Frank Wu's Perspective in Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White. Yashni Ramlochund College

The treatment of Asian Americans in the United States has been brought to attention through literature and popular culture, as well as through the self-representation technique by which Asian Americans discuss their own treatment. Frank Wu, author of Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White, reveals his own experience as an Asian American child who had to bear the cost of being an Asian. This essay will therefore analyze how racism operates to perpetuate negative stereotypes regarding Asian Americans and the impact that racism has on victims of racial stereotyping through the individual life experience of Frank Wu.

Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White aims to address the implications of racism in creating the “model minority myth” and the “perpetual foreigner syndrome” that are usually felt by the Asian Americans. These ‘myths’ serve a “purpose in reinforcing racial hierarchies”. Asian Americans have been stereotyped as being an unassimilable entity in mainstream culture. They are perceived as “alien” enemy and became a racialized subject. Readers are therefore able to understand how social discourse within day-to-day interaction plays an important role in the construction of the Asian American identity. Wu...