At the heart of my project lies a burning question: Where do Asian Americans fit in a country built on the Black-white racial divide? I’m particularly interested in how this conundrum has played out policy-wise, especially as the concept of “minorities” came into vogue for addressing racial disparities during and after World War II.

Just who counts as a “minority” besides Black Americans has long been up for debate. That fuzziness has allowed for a diversity of groups to make claims. For generations, Asian Americans have tried to “prove” their beleaguered minority status in order to access rights and resources. They furnished data illustrating their “underrepresentation” as evidence. But such metrics have spawned unintended consequences, including the peculiar branding of Asian Americans as an “overrepresented minority” as demographics changed. This twist invites us to approach anew our presumptions about “proportionality” and “representation” as tools for achieving equality and justice in democratic life.

The Color of Success came out just as #BlackLivesMatter and Ferguson captured the nation’s attention. I didn’t expect it to find so many readers outside of academic circles. But its history of “model minority” typecasting speaks to a growing urgency among Asian Americans to dismantle anti-Black racism, particularly where we have been implicated in feeding it. This yearning inspires my current work.

At the same time, a vocal minority of Asian Americans began to organize to end affirmative action. They’ve been very effective in putting major universities (Harvard, UNC) on the defensive. Then with the pandemic Asian Americans experienced intensities of hostility and violence. After the horrific shootings in Atlanta and Indianapolis in spring 2021, we saw an unprecedented—and frankly astonishing—outpouring of concern for Asian Americans. While these are not feel-good circumstances, they do confirm to me that Asian Americans are important figures in the history of racial justice.

Social media obviously figures enormously into race-making today—how racial identity gets produced, embraced, contested, reappropriated, and so forth over time. The amount of data is endless, but even analyzing a tiny sample provides empirical heft to what we sense intuitively.

Asian American Twitter was difficult to study before 2021 because there wasn’t really a hashtag that had gone super-viral for an extended time. Then came #StopAsianHate. My team of graduate students pinpointed celebrities who amplified the hashtag, which helps explain why 2021 was such a turning point. Olivia Munn was one of the earliest users. BTS’s tweet from March 29 became the most retweeted of 2021. Perhaps most sobering was discovering how few tweets paired #StopAsianHate with #StandWithSikhs—a hashtag that arose in the wake of the Indianapolis FedEx facility shooting just a month after the Atlanta tragedy. This divergence underscores the constraints of the #StopAsianHate framework.