This article presents a critical review of 112 works of research on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) in higher education. It focuses on ways previous scholarship framed AAPIs in higher education, and specifically on how those works engaged in a sustained project of countering the model minority myth (MMM). Many publications on AAPIs in higher education mentioned the MMM and neglected to account for the original purpose of the MMM—to maintain anti-Black racism and White supremacy. We identified four key and interconnected limitations implicit in the counter-MMM framework that result from a lack of a critical recognition of the model minority as an instrument to maintain White dominance. Our analysis suggests that the well-established counter-MMM scholarly project is fundamentally flawed in its ability to humanistically reframe and advance research on AAPIs. Therefore, we call for a reframing of research on AAPIs in higher education.

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Overcoming the deeply embedded anti-Black racism and colonial heritage of North America is an ongoing project. Scholars have yet to explicate fully the ways that racism and colonialism are foundational to the construction of institutions of higher education. Plantation politics provides the opportunity to reveal parallel organizational and cultural norms between contemporary higher education institutions and slave plantations. To better explore the applicability of this theory, the authors share an example of the parallel between slave plantations and contemporary universities called “The Oxymoronic Social Existence of Whites (or Neoliberalism as the New Slave Code)” and its implications for campus practice toward racial liberation. The authors argue that the institutional logics of colonialism and imperialism— which were essential to the establishment of this country and led to the creation of plantations and the enslavement of Black bodies—exists within higher education institutions today.