Asian Americans in the Law

Mainstream American discourse renders invisible the experiences and lives of Asian Americans and leaves them beleaguered by the “model minority” image. The book, "Incidental Racialization: Performative Assimilation in Law School," explores how professional socialization and racialization happen simultaneously during legal education.

While the collection of data regarding attrition in law schools and number of partners in law firms offers a profound narrative on the state of Asian Americans in the U.S. legal profession, it remains, to an extent, abstract. While the numbers offer a much-needed, broad, and systemic analysis of the major issues facing Asian Americans lawyers, it is easy to lose sight of the individual narratives behind the percentages and statistics

The model minority argument has earned the labels of stereotype and myth as critics have taken aim at both its premises and conclusions. Many point to the purpose of the argument as disingenuous insofar as it is intended to drive a wedge between different disadvantaged groups. Others claim that it is misleading because performance metrics and even representation figures do not speak to many of the biases that persist today.

As Yung-Yi Diana Pan explains in “Incidental Racialization,” panethnicity in the United States is more a construct that is prescribed than something innate to anyone’s sense of identity independent of how they are perceived. The Asian American population in the United States, which totaled roughly 20.4 million in 2015, is spread out among numerous countries of origin.