An Invitation

We launched this survey over a year ago in the early spring of 2019. 

If we were to send the exact same survey out today, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and continued uprisings against ongoing police violence and the movement for Black Lives, I would venture to guess our results about the Asian American online political landscape would be different. We might see policing and mass incarceration as an even higher priority policy issue, as well as upticks in interest for policies around healthcare, labor, and housing. At a time where our personal, political, and professional lives primarily inhabit virtual spaces, the questions around platforms and applications used on a daily basis may change as people have incorporated new methods of communication into their day-to-day routines. Where half of our respondents spent around 2-6 hours online in one day, this duration has likely gone up.

However, the way a particular participant responds to a survey tool can also change within a given day or a week. A survey archives collective moments of interaction and interpretation.

So what can we learn from older data? 

We created this survey with the underlying assumption that Asian American political lives in digital environments continue to be robust and varied, encompassing a myriad of tools, issues, and practices. This survey both confirms that assumption and also reveals the inheritances of Asian American online politics in the last decade—the orientations and positioning of Asian America as a political formation.

Over half the respondents had used or followed #Asians4BlackLives and #NotYourModelMinority. 2019 comes in the wake of the 2014 Black Lives Matter protests, including the murder of Akai Gurley by Chinese American NYPD officer Peter Liang and marked one moment when Asian Americans publicly engaged in online conversations about anti-Blackness within our communities and interrogated the role of the model minority myth. 

Yet, we also have shorter memories of our digital activist histories. While 56% of participants had used or followed #MeToo, widely circulated through 2017, only 8.7% of participants had used or followed the hashtag #YesAllWomen, a 2014 hashtag that also indexed personal stories of gender-based harassment and violence. 

This data marks a point of political engagement situated in a longer lineage. 

The current report offered makes a case for ways digital culture plays a role in how people locate, change, and evolve their orientations to politics given their personal experiences, backgrounds, and histories. Beyond that, I think what we offer is a rumination on how community-based data can be collected and analyzed. 

We hope you might find something here. For example, in the data on gender, there’s a qualitative richness in the languages used by Asian Americans to describe their gender identities. We share these methodologies and materials with you as an open invitation to use and repurpose these tools and data.

About the Survey Tool

Questions last edited on January 9, 2019