 1965 that favored Asian immigrants from investor and managerial classes, alongside the rise of Asian economies, has further reinforced the identification of Asians with the speculative dynamism of finance capitalism. (n.p.) Thus, the “menacing foreignness” (Day, 2021, n.p.) lurking behind both the Model Minority and Yellow Peril tropes creates a form of dehumanization such that Asian Americans can be “...reduced to an economic func- tionality based on labor efficiency, identified not with the qualitative substance of their bodies but with the quantitative rate of their labor” (Day, 2021, n.p.). In this way we see that, ultimately, “ ... ‘yellow peril’ and the ‘model minority’ stereotype function as complementary aspects of the same form of racialization, in which economic efficiency is the basis for exclusion or assimilation” (Day, 2016, p. 7, see also, Lye, 2005). The raciali- zation of Asian Americans as efficient through their association with abstract labor, thus is the basis for their positioning as an ever-present, racial threat expressed through the construction of the Model Minority. Reframing the model minority in education Following Day (2016, 2021), the form of racialization of Asian Americans that I have argued for here—as efficient workers associated with abstract labor—allows us to understand the Asian American Model Minority in education and its use as a threat against all racialized groups in a new way. Whereas Black students and other non-Asian American students of color have been constructed as culturally deficient to explain their disparate 200 W. AU educational outcomes (Blanton, 2003; Ladson-Billings, 2017; Lee, 2009), we can now see that the Asian American Model Minority student has been constructed as culturally efficient to explain their educational success. That is to say that, within the myth, the Asian American Model Minority achieves in education because they are supposedly more efficient with their educational labor than other groups, and that this efficiency is explained by stereotypes about Asian culture. The possibility of this construction is cre- ated through the association of Asian Americans with abstract, efficient labor because the Asian American subject is functionally being abstracted from the concrete conditions faced by Asian American students and their communities. Higher test scores, graduation rates, and college attainment for Asian American students are thus articulated through of a form of raci- alization that masks the heterogeneous material conditions that produced those educational outcomes for specific groups in favor of a myth that the homogenous Asian American Model Minority simply works harder, can achieve more with less than Whites, and can even achieve more than other peoples of color despite also experiencing a history of racism and discrim- ination in the United States. The myth of Asian American cultural efficiency is thus used oppositionally as proof of the cultural deficiency of others, because it appears to partially disrupt the white supremacist racial order of educational labor. Understanding the Asian American Model Minority racialized as abstract, efficient labor also helps illuminate an intersection of race and neoliberalism in education. Importantly, some scholars have already connected the Model Minority stereotype directly to neoliberalism. Lee (2009), for instance, noted that: The continuing dominance of the model minority stereotype reflects the fact that the stereotype continues to support the rhetoric of the achievement ideology. Asian Americans as model minorities are the ideal neoliberal subject—motivated, self- sufficient, and successful. The model minority success of Asian Americans is interpreted as evidence that markets are neutral and color-blind. (p. 11). Similarly, Jun (2011), argues that, through the Model Minority, Asia(n) Americans have come to embody the neoliberal theories of human capital, individual entrepreneurship, and self-regulation in the post-1965 era of Asian immigration to the U.S. The theorizing of Asian American racialization presented here buttresses these arguments, since it identifies that labor efficiency is central to how Asian American Model Minority success is con- structed as individual merit based on hard work, rendering potential structural barriers as negligible or non-existent. Bringing this line of analysis to bear in education is important because if, as Lee (2009) suggests above, the Asian American Model Minority represents the “ideal neoliberal subject” (p. 11), then we can now also see that the Asian American Model Minority student comes to represent the ideal neoliberal educational subject. In this construction, Asian American student success is explained by their supposed ability to work hard and faster and triumph over their peers in the free market competition of individual achievement, all due to the excessive efficiency of their educational labor. The Asian American Model Minority student racialized as educationally efficient labor thus becomes the physical and cultural embodiment of meritocracy—the myth that all it takes to succeed in the United States is hard work (Lemann, 1999). This, in turn, also explains the positionality of some conservative Asian Americans, who in coalition with conservative whites, have attacked affirmative action programs as discriminatory. We can interpret conservative Asian American outrage at perceived discrimination as a combination of their own internalized belief in the racist Model Minority stereotype (Poon et al., 2019; Yi & Todd, 2021) and feelings that they or their children are not be rightly rewarded for what they perceive as the efficiency of their own educational labor. Relatedly, Asian American students in higher education who feel self-hate and isolation if they do not live up to the Model Minority stereotype (Gupta et al., 2011; Kim & Lee, 2014) can be explained as them feeling like they are not efficient enough to fit into their own racialization as Asian Americans. The association with efficient productivity and abstract labor ultimately dehumanizes Asian Americans, and this dehumanization points to how the Asian American Model Minority in education (and society) is dependent on the fungibility of Asian American labor. Fungibility is a legal and eco- nomic term that refers to the interchangeability and substitution of one thing for another, and it signals the way that economic systems require abstraction and homogenization in order to establish markets where one thing can be exchanged for another (Ong, 2016; Winnubst, 2020). Looked at dialectically, fungibility implies both a usefulness or value of something and a disposability or a willingness to exchange that same thing. In this light, we might understand the history of Asian Americans being both val- ued and despised for their labor that I described previously as the Asian American racial contract (Mills, 2014), as an embodiment of the fungibility of Asian American labor: Each specific Asian immigrant group was used for their labor, and when that labor was construed as a threat, one group was exchanged for another. In this way, Asian American fungibility is also at the heart of anti-Asian violence because Orientalist Yellow Peril relies on the Western construction of an abstracted, homogenous Asian “Oriental” such that any Asian American subgroup can be cast as a target of violence, incarceration, or exclusion depending upon historical, political, cultural, or economic conditions. Indeed, the myth of the Asian American Model Minority in education and society is built upon an abstracted homogeneity that renders Asian Americans fungible such that the educational and eco- nomic success of one subgroup can be substituted in exchanges as being true for all groups.3 This abstraction and fungibility of Asian American educational labor thus illuminates how the myth of the Model Minority invisibilizes the varied educational experiences and educational outcomes of specific Asian American subgroups and how the myth has been leveraged in a threatening manner against all racial groups.