The Model Majority: Asian America and the Making of American Professionalism

More than two decades into the twenty-first century, Asian Americans have obtained representational visibility and institutional agency in an ever widening range of professional industries. No longer restricted to so-called model minority career paths, such as those in medicine or engineering, they are professionalizing as filmmakers, content creators, podcasters, competitive gamers, chefs, restaurateurs, artists, authors, musicians, comedians, and even politicians with presidential aspirations. Once outsiders relegated to their own niche subculture or ethnic enclave, Asian Americans have become industry makers and shapers incorporated into the very sites and processes governing the production of mass culture. Asian America is America. More than a simple claim for minority agency within majoritarian life, this statement attests to the idea that the story of Asian America today is a story about what happens when a minority group reaches a cultural critical mass.

The phenomenal rise of Asian American professionals in the twenty-first century is often interpreted through the lens of generational difference, where newer generations of Asian Americans distinguish themselves from previous generations through an expanding set of interests and claims to newer forms of professional labor. Generational explanations like these are tempting given how the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 remains central not just to the histories of Asian American professional class formation but indeed to situating race and ethnicity as critical sites of epistemological inquiry in Asian American Studies. Yet, as Lisa Lowe reminds us, "master narratives of generational conflict and filial relation" risk reducing an otherwise large-scale institutional phenomenon into narratives of "privatized familial opposition," which obscures how both the material and ideological developments surrounding professional labor inform racial subjecthood.¹ The professionalization of Asian Americans across industries illuminates how racial subject formation is and has been co-constituted through the institutional and ideological management of professionalism. Rather than suggest that racial form coheres through a participatory relation to professional labor systems — the claim held by the post-1965 immigration thesis — I mean to assert that Asian Americans occupy a unique ontological relationship to the professions, such that what we have come to know as the Asian American in the twenty-first century has been co-constituted through the consolidation, expansion, and creation of US professions since the postwar era.

The professions, as we know them today, articulate an institutional formation rooted in capitalist industry developments during the Industrial Revolution in the late ninetieth and early twentieth centuries. Their origins can be traced back to medieval times in the UK, but, in their modern form in the US, they grew alongside the rise of managerialism as an organizational practice in the workplace. Managerialism formalized knowledge work into an occupational labor, distinguishing it from manual labor. Managerialism produced a new breed of worker, the professional manager, who occupied a relational middle ground between capitalist owners and manual laborers. John and Barbara Ehrenreich conceived the professional manager as part of a new class, the "professional-managerial class" or "PMC," whose primary function was to reproduce capitalist class culture and relations.² Rather than signifying a specific type of embodied knowledge worker within a particular career field, the professional expressed more a relational class subject who legitimized the new social division of labor within monopoly capitalism at a time when the accrual of wealth appeared up for grabs. Their positionality, occupying an aspirational relation to the capitalist class and an antagonistic relation to the working class, preserved the American Dream. The formation of the professions went hand in hand with the formation of the American middle class.³ Professionals spanned industries, from healthcare to the arts, encompassing an array of careers, including physician, lawyer, engineer, teacher, social worker, journalist, and artist. According to the US Census Bureau, professionals comprised a mere 10% of the labor force in the early 1900s.⁴ By 1950, that number doubled to nearly 20%. In concept, the professions rendered capitalist production more efficient to meet the demands of growing industries, expanding markets, and new consumer bases. Today, they make up around 43% of American jobs.⁵ But, in practice, they exacerbated social disparities while conflating class identity with cultural identity, as certain middle-class tastes and values came to define the culture of the professions.⁶

The professional embodied a specific set of cultural traits that prescribed the terms for institutional belonging across industry fields, which only proliferated in the postwar era, an era of financialized growth referred to by economists as the Golden Age of Capitalism.⁷ These traits include a respect for learned expertise, the acquisition of credentialed knowledge, an industrious work ethic, a willingness to engage in delayed gratification through forms of lengthy career training, and compliance with the standards and codes of ethics governing an institution. Collectively, these otherwise innocuous workplace traits signified for an individual's character, justifying their right to institutional access during a transformative period of widespread industrial expansion. Though thought to exemplify the disinterestedness central to professional knowledge work, they came to code for an individual's capacity to obtain inclusion and belonging within the professions.

