Asian or Not Asian? Examining Difference in Street Race among Asian Americans

• In Event: 50260 - Section on Asia and Asian America Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 10: Rethinking “Asian American”: Identity, Perception, and Intra-Group Difference

Abstract

In October 2023, newly released FBI crime data revealed that for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic began, anti-Asian hate crimes decreased by 33 percent. However, this decrease was not evenly experienced across Asian groups, with the number of bias-motivated incidents toward Muslims and other religious minorities that include Asians increasing. These trends underscore the salience of debates about who “counts” as Asian and the boundaries of Asian-ness in the US—and the need to disaggregate and think intersectionally about Asian experiences. In this paper, we contribute to this discourse by drawing on the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS) and analyzing how Asians perceive their “street race”. Specifically, we ask: (1) to what extent do self-identified Asians report their street race as Asian and (2) how does perceiving (or not) a street race of Asian vary across national origin, skin tone, and religion? We find that Chinese, Taiwanese, Korean, and Vietnamese individuals most frequently report their street race as Asian, with this percentage declining for Indians, Filipinos, Southeast Asians, and Pakistanis. Notably, Japanese individuals reported their street race as Asian least often at 46 percent. In addition, we find that as skin tone shifts from light to increasingly dark, Asians have higher odds of their street race not being perceived as Asian; compared to Chinese individuals, every Asian group had significantly higher odds of their street race not being perceived as Asian; and street race differs across religion, primarily for Catholics and Protestants, a finding which bears further analysis. Together, findings illuminate the need to think intersectionally and multidimensionally about Asians’ racialized experiences, disaggregate across numerous social dimensions (e.g., religion, national origin), and advance this line of inquiry to consider the impact that differential street race for Asians has on diverse social and material outcomes.

Authors

• Sharan Kaur Mehta, The University of New Mexico

• Edward D. Vargas, Arizona State University-Tempe

• Yasmiyn Irizarry, University of Texas at Austin

• Nikita Rupani, The University of Texas-Austin