Racialized Narratives and Structural Exclusion: Exploring Media Discourses and Regulatory Practices on US Asian-Dominated Nail Salons

Racialized exclusion of Asian entrepreneurship and its communities, as part of the entrenched systemic racism in American society, has long been promulgated by the mainstream media and policymakers. Notably, nail salons, as an Asian-dominated multi-billion-dollar industry, reflect the confluence of media portrayals and policy structure of racialization. With the racial triangulation framework, we examined the news discourse of nail salons in New York (2015–2016) and California (2020–2022), and therefore, identified a four-step racialization of Asians that underlines media-regulation nexus, that is, Othering, Discriminating, Regulating, and Consolidating. Specifically, the general stereotypical portrayals of Asian Americans, for example, Model Minority and Yellow Peril, generate discriminatory images of certain Asian groups (e.g., business owners and immigrant workers) through covert language and frames, further motivating top-down regulatory measures that aggravate the economic and political burdens on the whole Asian community and thus solidifying the current racial dynamics. Altogether, this study heightens our sensitivity to the varied forms of (re)production of anti-Asian racism and underlines the legacy of White supremacy and colonialism in symbolic constructions and the legal regime.