Despite being portrayed as a “model minority” most Asian Americans experience discrimination in many parts of their day-to-day lives with half of Indians saying they have experienced racial discrimination, according to a new report.
Specific discrimination incidents include interpersonal encounters with strangers; at security checkpoints; with the police; in the workplace; at restaurants or stores; and in their neighborhoods, according to a new survey by Pew Research Center.
About six-in-ten Asian adults (58%) say they have ever experienced racial discrimination or been treated unfairly because of their race or ethnicity, according to Pew’s new analysis of a multilingual, nationally representative survey of 7,006 Asian adults conducted from July 5, 2022 to Jan 27, 2023.
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This includes 53% of Asian adults who say they have experienced racial discrimination from time to time and 5% who say they experience it regularly.
Specifically, 67% of Korean adults say they have experienced racial discrimination, higher than the shares among Vietnamese (57%), Filipino (55%) and Indian (50%) adults.
About 26% of Indian adults say strangers have called them offensive names, a lower share than other origin groups.
About 79% of Indian adults say a stranger has mispronounced their name, a higher share than among other ethnic origin groups.
In their daily lives, 52% of Asian Americans say they have experienced at least one of three discrimination incidents in which a stranger treated them like a foreigner.
About 49% of Korean Americans say strangers have acted as if they didn’t speak English in day-to-day encounters, compared with smaller shares of Chinese (40%), Filipino (37%), Indian (32%) and Japanese (26%) adults.
About three-in-ten or more Korean, Chinese, Indian and Vietnamese adults say someone has told them to go back to their “home country.” About one-quarter of Filipino and Japanese adults say the same.
More than half of Asian adults (55%) say they have not heard of the term “model minority.” Just under half (44%) say they have heard of the term.
About half of Korean and Chinese adults say they have heard of the term, while only about one-third of Indian adults say the same.
About 68% of Indian adults say strangers have assumed they are good at math and science, a higher share than among most other origin groups.
About three in ten Vietnamese (31%), Japanese (28%) and Filipino (28%) Americans and about two in ten Indian adults (21%) say they know another Asian person in the US who has been the victim of a racially motivated threat or attack since the Covid-19 pandemic began in 2020.
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About six in ten Filipino (64%), Chinese (63%) and Korean (62%) adults say discrimination against Asians is a major problem. A smaller share of Indian adults (44%) say the same.
In the 2021 focus groups of Asian Americans, many participants talked about their experiences being bullied, harassed or called offensive names because of their race or ethnicity, according to the Pew report.
“As an Indian female, we tend to be very hairy … starting very young, so in sixth and seventh grade I was super hairy and so all the other girls would be like, ‘Oh my god, are you like shaving already? Or what’s going on with that?’ And then people would call me, ‘Sand N-word.’ A lot of just like, ‘Saddam’s daughter,’ just like those types of words,” a US-born woman of Indian origin in her late 30s was quoted as saying.
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“We just have to deal with it more than the average person. I’ve been called DJ Isis, I’ve been called terrorist. … [O]n a day-to-day basis I feel welcome [in America],” said a US-born man of Indian descent in late 20s said.
“This is my country. I’m here to live; I’m here to stay. But there are just those one or two instances that just make you feel like maybe it would have been better if I was somewhere else or maybe it would have been different if I was White or whatever.
“I feel like the only person that’s going to be 100% fully welcome is a White male and that’s the only person that’s going to be 100% welcome 100% of the time,” he added.
“My brother-in-law’s son was stopped because his beard had grown and they felt that he may be from some terrorist group. Hence, he was stopped for two hours and cross-questioned,” said an immigrant woman of Indian origin in her early 50s in Hindi.
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“When he came back home, his mother, my sister-in-law, told him to shave his beard and mustache clean as he looked exactly like ‘them,’” she said.
“After 9/11, things changed a lot. I feel like things changed for a lot of us and I remember my parents putting out American flags everywhere – outside the house, on the mailbox, like wherever they could stick them,” said a US-born woman of Indian origin in her early 30s.
“And even now, I do get … constantly pulled over when you’re in line at the airport, by TSA and at this point I just know I’m going to get pulled over. … I make my way leisurely to that section because I know that they’re going to profile me.”