Given the prescriptive criteria organizing professionalism, scholars in Asian American Studies tend to view professionalization as a disciplinary process wherein minoritized workers are compelled to assimilate into a fixed set of static norms. This interpretation is central to the post-1965 immigration thesis, which operates on the premise that hyper-selective immigration reform measures initiated by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 recruited high-achieving diasporic Asian students and professionals to the US to legitimize American capitalism amid the growing threat of communism.⁸ Post-1965 immigration reforms remain central to recent turns in Asian American literary studies that look toward the Northeast Asian political economy to index the ways that transimperialism shaped Asian American professional identity in the US.⁹ Stereotyped perceptions of their purported strong work ethic, proclivity for delayed gratification, investments in education and extensive career training, and obedience to institutional norms and authorities aligned Asian Americans with the professional. Such discursive alignments racialized them as model minorities situated within the so-called middle ground between whiteness and Blackness in the hierarchy of American race relations. The cultivation of what might otherwise be called the Asian America PMC therefore modeled the global ambitions of an increasingly multiracial nation-state under neoliberalism. They legitimized the US political economy through their embodied relation to late twentieth-century professionalisms.

Yet, the post-1965 immigration thesis is not without its shortcomings. Namely, it presumes the professions to be a fixed institutional formation. This is evidenced by its reliance on narratives of arrival that establish migration as its centralizing trope. Such narratives position the Asian American professional as a belated figure who arrives as a prescribed cultural form molded to a preformulated set of professional formations. In doing so, it naturalizes an interpretative framework that overlooks the complex ways that both the professions and the norms governing them evolved, expanded, and even emerged anew within the US labor economy alongside shifting meanings of labor, labor markets, labor technologies, and commodities. Although prescriptive in their initial formulation, the professions are unstable institutional formations that mutated across time and industry sector to manage institutional access and belonging, while adapting to changes in capitalist modes of production. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the corporate office spaces of Silicon Valley, where midcentury technical knowhow gave way to humanistic values as new technologies, from the microprocessor to generative AI, engendered new meanings of professionalism that reimagined the criteria for belonging within the field. In his recent book, The Technological Republic (2025), Palantir CEO Alexander Karp describes today's Silicon Valley tech workers as agents of morality whose primary responsibility is to answer the "vital yet messy questions of what constitutes a good life" and "which collective endeavors society should pursue," thereby constructing an "ethical framework" for engaging with technology.¹⁰ These technocratic beliefs ironically spurred Palantir's governmental contracts with the US Department of War and the Department of Homeland Security to provide data integration to aid in the War in Iran and to assist in migrant tracking tactics. The widespread emergence of digitized labor in the early 2000s also exemplifies how newer professional forms, like the social media content creator, no longer necessitate credentialed knowledge as a condition for inclusion in the platform economy. The professional then is a slippery representational cultural formation, expressing shifts in the social, economic, and political imperatives underwriting American institutional life.

This essay lays a critical foundation for approaching professionalization not as a monolithic, linear, or fixed process in which an individual becomes socialized into a workplace through a strict adherence to a fixed set of institutional norms; instead, it theorizes professionalization as an unstable, adaptive, and ongoing mode of institutional management that operates by regulating the terms for workplace socialization as they evolve alongside labor, labor markets, labor technologies, and commodity cultures. It explains how an historically minoritized population can gain access to institutional inclusion yet remain marginalized and subject to deprofessionalization despite appearing to possess claims to workplace socialization and belonging. The professions and their attendant professionalisms are neither homogenous nor static. They change, much like the institutional landscapes they comprise. They not only adjust to shifts in the market but propel such shifts. Professionalization does not take one form but rather many. It names less an individuated pathway for careerism and more a multiform relation to institutional life that materializes through a dynamic synthesis of historical and ideological processes.

Professionalization, for these reasons, is always a form of identity construction and management. Race is not supplemental to professionalization, as if it were merely a politicized feature of the late twentieth-century neoliberal capitalist economy. Rather, race is and has been one of its organizing tenets, alongside class. Critical fixations on the numerical underrepresentation of minoritized professionals in the workplace fall short in their diagnostic interrogation of institutional norms because they overlook the ideological conditions that, across time and industry, make professional management a highly unstable, adaptive, and even contradictory systemic process designed to reproduce inequality. If minoritized workers have always been underrepresented, the issue at hand must concern more the conditional nature of the norms governing their ongoing underrepresentation than the fact of their underrepresentation. Professionalization thrives off instability and contradiction, off the image of inclusion despite a reality that suggests otherwise.

