Most Asian Americans don’t consider themselves very well informed on the history of Asians in the United States and are more likely to identify themselves by their ethnicity than by the term “Asian American,” according to a new survey from the Pew Research Center.
“We were trying to understand, how do Asian Americans most often identify themselves, as well as trying to understand, what are the shared experiences among them in the U.S.,” the lead author of the report, Neil G. Ruiz, associate director of race and ethnicity research at the Pew Research Center, told Gothamist.
We were trying to understand, how do Asian Americans most often identify themselves, as well as trying to understand, what are the shared experiences among them in the U.S.
The survey, released Monday, involved more than 7,000 respondents, over 5,000 of whom are foreign-born, making it the largest ever conducted of Asians nationwide, Ruiz said.
The report focused on the six-largest Asian subgroups: Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Indian, Japanese and Vietnamese Americans. Other populations, including Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Thai and Malaysians, each comprise less than 2% of the Asian American population, “making it challenging to recruit nationally representative samples for each origin group.” The survey was offered in Chinese, Korean, Hindi, Tagalog, Vietnamese and English.
From 2010 to 2019, the Asian American community grew faster than any other racial group, but according to the report remains a relatively small population, comprising 7% of the U.S. population, or 23 million people.
Just under a quarter (24%) of respondents consider themselves extremely/very informed about U.S. Asian history, with half saying they’re somewhat informed and another quarter of respondents saying they’re little informed or not informed at all.
However, the report leaves unanswered what, exactly, constitutes a depth of knowledge about Asian American history. While many Americans are at least glancingly familiar with the mass internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the role of Chinese laborers in the construction of the transcontinental railroad, the history also includes the settlement of Louisiana by Filipino sailors and indentured servants during the 1700s, as well as the 1907 expulsion of South Asian laborers from Bellingham, Wash., by angry white mobs. Educators, historic leaders and educators say schools could do better.
“And of those who are informed about the history of Asians in the U.S., they’re mostly learning through informal means, such as the Internet or media, and not through schools,” said Ruiz. The findings could play into a push by New York state lawmakers to include the teaching of Asian American history in public schools.
The report touches on sensitive identity questions, such as who do Asians even consider Asian? While the vast majority of respondents (89%) consider East and Southeast Asians to be Asian, only 67% regard South Asians as Asian and only 43% consider Central Asians to be Asian.
However, a sizable proportion of the Asian community do not actually describe themselves as Asian or Asian American. 52% of respondents tend to identify themselves by their ethnicity, either with or without the term “American” added on. This is most pronounced among Korean (66%), Vietnamese (64%) and Indian (62%) respondents, but Indians stood out for their tendency to avoid hyphenation altogether: 41% identify simply as Indian as opposed to Indian-American.
By contrast, the report noted, just 34% of Japanese respondents use Japanese or Japanese American to describe their identity and were more likely to identify as Asian American (25%) or simply American (20%).
Most Asian Americans identify with or lean toward Democrats, including more than two-thirds of Indians (68%), Filipinos (68%) and Koreans (67%) who are registered voters. Among Chinese voters 56% support Democrats versus 38% who support Republicans, while only 42% of Vietnamese support Democrats while 51% support Republicans.
Asked what it means to be “truly American,” the vast majority of respondents said it meant “accepting people of diverse racial and religious backgrounds” (94%), “believing in individual freedoms” (92%) and “respecting U.S. political institutions and laws” (89%). These rates largely corresponded with those of the overall U.S. population.
“They’re no different in their view of what it means to be, in these measures, American,” said Ruiz.
He added that upcoming reports would tackle other dimensions of the Asian experience, including anti-Asian violence and harassment.
