Higher Education Academics Say Disaggregation Key to Fighting ‘Model Minority’ Myth for Asian-Americans, Pacific Islanders and Native Hawaiians

Higher Education Academics Say Disaggregation Key to Fighting ‘Model Minority’ Myth for Asian-Americans, Pacific Islanders and Native Hawaiians: For African-Americans in the 20th century, few civil rights challenges took on greater importance than the issue of desegregation.

For Asian-Americans in the 21st century, one of the most important issues in the arena of civil rights is increasingly being summed up in a word that sounds similar and deals with similar things, only in a different way and on an entirely different level.

The word is “disaggregation,” and it is a word that was uttered dozens of times on Friday by a series of speakers — from presidential appointees to professional academics — at a public policy forum titled, “New Research and Policy on Asian-Americans, Pacific Islanders and Native Hawaiians: Meeting the Needs of the Fastest Growing Group in America.”