I am Asian. To be specific, I am Korean American. I am highly educated and, though I earn a meager community college professor's salary, my professor husband and I together have made comfortable lives for ourselves and our two children. I am in many ways living the American dream. A house. A family. A respectable job. I am a model minority.

And I hate being a model minority. It's so pejorative. It's so limiting. It is so a term coined by whites who wish that minorities would act more white. There. You are a model minority if your life is like the life of white people. But this is deceptive. Not all whites live like that. There are plenty of white people living in poverty, out of wedlock, on food stamps, homeless, hopeless. The idea of someone having made in the image of the successful white is as much a mirage as it is the image of a black man as a thug.

I saw a recent report on what racial groups sympathize with Black Lives Matter. At the top are blacks, then followed by Asians (over 60%), then followed by Hispanics. This is curious. If Asians are the model minority and are supposed to have integrated into the American society so well that somehow they are the non-white whites, what is the cause of this huge percentage if Asians sympathizing with a movement started to bring attention to the racial divide in police brutality?

Even though on the surface Asians have achieved the so-called American dream, the reality is that racism still exists for them. All Asians run into racism at some point. They can be successful doctors, lawyers, professors, and other professionals, but still they are treated differently. For example, I am asked all the time how come I speak German? Would a white German teacher ever be asked this? Also, the existence of bamboo ceiling, for example, is well-documented. The fact is simply that, while Asians may have been successful immigrants, they are still subjected to the racist bias in white America. Asians experience this everyday while at the same time being touted as the model minority. It is as if Asians can achieve all that they want, but they are still reminded that they are NOT quite American enough.

Think about it. You do everything that you are supposed to do, and yet you still face discrimination. What can the reason be? Racism. It still permeates the American society. That is why Asians sympathize with Black Lives Matter even though it would seem they have nothing to complain about. I, for one, sympathize strongly with Black Lives Matter. I know that racism exists. If I, as an Asian American, as a model minority, still face racism, then how bad must it be for blacks whom many accuse of being the failed minority?