Anti-Asian Sentiment and Institutional Racism: Through the Lens of Information Cascades
Vincent Chin was a Chinese American who was brutally murdered 1982 by two Americans who misidentified him to be Japanese, which many Americans blamed for the loss of their auto industry jobs. Forty years after the Killing of Vincent Chin, anti-Asian violence and hate crimes continue to surge. From March 2020 to March 2022, over 11,500 incidents of hate have been reported, with many more going unreported. According to a 2022 STAATUS Index, 1 in 5 Americans believe that Asian Americans are at least partially responsible for COVID-19. When did this surge of anti-Asian sentiment begin? We can view the source of this surge through the lens of information cascades within institutions and among individuals.
Before the pandemic, Asian Americans have had a long history of systemic racism and the model minority myth, beginning with the first wave of Chinese immigrants in the early 1800s. As soon as Americans felt that their jobs were at stake, they began to view Asian Americans as exotic, sub-human, and voiceless. Discrimination against Asian Americans during the 19th-century created an information cascade that utilized stereotypes, and with America being predominately white during that time, it was easy for that to cascade into institutions to create a power dynamic that has lasted until this day.
Fueled with mob mentality, institutional stereotypes, and other events in history such as the Internment of Japanese Americans, the Murder of Vincent Chin, and the Koreatown LA Riots, we now arrive at a time where information cascades have created a foundation where certain people in power feel like they have the right to speak ill to a group of people despite the detrimental consequences that come with it, knowing that they are supported by the mob mentality. Specifically, I am referring to the instance where former president Donald Trump used the term “Chinese Virus” in a tweet back in March of 2020. According to a study from UCSF, more than 380,000 tweets with #chinesevirus had anti-Asian sentiment. With someone with as much power as the president spewing claims against these certain group of people, it is easy for information to cascade among Americans and rally them to blame another group. Especially if people do not know much about Asian Americans, according to the concept of information cascades, they will simply build their perceptions off what people in the past have thought or what popular figures have said.
As a result of an information cascade backed by hundreds of years of ignorance, racism, and politicians, anti-Asian sentiments have been ingrained into institutions and the mob. An example of it happening was when Donald Trump created a tweet that blamed China for causing the COVID-19 pandemic, inciting a wave of anti-Asian violence. Information cascades can be dangerous when people within it do not attempt to break the cycle of ignorance by educating themselves, and to this day, we are still seeing the dire consequences affecting the livelihood of Asian Americans.
Sources:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08964289.2021.2015277?cookieSet=1
https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/forefront.20220411.655787/
https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2021/03/420081/trumps-chinese-virus-tweet-linked-rise-anti-asian-hashtags-twitter