Findings indicate significant differences in academics, health and poverty
Language barriers and institutional racism appear to be the largest forces creating academic and socioeconomic disparities between Asian and Pacific Islanders and caucasians, according to a recent report released by the Coalition of Communities of Color. The report on the API community was five years in the making and is the third report in a series of seven that seeks to highlight inequities of minority groups in Oregon. Through its research, the coalition seeks to ultimately unite communities to achieve social justice.
The coalition looked at 28 institutions to determine its findings, including income, education, early learning, bank-lending practices, child welfare, juvenile justice and others. Seventy-four percent of the API community as a whole meets or exceeds statewide benchmarks for education and poverty. However, when broken down into the divergent languages that comprise the API community, the numbers begin to drop. The Bhutanese and Nepalese communities are at 24 percent, Burmese are at 33 percent and Karen speakers are at zero percent.
In its research, the coalition stressed the need to separate the more than 100 different speaking languages within API and break down each community as thoroughly as possible, so as to no longer look at the group as a single identity. The single-identity system doesn’t account for separate experiences and can alter the perception of individual groups within the community.
“The current standards used to collect information of our communities masks the inequities of specific groups,” said Joseph Santos-Lyons, a coordinator with the Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon, a statewide community advocacy organization that partners with the coalition. He explained that these practices “give a false picture, the myth of the model minority. We know that people who respond to surveys and voluntary data tend to be more educated and speak better English. We’re not hearing from communities that don’t.”
According to Santos-Lyons, language is the key barrier to the inequities revealed in the report that show a significant disparity of academic achievement between API children and caucasians including math, reading and on-time graduation.
When asked about the report’s finding regarding the academic disparity, Santos-Lyons said he wasn’t surprised. “The quality of ELL and ESL programs have really struggled to have a strong curriculum,” he said. “The department has gone through substantial challenges in turnover or outcomes that lack real meaningful engagement. We have an underfunded, under-supported program in the public school system,” Santos-Lyons added.
Nearly 50 percent of API children in public schools participate in English Language Learner or English as a Second Language programs, and these students only graduate 28 percent of the time.
Portland State social work professor Ann Curry-Stevens is the lead researcher and author for the coalition reports. She believes that even if language barriers were easily fixed, the community still would not end up reaching parity with caucasians. The prevailing factor, according to Curry-Stevens, is institutional racism.
“One of the issues the coalition faces is the widespread belief that racism is a feature of the nation’s past, and that movements of civil rights and stronger recognition of the rights of communities of color including legislation have solved the problem,” Curry-Stevens said. “This data really uncovers that institutional racism is alive and well, leading to very narrowed outcomes for communities of color.”
In health issues the numbers are even more troubling. According to the report a recent study showed that Asian and Pacific Islanders have incidence rates of cervical cancer similar to caucasian women in the U.S. This trend does not hold true of all Asian groups in the U.S. “Vietnamese-American women have rates of cervical cancer five times higher than whites,” the report stated.
Despite the troubling numbers in health issues and academic success, one interesting feature of the API community is that on a national level it is doing well and in many ways outperforming white people. In Oregon that is not the case. Initially, Curry-Stevens and the researchers thought that the answer would be one of composition, because the difference between American-born and new arrivals would explain the disparity of national success and where Oregon stands. However, Oregon has more native born and fewer new arrivals, so the question remains open.
“The coalition often gets asked to explain what they think is happening. Number one is that our really progressive identity, the idea we’re one of the greatest places to live is actually a problem. When we’re so progressive and have such a positive reputation it advances the belief implicitly that we can’t be racist,” Curry-Stevens said. “We don’t need special initiatives, we don’t need special legislation and so that progressive identity really gets in the way of the disability of the needs of color, a willingness to acknowledge these disparities.”
Previously the Coalition of Communities of Color released reports on the Native American and Latino communities, and a report on the African American community is forthcoming.
