What Drives Success?

Race and identity are topics we have been looking at in depth over the past few weeks. As my partner and I prepare for our collective history report, I keep coming across the idea of Japanese Americans as a model minority. This idea came up in the video we watched for class, Color of Fear (1993), in reference to the Asian Americans. While reading an article in the New York Times it again appeared; it states “The fact that groups rise and fall this way punctures the whole idea of “model minorities” or that groups succeed because of innate, biological differences. Rather, there are cultural forces at work.” The article is an observation on race and success in America.  It was interesting to me how it evaluated the idea of race first in laying out race and success in America but then quickly breaks that down into character traits. This construction of identity can be found in all races and varies on an individual level. It is shaped by what we discussed in class last night, found in the communication theory of identity, the four different levels of identity. These four levels are personal, enacted, relational, and communal.  Read What Drives Success? Is the author’s idea of identity constructed on “the relationship between identity, communication and power (Medoza, Halvalani, Drzewicka, 2002)?”  Or is it solely examined from a social sciences perspective? It is necessary when looking at any faucet of race or ethnicity in America to examine what Medoza, Halvalani, and Drzewicka argue, the terms of historical contextualization and power relations.