Funders and peer reviewers are contributing to systemic racism through their biases about members of...
Researchers who study Asian American and Pacific Islander communities can face another barrier: gatekeepers who downplay social inequities that affect AAPIs and dismiss studying them.
A peer reviewer said his analysis of low academic performance among 8,000 AAPI students in Hawaii was "Really fascinating." But the reviewer also made a comment to the effect of: "'Too bad this is about Asian Americans.
Could myopic gatekeepers stymie research on AAPIs? It seems likely, especially considering data shows a stark gap in funding for research on AAPIs.
A 2019 study in JAMA Network Open found that clinical research focused on AAPIs and funded by the NIH comprised just 0.17 percent of its total budget, based on 529 projects between 1992 and 2018.
Without funding, there are fewer resources for research, thus creating a vicious cycle of omitting AAPIs from influential scholarly work.
To be clear, calling for attention and research on AAPIs should not take away from resources for Blacks, Latinos, Indigenous and other marginalized communities in need.
Consider that AAPIs were the focus of media stories on racial and economic inequality less than 4 percent of the time in an analysis of some 380 articles from 2019, according to a report from Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy.
Even if research did include data about AAPI inequality, media articles omitted it 37 percent of the time.
The troughs experienced by vulnerable AAPIs are hidden by the peaks of high-income Asians.
Crime research with disaggregated AAPI data is rare, but one study showed youth arrest rates were highest for people of Samoan ethnicity, followed by Black, Laotian and Vietnamese people, in Alameda County in the San Francisco Bay Area.