Experiences of racist encounters among Asian Americans: analysis of #thisis2016

ABSTRACT Asian Americans have a history of discrimination and othering in the US. In October 2016, journalist Michael Luo put out a call for Asian Americans to tweet racist encounters using the hashtag, #thisis2016. The aim of this study was to examine the encounters shared by Asian Americans. Tweets between October 2016 and December 2017 were obtained via Twitter. The tweets were scoped down to 3,156 tweets to include those that appeared to answer the original call. A phenomenological approach was the overall framework with thematic content analysis applied to analyze the data. Tweets were categorized by type of racist encounter. The racist encounters included: microaggressions, denial of intra-ethnic differences, seen as other, verbal harassment, validation of anti-Asian racism, prejudice, verbal violence/attack, and model minority. Understanding the unique experiences of Asian American individuals, families, and communities helps to target policies, social services, and programming that takes these factors into account.