CVK
One of our readers objected to my calling this BusinessWeek article “totally stupid” in our links post:

lavanya:
I kind of resent the way MMW completely dismisses the article by calling it “totally stupid” and then not qualifying why. Mind you, I’m no defender of the model minority myth but I noticed how you guys completely avoided engaging in any thoughtful discussion on your criticisms of the article. Calling it “totally stupid” is downright lazy on your part. You might as well have headlined this article with, “You Stupid Indians Need to Know Your Real Place.”

My response was really long so I figured hey, why not reproduce it here as a post rather than letting it linger in the comments section, since not everyone reads the comments? Besides, the topic of positive stereotypes has been coming up a lot lately on MMW. I might as well weigh in on it. So here’s my response:

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lavanya, point taken. These link posts are generated automatically when we bookmark pages in del.icio.us and we only have room for about 40 words to use as a description. Still, I probably could have come up with something more intelligent than “totally stupid.”

This was also one of those cases where I assume that most people reading MMW are already familiar with our belief system and have read a lot of past blog posts and listened to our podcasts, and would immediately know why I thought it was “stupid,” because we’re always going on about the pitfalls of positive stereotypes. But of course, not everyone falls into that category and we shouldn’t assume that. New people discover MMW everyday.

If you are familiar with our stuff, you’d know that the last thing we’re suggesting is “You Stupid Indians Need to Know Your Real Place.” What the “totally stupid” referred to was the way the author of the article not only accepts, but CELEBRATES positive stereotypes and the model minority myth. And then also attributes these positive stereotypes to some kind of innate cultural capital possessed only by Indians and Indian-Americans. [more after the jump…]

This kind of thinking completely ignores structural issues. Wadhwa proclaims that Indians “received no special treatment or support,” but ignores the fact that only certain types of Indian people have been allowed into the country in the first place. Ever since the 1965 Immigration Act, the immigration system has been designed to give heavy preference to foreigners with education and skills, and those who already have relatives in the country. So the people who find their way to the U.S. are not some random sampling of people from a specific country: they are often highly educated folks who already have a support system here via their relatives — they’re not starting completely from scratch.

Also, if Wadhwa believes that Indians have an inherently superior work ethic as part of their culture, does that also mean that he believes other groups have inherently *inferior* cultures? You see how positive stereotypes all have an ugly flipside?

If you get a chance, definitely check out episode 18 of Addicted to Race and listen to our interview with Alice Sandosharaj. She does an excellent job of explaining why positive stereotypes are not only dehumanizing to the group being stereotyped, but how they exist at the expense of another community: usually blacks and Latinos. She also explains how it is unfair to pit, for example, Asian-Americans against African-Americans, because you simply cannot compare a group made up of large proportion of highly-educated recent immigrants with a group that has been politically, social and economically oppressed for centuries. Here’s the link:
http://www.addictedtorace.com/?p=33

I would also recommend checking out the lengthy discussions that have been going on among MMW readers for the past few days about positive stereotypes here.