Asian Americans provide a conceptual entryway into tracing these institutional and ideological mechanisms because they embody the kinds of contradictions that culturally align them with the professions. Their perceived hypervisibility in the professions rests on their historical marginalization within and even exclusion from them. This contradiction legitimizes the perception that the professions facilitate equality. Their middling position within the US's racial hierarchy, a dynamic that predates 1965, established a unique ontological relation to the professional as a middling institutional subject formation who legitimized the social division of labor. Through their associations with the defining traits of professionalism, Asian Americans reconciled the dialectical tension imminent in the postwar restructuring of labor as the reproduction of capitalist class and race relations became sedimented in newer forms of work. Barbara Ehrenreich reminds us, after all, that the professions were rooted in a preservationist ethos designed to protect the expanding middle class from downward mobility during the postwar years.¹¹ As racial unrest surfaced alongside postwar class tensions during a period of socioeconomic growth for the nation-state, Asian Americans became the professions' protectors and beneficiaries. US professionalisms and Asian American racial subjecthood were constituted symbiotically to reproduce both capitalist class relations and race relations. In this way, the professional is not just a class identity but so too an embodied racial identity.

Today, professionalization articulates the cultural — and, indeed, contradictory — logic binding the Asian American community. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the proportion of Asian Americans in professional career tracks surpasses those of any other racial demographic, including whites.¹² Within the Asian American community, the percentage of those in the professions exceeds those in working-class industries. This is consistent across Asian ethnic communities. According to the Census Bureau, fourteen different Asian ethnic communities now have a higher percentage of educational attainment than the U.S. average, leading to comparatively high levels of household income.¹³ In spite of its vast internal differences, Asian America is consolidating under the professions. At the same time, Asian Americans experience the highest level of income inequality across race in the US.¹⁴ Many are refugees and undocumented immigrants who either fall into the American working class or participate in precarious labors in vulnerable spaces that escape institutional legibility. Nevertheless, in spite of these differences in class, many of the children of these underserved populations still experience upward mobility. Sociologists Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou refer to this phenomenon as "second-generation convergence."¹⁵ However, more than a story about generational access, these contradictory socioeconomic developments attest to the unique ontological relationship that binds Asian Americans to the professions.

It is not that Asian Americans are now becoming professional. Rather, in some sense, they always were. The professionalization of Asian Americans in the twenty-first century indexes the manufactured outcome of a longer history of institutional management that flourished in the postwar years as professional class formation found legitimacy in Asian American racial subjecthood. As the one minoritized racial demographic perceived to have achieved access to socioeconomic security under racial capitalism, Asian Americans provide a conceptual entryway into diagnosing shifts in the social, cultural, and political ideologies underwriting US mass culture. My critical approach to professionalization insists that minoritized racial forms have been imbricated in the consolidation, expansion, and evolution of the professions and their attendant ideologies not in spite of but precisely because of their marginalization within majoritarian institutional life.

Asian Americans appear to suffuse mass culture now because they embody representational proxies for the professional institutions and ideologies that structure it. Their increasing claim to an ever widening range of professionalisms — to the point that their current perception as so-called "overrepresented minorities" has put their status as a minoritized community in question — is not due to a model minority work ethic that facilitated their access to new and diverse industry spaces. Rather, this claim is due to their racial subjecthood becoming synonymous with the professions, and, vice versa, the professions becoming synonymous with Asian Americanness. What the post-1965 immigration thesis got right then was that the professions relied on Asian Americans and Asian Americanness for their own legitimation and growth. But this crucial connection had been imminent since the midcentury when the professional rose as a popular representational institutional and cultural subject formation that found a relational proxy in Asian Americanness. This special cluster's focus on mass culture, as opposed to popular culture, helps to distill such crucial insights. Developments in the postwar economy made access to the professions a realistic aspiration, at least perceptually, for minoritized and majoritarian populations alike, and this perception of access made the management of race relations integral to the dynamics of liberal — which is to say capitalist — democracy. Rather than signifying a static monolithic figure, the Asian American professional articulates a pliable subject whose incorporation into multiple kinds of professionalisms across time and industry exposes the pliability of professionalization as a regulatory institutional apparatus. Asian Americanness becomes a container for the developmental logics of professionalism in the US from the postwar era to the present.

