Can POC be racist? Colorism and the ‘model minority’ myth explained

It can be a huge challenge to explain Black Lives Matter to non-black families of color, especially for immigrant and refugee families who haven’t grown up within the context of America’s anti-Black racism. In this episode, we tackle colorism, the “model minority” myth and how non-Black people of color can be racist and face racism at the same time.

Jump ahead to the noted time stamp if you want to go straight to one of these tips.

Think about your own relationship to whiteness (2:03)

Before diving into conversations about race, it’s important to confront your personal relationship with racism and colorism and the benefits of proximity to whiteness that you’ve experienced in your own life. Modern day racism is a byproduct of colonialism, and how it’s incentivized putting a premium whiteness over the last 500 years. “It was actually a survival strategy to be in proximity to whiteness,” says Leslie P. Arreola-Hillenbrand, founder of Latinx Parenting. “Our ancestors did survive by aligning ourselves with whiteness and marrying into whiteness. It can be really uncomfortable and it can bring up some shame.” Colonial practices like caste systems predate American slavery and can make it easier for families who immigrate to the U.S. to internalize perceptions of themselves and others based on race.

In some ways, this paved the way for the “model minority” myth to take hold in Asian American communities, a belief that Asian Americans, because they are hard-working and they follow the rules and they do all the right things — are successful. The “model minority” myth is a stereotype that started after world war II to reconcile flaws in America’s democracy, like Jim Crow laws which contradicted the idea of a truly free society. “Implicit in the model minority idea is that there must be a problem minority,” says Soya Jung, co-founder of ChangeLab. “And so whatever discrimination that black people are facing, it's their own fault. It is inherently anti-black.”

Ask about your family member’s own experiences (3:04)

A great way to initiate a conversation about race is to ask your parent or family member about their own experiences. If someone says something racist in real-time, use it as a catalyst to ask more questions. “If you are deeply curious, it's very likely that at some point in their lives they have experienced some form of oppression,” says Jung. “Those conditions force us to see each other as rivals — that my prosperity necessarily depends on somebody suffering.”

Validate their experiences of oppression (4:12)

Zhu thinks that a part of why she gets pushback from her parents could be because they feel like when she brings up injustice within another racial group, it makes them feel like their experiences are invalidated. This is why it’s really important to go into conversations like this informed and empathetic to the fact that as a person of color, they’ve experienced racism too. Arreola-Hillenbrand says to think about the pressures being put on immigrant parents, those who for whom English is not their first language and people who still may not have access to educational resources.