Amid worries that the Chinese exclusion laws from the late 1800s would hurt an allyship with China in the war against imperial Japan, the Magnuson Act was signed in 1943, allowing 105 Chinese immigrants into the U.S. Many scholars have argued that some Asians only started to 'make it' when the discrimination against them lessened - and only when it was politically convenient. and gaining citizenship and have been sent to incarceration camps, Kim pointed out, but all that is different than the segregation, police brutality and discrimination that African-Americans have endured. 'Sullivan is right that Asians have faced various forms of discrimination, but never the systematic dehumanization that black people have faced during slavery and continue to face today.' Asians have been barred from entering the U.S. 'Racism that Asian-Americans have experienced is not what black people have experienced,' Kim said. These arguments falsely conflate anti-Asian racism with anti-black racism, according to Kim. 'And it was immediately a reflection on black people: Now why weren't black people making it, but Asians were?' 'During World War II, the media created the idea that the Japanese were rising up out of the ashes and proving that they had the right cultural stuff,' said Claire Jean Kim, a professor at the University of California, Irvine. The effect? Minimizing the role racism plays in the persistent struggles of other racial/ethnic minority groups - especially black Americans. Since the end of World War II, many white people have used Asian-Americans and their perceived collective success as a racial wedge. It's very retro in the kinds of points he made.' 'The thing about the Sullivan piece is that it's such an old-fashioned rendering. Much of Wu's work focuses on dispelling the 'model minority' myth, and she's been tasked repeatedly with publicly refuting arguments like Sullivan's, which, she said, are incessant. Wu, an Asian-American studies professor at Indiana University and the author of The Color of Success. 'It's like the Energizer Bunny,' said Ellen D. This strategy, she said, involves '1) ignoring the role that selective recruitment of highly educated Asian immigrants has played in Asian American success followed by 2) making a flawed comparison between Asian Americans and other groups, particularly Black Americans, to argue that racism, including more than two centuries of black enslavement, can be overcome by hard work and strong family values.'

'Sullivan's comments showcase a classic and tenacious conservative strategy,' Janelle Wong, the director of Asian American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, said in an email.

And at the root of Sullivan's pernicious argument is the idea that black failure and Asian success cannot be explained by inequities and racism, and that they are one and the same this allows a segment of white America to avoid any responsibility for addressing racism or the damage it continues to inflict.

Not only inaccurate, his piece spreads the idea that Asian-Americans as a group are monolithic, even though parsing data by ethnicity reveals a host of disparities for example, Bhutanese-Americans have far higher rates of poverty than other Asian populations, like Japanese-Americans. Sullivan's piece, rife with generalizations about a group as vastly diverse as Asian-Americans, rightfully raised hackles. What gives? It couldn't possibly be that they maintained solid two-parent family structures, had social networks that looked after one another, placed enormous emphasis on education and hard work, and thereby turned false, negative stereotypes into true, positive ones, could it? It couldn't be that all whites are not racists or that the American dream still lives?' 'Today, Asian-Americans are among the most prosperous, well-educated, and successful ethnic groups in America.

Closed hands means cheap myth