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The N-Word: interviews by the Washington Post

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The N-Word: interviews by the Washington Post

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These videos are all about the use of the n-word and how it makes people feel. The n-word is used n The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn a lot, making it a very controversial novel. There were many different views on the word, but they all had the same general idea that there feelings depended on the way its use and who is saying it. They make you question your choices and rethink things that may have become normal to you in your everyday life. These videos also make you question society and how messed up it can be, just like Morrison mentions Huck did in the book.

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Explore perspectives.
Select three to see a custom video.

Start your own conversation

Add a question or use one of the submitted questions to start a conversation with your social network. (Note: The n-word has not been filtered from submissions.)

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n-word; donte stallworth; neal brennan; dave chappelle show; nfl; national football leagues bans nword; nfl bans the nword; nigger; nigga; nigger vs nigga; kkk; ku klux klan; jay z; oprah;

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The n-word: An interactive project exploring a singular word

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After the National Football League made the controversial decision to ban the n-word on the field this year, a team of Washington Post journalists explored the history of the word, its evolution and its place in American vernacular today.

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The Amazing Troubling Book by Toni Morrison

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The Amazing Troubling Book by Toni Morrison

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This source mentions the race issue in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and the use of the n-word just like the other sources. It brings up the fact that some school were going as far as taking the book out of school lesson plans because of the word. However, this focuses mostly on Huck's emotional state and how much he goes through for being so young. I believe that this is also a very important piece to the novel. Morrison makes many great points about how society is ruining this child and affecting his view on the world around him for the worse. She also discusses the way Huck is going to deal with life and emotions without Jim around anymore which is a great thing to think about.

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What kind of Asian are you? Alex Dang slam poetry

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What kind of Asian are you? Alex Dang slam poetry

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Alex Dang talks about stereotyping and and the effects it has. He talks about the uses of the words"chink" and "gook" and how they are incredibly offensive terms, just like the n-word is for some as the Washington Post interviews mention. The stereotypes in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn give Huck an incorrect view on Jim and other slaves originally, and he does not realize how offensive he is being throughout the book, and he doesn't understand that the n-word could be offensive. Dang says that he never saw any Asian representation or different Asian cultures being represented or recognized on TV as he grew up, an it had a big effect on his view of himself as a child, as Morrison said that Huck was dealing with his views being affected by society as well. I enjoyed his poetry very much because it was effective and makes you think about racial stereotypes and issues others may have that you don't have. This source shows how we have gone  backwards with racism in America.

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Alex Dang - "What Kind of Asian Are You?" (NPS 2013)

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Subscribe to Button! New video daily: http://bit.ly/buttonpoetry If you loved this poem, check out Sam Cook: http://bit.ly/1qP8vvM Alex Dang, performing for Portland, OR at the 2013 National Poetry Slam. Follow Button on Facebook: http://bit.ly/SG5Xm0 About Button: Button Poetry is committed to developing a coherent and effective system of production, distribution, promotion and fundraising for spoken word and performance poetry.

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Native Americans have been discriminated against since people first started settling in North America a long time ago. I've been learning about this discrimination in my history class and this discrimination has not gone away. The other sources are generally about racism people of color have faced from white people, but this source shows that discrimination is not limited to whites against POC. Some people of color judge other people of color, and whites judge other whites. What kind of Asian are you?  discusses the stereotyping of Asian people and Indian Education  does that as well with stereotyping of Native Americans, such as their drinking habits. This shows how we have not moved on from our discrimination against the people who lived here before us.

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FIRST GRADE / My hair was too short and my U.S. Government glasses were horn-rimmed, ugly, and all that first winter in school, the other Indian boys chased me from one corner of

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Racism: Skipping Stones Magazine  written by 13 year old, Paul Shin (source found on MARVEL)

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Racism: Skipping Stones Magazine  written by 13 year old, Paul Shin (source found on MARVEL)

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Here we have a young boy explaining his experience with racism, and commenting on how different parts of the country react differently to race and other cultures. He does not understand how people live in the same country but different areas are so unlike others, and neither do I. It is similar to Alexie's piece in the sense that the discrimination wasn't limited to white people against POC. Many whites in America also make fun of other white people from different countries for the way they speak and pronounce words. These two sources, along with The N-Word, build on each other in that they show multiple different ways of being offensive and racist through words, whether it is name-calling, judging someone's looks, or judging them based on traditions and other stereotypical behavior. It exposes how we are not teaching our kids to not treat people different because of their race.

