Her Culture Bi-Monthy Magazine June/July 2015 | Page 71

"While misrepresentations are hurtful by themselves, the concrete effects they have are even more detrimental to cultural diversity."

and successful…hiring or promoting them does not count as encouraging diversity”. As a result of stereotypes, Asian-Americans are then perpetually stuck in a cycle of exclusion from jobs that do not “fit” their characters, a cycle of exclusion from cultural diversity.

In Kee’s words, “if you try to navigate the human part of it, we are seeing, as yellow people, our stereotypes still existing in the heads of many people. We don’t get the chance to really go through and break the glass ceiling.”

The term “model minority” is not only discriminatory but also one-dimensional. Contrast to what the name suggests, Asian-Americans, or any minority groups, are not and should not be branded as models.

As Helen Zia, an Asian-American activist and historian, explains in Time Magazine in October of 2014, “We have the good, the bad, and the ugly. We’re not models. We should…be seen in our full humanity.”