Recently, Asian Americans — particularly the elderly — have been attacked publicly in what appear to be hate crimes. These attacks reveal Asian Americans’ precarious position in the United States. As the pandemic began, President Donald Trump repeatedly referred to the coronavirus as the “kung flu” or “Chinese virus,” linking it to Chinese Americans. These comments evoked stereotypes of Asian Americans as disease-carrying foreigners who cannot and will not assimilate into mainstream U.S. society.
Scholars have linked Trump’s rhetoric to increased hate speech and violence, such as this surge in anti-Asian American violence. Since the start of the pandemic, about 3 in 10 Asian Americans say they have been mistreated or discriminated against based on their race.
What effects do such experiences have on politics? My research suggests that being targeted with negative stereotypes and discrimination leads Asian Americans to feel more strongly attached to the identity of “Asian American,” despite the tremendous diversity in that community.
Anti-Asian stereotypes in the United States
Research suggests that Asian Americans are often thought of as forever foreigners, a group inherently “un-American” and incapable of assimilating into U.S. society. Such stereotypes can be traced back to the first Filipino and Chinese immigrants’ arrival in the United States.
Historically, anti-Asian bias in the United States has had two streams. First are health-based anxieties that they carried disease. Second are economic anxieties about competition for jobs, which contributed to Congress’s passage of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and 1930s attacks by Whites on Filipino farmworkers. These twin fears have recently converged, with the pandemic emerging while China is rising as an economic competitor.
At the same time, many think of Asian Americans as the “model minority.” This stereotype imagines a monolithic group that is economically well off, excels in school and gets ahead in American society despite experiences with racism. This stereotype can be used to denigrate African Americans and Latinos by comparison, while silencing Asian American concerns. It also collapses everyone with ancestry from the planet’s largest continent into one homogeneous group, despite a host of national origins, religions, cultures, even historical antagonisms, with their only unifying characteristic being that they were assigned to the “Asian” category in the United States.
How I did my research
To examine how discrimination and stereotyping affect Asian Americans, I spearheaded the 2020 Asian American Omnibus Survey (AAOS). The company Bovitz collected data in late February 2020, surveying 1,514 self-identified Asian Americans, of whom 47 percent say they were foreign-born and 53 percent U.S.-born.
I embedded an experiment within the survey designed to assess how Asian Americans respond to stereotyped messages about their group. Respondents randomly read one of three news vignettes, two of which contained slightly offensive assumptions, similar to the kinds of microaggressions someone might encounter in daily life.
The first vignette evoked the model minority by describing Asian Americans as having a “strong work ethic and math ability” and reporting that companies treated Asian American employees better than others in hiring and promotions. The second evoked the “forever foreigner” trope, depicting Asian Americans as incompetent in English and likely to face job discrimination. The third, used as the control, talked about companies’ increasing hiring and didn’t mention race or ethnicity at all.
Then I asked respondents to rank how strongly they agreed or disagreed with a series of statements designed to assess closeness to other Asian Americans, such as “the fact that I am Asian American is an important part of my identity” and “Asians in America have similar political interests.”
The ‘forever foreigner’ stereotype can activate Asian American political identity
Individuals who read the “forever foreigner” vignette rated the importance of their Asian American identity 6.7 percentage points higher compared with the control group and were more likely to agree that Asian Americans of all backgrounds had common political interests. Individuals who read the “model minority” vignette were 5 percentage points more likely compared with the control group to agree that Asian Americans shared a “linked fate,” a sense that their personal well-being was tied to the well-being of the whole group.
While these effects were small, I conceived of them as individual incidents of a microaggression — and expect that these effects should compound over time as each individual repeatedly encounters these assumptions.
That’s likely to increase political activism
These findings line up with what other researchers have found. For instance, political scientists Jane Junn and Natalie Masuoka also found that reading about discrimination against the group (for instance, not being hired because of a stereotype) leads individuals to identify more closely with their racial group. Further, political scientist Taeku Lee found that individuals who identify with a group’s racial identity are more likely to be politically active.
If discrimination leads individuals to more strongly identify with their marginalized group, that’s likely to have an effect at the ballot box and in politics more generally.
Asian Americans are already a key group in U.S. politics. In the 2020 election, Asian Americans turned out in historic highs in Georgia and Texas, voting predominantly for President Biden. Last year’s election also saw the highest number of Asian Americans ever voted into Congress. Nathan Chan, Jae Yeon Kim and I have also found that the pandemic, scapegoating and Republican blame for the coronavirus have pushed Asian Americans to identify more closely with the Democratic Party.
As a result, my research suggests, the current spate of anti-Asian violence may strengthen Asian American identity across different national origins and cultures. And that may push the group more fully into active involvement in U.S. politics.
Vivien Leung (@leungvivien_) is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of California at Los Angeles.
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