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| PEW GRAPHIC |
The Pew Research Center has been invaluable in getting a gauge on Americans' economic well-being, social status and opinions but it falls woefully short when addressing racial or ethnic issues, especially in regards to Asian Americans.
Their latest survey taken by Pew, how different ethnic groups react or affected by to the coronavirus pandemic is a case in point.
Pew asked questions of their American Trends Panel (ATP), which is "a nationally representative panel of randomly selected U.S. adults. Panelists participate via self-administered web surveys."
The survey neatly categorized those responses according to White, Black and Latino. One would think, if the panel is "randomly selected" there would be a few Asian Americans responding, especially if the random selection process delved into the states of Hawaii, California or Nevada, where Asian Americans make up a significant portion of the population. In the case of Hawaii, AAPI make up the majority of the population.
The usual response is that Asian American responses are "statistically insignificant." In other words. so few AAPI responded to make the numbers gained to be questionable as truly representative of that ethnic group.
Asian Americans make up about 22 million, or almost 7%, of the US population. But in California, the US's largest state by population, Asian Americans make up almost 18% of the population. In Hawaii, Asian Americans make up about 40% of the island state's 1.4 million inhabitants.
Drilling down even further, getting information about specific ethnic groups, ie, Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, South Asian, etc.) is even more difficult.
Its not the first time that Pew's surveys have been criticized for its outdated view of America. When the research center released its survey of the country's social trends after the 2010 Census, Asian Americans raised a ruckus when, once again, they were deemed "statistically insignificant." You can imagine the protests that came from the AAPI community to be brushed aside by a reputable statistic-oriented research institution such as Pew.
In an effort to rectify their omission, in 2012, Pew released a follow-up report, “The Rise of Asian Americans,” The researchers were heavily criticized again for painting Asian Americans as the “model minority” by presenting all the positive attirubtes of Asian Americans. As a result, Pew revised their findings in 2013.
Subsequent follow-ups to the follow-up continue to this day with Pew researchers taking more care in its interpretation of the raw data that they glean about Asian Americans.
However, Pew's Asian American surveys are not combined with that of Whites, Blacks and Hispanics. It is usually in a form of a special report focusing in on Asian Americans as if AAPI are not part and parcel of the the American fabric. In other words, Asian Americans are unintentionally being "otherized" thus reinforcing the "perpetually foreign" image of AAPI no matter how many generations removed they may be from the initial immigrant generation.
It is human nature for a person of a particular ethnicity to look at the statistics that tell that person about the ethnic group he or she belongs to. By not including Asian Americans in with the other ethnicities, Whites, Blacks and Hispanics learn nothing about Asian Americans. Conversely, Asian Americans can't easily compare themselves with the other ethnicities without further effort.
Groups like AAPI Data that specializes in surveys of AAPI subgroups provide invaluable data about Asian America and Pacific Islanders, fill in the blindspot of bigger research institutions like Pew. Most of the time, AAPI Data is able to break down the data into the different AAPI subgroups, something -- for some reason -- the mainstream data collectors and researchers find difficult to do. The more cynical among us might conclude that the researchers just don't want to spend the time (and money) doing the extra digging.
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| Sample questions from E.J.R. David's survey. ___________________________________________________ |
The difficulty in attaining information specific to a particular Asian subgroup forces researchers to divine other methods of collecting that data.
Prof. E.J.R. David of the University of Alaska, saw the shortcomings of the recent Pew study regarding opinions of the coronavirus by going online to get the sentiments of Filipino Americans.
In a Psychology Today article, that while he admits the information he's collected is unscientific, he was able to surmise that Filipino Americans might be more vulnerable to COVID-19 than other AAPI groups because of the high number of Filipinos in the healthcare industry, ie. 20% of the nurses in California are Filipino; and because of the polyglot nature of Filipino racial lines, Filipino Americans might be less susceptible -- or at least experience -- the racist attacks hurled at AAPI being blamed for the spread of the coronavirus.
David's findings is an example for the need for more disaggregated data collection to understand the vast differences among the peoples who come from a score of countries and cultures of Asia and the Pacific Islands.
Demographers predict that by 2040, the United States will be a majority minority country. That apparent eventuality scares the bejeebers out of white supremacists and people of that ilk. Although Whites will no longer be in the majority, they will still be the largest group numerically. Despite the fears of white supremacists, the institutions that form the basis of the US will most likely still keep Whites entrenched as the most powerful racial group in the country.
Perhaps the wide disparities and cultural differences between the some-2 dozen ethnicities and nationalities typically classified under the all-encompassing category of Asian American has something to do with the reluctance of Pew to do the hard data gathering, but I would argue, that is exactly why more effort needs to be put into gathering the raw data if we're to get a better picture of today's -- and tomorrow's -- America.
That's all the more reason to take into account the views of Asian Americans, the fastest growing and the largest provider of immigrants, who will play increasingly important roles in the US workforce and as taxpayers, since the 2010 Census.
EDITOR'S NOTE: For additional commentary, news and views from an AANHPI perspective, follow me at Threads.net/eduardodiok, @DioknoEd on Twitter or at the blog Views From the Edge.
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