U.S. textbooks portray Asians in a limited and negative light, new study shows

The study also found that the sentiment of verbs used to describe Asians was markedly negative, more so than the language used to describe actions of other ethnic groups. Specifically, the researchers identified the prevalence of words like attack, invade, and threaten in connection with Asians, in contrast to verbs like begin, want, and believe used in connection with groups like Germans and the British.

“The disparity is shocking,” said Patricia Bromley, an associate professor at Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE) and the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. “For Asian groups, not only did we see the dominance of the war narrative, but the language is much more aggressive, more negative. The negative sentiment is higher for Asian groups relative to other social groups, in sentences related to war and in non-war contexts.”

The study, published March 27 in the journal Educational Researcher, was co-led by Lucy Li, who earned her bachelor’s and a master’s degree in computer science from Stanford and is now a doctoral student at the University of California at Berkeley. David Bamman, an associate professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley, is also a coauthor.

A disproportionate focus on war

While war is commonly a centerpiece in U.S. history textbooks, the researchers said, they found that the emphasis on war was far greater for Asians than for other ethnic groups. More than 45 percent of sentences mentioning Asians or Asian Americans were focused on war or conflict, compared with about 14 percent of sentences in the textbooks overall.

“That focus obscures the social history of Asians and Asian Americans, the complicated history of migration and other transnational experiences as they’re linked to militarism,” said Choi. “It also perpetuates the stereotype of Asian Americans in history as the foreign enemies.” The emphasis on “fighting” verbs in connection with Asians oversimplifies their roles into either aggressors or victims, she said. 

The researchers also gave examples of Asians who had an important role in the history of the United States but were rarely or not mentioned in the textbooks. For one, a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1898 brought about by Chinese American Wong Kim Ark helped to establish birthright citizenship for anyone born within U.S. territory, but only one textbook in the study sample included a reference to his case. None of the textbooks mentioned Japanese American Yuri Kochiyama, an activist who played a significant part in the U.S. civil rights movement. 

When historical figures were named in sentences mentioning Asians or Asian Americans, nearly two-thirds of the individuals who were named were white, the researchers found. This sentence, for example – “In fact, because most Japanese people had never seen steamships before, they thought the ships in Perry’s fleet were ‘giant dragons puffing smoke,’ ” – refers only to Matthew Perry, a white American naval commander, by name.

“Asians and Asian Americans are reduced to groups and treated quite monolithically, versus the white figures, who get to be heroic actors with power and agency as individuals,” said Bromley.

The study also found that most mentions of Asian Americans were limited to Chinese and Japanese Americans, excluding groups such as South or Southeast Asians. Filipino Americans are the third-largest Asian American group, Choi noted, but rarely appeared in the textbooks except in the context of the U.S. annexation of the Philippines.