What I’m feeling about this reading is Asian Americans are the fastest growing minority population in the country. Moreover, they provide a wonderful lens on the experiences of immigrants and minorities in the United States more generally, both historically and today. In this timely new text, Pawan Dhingra and Robyn Magalit Rodriguez critically examine key sociological topics through the experiences of Asian Americans, including social hierarchies (of race, gender, and sexuality), work, education, family, culture, identity, media, panethnicity, social movements, and politics. The “yellow peril” is a racist color-metaphor that misrepresents the peoples of East Asia as an existential danger to the Western world and a “model minority” is a minority demographic whose members are perceived to achieve a higher degree of socioeconomic success than the population average, thus serving as a reference group to outgroups, race and gender is a social construct, defined by markers such as skin color, hair texture, eye shape, ancestry, identity performance and even name.
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Thuc Thao Tran, I completely agree with you on this idea of race and gender as a social construct. Race is defined by markers like small things that people automatically see and label you immediately as one race over another. I think it is pretty much a societal dilemma that will get worse over time. If people raise their children to see past races or to find ways to live peacefully without a barrier of race, things would be better and the paradigm of society’s list of social constructs would no longer exist.