Though a common identity has helped build political coalition and power over time, the term “Asian American” is burying subgroups. It’s time, advocates say, to break the data down.
In Hmong American neighborhoods like hers, families that lived several generations to a home were the first to lose loved ones. Then, all at once, things accelerated, and tragedy crept closer to home. Her best friend came close to death. She watched from a painful distance as her first family member became ill and died.
“Many of our communities were overlooked,” Lee-Yang told NBC News. “How things function in this world, you need numbers to prove anything.” It coincides with the community asking itself central questions: What does “Asian American” even mean anymore? Do Indian Americans, who earn a $119,000 median household income, belong in the same statistical category as Burmese Americans, who earn $44,000? Does a first-generation Bangladeshi family have anything in common with a fifth-generation Japanese one?
Disaggregation and data equity don’t just apply to Asians, Ramakrishnan said, and ethnicity isn’t the only area in which government agencies collect and release broken-down data. The U.S. already disaggregates most population data by characteristics like age and sex. It’s how researchers identified that women in the U.S. make 82 cents for every dollar a man makes or that heart disease is the leading cause of death for men.
New York Attorney General Letitia James later acknowledged not all communities were “given the equal chance to survive.” Members of Indiana’s Burmese Community Institute during a group trip to Washington D.C. Courtesy Burmese Community Institute. have only been educated through high school With more community understanding could come more aid, English as a second language teachers, and Burmese speakers in local government, he said. Those things are not always simple to access, especially when Burmese immigrants disappear into larger Asian American narratives.
“My dad picked Black because he didn’t know which one to pick,” he said. “‘Asian American’ for him meant Chinese or East Asian, and so he didn’t pick that one. If you asked him the same question in Guyana, he would never have picked Black; he would pick Indian.” “Since the war on terror began, I think there’s been an interesting intersection between Muslim communities who are not from South Asia and South Asians who are racialized as Muslim,” they said. “That’s another unique sub-identity within ‘Asian American.’”Kamrul Khan, who was raised in a Bengali neighborhood in Brooklyn, said he’s seen his community time and again be overshadowed in larger narratives. Where he grew up in New York City “felt like Bangladesh,” he said.
In Washington, disaggregation by ethnicity for K-12 public school data was enacted in 2017, with the goal of closing the gap in educational attainment between ethnic groups. The bill specifically called for the further disaggregation of Asian student data by country of origin, Black student data by whether they immigrated here or were born in the U.S., and white student data by Eastern European nationalities.
The timely implementation of disaggregation laws can be a struggle of its own, he said, and that’s just the first step. The next is analyzing that data and implementing real, community-based outreaches based on it. Across sectors, that might mean unique things.
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