Asian American racialization in America’s top-ranked public high schools: synchronizing discourses of model minority and perpetual foreigner

Asian Americans are racialized into a highly complex and somewhat paradoxical position in the U.S. racial matrix. Drawing on interviews with parents at highly selective public magnet schools, this critical discourse analysis explores the processes of Asian American racialization and examines the ways that parents invoke and mobilize the racializing discourses of model minority and perpetual foreigner when discussing the Asian American student presence at their children’s schools. I first show how the model minority myth functions as a discursive racial weapon used to harm other communities of color, and then I demonstrate how Asian American students and families are simultaneously racialized by both model minority and perpetual foreigner discourses as competitive threats, outsiders whose presence causes unease and discomfort, and foreigners with inferior practices. Examining these racializing discourses and the ways that they function in synchrony is critical to understanding the racialized position of Asian Americans.