Ethan Lien
Research Mentor: Melissa Borja
Mentor Department: American Culture, LSA
Author(s): Ethan Lien, Melissa Borja
Session: Session 4 (1:00 PM – 1:50 PM)
Presentation Type: Poster 35
Abstract
This project aims to study the relationship between states that voted for Trump or Biden during the 2020 presidential election and anti-Asian hate incidents that were reported in the news media. Previous research has found that typically legislators of color and Democrats showed more concern for racism and discrimination during the Covid-19 pandemic. However, we questioned if there was a partisan pattern in where these violent and discriminatory incidents occurred. To investigate this question this project uses data from the Virulent Hate project to identify the top ten states with the most presence of anti-Asian hate incidents reported in the media. When referring to the dataset of the top ten states with anti-Asian hate incidents, we noticed that nine of them were blue states, with two being swing states. While one might expect states that voted for Trump would be the site of more anti-Asian hate incidents, it was in fact states that voted for Biden that were the sites of more anti-Asian attacks. According to a 2020 census of AAPI population in each state, five of the states with the most incidents were also among the states with the highest AAPI population. Considering this, a possible explanation for the relationship between blue states and anti-Asian hate incidents could be due to higher AAPI presence. Furthermore, we found that out of the database of anti-Asian hate incidents reported, 85.4% of the articles were reported from blue states, meaning this relationship could possibly be due to having news media that are more interested in addressing these issues. While we are still considering what scholars have said about partisanship, our findings clarify our knowledge on political representations.
