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ABSTRACT
What explains support for Black Lives Matter among Asian Americans? This article draws on nationally representative data from the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey to examine the contours of Asian American public opinion on Black Lives Matter and the factors that shape them. Examining intragroup and intergroup attitudes across a set of racial, ethnic/national origin, and cross-racial group measures, I show that race-based considerations are significant predictors of Asian American support for Black Lives Matter. Specifically, I find that those who support Black Lives Matter are more likely to perceive linked fate with other Asian Americans and with other non-white groups and to perceive anti-black discrimination in the United States. I argue that, while never a panacea, race-based linked fate beliefs among Asian Americans, both as Asian Americans and with other groups of color, are a viable and imperative part of building cross-racial coalitions and contemporary racial justice movements.
Acknowledgements
I thank Janelle Wong, Christian Collet, Deb Thompson, Al Tillery, the editors of this special issue, and anonymous reviewers for their many helpful comments, conversations, and suggestions. I also thank Alecia Richards and Jaeyoung Shin for their excellent research assistance. Earlier versions of this work were presented at the 2018 Western Political Science Association Annual Meeting and the 2018 Association for Asian American Studies Annual Conference.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Recent examples of political work in solidarity with other racialized communities include the 2016 Dakota Access Pipeline protests (#NoDAPL) on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation and mobilizations calling for “an end to all deportations, immigrant detention, and Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) raids” (https://policy.m4bl.org/end-war-on-black-people/). That said, Black Lives Matter has not yet articulated a clear or definitive viewpoint on ally support – in particular, whether the movement desires or requires support from other racial and ethnic groups and, if so, which groups (e.g., whites, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, Arabs, or Muslims). Taylor (Citation2016) calls this an “important frontier of the movement” and rightly points out the need for Black Lives Matter to “have a real plan for building and developing solidarity among the oppressed” (186).
2 For example, according to data from the Election 2008 and Beyond Survey, 32% of Asian Americans believe that racism remains a major problem in our society and 63% believe racism exists today but is not a major problem, while just 3% believe racism once existed but no longer exists and another 3% believe racism has never been a major problem (http://www.2008andbeyond.com).
3 In an even broader formulation and, accordingly, even more politically contested, this category can further expand to include the Pacific Islands – e.g., Asian American/Pacific Islander (AAPI) and Asian Pacific Islander American (APIA).
4 See, for example, Julia Zorthian, “Black Lives Matter Activist Confronts Clinton at Fundraiser,” Time, February, 2016; Dara Lind, “Black Lives Matter vs. Bernie Sanders, Explained,” Vox, August 11, 2015.
5 For example, Black Lives Matter has also received and held the nation’s attention on issues of racism in the criminal justice system through the intentionally politicized actions of NFL football players, led by Colin Kaepernick, and other sports figures who have “taken a knee” during the national anthem in protest of police brutality. Similarly, influential music and television/film celebrities have contributed to the momentum of the movement, with noted examples including Beyoncé’s award-winning visual album, Lemonade, Chance the Rapper’s Chicago-based community organizing and philanthropy, and actor Jesse Williams’s activism through outspoken social media posts and awards speeches.
6 Among the full, nationally representative sample, the data are distributed as follows: 39% have heard a lot about Black Lives Matter, 34% some, 16% a little, and 12% nothing at all. Across racial groups, white and black respondents reported the highest levels of awareness with nearly half having heard a lot (48% and 45%, respectively) and more than three-quarters either some or a lot (79% and 81%, respectively). The two groups with large and fast-growing foreign-born populations, Asian Americans and Latinos, are the least likely to be familiar, reporting the highest percentages of having heard nothing at all (17% and 16%, respectively) and the lowest percentages of having heard a lot (27% and 39%, respectively). This is not surprising given that Asian and Latino communities include larger shares of new or recent immigrants who consume less English-language or mainstream media, lessening familiarity with Black Lives Matter and racial and ethnic politics in the U.S. generally.
7 Establishing the foundations of a richly interdisciplinary literature, recent studies have chronicled and critically engaged with the movement’s visionary aims beyond short-term policy change; its intellectual lineages in black political thought, black social movements, and black resistance; its foundations in historical-institutional processes of race and state development and, in turn, its potential to shape these processes; its black feminist foundations and intersectional agenda-setting; and its expansive commitment to political solidarity with all oppressed communities worldwide (Davis Citation2016; Taylor Citation2016; Hooker Citation2016; Lebron Citation2017; Francis Citation2018; Johnson Citation2018; Thurston Citation2018).
