Racial Satire, Race Talk, and the Model Minority: South Asian Americans Speak Up

Race-based comedy can help increase awareness of the social contradictions around race; but its polysemy underscores the difficulty of determining the extent to which race-based comedy may reinforce, rather than challenge, racial stereotypes. Racial humor focused on model minority groups may be particularly insidious precisely because the model minority discourse precludes claims of racism. Therefore, reactions to racial satire by model minority group members can reveal much about the functioning of the discourse. In this essay, I analyze responses by South Asian Americans to an ostensibly satirical column by columnist Joel Stein. While the strategies of racism denial used by many reinforce the model minority discourse, other bloggers challenge the column’s (re)production of racist discourse.