Most Asian Americans don’t consider themselves very well informed on the history of Asians in the United States and are more likely to identify themselves by their ethnicity than by the term “Asian American,” according to a new survey from the Pew Research Center.
“We were trying to understand, how do Asian Americans most often identify themselves, as well as trying to understand, what are the shared experiences among them in the U.S.,” the lead author of the report, Neil G. Ruiz, associate director of race and ethnicity research at the Pew Research Center, told Gothamist.
The survey, released Monday, involved more than 7,000 respondents, over 5,000 of whom are foreign-born, making it the largest ever conducted of Asians nationwide, Ruiz said.
The report focused on the six-largest Asian subgroups: Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Indian, Japanese and Vietnamese Americans. Other populations, including Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Thai and Malaysians, each comprise less than 2% of the Asian American population, “making it challenging to recruit nationally representative samples for each origin group.” The survey was offered in Chinese, Korean, Hindi, Tagalog, Vietnamese and English.
From 2010 to 2019, the Asian American community grew faster than any other racial group, but according to the report remains a relatively small population, comprising 7% of the U.S. population, or 23 million people.
Just under a quarter (24%) of respondents consider themselves extremely/very informed about U.S. Asian history, with half saying they’re somewhat informed and another quarter of respondents saying they’re little informed or not informed at all.
However, the report leaves unanswered what, exactly, constitutes a depth of knowledge about Asian American history. While many Americans are at least glancingly familiar with the mass internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the role of Chinese laborers in the construction of the…
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