Vivien Leung, PhD

My book project, "But Where Are You Really From? Microaggressions, Discrimination, and Asian Americans" (working title) examines the link between interpersonal discrimination, political group identity, and behavior.

Abstract

How do experiences with discrimination impact minority group identity and behavior? Although discrimination has been found to be an important explanatory variable in minority political behavior, this work has been overwhelmingly focused on experiences with structural discrimination. There is no comprehensive theoretical framework that examines how experiences with interpersonal (i.e. peer to peer) casual forms of racism lead individuals to identify more strongly with their racial group. I argue that experiences with microaggressions (a form of casual racism and discrimination) are commonplace in the day to day lives of minorities and influence identity attachment and behavior. These experiences can be categorized by their stereotypical content on a positive to negative spectrum based on the stereotype at the heart of the microaggression. I focus exclusively here on the experiences of Asian Americans, a group that receives microaggressions on the basis of a ‘positive’ stereotype (the model minority) and a ‘negative’ stereotype (the forever foreigner) and how these racial microaggressions shape their behavior. I aim to show that experiences with racial microaggression form a point of commonality for Asian Americans who then utilize these experiences to reinforce their panethnic group identity and sense of racial group consciousness. Using a survey experiment and a lab experiment, I also investigate how different stimuli can shift attachment to the racial group identity and the frequency of political engagement.