Disaggregating and Disentangling Asian-ness: Examining Street Race for Asian Americans

• In Event: Asia and Asian American Section Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 8: Asia and Asian America Section Roundtable - Race

Abstract

Sociological debates about the boundaries of Asian-ness in the US have persisted for decades, fueling ongoing calls to action to disaggregate racial data that homogenizes the experiences of immensely diverse Asian groups—and to think intersectionally about the racial realities of Asian Americans. Significant gaps remain in our understanding of how race is lived, perceived, and experienced my Asians in the US, however, which poses notable concerns given how consequential racial appraisals can be on the lived experiences and material realities of community members. In this paper, we address this gap by drawing on the Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS) from 2020 and 2024 and analyzing how diverse Asian groups similarly or differently perceive their “street race”. 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. 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, with these odds consistently higher for female Asians across groups; and street race differs across religion and gender. 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 Vargas, Arizona State University

• Yasmiyn Irizarry, University of Texas at Austin

• Nikita Rupani, The University of Texas-Austin

• Nancy López, University of New Mexico-Albuquerque