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This poem is based on good feelings the author had with bonding with multiple races together, whereas the rest of the sources focus on the stereotyping and judgement based on race and culture. It makes a nice contrast to the everything bad and upsetting you hear so often today. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck takes a little while to treat Jim as more than a slave but an actual person and begin to care about him. In this source when an Arabic woman was found crying on the floor,  women from all races helped cheer her up despite their differences. It was a beautiful story to show that not everyone in America is racist and can get along together.

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User account The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets.

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Stop trying to silence us black women on racism: Washington Post

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Stop trying to silence us black women on racism: Washington Post

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The discussion on racism in America is a controversial  and many people in the country like to bring up the issue and share their opinions. However, many black women across the nation, both in high power positions and low power positions, feel that they are not being respected and get shut down when they try and share their thoughts. They have found that others who have shared the same opinions who are not POC, do not get the same disrespect and negative attention brought to them. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn shows that if a black man was walking around by himself then he would be taken in with his freedom being threatened and nobody would believe he was a free man unless a white person was there to confirm it. This is similar because when these black women try to say something, people bring a lot of negative attention to it and things like their jobs can be threatened , yet if a white person says the same thing then they are simply stating their opinion.

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Lately, the White House and big corporations seem to be angrier about the words "racist" and "white supremacist" than they are about racism and white supremacy.

A Twitterstorm of controversy erupted after ESPN host Jemele Hill called President Trump a "white supremacist." In response, ESPN publicly censured her, saying her comments "do not represent the views of the network," and that she had recognized her actions were inappropriate. Reportedly, ESPN even tried to take Hill off the air. But that wasn't enough for the White House. Acting in her official capacity, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that Hill's tweets were "certainly something that I think is a fireable offense."

That's the press secretary for the same man who called former president Barack Obama a racist when he worked for NBC. The same man who dragged his feet when asked to disavow the Ku Klux Klan, and who is now doubling down on his claim that "both sides" were responsible for the violence at a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, which ended in a woman being run over allegedly by a man with white supremacist ideologies.

This morning, Trump added to the pressure on ESPN, tweeting:

ESPN is paying a really big price for its politics (and bad programming). People are dumping it in RECORD numbers. Apologize for untruth!

- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 15, 2017

Black women helped send white men into space. And won back-to-back tennis titles. And changed the makeup industry. We have even made our way into the White House. But lately, it seems those in power would rather have black women around the world sit down and shut up, especially about the racism, sexism and white supremacy that threaten our daily lives.

Hill is hardly the first public figure to call Trump a bigot or white supremacist. My colleague Dana Milbank called candidate Trump a bigot and a racist back in 2015. This week, Miss Texas Margana Wood, during the question-and-answer portion of the Miss America pageant, dragged Trump for his response in Charlottesville. She's been safe from Trump's itchy Twitter fingers. Yet Hill, a black woman, is the only one the Trump administration wants fired from her job for saying so.

The silencing of prominent black women who speak out about racism isn't limited to America. In Great Britain, L'Oreal Paris recently fired black transgender model Munroe Bergdorf for posting social media messages about white privilege. Labour Party lawmaker Diane Abbott has spoken about the increased racism and sexism she's faced as a member of Parliament, even to the point of a Tory councillor sharing a picture of her as an ape with lipstick.

When it comes to the fight for social justice and equality, don't believe the Pepsi-fied version that would rather erase and replace black women with the likes of Kendall Jenner. Black women have been on the front lines against racism, sexism and white supremacy since the beginning.

For more, watch the video above. In short, we weren't silenced then, and we won't be silenced now.

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Opinion | #IStandWithJemele: Stop trying to silence us black women on racism

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Lately, the White House and big corporations seem to be angrier about the words "racist" and "white supremacist" than they are about racism and white supremacy. A Twitterstorm of controversy erupted after ESPN host Jemele Hill called President Trump a "white supremacist."

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Bank to pay $10.6M over loan discrimination charges

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Bank to pay $10.6M over loan discrimination charges

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Bancorp South discriminated against minorities mortgage loan. This is an example of how some Americans are still highly racist today. The n-word was used in a purposefully rude way and was a major cause in this lawsuit. It builds further on the discussion of the way word is used like the Washington Post asked about. It is offensive to many and others do not think of the way the word can effect someone, as Alex Dang points out, or the way it can even effect themselves.

