Countering stereotypes about Asian Americans
Asian Americans report less discrimination in employment, housing and criminal justice compared with other racial minorities in the United States (Discrimination in America, Harvard Opinion Research Program, 2018). But they often fall victim to a unique set of stereotypes—including the false belief that all Asian Americans are successful and well adapted—that render them invisible in discussions of race and prejudice in America.
Evidence also suggests that Asian Americans, who represent about 6% of the U.S. population, are frequently denied leadership opportunities (The Illusion of Asian Success, Ascend, 2017) and are overlooked in research, clinical outreach and advocacy efforts. For example, despite the fact that the population has increased by 72% since 2000, making it the country’s fastest growing racial or ethnic group (Pew Research Center, 2017), clinical research efforts focused on Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander populations have made up only 0.17% of the National Institutes of Health budget since 1992 (Doàn, L.N., et al., JAMA Network Open, Vol. 2, No. 7, 2019).
The U.S. Census Bureau defines Asian Americans as American citizens and nationals originating from East Asia, Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent. This highly diverse group includes more than 20 different cultures with numerous languages and religions. It also encompasses everyone from refugees and recent immigrants to fifth-generation Americans.
“Our existence as an aggregate group is very much a political creation that exists only in the United States,” says Helen Hsu, PsyD, a clinical psychologist and president of the Asian American Psychological Association. “But when we look at specific subpopulations, we see that for almost every health and economic indicator, there are Asian Americans who are struggling.”
Cambodians and Hmong, for example, experience significantly higher poverty rates and worse educational outcomes than the general population (Pew Research Center, 2017), while nearly 80% of the Bhutanese population in America struggles with English proficiency (“Ethnicity Data Is Critical to Address the Diverse Needs of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders,” AAPI Data, 2018). Psychologists have begun to probe and document such disparities to shine a light on the experiences of Asian Americans and determine how best to aid the group’s subpopulations. But, these researchers say, more work and attention are needed. Even within the field, researchers face hurdles in terms of securing funding and publishing their findings. For instance, many scientific grantmaking agencies do not consider Asian Americans an at-risk group, says psychologist Vivian Tseng, PhD, the senior vice president of grantmaking programs at the William T. Grant Foundation.
“Being invisible is damaging in itself because the way in which you’re suffering goes unseen, largely ignored and overlooked,” says Tseng. And while many groups experience discrimination, the invisibility Asian Americans face is “pernicious on its own and can ultimately cause even more suffering.”
Model minorities and other myths
The so-called “model minority” stereotype, one of the most pervasive and harmful assumptions about Asian Americans, holds that Asian Americans are a uniformly high-achieving racial minority that has assimilated well into American society through hard work, obedience to social mores and academic achievement. The term was first used in the 1960s by academics and journalists—and later by politicians—to create a divide among racial minorities and to downplay the role of racism in the inequities of American society, says Richard Lee, PhD, a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota who studies race and ethnicity.
“In the midst of advocacy against racism, this was a very convenient tool,” Lee says. “Elevating Asian Americans as a model minority essentially absolved white systems from taking real accountability for the inequities they’ve created.”
Research shows how pervasive the myth is: In one study of 165 Asian American high school students, for example, 99.4% of participants had experienced the stereotype at least once (Thompson, T.L., & Kiang, L., Asian American Journal of Psychology, Vol. 1, No. 2, 2010). Though calling a group exemplary may seem like a positive characterization, “the nature of all stereotypes is that they dehumanize people and prevent us from seeing them in their whole humanity,” Tseng says.
In fact, whites who endorse the model minority myth are also more likely to concurrently hold other, unfavorable beliefs about Asian Americans as well (Parks, S.J., & Yoo, H.C., Asian American Journal of Psychology, Vol. 7, No. 4, 2016). Those beliefs include what researchers call the “perpetual foreigner” stereotype, which casts Asian Americans as fundamentally foreign individuals who will never fully assimilate into American society. For example, even second- and third-generation Asian Americans are frequently asked where they are from or told that they speak English surprisingly well.
In one study, Lee and his colleagues found that such treatment is psychologically harmful beyond the effects of general discrimination, leading to depression symptoms and lower self-esteem (Armenta, B.E., et al., Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, Vol. 19, No. 2, 2013). “It essentially denies your sense of being American, denies your feeling like you belong here,” says Lee. “And of course, not feeling like you belong is a horrible thing.”
Like other racial minorities, Asian Americans are also targets of gendered racism. Asian American men are often seen as effeminate or asexual, while Asian American women are viewed as sexually desirable, exotic and passive. In one study of race and occupational roles, for example, participants ranked Asian men as significantly more hirable for a librarian job (a traditionally feminine role) and less hirable for a security guard job (a traditionally masculine role) compared with African American and Caucasian men (Hall, E.V., et al., Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 41, No. 6, 2015). Another study, led by Shruti Mukkamala, PhD, a senior staff psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, student counseling center, surveyed Asian American women about their experiences of discrimination. Respondents said that in addition to more overt forms of racial bias, their colleagues, acquaintances and even romantic partners held inaccurate assumptions about Asian American women, including that they were or should be submissive, sexually exotic or petite (Asian American Journal of Psychology, Vol. 9, No. 1, 2018).
“These intersectional experiences haven’t received much attention from researchers, so our goal was to start by documenting their nature and prevalence,” Mukkamala says. “Now, we need to consider their impacts on the personal and professional lives of Asian American women and find ways to increase public awareness about the stereotypes themselves.”
