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THE BLACK MODEL MINORITY

Slavery, Settlement, and the Genealogy of the Model Minority

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 September 2021

Bayley J. Marquez
Bayley J. Marquez*
Affiliation:
Department of American Studies, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA
*
Corresponding Author: Bayley J. Marquez, Department of American Studies, University of Maryland, 1328 Tawes Hall, 7751 Alumni Drive, College Park, MD20742. E-mail: bmarquez@umd.edu.
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Abstract

This paper interrogates the fundamental anti-Blackness of model minority discourses and how they are embedded in structures of anti-Blackness and settler colonialism through a genealogical examination of the contradictory history of the “Black model minority” within the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute’s Indian Program. This program educated both Black and Indigenous students throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and purposefully made racialized comparisons between groups. I read this history through present day scholarship on the model minority myth in relation to anti-Blackness and settler colonialism. I argue that the “Black model minority” at Hampton was predicated on upholding slavery through defining it as an educational project and that slavery and settler colonialism are intimately linked through pedagogy. This narrative of the Black model minority demonstrates that slavery and land dispossession were framed as pedagogic by industrial education institutions. Ultimately, this work questions the idea of “valuing education,” which is present in model minority discourses across many contexts, and how it is complicated by this history.

Keywords

Model MinorityAnti-BlacknessSettler ColonialismEducationSlavery
Type
State of the Art
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , Spring 2022 , pp. 129 - 145
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Hutchins Center for African and African American Research

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