We have talked about the perpetual foreigner stereotype, but exactly how prevalent is it? Is it getting stronger or weaker? With whom is this stereotype more deeply root? A recently published paper took a data-driven approach to answer these questions. Who is American? A comprehensive analysis of the American = White/Foreign = Asian stereotype (2007–2023) analyzes the perpetual foreigner stereotype and makes a number of interesting conclusions.
As the paper may be hard to parse for people not accustomed to reading academic published work, I will summarize what I think are the most interesting points. As you might expect, the American = White association, was strongest among White Americans. It was particularly strong with Americans who lived in places where there weren’t many Asian Americans or who were older or more conservative. I found it interesting that these factors were much stronger than other factors like gender and education levels (e.g. college-education or not). In a bit of good news, the American = White association has been weakening over the period of 2007 through 2023, although the progress was disrupted by the COVID-19 Pandemic. Let’s hope that this is only temporary.
I am happy that someone has taken a data-driven look at this stereotype. I have talked about the paper’s findings at a very high level – there are more subtleties to the data and the author’s conclusions. I suggest you look at the paper if you are more interested.
