Attitudes of Asian Americans on Racialized Issues

• In Event: Ideological Diversity within Minoritized Communities

Abstract

Prior research has shown that respondents’ preferred sources of political news, linguistic preferences, and use of specific social media platforms affect their attitudes toward racialized policies. These effects are noticeable for both White and Black Americans, but other racial groups are understudied. Asian Americans play increasingly crucial roles in local elections and legal battles surrounding racialized policies like affirmative action programs in college and high school admissions. Therefore, it is critical to study their attitudes on these issues.

We propose a survey of US citizens from the six largest Asian American national-origin groups, namely Chinese, Indian, Filipino, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Korean. Our dependent variables consist of questions on three critical racialized issues - policing, affirmative action, and immigration. Our independent variables include sources of political news, preferred social media platforms, primary language of news consumption, attitudes toward Black/White Americans. Additionally, we included ten measures of the model minority myth. We control for gender, age, family income, education, partisan identity, and immigration status (including immigrant generation).

Our study makes 2 contributions - we measure the differing impact of social media and political news sources among Asian Americans of different national origins, and we corroborate findings from qualitative studies on the effect of the model minority myth. We expect our research will highlight key mechanisms of racial attitude formation among Asian Americans. The study will also reveal key distinctions between Asian American national origin sub-groups in not only their attitudes, but also how different social media platforms and news media sources impact these groups differently.

Authors

• Anmol Panda, University of Michigan

• Libby Hemphill, University of Michigan