Foreigners in their own country:
Asians in America

NARRATOR: Against the backdrop of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve witnessed a surge in a particular kind of bias – one that’s been relatively dormant for decades:

ASIAN-AMERICAN WOMAN (NEWS CLIP): I was told that I “should be rounded up with the virus and shipped back to China.”

ASIAN-AMERICAN MAN (NEWS CLIP): He just said “F— you and your chinky policy,” told me to go back to China…

MAN ON SUBWAY (NEWS CLIP): Every disease has ever came from China, homie. Because they’re f—ing disgusting.

NARRATOR: Over 2000 of these kinds of incidents have been reported since March – compared to 158 reports in all of 2019…

ONSCREEN TEXT:
2020 (March – June): 2100+ incidents reported
2019: 158 incidents reported

NARRATOR: …and often this idea of “belonging” is at the heart of the attacks. You are not American. Go back to where you came from.

Now, these cases smack of an explicit racism and xenophobia, the kind that embarrasses and outrages the vast majority of Americans. Most of us would never say such things publicly or believe them privately.

The question is: is there something implicit feeding into these explicit actions. Are associations about race and belonging embedded in our culture, prevalent enough that we’ve all absorbed them too?

According to the science, the answer is yes. Many of us (even many Asian Americans!) have a documented bias that Professor Mahzarin Banaji calls “a strong contender for Our Most Ridiculous Mindbug Prize.” Here’s how ridiculous it is.

This is British actor Hugh Grant.

And this is American figure skater Kristi Yamaguchi, Olympic gold medalist and two-time World Champion.

Are they equally “American?”

Of course not. One of them isn’t American at all.

But at some level, our minds see someone like Grant as more “American” than someone like Yamaguchi.

HUGH GRANT: Don’t be ridiculous.

NARRATOR: Citizenship may have a precise legal definition: if you are born in the United States, you are American. But Thierry Devos’ research with Mahzarin showed that implicitly our minds follow a different rule:

American = White

Participants taking an IAT were much better – faster, more accurate, at associating “American” with “White” than with “Asian”. Even when the faces they saw were of famous Asian Americans like Lucy Liu and Kristi Yamaguchi and famous White Europeans like Hugh Grant or Gerard Depardieu.

Here’s a big question: So what?

Why does it matter if we have this ridiculous implicit bias?

The data show that the stronger someone’s belief that American = White, the less willing they are to hire qualified Asian Americans for national security jobs, and the more negatively they evaluate an Asian American’s opinion on immigration policy.

And as we go about our day to day lives? We may never say the words “Go back to China”. But  a subtler question springs from the same implicit notion of foreignness:

MAN’S VOICE: But where are you really from?

NARRATOR: And that one’s pretty common.

Listen: bias thrives in times of uncertainty.  The science tells us that when we feel unsure or threatened, our brains process information differently. We become more sensitive to potential danger — whether it’s a stranger walking toward us or a virus that’s taken hold in our town. We show more bias against people who aren’t in “our” groups.

 So remember this:  There’s an implicit association most of us carry about what it means to be  “American”  or what an “American” looks like. … and in moments of uncertainty, it likely gets stronger. How could it not when we explicitly hear COVID-19 referred to as the “Chinese virus”?

So what can we do?

Some of us are lucky. Research shows that in areas with more Asian Americans, people don’t believe that “American = White” quite so strongly. (Congrats, San Francisco.) This tells us something about the power of exposure.  If you see a lot of Asian-Americans around you, of course it’s easier to see Asians as “American”!

What about the rest of us? Those of us whose environments can help a Hugh seem more American than a Kristi, even when we know it’s not true? Two words: Culture and Media. They don’t reflect what America really looks like. Now, we can’t wait around for Hollywood and social media feeds to get it right… but we can make decisions about what we are exposed to. This means little decisions every day about the books we read, the movies and news we watch, the things we include when we celebrate “American” identity. That’s how unlearning happens.

It’s these little things that will chip away at an old stereotype and bring our brains into modern times.