NYU CARA & ABRA PROJECT – COVID-19, Asian Americans, Resiliency, and Allyship | Asian and Black Americans, Racism, and Allyship

The CARA and ABRA projects are led by primary investigators at New York University: Dr. Doris Chang (Silver School of Social Work) & Dr. Sumie Okazaki (Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development Department of Applied Psychology).

CARA PROJECT

The COVID-19 pandemic and the national protests against police brutality against Black Americans have highlighted the systemic racism that underlies American society. In 2020, we saw widescale protests against structural racism and anti-Black racism, in particular, occurring against the backdrop of a global pandemic and the rise of anti-Asian discrimination and xenophobia.

The CARA (Covid-19, Asian Americans, Resiliency, and Allyship) Project at NYU aims to understand how Asian Americans are currently responding to these two crises. Through this study, we hope to examine Asian Americans’ identity, belonging, and civic responsibility, with far-reaching consequences for their individual and community well-being.

In 2020 Fall, we administered an online survey to a national sample of 689 Asian and Asian American adults. The majority (49.6%) identified as East Asian, 22.5% were Southeast Asian, and 18.6% were South Asian. Another 6.2% identified as multiracial, and 3.1% as multiethnic Asian. Using standardized measures, we assessed respondents’ exposure to stressors associated with the pandemic and the current racial climate, attitudes toward anti-Black racism, perceptions of linked fate, collective racial identity, individual coping responses, civic engagement, and activism, and other forms of resistance and empowerment against racism.

We are now in the process of quantitative data analysis and collecting qualitative data to examine how the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement have affected Asian Americans’ sense of racial belonging, intergroup anxiety, and individual and collective coping responses.

ABRA PROJECT

Discrimination experiences also affect a group’s sense of belonging, intergroup race relations, and collective action, which are crucial community-level indicators of well-being and societal integration. Recent studies on civic and political engagement, two forms of collective action, have typically focused on individual demographic and psychological predictors; studies rarely consider how macro-contextual factors such as ambient racial climate (including negative views of other racial groups) and community characteristics affect racialized individuals’ psychosocial experiences, intergroup relations, and collective actions aimed at addressing racial inequality.

ABRA (Asian and Black Americans, Racism, and Allyship) project examines how geocoded indices of sociocultural climate and structural inequalities (e.g., racial attitudes, residential segregation, economic inequities) interact with individual psychological variables to predict Asian and Black Americans’ experiences, attitudes, and behavioral responses to racism. For this aim, we collaborated with the faculty investigators in public health (Dr. Thu Nguyen), social psychology (Dr. Maureen Craig), and sociology (Dr. Harvey Nicholson).

In May 2022, we administered an online survey to a national sample of 359 Chinese, 360 Flipinx, 359 Asian Indians, and 367 Black and African American adults. Using standardized measures, we assessed respondents’ exposure to stressors associated with racism and the current racial climate, attitudes towards anti-Black and anti-Asian racism, interracial relations, collective racial identity, other forms of resistance and empowerment against racism, and health and mental health outcomes. We are now in the process of analyzing the data and writing the manuscript.

Funding: NYU Constance and Martin Silver Center on Data Science and Social Equity