Asians (Asian-Americans) as the “Model” Minority for Illiteracy, Poverty, Obesity (?)

I just drove 1,000 miles across the American Midwest this past weekend. En route, there were plenty of billboards to look at. Interestingly, many of them were public service announcements. Perhaps even more interesting was the fact that many of those billboards featured images of Asian people that supposedly represented a need group targeted by the public services. Being a marketer in an Asian/American (not Asian-American) household (my wife is a native and citizen of Vietnam), perhaps I (we) are especially sensitive to this phenomenon. But let me recount the billboards we saw:

• Illiteracy – a 30-something Asian man was pictured in a billboard that featured adult literacy programs
• Obesity – a 20-something, fairly round Asian woman’s face was pictured in a billboard that featured obesity awareness/prevention
• Child proverty – an Asian child (female) was pictured in a billboard that attempted to draw awareness to some statistic about American children who live in poverty
• Lupus (disease) – an 40-something Asian woman was pictured in a billboard that advised of the symptoms of Lupus erythematosus, a degenerative tissue disease

Since the billboards were stereotyping (most mass advertising does — that is its nature), I’ll go ahead and stereotype too (without doing proper research on my claims here). Namely, Asians (or Asian-Americans) do not jump out to me as a group of people who would warrant prominent placement in these ads. I do know of the stats in terms of per capita income and living standards (they rank higher than whites in these areas). To that end, I think that illiteracy and poverty would probably be relatively low among Asians. Maybe for illiteracy, they were thinking ESL (English as Second Language), but that’s not the same service as illiteracy programs. And obesity? While there is certainly an obesity problem here in the U.S., if I were putting my marketing dollars to work, I don’t think I’d put a lot of them into targeting Asians. (Ironically, soon after we saw the obesity PSA billboard, we saw one for a weight loss program that featured a stock photo of an ultra-skinny Asian girl in a bikini). Can’t speak for Lupus disease, although I believe it does affect non-Europeans more.

So what’s next, Asians in anti-meth ads?

Does anyone else think this is weird?