[QZ] Fifty years on, the overachiever stereotype is still hurting Asian Americans

 

(A-Town Boyz/YouTube screen capture)

[QUARTZ]

As the cigarette smoke clears across the screen of the A-Town Boyz movie trailer, we see that Asian American men are the ones holding the guns. Not Korean, Chinese, or Vietnamese men in subtitled gangster films that make the international film festival rounds, but Asian American men in a documentary set in Atlanta, Georgia. What happened to the American dream for this so-called model minority? This seems to be the question this forthcoming film’s executive producer Spike Lee and director Eunice Lau hope we will ask.

Featuring the often-ignored lives of Asian American gang members and their families in Atlanta, the documentary foregrounds a common struggle of immigrant life: finding a way into power structures and social networks that do not readily, if ever, open up to outsiders. A-Town Boyz is a timely reminder that across the United States, the “model minority” stereotype commonly used to understand Asian Americans is badly in need of a reality check.

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