What are the stereotypes of Chinese people in America, and are they true? We all know about the stereotypes set for the Chinese Americans in this country such as "Chinese people can't drive" or "Chinese people must be better at maths and have better grades." Well even though these stereotypes are farfetched and exadurated, they do have a reasonable past in which set those stereotypes.
To start off we we can begin at where these stereotypes were all set and what the history behind it is. According to the New York Times article "Confronting Asian-American Stereotyepes, "Jennifer Lee, a professor of sociology at Columbia University and the author of “The Asian-American Achievement Paradox” and Karthick Ramakrishnan, and a professor of public policy and political science at University of California, Riverside, and director of the National Asian-American Survey. In this artical Jennifer Lee stated "While the current stereotype of Asian-Americans is that they are smart, competent and hard-working, a century ago, Asian-Americans were perceived as illiterate, undesirable, full of “filth and disease” So then why were these stereotypes set you may ask? Well as it turns out, Harvard has even been accused of "giving lower personality ratings to Asian-American applicants."
"Lippman (1922) defined stereotypes as an oversimplified picture of the world that satisfied a need to see the world as more understandable and manageable than it really is." according to a research article by University of Massachusetts Boston student, Lin Zhu. It also states in the article, "As Lakoff (1987) states, “There is nothing more basic than categorization to our thought, perception, action and speech” Basically explaining the the perception of stereotypes."
Now lets explain why these stereotypees were set in the first place. The NPR article, Bad Asian Drivers, Good at everything talks about how the stereoype of how "Chinese people can't drive" is mostly set by very old, poor driving records of the early Chinese-American people. In Acording to a writer from "YOMYOMF" Philip wrote, after diving into several studies that looked at Asian drivers. "We are more likely to notice when a bad driver is Asian simply because we expect bad drivers to be Asian thus reinforcing the stereotype," But the steriotype mostlikely stuck due to Chinese-American's "slant-eyed appearance.
Other stereotyopes such as "all Asians are good at maths" and "All asians must be hard workers" Can be explained by history but can also be exadurated by the media which is better explained and detailed in the APA artical "Countering stereotypes about Asian Americans." You can brreak down the history and reasoning for Asian stereotypes based on what you just read.
Hope this helps : )