We can observe these developmental histories when surveying industries across the US where evolutions in the regulatory and cultural logics organizing professionalization manifested alongside shifts in racial meaning. They include the professionalization of chefs and restaurateurs in the postwar restaurant industry, Silicon Valley knowledge workers in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century tech industry, and anthropomorphized autonomous robots in the current automation and AI industries. These developmental histories cohered through a dynamic set of management phenomena, which I describe as pre-professionalism, re-professionalism, and post-professionalism, illuminating how shifts in capitalist modes of production coincided with new forms of professional and racial management. Signified by temporally rooted prefixes, these conditional modes of professional being invoke more than simple wordplay. They function to articulate an historical trajectory of professional values in the US and to engineer a set of critical possibilities around professionalization that is revealed by and through Asian America. They attest to the critical influence of Asian America on the professions, its pasts, and its futures.

Professionalization became naturalized as an institutional ideology by virtue of its dissemination beyond traditional professional formations, like medicine and law, to historically non-professional industries. Chefs were among the first to be elevated from working-class laborers to professionals by dint of the GI Bill, which initiated the erection of America's first culinary school in 1946 and later standardized food preparation practices through the publication of the Culinary Institute of America's first textbook, The Professional Chef, in 1962. These postwar developments formalized restaurant work into a professional knowledge form with fixed pathways and standards for institutional belonging. Asian Americans played a key role not just as aspiring chefs whose matriculation into culinary schools affirmed this new educational system, but also as non-professional amateur chefs whose appearances on mainstream television, like Joyce Chen, challenged the nascent professional values cohering around restaurant work. Culinary professionalism became defined through and against Asian Americans and Asian Americanness. It facilitated the emergence of an institutional phenomenon that I call pre-professionalism, a form of racialized management where minoritized chefs come to be stuck on the precipice of professional knowledge or skill acquisition and thus struggle to self-actualize into fully capable individuals in possession of their own professional competency and belonging. In the culinary world, pre-professionalism operates through the racialized assumption that Asian Americans lack imagination, making them more akin to culinary technicians or bespoke craftspeople than creative chefs with original tastes.¹⁶ This phenomenon is a symptom of how professionalism regulates minority access to the restaurant industry, even as it purports to be an inclusive multicultural space. Today, Asian American chefs have gained representational visibility across the restaurant industry. Still, they are often seen as technicians more than creatives, as evident in cooking competition shows like Top Chef.¹⁷ Many now seek alternative entryways into the food world, leveraging their social media fame as content creators to make the transition to chef, cookbook author, or restaurateur.¹⁸

Professionalism, as a set of traits dictating institutional access and belonging, also shifts across time within an industry alongside developments in capitalist modes of production that enable minority access to that industry. Initially conceived as a technical field during the midcentury, Silicon Valley adopted an ethos of disruption and innovation in the later twentieth century with the liberalization of the economy. This change took off as diasporic East and South Asians entered the tech industry, resulting in new professional values rooted in humanistic knowledge. This systematic shift in professional values articulates a process that I refer to as re-professionalization, where a profession recomposes its standards for institutional belonging to manage those already employed within it. Apple's 1997 "Think different" campaign, for instance, came on the heels of the H-1B visa program, which recruited diasporic Asian engineers to the tech industry. Silicon Valley's investments in humanistic knowledge forms precipitated the systematic cultural unbelonging of diasporic Asianness. Racialized as technical engineers, rather than innovative thought leaders, diasporic Asians became the foils against which humanistic knowledge work was legitimated as a professional value. Re-professionalization exposes how professional regulations operate as implicit forms of racial management by rendering a workforce marginal within an industry to which they have already obtained access. It reveals how institutions maintain the status quo while purporting to promote inclusion and diversity.

