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发帖数: 2741 | 1 Over the weekend, the hashtag #NotYourAsianSidekick exploded on Twitter,
trending for more than 24 hours, with over 45,000 tweets in less than a day.
This hashtag, started by writer Suey Park (@suey_park), inspired Asian
Americans and others to share their thoughts on the multiple ways Asians are
marginalized.
People tweeted about diversity within the Asian community, language,
stereotypes, body image, immigration, media representation, and other topics
. Although the conversation was initially about Asian American feminism, the
hashtag clearly had global appeal and tweets poured in from around the
world.
On Monday, a counter-hashtag #AsianPrivilege appeared. Twitter users
deployed this hashtag to claim that Asians experience relative privilege as
compared to other people of color. Many of the people behind this counter-
hashtag appear to be trolls tweeting from new accounts. Nevertheless, the
sentiments behind these tweets are widely shared as many people believe that
Asians and Asian Americans do not face discrimination.
As a sociologist, I think it is best to turn to the evidence: Do Asians face
discrimination? The labor market is one of the best places to take this
question because this is where many people believe Asians have reached
parity with white Americans.
Asian Americans have among the highest earnings in the United States. In
2013, Asians’ median weekly earnings were $973, as compared to $799 for
whites, $634 for blacks, and $572 for Latinos. It seems as if Asians do not
experience discrimination. However, these aggregate numbers hide many
disparities.
First of all, Asian men earned, on average, 40 percent more than Asian women
. The gender gap between Asian men and women is the highest of any racial
group. Secondly, these numbers hide the diversity within the Asian community
just $389 per week – putting them far below average. Whereas Chinese and
Indian men earn more on average than white men, the opposite is true for
Laotian, Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Hmong men. In sum, some Asians earn more
than whites, yet this is the case for only some nationalities – those that
have, on average, higher levels of education.
Chinese and Indian Americans have higher educational attainment than their
white male counterparts. This helps explain some of the earnings disparities.
Studies that take into account educational achievements find that Asian men
earn less than their white male counterparts. Sociologists ChangHwan Kim and
Arthur Sakamoto found that if you compare white men to Asian men with
similar characteristics, the white men often earn more. In other words, if
an Asian American man and a white man both live in New York, both went to
selective universities, and both studied engineering, we could expect that
the Asian American man would earn, on average, 8 percent less than the white
man.
The fact that Asian Americans do not earn as much as white men with the same
qualifications points to the fact that Asian Americans face labor market
discrimination. In other words, there is a real monetary cost to being Asian
American. Over the course of one’s career, this disparity can amount to
significant amounts of money.
Labor market discrimination against Asians is not unique to the United
States. A study conducted in Australia also uncovered labor market
discrimination against Asians. Alison Booth and her colleagues conducted an
audit study where they sent 4,000 fictitious job applications out for entry-
level jobs, where they varied only the last name of the applicant – thereby
signaling ethnicity.
The results were that the average callback rate for Anglo-Saxons was 35
percent. Applications with an Italian-sounding name received responses 32
percent of the time – with only a small statistically significant
difference. The differences were starker for the other groups: indigenous
applicants obtained an interview 26 percent of the time, Chinese applicants
21 percent of the time, and Middle Easterners 22 percent of the time.
According to these findings, Anglo-Saxons would have to submit three job
applications to have a decent shot at getting a callback whereas Chinese
applicants can expect to submit five.
This labor market discrimination – both in hiring and in compensation –
stems from stereotypes about Asians and Asian Americans. These stereotypes
were frequently mentioned on Twitter over the past few days.
People on Twitter pointed out the perpetual foreign-ness of Asian Americans:
My answer to the popular question "Where are you from?" is "My mother's
uterus." (People must not understand biology.) #NotYourAsianSidekick
— Amber Ying (@diabola) December 16, 2013
Others pointed to the exoticization of Asian Americans:
I need Asian American feminism because we're constantly reduced to being
exotic and fetishized. Stop diminishing us. #NotYourAsianSidekick
— Maureen (@maureen_ahmed) December 15, 2013
Many of these stereotypes are perpetuated by mass media.
Darrell Hamamoto analyzed representations of Asians and Asian Americans on
television between 1950 and 1990. He found that Asian men were often
represented in US media as asexual or effeminate, whereas Asian women were
often portrayed as hypersexual. Hamamoto contends that network television
negatively influences popular perceptions of Asians.
Although Asians make up five percent of people in the United States, in 2011
, they only accounted for two percent of all television representations. The
combination of few representations of Asian Americans in mass media along
with stereotypical representations work to feed these stereotypes.
The hashtag #NotYourAsianSidekick clearly struck a chord with people around
the world both because of the discrimination people of Asian descent face as
well as because of the fact that this discrimination is rarely discussed in
public forums. |
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