Recursive Resocialization: How Homeland Policy Legacies Shape Chinese and Indian American Views on Affirmative Action

• In Event: Asia and Asian American Section Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 11: Asia and Asian America Section Roundtable - Race, Culture and Politics

Abstract

Debates over affirmative action in U.S. higher education often treat Asian Americans as a monolithic bloc, yet internal viewpoints vary significantly across ethnic and socioeconomic lines. Drawing on 31 in-depth interviews with first-generation Indian and Chinese American parents in metropolitan Atlanta, this paper investigates the transnational frames of reference that shape their interpretations of U.S. race-conscious admissions. I introduce the concept of recursive resocialization to explain how immigrants utilize homeland institutional memories—specifically India’s caste-based reservation system and China’s exam-based gaokao—as interpretive lenses to navigate the American racial landscape.

Preliminary findings reveal distinct comparative logics: Indian parents, predominantly from upper-caste backgrounds, leverage the "creamy layer" critique to challenge the distributive justice of U.S. policies. In contrast, Chinese parents’ views are more contingent on their socioeconomic trajectories. While some welcome "holistic review" as a liberation from the gaokao’s rigidity, many express an "anxiety of unpredictability," equating American admissions criteria with the bureaucratic subjectivity they sought to escape. Despite these differences, most parents across both groups adopt a strategy of "accommodation without assimilation", or a "heads down" retreat into hyper-meritocracy, as a defensive buffer against institutional opaqueness.

By centering these bifocal policy schemas, the study contributes to the literature on comparative racialization and immigrant political incorporation. It reframes the "Tiger Parent" narrative not as an inherent cultural trait, but as a rational, transnational institutional response to the cognitive friction between deterministic homeland systems and the opaque logic of U.S. elite admissions. Ultimately, the paper suggests that building institutional trust with transnational communities requires addressing the predictability gap through more transparent, contextually verifiable metrics.

Author

• Anqi Hu, Emory University