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BancorpSouth( BXS)has agreed to pay a $10.6 million settlement of allegations the Mississippi-based regional bank used discriminatory mortgage lending practices that harmed African Americans and other minorities, federal officials said Wednesday.

A federal court complaint filed by the Department of Justice and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau alleged bank officials told loan officers to "turn [] down" minority mortgage applicants more quickly than whites, and avoid giving "borderline" applicants credit assistance that other mortgage seekers might receive.

BancorpSouth disagreed with the allegations and did not admit liability, but agreed to filing of the proposed consent order.

However, the court complaint charged that an audio recording of a internal BancorpSouth meeting around September 2012 "clearly articulates the bank's policy or practice to reject minority applicants more quickly than white applicants, as well as the bank's perception of African Americans."

During the session, a BancorpSouth manager instructed loan officers and processors that mortgage applications from minorities and others the bank viewed as "protected class" members should be "turned down" in 21 days, the complaint said. "Borderline" customers should also be turned down quickly, the manager said, while applications from whites were not subject to shorter reviews, the complaint alleged.

"In discussing the explicitly race-based denial policy, a loan officer commented that 'they need to get their credit up,' and "stop paying their damn bills late,' and then laughed," the complaint charged.

As meeting participants discussed the bank's hiring of an African American employee, the complaint said a loan processor cautioned, 'don't use the n-word,' the complaint alleged.

"A few moments later, a bank employee quipped, 'what's up, niggas!' the complaint alleged, saying meeting participants laughed at the racial remarks.

Federal officials and the complaint alleged BancorpSouth violated federal housing and equal credit opportunity acts by:

Illegally redlining in Memphis, the market from which it receives the most applications, by structuring business to avoid and discourage mortgage applications from consumers in minority areas from at least 2011 to 2013.

Improperly having one of the bank's lending units deny mortgage and other loan applications from African Americans at higher rates than whites.

Discriminating against African American borrowers by charging them higher annual percentage rates than whites with similar loan qualifications.

"When banks discriminate on the basis of race, they violate our civil rights laws and threaten the foundation of a fair economy," said Vanita Gupta, the head of the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division.

The CFPB found support for the allegations by sending testers to several BancorpSouth branches to ask about mortgages. CFPB Director Richard Cordray said the findings showed that the bank's mortgage lending process "harmed the people who were overcharged or denied their dream of ownership based on their race."

BancorpSouth operates branches in eight states and had total assets of $13.9 billion as of March 31. In a written statement, the bank called the proposed consent order, which requires federal court approval, "a positive development" that "is in the best long-term interest of our customers, employees, and shareholders."

BancorpSouth also said it has acted since 2012 to enhance its compliance management systems, reduce its fair lending risk, and increase lending in minority areas.

"The settlement is an opportunity for the Bank to avoid protracted litigation with the DOJ and CFPB, and to instead devote additional resources to continue serving the communities in which it operates, including helping meet the credit needs of all borrowers in those communities," the bank said.

BancorpSouth added that it reserved $13.8 million during the first quarter of 2016 for the settlement.

If the consent order wins approval, the bank will pay $4 million in direct loan subsidies to minority areas in Memphis, at least $800,000 to fund community programs, outreach and credit repair, $2.78 million to African Americans unlawfully denied or overcharged for loans, and a $3 million penalty.
Follow USA TODAY reporter Kevin McCoy on Twitter: @kmccoynyc

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Bank to pay $10.6M over loan discrimination charges

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BancorpSouth( BXS)has agreed to pay a $10.6 million settlement of allegations the Mississippi-based regional bank used discriminatory mortgage lending practices that harmed African Americans and other minorities, federal officials said Wednesday.

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The real reasons the U.S. became less racist toward Asian Americans : Washington Post

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The real reasons the U.S. became less racist toward Asian Americans : Washington Post

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It has been discovered that over time, Americans have become less racist towards Asian-Americans, but for a more selfish reason than many may think. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the king and the duke treated Huck and Jim the same when they were not pulling schemes, although still not in a good way. The king and the duke then later used Jim to tend to their on personal needs. This is what Americans did with Asian-Americans during the Cold War. However, many became less racist towards Asians as a way to put down African-American people. It shows how we moved forwards, sideways and backwards in society.

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Between 1940 and 1970, something remarkable happened to Asian Americans. Not only did they surpass African Americans in average household earnings, but they also closed the wage gap with whites.

Many people credit this upward mobility to investments in education. But according to a recent study by Brown University economist Nathaniel Hilger, schooling rates among Asian Americans didn't change all that significantly during those three decades. Instead, Hilger's research suggests that Asian Americans started to earn more because their fellow Americans became less racist toward them.
[The real secret to Asian American success was not education]
How did that happen? About the same time that Asian Americans were climbing the socioeconomic ladder, they also experienced a major shift in their public image. At the outset of the 20th century, Asian Americans had often been portrayed as threatening, exotic and degenerate. But by the 1950s and 1960s, the idea of the model minority had begun to take root. Newspapers often glorified Asian Americans as industrious, law-abiding citizens who kept their heads down and never complained.

Some people think that racism toward Asians diminished because Asians "proved themselves" through their actions. But that is only a sliver of the truth. Then, as now, the stories of successful Asians were elevated, while the stories of less successful Asians were diminished. As historian Ellen Wu explains in her book, " The Color of Success," the model minority stereotype has a fascinating origin story, one that's tangled up in geopolitics, the Cold War and the civil rights movement.

To combat racism, minorities in the United States have often attempted to portray themselves as upstanding citizens capable of assimilating into mainstream culture. Asian Americans were no different, Wu writes. Some, like the Chinese, sought respectability by promoting stories about their obedient children and their traditional family values. The Japanese pointed to their wartime service as proof of their shared Americanness.

African Americans in the 1940s made very similar appeals. But in the postwar moment, Wu argues, it was only convenient for political leaders to hear the Asian voices.

The model minority narrative may have started with Asian Americans, but it was quickly co-opted by white politicians who saw it as a tool to win allies in the Cold War. Discrimination was not a good look on the international stage. Embracing Asian Americans "provided a powerful means for the United States to proclaim itself a racial democracy and thereby credentialed to assume the leadership of the free world," Wu writes. Stories about Asian American success were turned into propaganda.

By the 1960s, anxieties about the civil right movement caused white Americans to further invest in positive portrayals of Asian Americans. The image of the hard-working Asian became an extremely convenient way to deny the demands of African Americans. As Wu describes in her book, both liberal and conservative politicians pumped up the image of Asian Americans as a way to shift the blame for black poverty. If Asians could find success within the system, politicians asked, why couldn't African Americans?

"The insinuation was that hard work along with unwavering faith in the government and liberal democracy as opposed to political protest were the keys to overcoming racial barriers as well as achieving full citizenship," she writes.

Recently, Wu and I chatted on the phone about her book and the model minority stereotype - how it was equal parts truth, propaganda and self-enforcing prophecy.
Can you tell us a little bit about the question that got you started on this book?
WU: America in general has had very limited ways of thinking about Asian Americans. There are very few ways in which we exist in the popular imagination. In the mid- to late-19th century, all the way through the late 1940s and 1950s, Asians were thought of as "brown hordes" or as the "yellow peril." There was the sinister, weird, "Fu Manchu" stereotype.

Yet, by the middle of the 1960s, Asian Americans had undergone this really arresting racial makeover. Political leaders, journalists, social scientists - all these people in the public eye - seemed to suddenly be praising Asian Americans as so-called model minorities.

I thought that might be a very interesting question to try to unravel.
How did these earliest stereotypes - these very negative, nasty images - take root?
Asian Americans first started coming in significant numbers during the California Gold Rush. Chinese immigrants came to do mining, then they ended up working on the Transcontinental Railroad, and agriculture. When those jobs died down, a lot of them moved to the cities where they started working in manufacturing.

At that time, in the 1870s, the economy wasn't doing that well in California. White American workers were very anxious about keeping their jobs. They looked around and they saw these newcomers who seemed very different from them.

There already had been a long tradition in the Western world of portraying the "Orient" as unknowable and mysterious. American workers started attaching these ideas to the Chinese newcomers, who were an easy target for white American anxieties about the growth of industrial capitalism and the undermining of workers' autonomy and freedom. They believed that the Chinese threatened American independence and threatened American freedom.

These ideas were particularly popular among the white working class at the time. The momentum started to build in the American West. There was the Workingmen's Party in California - one of their platforms was "The Chinese must go." That's how they rallied people. And they were very successful at it.

