by Kevin Schofield
About a year ago, I wrote about the “Hispanic health paradox”: the effort to understand why the country’s Hispanic population as a whole has better health outcomes than researchers predict based on their levels of household income, education, and insurance coverage. A study concluded that looking at the aggregate numbers for the entire population of Hispanic Americans was burying some disturbing health trends that show up when we look at subgroups.
This weekend’s read is a news article published by the Journal of the American Medical Association that makes largely the same point for the Asian American community. There are roughly 24 million Americans with Asian heritage. But “Asian” covers approximately 60% of the world’s population, including the two most populous countries in the world, India and China, as well as dozens of other smaller ones with diverse cultures, populations, climates, and degrees of social isolation (and thus genetic isolation) throughout their histories. For someone to mark their race or ethnicity as “Asian” on a form alone tells us very little about where they come from, what languages they speak, their religious or other cultural practices, their diet, or the DNA inside their cells.
And yet the federal government’s Office of Management and Budget, which largely dictates the set of options for specifying one’s race on census forms and countless other government data-collection instruments, often specifies just that one option to cover Asian Americans — and sometimes lumps “Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander” in there as well.
The article begins by recalling how Asian Americans were often de-prioritized during the initial rollout of COVID-19 vaccines in 2021, due in part to the “model minority” myth, the belief that Asians have an extraordinary ability to overcome hardship to succeed in American society. But in reality, according to the article, in 2020, “the Asian American population experienced double the percentage of deaths due to COVID-19 than the White population and as much as a 53% higher case-fatality rate.”