Ethnicity and Class as Competing Interpretations: The Socio-economic Mobility of Asian Americans

Abstract

This chapter deals with culture and structure as rival explanations, especially in the area of race or ethnic relations. In the United States, the subject of socioeconomic mobility among Asian Americans is often used by political conservatives to claim the triumph of cultural explanations of minority status.

This chapter is adapted from ‘Inventing and Reinventing of Model Minorities’, in Deborah Woo, Glass Ceilings and Asian Americans: The New Face of Workplace Barriers (Altamira Press, 1999).