By 1882, Congress passed the first of a series of Chinese Exclusion Acts, which was the first time a race- and class-based group - Chinese workers - were singled out by American immigration law. The Chinese Exclusion Acts restricted their entry into the United States and said they couldn't become naturalized citizens.

What's really striking is that in the 1890s, the federal government even mandated a Chinese registry. That sounds a lot like this issue of the Muslim registry today, right?
A lot of what you're describing sounds familiar today - the economic anxiety bleeding into racial anxiety, the targeting of outsiders ...
Absolutely. There are a lot of resonances. What's happening today didn't spring out of nowhere - it has a very long history in the United States.
Can you describe some of these old stereotypes? I think that most people have some idea from old Hollywood movies, but it's just such a contrast to how Asians Americans are portrayed today.
The ways in which Americans thought about these "Orientals" hinged a lot on moral differences and on issues of gender, sexuality and family.

Many great historians and scholars have done work on this. The major groups that came before World War II were the Chinese, Japanese, South Asians, Koreans and Filipinos. There were both similarities and differences in how the groups were viewed, but generally they were thought to be threatening - significantly different in a negative sense.

For the most part, a lot of Asian immigrants weren't Christian, so that was suspect. American Chinatowns had a thriving vice economy, so gambling, prostitution and drugs became popularly associated with Asians. (Of course, some of the same white Americans who were criticizing Asians were also the ones participating in these activities.)

There was this idea of moral depravity. At the time, the Chinese and Filipinos and South Asians in America were mostly single, able-bodied young men, so that also raised a lot of eyebrows. It looked like they were sexually wayward.

If you look at old stereotypical imagery of Asians in political cartoons, the way they tend to be depicted is that they are not aligned with white, middle-class notions of respectable masculinity. There's the long hair, the flowing clothing that didn't quite look masculine yet didn't quite look feminine - or maybe it was something in-between, as some scholars have argued.

The women were also thought of as morally suspect - as prostitutes, sexually promiscuous, that kind of thing.
An important argument in your book is that Asians were complicit in the creation of the model minority myth. The way we talk about this issue today, it's as if the white majority imposed this stereotype on Asian communities - but your research shows that's not the case. How did it really get started?
Absolutely. That is a critical point to understand. The model minority myth as we see it today was mainly an unintended outcome of earlier attempts by Asians Americans to be accepted and recognized as human beings. They wanted to be seen as American people who were worthy of respect and dignity.

At lot was at stake. At the time, Asians were living life under an exclusion regime that had many similarities to Jim Crow - not the same as Jim Crow, but certainly a cousin of Jim Crow. There was a whole matrix of laws and discriminatory practices.

By 1924, all immigration from Asia had been completely banned. Asians were considered under the law "aliens ineligible for citizenship." There were all these racial restrictions to citizenship under the law - and the last of these didn't fall until 1952.

Asian Americans tended to be restricted to segregated neighborhoods, segregated schools. They often did not have the kind of job prospects that white people had. They would be barred from certain kinds of employment either by law or by custom.

In 1937, a young U.S.-born Japanese-American man lamented that even if you went to college, you could only end up being a "professional carrot-washer." That was really true for a lot of people. They had very limited options for social mobility. And of course there was also violence - lynchings.

So for Asian Americans, one survival strategy was to portray themselves as "good Americans."
As you argue in your book, it became increasingly expedient for mainstream Americans to acknowledge, and even amplify, Asian attempts to gain respectability. What changed?
Those claims really start to stick in the 1940s, when the nation was gearing up for global war. American leaders started to worry about the consequences of their domestic racial discrimination policies. They were concerned it would get in the way of forging alliances with other people abroad. That really motivated American leaders and the American people to work on race relations.

During World War II, lawmakers thought that Chinese exclusion made for bad diplomacy. So Congress decided to overturn Chinese exclusion as a goodwill gesture to China, who was America's Pacific ally.

With the beginning of the Cold War, American policymakers became really attentive to putting their best image out into the world. They were very interested in winning hearts and minds in Asia.

Japan is a very good example. Japan lost the war and the United States took charge of reconstructing Japan in its own image as a rising democratic, capitalist country. And because Japan became such an important ally, that was the moment when Japanese exclusion laws could finally be overturned, which happened in 1952.

