The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority (Politics and Society in Modern America, 119)

There's a little-known truth about the model minority myth that I just started appreciating as a Chinese person in the US much more deeply after reading this book.And when you appreciate this truth, you'll probably notice greater complexities in your identity and upbringing, such as anti-blackness, classism, and white supremacy.One insight from this book pinpoints how Chinese actually helped create the Model Minority Myth in the 1940s. My jaw slammed through the ground. I was like waking up to a legacy of oppressing and being oppressed.I highly recommend this book for any Chinese in America. Agreed that it's a bit dry and therefore hard to synthesize the dense material. I read this as part of a reading group in the grassroots org Rad Chinese where you can find gently digested recorded online summaries and discussions of the book.

Excellent information

Excellently written and informative. Great topic that puts a more of race into perspective.

This book was informative but dry as boot leather. I had to read it for a class. I personally didn't like it.

Such an important and eye opening book.

Great content but a little dry. Very much a history book.

Great read!

I can't speak to the experience of Chinese-Americans but I can speak the Japanese-American one. The author seems to ignore the fact that communities can have there own conception of what is good and right outside of what the broader society may think. She doesn't seem to grasp that the negative values the yogore embodied were antithetical to Japanese culture. That it was a negative to Americans was secondary. The problem with academics who desire to portray minorities as victims or pawns is that they give them no agency and that is the biggest problem with this book.