Because We Need to Grapple with How We Talk about Asian Americans

Just over two months ago, a white male entered three Asian-owned spas in the Atlanta area, and in the ensuing carnage, took the lives of eight individuals, including six Asian women. While America grieved the unnecessary loss of so many lives, many Americans were faced with confronting an uncomfortable truth that Asian Americans knew far too well—that this event was not surprising.

It was not surprising because anti-Asian sentiment is not new. The violence against our Asian-American brothers and sisters has not started as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, but instead, is rooted deep within American understanding of Chinese immigrants tracing back over 150 years. When we talk about how Asians are “robotic” in their workplace rigor, we strip them of their humanity and reduce their complex emotional experiences, dreams, aspirations, and historical interactions into a single moment in time, a psychological concept we call “dehumanization.” Dehumanization can lead to a wide variety of outcomes—from discrimination in policies, to exclusion in social activities, to genocide and ethnic cleansing. When we claim they only reside in certain areas, or only hang out with their own group, we ignore the cultural and historical policy actions that played, assisted, and promoted that self-segregation in the first place.

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Because It Can Help Fight Stereotypes in the World of Science

The insidious negative effects of racist stereotypes on African Americans’ academic performance was described in The Atlantic in 1999 by former National Science Board member and social psychologist Claude Steele in “Thin Ice: Stereotype Threat and Black College Students.” The research that Steele referred to throughout the article was conducted during the 1990s and published in several well-respected peer reviewed outlets. It made a splash and spawned an entire branch of research on the various ways that negative stereotypes deleteriously impact their targets.

As an assistant professor of psychology at that time, Steele’s work resonated strongly with me on both personal and professional levels. While delighted to be a member of what was then a top nationally ranked psychology department, I was acutely aware of my status as the only African American member among the 60-plus faculty in the department. I routinely encountered other faculty and graduate students who openly questioned my professional credentials and legitimacy, and even wondered aloud about whether I had what it took to be successful. It was not just that I was a young woman or that I was an African American. It was what I represented in toto, including the confidence and grit I needed just to be present, that most seemed to vex my detractors. So, in addition to managing the expected pressures of being an assistant professor within a research-intensive setting, I also worked hard to counter the stereotype-based expectations of inferiority that a considerable number of people held about me.

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Because It Can Become a Tool to Dismantle White Supremacy

The 1966 Coleman Report was our nation’s first big social science project. It gathered and analyzed data from 600,000 students, 60,000 teachers and 4,000 public schools; it was designed to address the nation’s failure to provide “equal education opportunities for individuals by reason of race, color, religion or national origin.” The magnitude of persistent racial inequality in America was not in doubt at the time, nor was there doubt that the social sciences could help to explain the causes of inequity and recommend policies to level the field. In the years since Coleman’s landmark study, the social sciences have abundantly done so. A half-century of increasingly sophisticated research (e.g., on early childhood interventions, residential segregation, and neighborhood effects) and conceptual advances (e.g., critical race theory, intergroup relations, and stereotype threat) have given the country a much deeper understanding of inequality’s causes and consequences.

Despite this progress, it is evident that racism has a stronger hold than we thought possible. The civil rights era hoped to reestablish meaningful citizenship only to find institutional racism had dug in, gerrymandering and voter suppression had replaced poll taxes, a war on crime and a war on drugs resulted in police brutality and a massive incarceration rate. Social science has succeeded in documenting all of this, but our focus on evidence-based policy has underscored (and perhaps even widened) the gap between knowledge and the impact of what we know.

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Because Institutional Racism Exacerbates our Health and Economic Challenges

The COVID-19 epidemic is hitting African Americans particularly hard. As of this writing, 70% of all COVID-19 deaths in Louisiana are black residents in a state where only one-third of the population is black. To date, few states have released COVID-19 data by race, but the scant available information reveals that African Americans in Chicago, Milwaukee, and Detroit are being infected with and dying of COVID-19 at disproportionate rates.

Could the effects of historic and modern-day discrimination be contributing to these stunning statistics? In New Orleans, a city that is nearly 60% African American and has a small but growing Hispanic population, where the COVID-19 death rate is on a par per capita with New York City's, the answer is likely yes.

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Because It Can Challenge Conventional Wisdom

Social science research provides evidence that helps us understand the drivers of social problems. A lot of times, this evidence is in contrast to the conventional wisdom and may on the face of it seem counterintuitive.  However, evidence from social science research can show why certain policies work and why other policies fail, helping us inform policy and prevent unintended consequences.

An example of this is “ban-the-box” policies, laws that forbid employers from asking whether a job applicant was ever involved with the justice system. The purpose of such policies was to improve hiring rates for individuals with criminal backgrounds and limit discrimination by employers, based on the  theory that the stigma for those involved with the criminal justice system would not be present if employers did not have information about applicants’ criminal histories. The large racial disparities in the criminal justice system lead to further racial disparities in the employment of ex-offenders. Thus, banning the box would have the added benefit of reducing racial disparities in employment. Thirty-one states plus the District of Columbia have passed ban-the-box policies, along with over 150 cities and counties.

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Because Social Science Is Necessary to Achieve Health Equity

Living in an America in which all populations have an equal opportunity to live long, healthy, and productive lives is the vision of the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities. As we bring National Minority Health Month to a close, it is important to remember that not all groups have obtained health equity. Racial and ethnic minorities, rural residents, people with disadvantaged socioeconomic resources and sexual and gender minorities carry a disproportionate burden of illness and disease. The search to determine the best way to reduce health disparities and to achieve health equity remains challenging for all of us.

The potential to live longer and healthier lives is greater than ever before with the emergence of medical and technical advances in healthcare and the adoption of healthier lifestyles. Despite these advances, health disparities continue to persist. A health disparity, defined as a health difference that adversely affects disadvantaged populations, based on one or more health outcomes, results from a series of complex and interrelated factors. To truly reduce and ultimately eliminate health disparities a framework must be applied that can address the multifaceted underlying causes of the disparity.

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