Opinion: View from the 'statistically insignificant' or 'How do AAPI become statistically relevant?'

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Its not the first time that Pew's surveys have been criticized for its outdated view of America.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.

Sample questions from E.J.R. David's survey.
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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.

Speaking up works; Publisher to stop offering racist children's book

E.J. Ramos David

Dr. E.J. Ramos David is no shrinking violet so when he saw a book denigrating his Filipino heritage, he immediately launched a Twitter campaign exposing the book's harmful effects on his children.

The good news is that the publisher agreed with David, a psychology professor at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, and vowed to remove the book from his stock.

The "Brown Skin, White Minds" author's latest campaign began when he went to the Anchorage school to  pick up his kids -- who are Filipino and Athabascan (Indigenous Alaskans).

"I picked them up from school just like everyday. We were driving home and then my 10-year old, my oldest son, from the back of the car, I heard him ask me if I ate balut. It seemed like out of nowhere ... but I just said yes, I have. Then, a few minutes later, I heard him say, 'What? They have maktak on here?'" David told The Arctic Sounder. "So, then I looked in my rearview mirror and I saw him reading a book."

The book his son was reading was Capstone Publishing's "Take Your Pick of Disgusting Foods" by G. G. Lake. It features descriptions of dishes from around the world.

David posted the book on Twitter: "My 7 yr-old came home with this book from his school library. It has 2 Filipino foods & 1 Alaska Native food. This book is explicitly telling my Filibascan kids that their cultures are 'disgusting.' It's 2020, & the books in our schools are still teaching our kids to be racist."

As most visitors to Southeast Asia or watchers of the TV show Survivor know, balut is boiled fertilized duck egg, most common in the Philippines.

Maktak (which appears in the book in question as "muktuk") is whale skin and blubber and is a traditional food of Alaska's indigenous people.

As social media does sometimes, David's tweet went viral and was quickly shared not only with the parents of his childrens' school but within less than a week, it caught the attention of the publisher.

Remarkably, the publisher agreed with David's assessment.

"It was actually a lot more than I expected," said David to the Arctic Sounder. "I'm happy. Creating some kind of change is not always going to be this easy. Many times, there's going to be a lot of resistance or a lot of denial, or even people arguing back and fighting back and doubling down on their bigotry. So, to get this quick and this easy and this powerful of a response was refreshing and I hope it happens more."

"They were decisive about it. They did not make any excuses. They acknowledged there was something wrong that happened. And then they corrected it immediately," continued David. 

Kudos to the publisher. If only more publishers were as quick to correct their mistakes. 

"We are mortified and ashamed," wrote @CapstonePub, the publisher's official account. "You are right to call this book out as racist and we are taking steps to remove it from active sale. We specialize in titles that attempt to reach reluctant readers; topics that are gross and disgusting are popular hooks. However, cultures and traditions never fit this description and the myopic view that produced this book is inexcusable. We will be reviewing our staff training and looking across our list to make sure we are not perpetuating the problem in other titles. We're deeply sorry that bringing this to our attention was necessary, but thank you for doing so."

The moral of the story: Don't be afraid to speak up. If you see something racist. Report it as racist. You don't have to be belligerent, but don't hedge your words just to be overly polite. Racist is racist.

David, who has written extensively on internalized oppression and postcolonial psychology, concludes:

"I just hope that this serves as a lesson to always speak up," he said. "Even when we think nothing might come of it, even when we might feel alone or even might feel afraid to speak up, we should still try to speak up because we never know who might be listening. We never know who might become our allies. We never know who might become our supporters. We never know. Things might actually change."