AAPI Nexus: Policy, Practice and Community

In the United States, Pacific Islanders are disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 at alarming rates. Prior to the pandemic, the population was experiencing some of the largest health disparities in the United States driven, in part, by a lack of access to economic resources and health care. Historical events provide a context to understanding the current socioeconomic indicators that predispose Pacific Islanders to COVID-19 and provides insight into the circumstances that have led to the effective transmission of COVID-19 in this community. Other Pacific populations demonstrate more optimal control of COVID-19 and may provide models that have the potential to improve the devastatingly dis proportional rates of infection and death in this vulnerable community.

This article assess the economic impacts of COVID-19 on Asian Americans by analyzing five data sources: the Current Population Survey, Current Employment Statistics Survey, Unemployment Insurance (UI) claims derived from U.S. Department of Labor and Employment and Training Administration and supplemented by UI data from the California Policy Lab, and the 2018 American Community Survey Public Use Micro Sample. Major findings include Asian Americans have higher unemployment and jobless rates, make up a larger percentage of initial unemployment claims relative to their proportion in the labor force, and have suffered a 28 percent decline in small businesses.

In the current historical moment, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders (NHPIs) in the United States experience high levels of COVID-19 infection and death, risk losing billions in federal funding due to census undercounting, and have less political power due to systemic voter disenfranchisement. We believe these challenges result in large part from structural racism—the inequitable systems that reinforce racial discrimination in society—that unjustly disadvantages NHPIs and other people of color. In this paper, we describe how structural racism is manifesting in health and social inequities for NHPIs in the United States. Lastly, we provide recommendations for achieving justice and equity for NHPI communities.

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the challenges in gathering case and mortality data by race and ethnicity, especially for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs). The typical response would be to gather and disaggregate data among AAPI people. However, to what purpose does data disaggregation serve outside of describing disparities? We argue that collection of data both during and after the COVID-19 pandemic should be framed within principles of equity and justice, ideas put forth by Public Health Critical Race Praxis (PHCRP). Applying a PHCRP framework to data collection and disaggregation allows for researchers and policy makers to approach pandemic data collection and future data collection with both equity and community partnership in mind.

The emergence of COVID-19 has been accompanied by a rise of anti-Asian sentiment in the United States and other Western countries. Based on a thematic analysis of anti-Asian hate case descriptions reported between March 19, 2020 and March 26, 2020 to the Stop AAPI Hate database, this article explores how COVID-19 and Asians are racialized in the present-day context. Findings indicate that the racialization of COVID-19 is deeply informed by long-standing racial perceptions of Asians as unclean, heathen, and immoral. These perceptions are intimately related to current geopolitical tensions and are negotiated in assimilationist claims to worthiness by Asians in response to discrimination.

This essay takes place amongst the backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic and the discursive event of the USS Theodore Roosevelt outbreak in March. Using critical discourse analysis, I examine national and local news media’s complicity in the continued colonization and militarization of Guåhan through the centering of U.S. military narratives and methods of erasure, isolation, ambiguity, the dehumanizing of counterhegemonic actors, and the use of “One Guam” rhetoric. I found that the Indigenous people of Guåhan, and their ongoing struggle against the United States for decolonization and demilitarization, were largely absent from national coverage of the event. Simultaneously, local news media used the event to reaffirm existing colonial power structures while obfuscating the island’s status as a colony. This essay seeks to deepen understandings of the ways in which mainstream media reproduce American colonialism, and is imperative for Indigenous activists, political leaders, and organizers seeking to dismantle the interconnected projects of white supremacy, imperialism, and capitalism weighing on marginalized communities in the United States and around the globe.

The COVID-19 epidemic in the United States has shed light on health disparities, and the social, economic, and political contexts in which they occur. With respect to race and ethnicity, much of the narrative surrounding Asian Americans has focused on xenophobia and historical parallels to discrimination targeting this population during prior outbreaks. One minority group whose unique contextual experiences and needs remain mostly absent in the discourse is the South Asian community. This essay aims to explain the distinct influences on and consequences of the epidemic on the second-largest Asian American population and to delineate specific recommendations within a framework of health equity.

