Last fall, one Washington school district released an equity report that excluded Asian Americans from the categorization of “People of Color”. Key words: equity report, Asian American, POC. The irony is not lost on me, unlike how it was lost on school district officials. 

The North Thurston Public School District, which oversees 22 schools and over 15,000 students, released the report in hopes of highlighting opportunity gaps and performance disparities. Included within the report was the graph seen below, which was meant to illustrate the persistent opportunity gap between White/Asian students and Student of Color, which included “Black, Latinx, Native American, Pacific Islander, and Multi-Racial Students”. Asian students were conveniently excluded from the “Students of Color” category, a group that was described as “historically underserved students of color.” 

This categorization is problematic in many ways. Firstly, it seems to comment that Asian Americans are not historically undeserving minorities, thus ignoring the decades of struggle and plethora of discriminatory state-sanctioned policies that Asian Americans have had to endure, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act and Japanese Internment. By categorizing Asian Americans with white people, it signals that being a person of color is not determinant of historical struggles or ethnicity, but rather by performance. To be white, it suggests, means to be intrinsically higher performing than others, while being a person of color is to be, by default, underachieving. 

But even more importantly, it plays into the toxic Asian American ‘model minority’ myth and moves to widen the divide between minorities. Endorsing the ‘model minority’ stereotype does not come without its repercussions- it suggests that alleged cultural differences between racial groups are the cause of inequity and performance differences, instead of systemic inequalities. By consequence, it shifts the blame off of systemic oppression and onto the archaic and discriminatory idea that some minorities are better than others, pushing the ‘just do better’ mentality towards non-Asian POC. 

The relationship that is suggested to exist between race and achievement is, in and of it itself, misinformed. Race should not be seen as a factor of achievement, though there are certainly other determinants that should be addressed, such as socioeconomic status. According to a 2019 study by Education Next, socioeconomic differences account for one of the main contributors to performance gaps, with a 1.05 standard deviation difference between the top and bottom 10% on the socioeconomic scale, a figure that has remained relatively unchanged for the past 50 years. 

While North Thurston’s categorization was accidental, as spokespersons for the school district have claimed, the repercussions of their actions have not gone unnoticed. Especially during this time, it remains important to be aware of how our actions may contribute to stereotypes.