Consequences of discrimination
The fallout from such stereotypes can be powerful. For example, Asian American students in schools across the United States report being frequently bullied by other students based on their race, including name-calling, cyberbullying and physical intimidation, according to a report from the federal Asian American and Pacific Islander Bullying Prevention Task Force (AAPI Bullying Prevention Task Force Report, 2016).
And while a strong racial identity has historically been seen as a protective factor against discrimination and bullying, a meta-analysis led by Tiffany Yip, PhD, a professor of psychology at Fordham University in New York, shows that this isn’t always the case. She found that factors such as race, gender, age and nativity status can affect whether racial identity is helpful or harmful in resisting discrimination. For Asian Americans, for example, a strong ethnic or racial identity did not reduce the likelihood of engaging in risky behaviors such as delinquency and substance use (Developmental Psychology, Vol. 55, No. 6, 2019).
“Many researchers have looked at discrimination as this umbrella term, but there are qualitatively different discrimination experiences that different groups face,” she says. “That’s not captured well enough in our current literature.”
Psychologists say that historically, research in the field has focused too much on the experiences of high-achieving people of East Asian origin at the expense of more vulnerable groups. Now, researchers are broadening their focus to include other topics, such as psychological problems faced by Burmese refugees (Kim, I., Asian American Journal of Psychology, Vol. 9, No. 3, 2018), mental illness stigma among Korean American immigrants (Han, M., et al., Asian American Journal of Psychology, Vol. 8, No. 2, 2017) and the colonial legacy of Filipino Americans (David, E.J.R., et al., Asian American Journal of Psychology, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2017).
One way for researchers to acknowledge the diversity within the Asian American population is to recruit larger samples of Asian Americans and disaggregate data for various ethnic groups, says Hsu.
But grantmaking agencies and philanthropic organizations don’t always see value in funding research on Asian Americans. In addition to the low rate of NIH funding, only about 3% of all private and community grant funding on racial issues backs studies on Asian Americans, according to a 2016 report by the nonprofit Candid, which collects data on grantmaking foundations. Southeast Asian and Pacific Islander populations are particularly understudied.
Culturally competent care
The challenges that stem from stereotypes and invisibility even follow Asian Americans into the clinic. Asian Americans are less likely to use mental health services—including outpatient treatment, inpatient treatment and prescription medications—than any other racial group, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (Racial/Ethnic Differences in Mental Health Service Use Among Adults, 2015).
Clinicians might infer that their low rate of service utilization means that Asian Americans don’t face significant psychological problems, but research suggests otherwise. Several studies have found that Asian Americans present more severe symptoms when they do enter treatment (Hwang, W.C., et al., Psychiatric Services, Vol. 66, No. 10, 2015). And in a doctoral dissertation study of 17 years of archival data from a university student counseling center, Asian American and international Asian students reported more distress and experienced less improvement during psychotherapy compared with white students (La Stokes, H., Brigham Young University Scholars Archive, 2018).
“Asian Americans do have psychological problems,” says Gordon C. Nagayama Hall, PhD, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon who studies culture and mental health, “but when they experience distress, they tend not to seek treatment—in part because of these stereotypes.”
Other reasons for avoiding or delaying mental health treatment include severe stigmatization of mental illness in some Asian cultures and a dearth of culturally relevant treatment services, says Wei-Chin Hwang, PhD, a professor of clinical psychology at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California.
Hwang conducted the first NIH-funded randomized controlled trial that tested a form of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) adapted for an Asian American population (American Psychologist, Vol. 61, No. 7, 2006). He found that the adapted intervention, which addressed cultural identity, communication styles and differing beliefs about mental illness and treatment, nearly doubled the effect size and reduced dropout rates among Chinese American patients compared with traditional CBT.
Hall and his colleagues explored the effectiveness of such adapted interventions in a 2016 meta-analysis that included nearly 14,000 participants, 30% of whom were Asian American or Asian. The analysis found that culturally relevant interventions were significantly more likely to lead to remission from psychopathology than unadapted versions of the same interventions (Behavior Therapy, Vol. 47, No. 6, 2016).
“We need to understand each patient’s values, experiences and personal beliefs to ensure that the services we provide support their goals and are congruent with the values they hold,” Mukkamala says.
More research needed
Looking forward, Tseng encourages researchers to explore the implicit biases that guide who and what they study.
For example, she asks, why does research on Asian Americans so often focus on academic achievement among East Asians and not on a more well-rounded understanding of various populations, including East Asians, South Asians, Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders?
“Both philanthropic and government funders need to pay attention to who’s being ignored and excluded from research and research funding,” Tseng says. “Each has a real public responsibility to meet the needs of our diverse society.”
To gain a more nuanced understanding of Asian American populations, Mukkamala says it’s also essential to study intersectional discrimination and stereotyping. Sexual and gender identity, social class and disability status are important factors to consider.
To aid such research, one of Lee’s priorities is to develop measurement tools that are relevant to Asian Americans. Existing questionnaires about racial prejudice, developed with African Americans in mind, are often built around questions such as “How often were you followed by store employees when shopping?” and may not capture the full experience of research participants from other racial and ethnic groups.
“Asian Americans have their own unique racial history in this country,” Lee says. “While every minority group has some common experiences of discrimination, each also has unique factors that psychologists need to recognize, study and begin to address.”