Autonomous AI now threatens the existence of the professions. But that does not mean their hold over American institutional life is diminishing. Quite the opposite: power is being reconfigured through the management of professionalism in the global future. China, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea play crucial roles in this process as their increasing presence within the AI industry sector stokes techno-Orientalist cultural anxieties across the US. This racialized technoeconomic landscape contributes to the proliferation of what I observe as post-professionalism, an ideological orientation to diasporic Asianness that constructs professional Asian labor systems, and Asia more broadly, as obsolete within the global labor economy.¹⁹ It expresses an anticipatory power play that forecasts the end of diasporic Asian labor power to justify the West's control over the technoeconomic future. Post-professionalism emerges as competition over AI intensifies and expands globally, producing instability and uncertainty around the US's hold over existing market shares. It operates through techno-Orientalist fantasies that portray anthropomorphized Asian-run AI labor systems to be ineffectual. Contemporary science fiction films, like Alex Garland's Ex Machina (2014) and Kogonada's After Yang (2021), register post-professionalism's operative logic as they depict Japan and China as unworthy stewards of the global future due to their inefficient labor technologies and professional management systems. Whereas techno-Orientalist narratives of the past presented Asia and Asianness in terms of hyper-efficiency, as exemplified by Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) and William Gibson's novel Neuromancer (1984), post-professionalism reveals techno-Orientalism's newest morphology to be arranged by inefficiency and obsolescence. Post-professionalism is symptomatic of "racialization's displacement from subject to structure," a defining feature of what David S. Roh, Betsy Huang, Greta A. Niu, and Christopher T. Fan now refer to as "techno-Orientalism 2.0."²⁰ Post-professionalism rationalizes the total erasure of Asia from the future to maintain Western imperial power in the global economy. It emerges in the twenty-first century alongside the New Cold War, a large-scale battle over market control of automation technologies, artificial intelligence systems, advanced robotics, GPUs, and semiconductors. Post-professionalism identifies how Asia, Asians, and Asianness remain central to upholding America's professional ambitions in a global future premised on their inevitable downfall, even as — or, perhaps, precisely because — they occupy an ontological relation to the professions.

The success story of Asian America in the twenty-first century is only successful insofar as it serves to legitimize the professions amid ongoing developments in the reconfiguration of labor, power, and exploitation. Asian Americans articulate representational proxies for the professions not in spite of but because they were and continue to be underrepresented within them. Asian Americans identify less a model minority and more, I propose, a model majority who approximates the evolving cultural and institutional aspirations of the US since the postwar era.²¹ They cathect the hopes, dreams, and ambitions not of other minoritized groups, as often assumed under the framework of the model minority, but rather of a wider mainstream majoritarian populace. At the same time, their tenuous position within American institutional life exposes how their access to the production of mass culture, mass markets, and mass subjects resides in contradiction, since their belonging depends on their continued management.

By conceiving Asian Americans as the model majority, I do not mean to suggest that their integration into mass culture has allowed them to overcome their status as underserved or underrepresented minorities. Nor do I mean to imply that they no longer experience the material or institutional violences associated with minoritized life. Rather, my point is to claim Asian America's active role in the project of postwar nation-making through its multiform relation to and coeval development with American professionalisms. The model majority describes more a conceptual framework for interpreting racial form than a totalizing statement on the purported empowerment of the Asian American community. The model minority has long preoccupied the field of Asian American Studies. But our contemporary moment — one that this cluster identifies as the age of Asian American Mass Culture — affords the opportunity to theorize a new interpretive framework that accounts for the contradictory tensions therein. The model majority provides a method for tracing, interrogating, and projecting Asian America's influence on the professions now and into the future.

---

Leland Tabares (@leland.tabares) is an Assistant Professor of Race, Ethnicity, and Migration Studies at Colorado College. His research is published in Profession, Journal of Asian American Studies, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Arizona Quarterly, Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, and ASAP/J, among other venues. His book chapter on automation, AI, and the future of work is out in Techno-Orientalism 2.0: New Intersections and Interventions (Rutgers University Press). Currently, he serves on the MLA Delegate Assembly for Professional Issues on Race and Ethnicity in the Profession and is Co-Chair for the Circle for Asian American Literary Studies.

