On June 19, 1982, Vincent Chin, a 27-year-old Chinese American man, went out with some friends to a Detroit strip club to celebrate his bachelor party. There, he encountered two white male autoworkers, Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz. The U.S. auto industry was in a recession in the early ’80s, experiencing mass layoffs while Japanese car manufacturers thrived. Ebens reportedly blamed Chin, a U.S. citizen, for the loss of American jobs, shouting at him, “It’s because of you little motherfuckers that we’re out of work.” Not only was Chin American, but also he was not Japanese; yet to these men, he simply looked “Asian.” The fight moved outside, where Ebens and Nitz chased Chin down and beat him with a baseball bat. Chin died in the hospital, days before his wedding.
Many did not consider Vincent Chin’s death to be racially motivated. The judge ruled it the unfortunate outcome of a barroom brawl, and a congressional hearing on the Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 1997 referred to Chin’s murder as political in nature, rather than racial. This response revealed a blindness toward the specific form of racism that targets the Asian American community. Forty years after the death of Vincent Chin, Asian Americans remain positioned immutably outside of the American identity as they are attacked and scapegoated for a pandemic labeled “kung flu” and the “China virus.”
Illuminating how racism gets expressed against Asian Americans can give us greater insight into the complexities of how racism manifests in the United States in general, why it may sometimes be hard to see, and how to combat it.
Illuminating how racism gets expressed against Asian Americans can give us greater insight into the complexities of how racism manifests in the United States in general, why it may sometimes be hard to see, and how to combat it.
Our research reveals two key ways in which people of color experience racism in the United States. Black, Native, and Latinx Americans tend to be perceived as lower status, or lacking in occupational, educational, and economic prestige, compared to white Americans. Asian, Latinx, and Arab Americans, even those who are native citizens, are perceived as more foreign, or as deviating from cultural notions about who belongs in United States, compared to white Americans. These two dimensions have a powerful impact on different groups’ unique experiences with American racism.
For instance, we surveyed 380 adults in the United States online and asked them to describe the last instance of racial prejudice they faced. Black and Latinx Americans reported numerous instances of experiencing prejudice because they were assumed to be low in status. These participants described being followed around stores, harassed by police officers, mistaken for waitstaff, and not being taken seriously by their colleagues or employers. Asian Americans were significantly less likely to report this form of prejudice and indeed often faced the opposite set of assumptions, that of being an educated, hardworking, and successful “model minority.”
If we were paying attention only to this dimension of perceived low status, we might assume that Asian Americans do not face racism. However, Asian Americans regularly contend with another form of prejudice based on the perception that they are not American enough. In that same survey, Asian Americans most commonly described an experience of being perceived or treated as a foreigner. “[The cashier] spoke to me very slowly like I didn’t understand how to speak English,” one Asian American reported, while another described a man on the street who “started hurling racial slurs at me, telling me to go back to China, when I was born in America.” While Latinx Americans in our survey also reported experiencing prejudice based on perceptions of their cultural foreignness, Black Americans were much less likely than both groups to report facing this form of prejudice.
The knowledge that people of color are susceptible to different forms of racism based on perceptions of low status and cultural foreignness is important for predicting when discrimination is likely to occur.
A follow-up survey of over 1,000 U.S. adults asking how much they experience prejudice along these two dimensions replicated these same patterns, with Asian and Latinx Americans reporting more prejudice based on assumptions of cultural foreignness than Black and white Americans, and Black and Latinx Americans reporting more prejudice based on assumptions of low status than Asian and white Americans. Another study of 167 college students found that Asian and Latinx Americans reported being misperceived as “from another country” or a “nonnative English speaker” more often than Black and white Americans. Black American students reported being often misperceived as “dumb,” “unfriendly,” and a “criminal.”
The knowledge that people of color are susceptible to different forms of racism based on perceptions of low status and cultural foreignness is important for predicting when discrimination is likely to occur. For instance, Asian, Latinx, and Arab Americans may be particularly susceptible to discrimination for jobs that are seen as requiring stereotypical American characteristics like English fluency and enthusiasm, while Black, Latinx, Arab, and Native Americans may be more likely than Asian Americans to face discrimination for jobs that are perceived as requiring stereotypically high-status traits like advanced education. These insights allow us to go beyond the question of who faces discrimination to understanding when and why discrimination is likely to occur for different groups.
These broad racial labels are made up of diverse ethnic communities that each have their own unique experiences with discrimination along these two dimensions. When disaggregated, Southeast Asian American ethnic subgroups and Pacific Islanders may be more likely to face discrimination based on stereotypes about their low status. Black immigrants may be seen as more culturally foreign than Black Americans. And although many Black and Native Americans are less likely to be stereotyped as culturally foreign compared to Asian, Arab, and Latinx Americans, they are still not seen as American to the same extent as white Americans and face negative consequences as a result (recall the birther conspiracy incorrectly suggesting President Obama was not born in the United States).
Greater awareness of when and why discrimination occurs can help institutions understand where and how to intervene to change stereotypes and prevent discrimination.
Race and ethnicity also intersect meaningfully with other social identities, including gender, social class, and sexual orientation. Initial data on violence against Asian Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic suggests that Asian American women bear a disproportionate brunt of hate, possibly because of stereotypes that portray them as passive and sexually subservient. Our research shows that although Asian Americans in the aggregate are perceived as a relatively high-status group, Asian-American women are perceived as lower status than Asian American men. These factors all shape individuals’ likelihood of encountering discrimination.
Greater awareness of when and why discrimination occurs can help institutions understand where and how to intervene to change stereotypes and prevent discrimination. Changing these stereotypes could include diversifying media images, such as casting Arab, Asian, and Latinx in movie roles as American characters. In order to more fully mitigate bias in hiring and recruitment, institutions could create criteria that ensure hiring managers are not unnecessarily relying on stereotypically American characteristics, such as enthusiasm, to make hiring decisions. Realtors could be educated on how neighborhoods with different racial and ethnic groups may be perceived by white clients and work to provide a more accurate view. Pinpointing and preventing the unique racisms faced by Americans of color guides us toward a fairer and more equal America for all of us.
