"Yellow peril or model minority? Measuring Janus-faced prejudice toward Asians in the United States" - by CWP alum Enze Han

There are two prominent but seemingly contradictory symbols of how Asians are racialized domestically within the United States: “yellow peril” and “model minority.” How do these two racial tropes relate to each other? What effects do they have on the formation of support for race-targeted public policy? In this paper, we propose and empirically test that racialized resentment toward Asian Americans and the congratulatory framing of them as a model minority are both salient in the minds of the American public, reflecting the complexity of prejudices toward Asians in American society. Utilizing two original surveybased measures of anti-Asian resentment and the model minority stereotype, we empirically demonstrate the interconnection between the two racial tropes and highlight the key demographic and dispositional correlates of these multi-faceted contemporary racial attitudes toward Asian Americans. We then show that the two racial tropes, both independently and by interacting with each other, significantly shape racial public policy preferences in the United States.

D.G. Kim1 and Enze Han2 1 Inequality in America Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA and 2 Politics and Public Administration, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Corresponding author: Enze Han; Email: [email protected]

Professor Enze Han is Associate Professor at the Department of Politics and Public Administration. His research interests include international relations of East Asia, China's relations with Southeast Asia, Southeast Asian politics, and ethnic politics in China. Professor Han received a Ph.D in Political Science from the George Washington University in the United States in 2010. Afterwards he was a postdoctoral research fellow in the China and the World Program at Princeton University. During 2015-2016, he was a Friends Founders' Circle Member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, USA. In 2017, he was a fellow at the East Asia Institute in Seoul, South Korea. During 2021-2022, he was Lee Kong Chian Fellow on Contemporary Southeast Asia at the National University of Singapore and Stanford University. His research has been supported by the Leverhulme Research Fellowship and British Council/Newton Fund. Prior to HKU, Professor Han was Senior Lecturer in the International Security of East Asia at SOAS, University of London, United Kingdom.

Photo Credit: https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/AE7450C6C8224E913457A96B7818E821/S2049847024000657a.pdf/yellow_peril_or_model_minority_measuring_janusfaced_prejudice_toward_asians_in_the_united_states.pdf