A new initiative was announced Thursday by the White House, bringing together items that grassroots organizers have long been pushing for — among those are the disaggregation of data under the Asian umbrella and a more diverse range of language options in federal programs.
The White House Initiative on Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders is a plan to address the effects of Covid 19 on Asian American livelihoods, including businesses that suffered disproportionately during the Pandemic, spearheaded by Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra.
The Biden-Harris Administration is committed to tackling a wide range of challenges that affect communities that have historically been overlooked and underserved, Becerra said in a statement.
Asian American civil rights organizations applauded the move and hope that it will be used as a tool to support lower-income, underrepresented AAPI communities.
At a time when many Southeast Asian Americans are grappling with the physical, mental and economic impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic and ongoing systemic injustices, this is an important opportunity for our voices to be included in the decisions that affect our lives, Quyen Dinh, executive director of the Southeast Asian Resource Action Center, said in a statement.
Community leaders believe that the initiative will foster the inclusion and education of the general public on historical and present-day issues impacting these communities. They said that the priority list includes tracking hate incidents, providing career opportunities, and focusing on the unique needs of LGBTQ Asians.
While Covid 19 has hit all Americans with unprecedented challenges, we appreciate the Administration's recognition of the difficulties that are unique to Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, said Marielle A. Reataza, executive director of the National Asian Pacific American Families Against Substance Abuse. Community-building and rebuilding are essentials during this time, and we look forward to the progress needed to serve and heal our communities. One of the issues that have been mentioned in the announcement of the White House's new initiative is the data disaggregation. It has been an ongoing conversation for scholars of Asian American issues. According to AAPI Data, the Department of Education requires schools to aggregate student data across 48 ethnicities under the Asian label.
But looking at it this way can paint over the issues each community faces, and feed into the myth that Asians are generally successful and in less need federal support, as well as feed into the myth that Asians are generally successful. A lack of disaggregated data has diluted the severity of the epidemic and diluted its impact on individual AAPI groups.
It can make it harder for Asians to access pandemic resources because they aren't advertised as much in their neighborhoods. This is a problem for groups such as Hmong Americans, Indo Caribbeans, and Native Hawaiians, who experts say can be erased without looking deeper into Asian data.
I call this the gaslighting of the Asian American population, and it's been going on for decades, for every health condition I can think of, Tung Nguyen, professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, told NBC Asian America in October 2020. It is an example of anti-Asian structural racism. In some cases, even aggregated data shows a disproportionate level of suffering.
Southern California saw Asian-owned businesses hardest hit by the Pandemic. In September, customer-facing operations took huge blows in general, on top of the racism that kept people out of immigrant neighborhoods, according to Paul Ong, professor and researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Many Asian American entrepreneurs are immigrants, he said. They can speak English, they have a basic command of English, but not necessarily at the level that one needs, especially if the information is only provided in English. Older business owners who didn't know programs like the Paycheck Protection Program existed and couldn't get their services online quickly suffered the most, Ong said.
There seems to be a double whammy, he said.