Again, people in Congress worried that if we left these laws on the books, it would endanger a billion hearts and minds in the Far East.
It wasn't just a geopolitical thing right? It seems that by the 1960s, there were other reasons for investing in this image of Asians as upstanding citizens, reasons that were closer to home.
Oh, absolutely. There were definitely domestic reasons for why the idea was appealing that Asians could be considered good American citizens capable of assimilating into American life.

In the 1950s, there were general concerns about maintaining the right kind of home life. There's this image of the perfect American family - a suburban household with a mom, a dad, two to three kids, a white picket fence. That was the ideal, but it wasn't always realized. There was a juvenile delinquency panic in the 1950s, a big scare over how the nation's youth were getting themselves into trouble.

The Chinatown leaders were really smart. They started to peddle stories about Chinese traditional family values and Confucian ethics. They claimed that Chinese children always listened to their elders, were unquestioningly obedient and never got into trouble because after school they would just go to Chinese school.

When I started digging, I found that this idea of this model Chinese family, with the perfect children who always just loved to study and who don't have time to get into trouble or date - started to circulate quite prominently in the 1950s. That speaks to America's anxieties about juvenile delinquency.

Also, since these stories were taking place in Chinatowns, it allowed Americans to claim that America had these remaining repositories of traditional Chinese values at a time when the Communist Chinese had completely dismantled them. So there's this other level where these stories are also anti-Communist - they are doing this other ideological work.
How true were these stories though? How much of this was racial propaganda, and how much of it was rooted in reality?
These are obviously very strategic stories. In 1956, the federal government started to crack down on illegal Chinese immigration, which was in part motivated by the Cold War. So partly, the conservative Chinatown leaders thought this model Chinese family story would do a lot to protect them. They thought this PR campaign would reorient the conversation away from "Communists are sneaking into our country" to "Hey, look at these squeaky-clean, well-behaved children."

From reading community newspapers in these Chinatowns, we know they also had a lot of concerns about juvenile delinquency. In fact, behind closed doors there were heated disagreements about what to do. One woman in particular - Rose Hum Lee, a sociologist with a PhD from the University of Chicago - wrote lots of books and papers about the problems in Chinatown, and accused leaders of sweeping these problems under the rug.

There were Asian Americans then, as today, at the end of the socioeconomic spectrum. And that segment of the population tends to go unnoticed in these kinds of narratives.
It's interesting to compare the efforts of the Chinatown leaders to the parallel efforts of leaders in the African American civil rights movement, who also emphasized respectability - who wore their Sunday best on these marches where they were hosed down and attacked by dogs. What's stunning to me is the contrast. One group's story is amplified, and the other's is, well, almost denied.
I think the Japanese American experience also highlights some of this contrast. At the same time in the 1950s, you hear these stories about how the Japanese Americans dramatically recovered from the internment camps, how they accepted their fate. "After internment, many families were scattered across the country, but they took it as an opportunity to assimilate," that sort of thing.

Japanese Americans aren't perceived to be doing any kind of direct action, they weren't perceived to be protesting. A bad thing happened to them, and they moved on, and they were doing okay.

These stories were ideologically useful. They became a model for political cooperation. The ideas solidify in the 1950s. Americans had recast Asians into these citizens capable of assimilating - even if they still saw Asians as somewhat different from whites. And by the 1960s, what becomes important is that these socially mobile, assimilating, politically nonthreatening people were also decidedly not black.

That's really the key to all this. The work of the African American freedom movements had made white liberals and white conservatives very uncomfortable. Liberals were questioning whether integration could solve some the deeper problems of economic inequality. And by the late 1960s, conservatives were calling for increased law and order.

Across the political spectrum, people looked to Asian Americans - in this case, Japanese and Chinese Americans - as an example of a solution, as a template for other minority groups to follow: "Look how they ended up! They're doing just fine. And they did it all without political protests."

That isn't really true, by the way. Asian Americans did get political, but sometimes their efforts didn't get seen or recognized.

These stereotypes about Asian Americans being patriotic, having an orderly family, not having delinquency or crime - they became seen as the opposite of what "blackness" represented to many Americans at the time.
I would say it also costs the majority less to allow Asian Americans, who were still a very small part of the population, to let them play out this saga of upward mobility, rather than recognizing the rights and claims of African Americans during that same time.
I'm not saying somebody sat down and did a cost-benefit analysis. But in some ways, there seemed to be a big payoff for little risk. Even with the overturning of the exclusion laws, it's not like large numbers of Asians were coming into the United States at the time. Asian Americans at that time were still a pretty marginal part of the population.

