Model minority myth-busting: the dangers of White malleability and the power of transtemporal abolition

This project explores how Asian American racial identity has been repeatedly reconfigured to sustain the logics of white supremacy, particularly through the model minority myth, which the author determines is a carceral apparatus. Model minority myths do not just position Asian Americans as successful minorities, but rather actively reinforce, expand and disguise the workings of police and prisons as primary tools of white supremacy. In other words, creating the model minority myth both repaired the fissures of white supremacy won by 20th century multi-racial coalitions as well as evolved the punitive powers of white cultural institutions. Through this myth, notions of innocence and criminality are allocated unevenly across communities and movements, reinforcing the prison-industrial complex (PIC) while rendering its operations adaptable and opaque.

Adopting an interdisciplinary methodology and scholar-activist perspective, this work insists that weakening the PIC requires analyzing and confronting how white supremacy mutates through racial myths and media representations of Asian America . The author draws from a wide range of 20th and 21st century sources including prison literature, poetry, graphic memoirs, legal cases, news media, social media, and science fiction to identify unexpected but meaningful connections between Asian American cultural production and carceral power through a term called white malleability. This framework highlights how the model minority myth enables forms of racial exploitation that penetrate even the intimate and imaginative spaces communities build for survival and belonging. Finally, to subvert the violence of white malleability, the author introduces the framework of transtemporal abolition, a multidirectional and ethical process of remembrance and action.