8 That said, polling with modest samples of non-white respondents remains prevalent – e.g., Times/CBS News Poll (http://www.cbsnews.com/news/negative-views-of-race-relations-reach-all-time-high-cbsnyt-poll/) and NBC News/Wall Street Journal Survey (http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/MSNBC/Sections/A_Politics/15398%20NBCWSJ%20September%20Poll%20(2).pdf).
9 By contrast, an increasing number of surveys have featured larger samples of Latino respondents, particularly in research-oriented surveys – e.g., Pew Research Center: 2016 Racial Attitudes in America (http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/06/27/on-views-of-race-and-inequality-blacks-and-whites-are-worlds-apart/) and CNN/Kaiser Family Foundation: Survey of Americans on Race (http://files.kff.org/attachment/topline-methodology-survey-of-americans-on-race).
10 See, for example, Chris Fuchs, “Thousands Rally After Conviction of Ex-Cop Peter Liang in Death of Akai Gurley,” NBC News, February 20, 2016; Lisa Torio, “Why Are Some Asians Still Supporting the Cop Who Shot Akai Gurley?”, The Nation, March 15, 2016; Julia Carrie Wong, “‘Scapegoated?” The Police Killing that Left Asian Americans Angry – and Divided,” The Guardian, April 18, 2016; “A Letter From Young Asian-Americans To Their Families About Black Lives Matter,” NPR Code Switch, July 27, 2016 (also: Letter for Black Lives: An Open Project on Anti-Blackness – https://lettersforblacklives.comand#Asians4BlackLives – https://a4bl.wordpress.com); Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence (CAAAV), “Statement to Asian and Asian American Communities on the Murder of Akai Gurley by NYPD Officer Peter Liang” – http://caaav.org/caaav-statement-to-asian-and-asian-american-communities-on-the-murder-of-akai-gurley-by-nypd-officer-peter-liang.
11 Alicia Garza (Black Lives Matter co-founder), “A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement,” The Feminist Wire, October 7, 2014.
12 I hold that lack of support, or “non-support,” can be understood to include not only wholesale opposition but also middle ground positions expressed as uncertain or ambivalent attitudes. I discuss this further below.
13 Scholars have articulated different accounts of shifting racial paradigms that underscore the malleability and precariousness of Asian American racial status. For example, while Kim (Citation1999) argues that Asian Americans have been racially triangulated between blacks and whites on a multidimensional “field of racial positions,” Bonilla-Silva (Citation2004) presents evidence of an emerging tri-racial stratification system that relocates Asian Americans across three tiers – namely, in which the majority of Asian subgroups are considered “honorary whites” (Japanese, Korean, Indian, Chinese, Filipino), while some become members of the lowest status group, “collective black” (Vietnamese, Hmong, Laotian), and a small handful join the “white” stratum (“a few Asian-origin people”).
14 The total number of respondents across all racial group samples is 10,145, with interviews completed online between December 3, 2016, and February 15, 2017. For more details about the 2016 CMPS data collection, see http://cmpsurvey.org.
15 Importantly, I do not mean to suggest that beliefs about race cannot also predict opposition to Black Lives Matter. For example, when Asians politically align with whites or perceive no commonalities with blacks, race-based considerations may strengthen opposition. Uncertain or ambivalent attitudes (“neither support nor oppose”) that might indicate a lack of strong feelings or a mixture of feelings toward Black Lives Matter merit closer examination as well. For the present purposes, results from a comparison of models that separately examine responses of support, oppose, and neither shows the latter two to be predicted by the exact same set of factors (anti-black discrimination, ideology, partisanship, protest, Indian, income), providing some reassurance that the combined category of “non-support” in this study does not mask critical differences between responses of oppose and neither.
16 As discussed above, this analysis concentrates on support for Black Lives Matter and distinguishes between support and non-support. To this end, support is examined as a dichotomous variable where “strongly support” and “somewhat support” are coded as 1.
17 For example, importance of racial group identity: χ² (3) = 74.02, p ≤ .001; importance of ethnic/national origin group identity: χ² (3) = 60.49, p ≤ .001; racial group linked fate: χ² (3) = 184.77, p ≤ .001; ethnic/national origin group linked fate: χ² (4) = 174.46, p ≤ .001.
18 To be sure, group-based attitudes among Asian Americans should be understood not just relative to other groups but as varying across contexts vis-à-vis intragroup identities, issues, and locations.
19 Without a doubt, public perceptions of anti-Asian discrimination experiences should not be conflated with actual experiences of anti-Asian discrimination, especially post-9/11, but for present purposes such perceptions are key.
20 A racial group lens and an ethnic/national origin group lens should not be understood as competing in an either/or sense; rather, they can and do operate simultaneously. Indeed, this is an empirical question for future studies to examine.
21 Jie Zong and Jeanne Batalova, “Korean Immigrants in the United States,” Migration Policy Institute, February 8, 2017.