As harmful as Asian exclusion was, I would agree that those structures were not as deep or pervasive as anti-black racism. It wouldn't do as much to change the overall social picture by allowing these small numbers of Asian Americans to move forward. It was easier to do, in some ways, because those exclusion structures were not as pervasive, and the consequences had not been as long-lasting as they had been for African Americans.
A really fascinating part of your book describes how these new Asian stereotypes shaped the Moynihan Report, which infamously blamed the plight of African Americans on "ghetto culture." I think that is a great example of how this model minority stereotype started to get used against others in the 1960s.
Daniel Moynihan, the author of that report, was a liberal trying to figure out how to solve this huge problem - the status of African Americans in American life.

If you look in the report, there's not really any mention of Asian Americans. But just a few months before the Moynihan Report came out in the summer of 1965, Moynihan was at a gathering with all these intellectuals and policymakers. They're talking about how Japanese and Chinese Americans were "rather astonishing" because they had thrown off this racial stigma. Moynihan points out that 25 years ago, Asians had been "colored." Then Moynihan says, "Am I wrong that they have ceased to be colored?"

That was a very striking and powerful moment to me.
I think a lot of people believe that the model minority stereotype came out of the huge surge of highly educated Asians who started coming to the United States after 1965. But as your book shows, I think, the causality actually runs the other way.
It's mutually reinforcing. At the time that the United States did this major immigration law overhaul in 1965, policymakers decided that the nation should select its immigrants based on how they could contribute to the economy (and also to reunify families). So what we start to see is people coming to the United States with these credentials and backgrounds and training, and they seem to confirm some of the ideas that are already there - that Asian Americans are model minorities.

My book stops in the late 1960s, but what I think has happened since then is that the model minority stereotype story has really shifted away from the original ideas of patriotism and anti-communism. We now fixate more on education. There's the image of the tiger mom focused on getting her kid into Harvard. That emphasis also speaks to a shift in the American economy, how upward mobility really depends on having a certain kind of educational training.

And the anxieties about Asians have never really gone away. Now they're portrayed as our global competitors. So underlying the praise there's also this fear.
Sometimes in America, it feels like there are only so many racial buckets that people can fall into. With increased immigration from South Asia and Southeast Asia, for instance, it seemed like lot of the newcomers were swept up into this model minority narrative.
What happened in 1965 is that we opened up the gates to large-scale immigration from places like Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia. From Asia, you get large numbers of people coming from South Asia, the Philippines, Korea. Then by the 1970s, the United States is fighting a war in Southeast Asia, so you get this refugee migrant stream. And you're right, they're stepping into this predetermined racial landscape, these preconceived notions about how Asians are.

But as a historian, as someone who thinks about race in American life for a living, I also think that the "model minority" category has only a limited usefulness now in terms of our analysis. We talk about it as a common stereotype, but it doesn't explain the whole scope of Asian American life today - especially since 9/11, when you have communities of South Asians who are Muslims or Sikhs now being racially targeted or labeled as terrorists. So that has become another stereotype of Asians these days.
I think that underscores maybe the meta-narrative of your book - how we in America have always viewed ethnic and racial minorities through the lens of politics and geopolitics, right? In terms of international relations, in terms of what kind of image we want to project to the world, and in terms of what our national anxieties about other countries are.
Absolutely, that's the link. The model minority stereotype and the terrorist stereotype are related, I agree, in how they speak to the geopolitical anxieties of their times.

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The real reasons the U.S. became less racist toward Asian Americans

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Between 1940 and 1970, something remarkable happened to Asian Americans. Not only did they surpass African Americans in average household earnings, but they also closed the wage gap with whites. Many people credit this upward mobility to investments in education.

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Abdulrahman Zeitoun is a Muslim man from Syria who was faced with many discriminating situations  during hurricane Katrina. He was wrongfully accused of being a terrorist, and called hurtful names, similarly to Alex Dang in his poem. Just like Sherman Alexie did, Zeitoun was stereotyped based on the actions of others part of the same race. All across America, there is a hatred for Muslims because of the choices of few of them. Zeitoun's wife, Kathy, was a white Muslim who was victimized by hate crimes just like her husband. This book shows how American society has moved backwards in the fight against racism.