Asian American Symbolic Boundary-Making: Revisiting Racial Triangulation

• In Event: Culture and Inequality

Abstract

Sociological scholarship has long struggled with where Asian Americans lie in the US racial hierarchy. Evocations of culture have placed Asian Americans on an oscillating scale between depictions of forever foreigner and model minority. Claire Jean Kim’s (1999) seminal theory on Asian American racial triangulation has served as a longstanding model of Asian American racial position within the US racial hierarchy. However, as scholarship has pointed out, the racial demographics of the US has changed significantly since 1999 (Tran 2024), and immigrants are playing an increasingly important role in the landscape of policy. Although Kim’s recent reformulation of racial triangulation in her newest book adjusts the positions of Asian Americans, where groups of immigrant origin place themselves and how in what contexts remains uninterrogated (Kim 2023). Our study seeks to interrogate how and where Asian Americans define and establish cultural boundaries within the racial hierarchy. We ask: what kind of symbolic boundaries do Asian Americans create between themselves and other racial groups and under what policy contexts do these boundaries shift? Using data from the 2024 American Mosaic Project national survey, we use Bayesian cumulative logit models to assess how Asian and Asian American respondents establish and manage symbolic boundaries between themselves and other marginalized groups in the US. We then examine how specific policies such as anti-immigrant policies and DEI attitudes predict symbolic boundary construction. Through our statistical analysis, we seek to understand how unclear definitions of Asian American culture reproduce the Black/White binary in sociological research with implications for larger racialized inequalities among racialized groups of immigrant origins.

Authors

• Shania Kuo, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities

• Francesca Bernardino, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities

• Doug Hartmann, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities