Holland & Knight's Diversity Council and Asian/Pacific Islander (API) Affinity Group are proud to celebrate Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month and pay tribute to the generations of Asians and Pacific Islanders who have enriched America's history and continue to play a role in its future success. This year, we took time to reflect on how we could better support our API colleagues, sitting down with attorneys and staff to have important conversations about racial justice and allyship. Throughout the coming weeks, we will be See more +
Holland & Knight's Diversity Council and Asian/Pacific Islander (API) Affinity Group are proud to celebrate Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month and pay tribute to the generations of Asians and Pacific Islanders who have enriched America's history and continue to play a role in its future success. This year, we took time to reflect on how we could better support our API colleagues, sitting down with attorneys and staff to have important conversations about racial justice and allyship. Throughout the coming weeks, we will be presenting a video series showcasing some of these conversations. We hope that the stories conveyed in these videos help advance dialogue around API Heritage Month as well as lead to further discussions of how we can be better allies to our API friends, family and colleagues.
In the final episode of this series, Partner Raymond Kim looks at the model minority myth, or the idea that Asian Americans are the "ideal" minority group who has worked hard and achieved the American Dream. Raymond traces the myth's origins to a 1960s article praising the Japanese American community's ability to overcome post-internment challenges, and he describes two major issues associated with this myth: Not only does it ignore Asian American communities that are not thriving, it is also used against other minority communities. Reflecting on the myth's long-term effects, Raymond explains how it has made the Asian American community invisible, with that lack of visibility becoming apparent only within the last year. He says moving forward, it's important to have discussions around issues like the model minority myth to help others recognize the social, ethnic and economic diversity within the API community. See less -