This paper reflects how California’s Filipino families have been affected by the CARES Act. As the Policy Director of the Bulosan Center for Filipino Studies, I draw on the center’s policy briefs, which summarize existing literature; community testimonies; and preliminary findings from the center’s Filipinx Count! Survey, which surveys Filipinos on their experiences with health care, labor, and immigration, among other issues. Using preliminary data gathered during the COVID-19 pandemic, I illustrate the lived experiences of public policy in a time of a global pandemic through the lens of California’s Filipinx diaspora.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated existing challenges Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) face in accessing healthcare: language access, barriers for immigrant populations, lack of data disaggregation, and lack of community resources. AAPIs also have increased vulnerability to COVID-19 due to higher representation in specific labor sectors. These challenges take place in the context of increasing anti-Asian hate and xenophobia. This article focuses on one organization addressing these challenges: the Asian & Pacific Islander American Health Forum (APIAHF). We will describe how APIAHF is using narrative change, structural change, and community change to address pandemic-related emergent and longer-term needs and how funding structures and critical partnerships with a variety of stakeholders support these efforts.

The Hawaiian kingdom, prior to the illegal overthrow of its monarchy (1893) and the subsequent English-only compulsory education (1896), had boasted a 91‒95 percent literacy rate. Since the U.S. annexation of Hawai‘i (1898), however, the settler colonial school system has maintained inequitable student outcomes for Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders that have become an intergenerational “achievement gap” across multiple academic and disciplinary student indicators (i.e., proficiency, suspension rates). The Office of Hawaiian Education (OHE) uses a theory of change that engages activist research to identify specific historical contexts to contemporary circumstances and issues, to inform futurities for Hawaiian education. These initiatives seek to rethread Hawaiian education into the tapestry of traditional sources of knowledge production that improve cultural, intellectual, and political sustainability for all learners. Today, OHE uses a SWOT and GAP analysis of the impact of COVID-19 on Hawai‘i Department of Education stakeholders (students, their families, schools, and communities) to inform its educational P4 (practices, projects, programs, and policies) that will move Hawaiian education for all learners forward, beyond the current pandemic toward a sustainable model of education that engages learners as knowledge producers with strength-, place-, and culture-based pedagogies that reconnect them to traditional sources of knowledge production.

We discuss the importance of data disaggregation in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic for small race and ethnic groups. In normal times, the lack of data for the Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (NHPI) populations is a problem of representation. During a pandemic, it means that resources and messages will not be targeted to these communities. As we adapt to the new reality, we argue that there is an important need for consistent and timely data disaggregated by race and ethnic groups in anticipation of future infectious disease epidemics.

This paper offers an analysis of Asian American voter participation and candidate choice in the 2020 primary election. We look at election records from eight different states as well as offer a case study on Asian American voters in Los Angeles County. We find that the number of Asian American voters grew moderately in the 2020 primary compared to the 2016 primary. Some evidence shows that Asian Americans preferred Bernie Sanders over other candidates but the pattern of Asian American candidate vote choice does vary across states suggesting that local politics influenced Asian American preferences. Asian Americans are an understudied group in American elections and this paper offers new data that can be used to gain insights into how Asian American voter participation changes over time.

Analyses of the 2016 election focused a great deal on the “White Evangelical vote,” signaling the important intersection of race and religion. But not all Evangelicals are White nor does Christianity encompass all American religion. The Asian American community brings these two social dimensions into broader perspective. We argue that Asian American religious communities encounter two major political parties with different cultural schemas: the White Christian ideal of American society on the right and Multicultural Liberalism, a racially and religiously pluralistic vision of America, on the left. Using data from the Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS) 2017 we illustrate the 2016 presidential candidate choice and party affiliations of Asian American voters and nonvoters disaggregated by religious identity. We suggest that the Republican Party’s candidate and thinly veiled White Christian nationalism likely alienated a potential non‒White Christian base. Similarly, most Asian American Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs voted for Clinton despite great proportions of all groups identifying as political independents. Political practitioners will find important considerations when evaluating coalition building given the patterns we show here. We offer suggestions on how to frame the considerations of religious Asian Americans under our current racialized and religionized political culture.

The 116th Congress is making history in representational politics with the highest number of AAPI legislators in U.S. history. However, AAPI legislators’ increased visibility comes at the same moment as white supremacist politicians and pundits racialize a global pandemic. How have AAPI legislators responded to the COVID-19 outbreak? Our findings provide preliminary support for our hypotheses that AAPI legislators are more likely to be sponsors of AAPI-targeted legislation and that AAPI women legislators are more likely to introduce bills targeting AAPI constituents than their male counterparts. In addition, AAPI women legislators as a whole are more likely to sponsor legislation to advance interests of the intersectionally disadvantaged than AAPI men legislators during our study period (February to mid-May 2020).