---

References

1. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Duke University Press, 1996), 63. ↩︎
2. John and Barbara Ehrenreich, "The Professional-Managerial Class," Radical America (March-April 1977): 13. ↩︎
3. Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (Pantheon, 1989). ↩︎
4. US Bureau of the Census. Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1957 (US Bureau of the Census, 1960): 74. ↩︎
5. US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment Projections - 2024-2034, August 28, 2025; US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey, February 20, 2026. ↩︎
6. Burton Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (Norton, 1976). ↩︎
7. The Golden Age of Capitalism: Reinterpreting the Postwar Experience, ed. Stephen A. Marglin and Juliet B. Schor (Oxford University Press, 1992); UN Report, "Chapter II: Post-war reconstruction and development in the Golden Age of Capitalism," World Economic and Social Survey, 2017. ↩︎
8. Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou, The Asian American Achievement Paradox (Russell Sage, 2015). ↩︎
9. Christopher T. Fan, Asian American Fiction After 1965: Transnational Fantasies of Economic Mobility (Columbia University Press, 2024). ↩︎
10. Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief and the Future of the West (Penguin Random House, 2025): xiv. ↩︎
11. Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling, 15. ↩︎
12. US Bureau of Labor Statistics, "Labor force characteristics by race and ethnicity, 2023," BLS Reports, 2023, https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/race-and-ethnicity/2023/home.htm ↩︎
13. USAFacts, "AAPI Demographics: Data on Asian American ethnicities, geography, income, and education," April 25, 2025, https://usafacts.org/articles/the-diverse-demographics-of-asian-americans/. ↩︎
14. Christian E. Weller and Jeffrey P. Thompson, "Wealth Inequality Among Asian Americans Greater than Among Whites," Center for American Progress, December 2016; Neil G. Ruiz, Ziyao Tian, and Shannon Greenwood, "The Hardships and Dreams of Asian Americans Living in Poverty," Pew Research Center, March 27, 2024. ↩︎
15. Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou, The Asian American Achievement Paradox (Russell Sage Foundation, 2015), 31. ↩︎
16. Grace Wang, "A Shot at Half-Exposure: Asian Americans in Reality TV Shows," Television & New Media, Vol. 11, No. 5 (2010): 404-427. ↩︎
17. Timothy K. August, "The Contradictions in Culinary Collaboration: Vietnamese American Bodies in 'Top Chef' and 'Stealing Buddha's Dinner," MELUS, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Fall 2012): 100-102. ↩︎
18. For more on this cultural history, see Leland Tabares, "Misfit Professionals: Asian American Chefs and Restaurateurs in the Twenty-First Century," Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 77, No. 2 (Summer 2021): 103-132. ↩︎
19. For more on this topic, see Leland Tabares, "Working Futures after Asians: Automation, AI, and the Global Labor Economy," in Techno-Orientalism 2.0: New Intersections and Interventions, ed. David S. Roh, Betsy Huang, Greta A. Niu, and Christopher T. Fan (Rutgers University Press, 2025): 23-38. ↩︎
20. David S. Roh, Betsy Huang, Greta A. Niu, and Christopher T. Fan, "The Present Futurity: Techno-Orientalist Infrastructures," in Techno-Orientalism 2.0: New Intersections and Interventions, ed. David S. Roh, Betsy Huang, Greta A. Niu, and Christopher T. Fan (Rutgers University Press, 2025): 4. ↩︎
21. According to my research, there are only two other instances in which the phrase "model majority" has been used in critical scholarship. Rebecca Chiyoko King-O'Riain invokes it for the title of her 2004 book chapter, "Model Majority? The Struggle for Identity among Multiracial Japanese Americans," which examines the politics and histories of racialization within the multiracial Japanese American community to expand definitions of Japanese Americanness and to highlight how moving beyond a black/white context enables alternatives for conceiving multiracial politics amid critiques of essentialism and illusionism (177). However, the term itself is not used or referenced in the body of the chapter. More pertinently, in her book, The Race Card: From Gaming Technologies to Model Minorities (2019), Tara Fickle uses "model majority" to refer to a kind of postracial ideology that draws "a positive correlation between Asian American race and success" in ways that make Asian Americans "exemplary, that is, of the perception held by the general population, of living in 'a world governed more by chance and luck' than fair competition" (84). Her approach speaks to the role that gambling plays in the propagation of the American Dream as it manifests through what she calls ludo-Orientalism. Informed by King-O'Riain and Fickle's ideas, yet distinct from them, my critical approach theorizes the model majority as a set of relations for conceiving race and class within an unstable system of postwar US nation-making, such that the model majority can be interpreted as a conceptual apparatus for tracing the shifting relations between minoritarian and majoritarian racial meaning amid institutional, ideological, and cultural developments in the US labor economy through the consolidation, expansion, and evolution of the professions. ↩︎