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The past 2 years have been a period of mourning, anger, fear, and exhaustion for Asian Americans: 16% of Asian American adults were victims of hate crimes in 2021, up from 12.5% in 2020; 31% worry “all the time” or “often” about being victimized because of their race; and 36% have changed their routines over concerns about personal safety. Despite the increase in anti-Asian hate crimes in the US, one-third of Americans remain unaware of the situation. The White House’s invitation to BTS—the globally popular K-pop group—will go a long way toward raising awareness.

Refusing to stay silent after the mass murder in Atlanta, Georgia, last year that left eight dead, including six women of Asian descent, BTS issued a statement: “What is happening right now cannot be dissociated from our identity as Asians.” Despite their inimitable success and stature, the seven performers have not been immune to anti-Asian racism; they know how it feels to have racial epithets hurled at them, be blamed for COVID-19, mocked for the way they look, and dismissed.

Dismissing Asians and Asian Americans comes easily when they are absent from one’s imagination: 58% of Americans cannot name a single prominent Asian American; and only two states (Illinois and New Jersey) require Asian American history to be taught in their public schools. Not surprisingly, 42% of Americans cannot name a single policy or historical event related to Asian Americans. Even when prompted, 45% are unaware of the Chinese Exclusion Act, and 67% never heard of the murder of Vincent Chin in 1982.

Vincent Chin was a Chinese American engineer who was beaten to death with a baseball bat by two white autoworkers in Detroit, Michigan. Chin was blamed for the loss of auto jobs amid a rise in Japanese imports and a national recession. The two white men pled guilty to manslaughter, yet each was sentenced to only 3 years of probation and a fine of $3000.

The trope of Asian Americans as the foreign “other” is a product of decades of targeted exclusion. Asians are the only group who have been explicitly excluded from immigrating into the United States because of their race and national origin. Beginning with the Page Act of 1875 that banned women from any “Oriental country” on the presumption that they were prostitutes, laws of exclusion soon expanded to Chinese male laborers with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Chinese exclusion was not repealed until 1943, and America’s long-standing policy of restricting immigrants from non-European countries was not abolished until 1965 when Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act.

Like two-thirds of Asian Americans today, I am an immigrant. I am also a child of immigrants; at the age of 3, I emigrated with my parents from South Korea because my father sought to pursue a PhD in religion and work with a professor at Temple University whose research he admired. My mother—who was trained as a nurse by American missionaries in Seoul—obtained a visa for our family, enabling us to immigrate after the 1965 change in US immigration law.

Soon after entering the PhD program, my father would feel the sting of racism because his spoken English did not match his reading fluency (nor his fluency in German, for that matter). Dismissed as a “foreign student,” he had trouble finding professors willing to listen to his ideas and shepherd him into a dissertation project. The dismissal of Asian students is not unusual. In a 2012 study, researchers sent emails to more than 6500 professors in American universities across disciplines, posing as prospective graduate students with names signaling their race and gender. Professors were the least likely to respond to those with Chinese and Indian names. My father earned his PhD in spite of being dismissed, but it took years longer than it should have.

We may not know about their legacy of exclusion or even be able to name a prominent Asian American to be intimately familiar with the pernicious stereotypes of Asians—they are indelibly foreign, and therefore easily mocked and readily disregarded. This is the cost and consequence of failing to include the history of Asian America as an integral part of the history of America. Given their stardom, BTS could easily choose to turn a blind eye and dismiss anti-Asian violence and racism. They choose not to, and neither should anyone else.

Jennifer Lee is the Julian Clarence Levi Professor of Social Sciences in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University, New York, NY, USA. [email protected]

On April 28, 2022, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences announced Sociology Professors Jennifer Lee and Thomas DiPrete as a newly elected members.

Founded in 1780, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences is one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious honorary societies. It recognizes excellence in multiple areas, including leadership, academia, arts, and research. In addition to being an honorary society, the Academy is a research institute that advances the common good by addressing issues of critical importance to the nation and the world.

The Department of Sociology is delighted to welcome new faculty members in 2022, whose expertise in Urban Poverty, Racial and Socioeconomic Inequality, and Race, Ethnicity and Politics (REP) will introduce new courses and workshops to the curriculum. Mario L. Small is the newly appointed Quetelet Professor of Social Science as of January 2022. Marissa Thompson and David Knight will join the faculty as Assistant Professors in July 2022.

This cluster of scholars’ research focuses on race and ethnicity, with strong connections to existing subfields within the department in the areas of social networks, organizations, and stratification. “From a sociological perspective, race actively constructs social difference, imposes hierarchies of superiority and inferiority, creates distinctive forms of resistance and protest, and has profoundly shaped the American story,” said Bruce Western, Chair of the Sociology Department.  “At a time when American society is mobilized by racial injustice, the discipline of sociology can and should be a critical venue for greater understanding through research, and greater engagement through teaching and public outreach.”

Meet the newest professors:

In this Falling Walls presentation, Prof David Stark talks about the idea of an algorithmic society, power asymmetries on the organizational level, and the relationship between platform providers and their customers.

Prof. Lee joins a select group of scholars at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, as a member in the School of Social Science, where she will be in residence during the 2022-23 academic year. The Department of Sociology congratulates Prof. Lee on her fellowship.

The twin prods of a U.S. president trying to rebrand the coronavirus as the ‘China virus’ and a bloody attack in Atlanta that left six Asian women dead have brought to the fore a spate of questions about Asian Americans in the United States.

Columbia University sociologist Jennifer Lee has been answering many of those questions her entire academic career, and across four books, dozens of journal articles and untold media appearances. One of the first questions she answers in this Social Science Bites podcast is who are ‘Asian Americans’? As she tells interviewer David Edmonds, “No one comes to the United States and identifies as an Asian American.” Instead, if asked, they are likely to identify with national origin or ethnicity – say Chinese, or Japanese, or Filipino – rather than with the umbrella construct of Asian American.

For many, especially in the southern United States and particularly in Texas, Juneteenth has been an emancipation celebration observed for generations. It commemorates the announcement of General Order No. 3, proclaiming freedom from slavery in Texas on June 19, 1865. That day was when every enslaved person in the U.S. finally knew that they were free and the institution came to an end.

Racial Attention Deficit

Sheen S. Levine1,2 *, Charlotte Reypens1

, and David Stark2,3
1 The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX 75080, USA
2 Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA
3 University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK
* To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: [email protected]
Teaser
Americans make poor decisions because they ignore their Black peers — a large
experimental study shows and suggests a remedy.
Abstract
Despite concerted efforts towards equity in organizations and elsewhere, minority members
report that they are often ignored and their contributions undervalued. Against this
backdrop, we conduct a multi-year experimental study to investigate patterns of attention,
using a large, gender-balanced sample of White working-age Americans. The findings
provide causal evidence of a racial attention deficit: Even when in their best interest, White
Americans pay less attention to Black peers. In a baseline study, we assign an incentivized
puzzle to participants and examine their willingness to follow the example of their White and
Black peers. White participants presume that Black peers are less competent — and fail to
learn from their choices. We then test two interventions: Providing information about past
accomplishments reduces the disparity in evaluations of Black peers, but the racial attention
deficit persists. When Whites can witness the accomplishments of Black peers — rather than
being told about them — the racial attention deficit subsides. We suggest that such a deficit
can explain racial gaps documented in science, education, health, and law.