Patterns in the Backlash: Early Findings from Our Listening Sessions on Anti-Democratic Attitude Drift

A peek into our research process

This year, Asian American Futures is launching groundbreaking research into a growing and urgent question with profound implications for racial justice and democracy: Why do many Asian Americans—despite broadly inclusive values—drift toward positions that are anti-democratic or reinforce structural inequities? This tension threatens multiracial solidarity, complicates coalition-building, and exposes a narrative gap exploited by the right. Issues like affirmative action in college admissions–which 70% of Asian Americans supported, but who also became the face of dismantling it–is a classic example. We’ve also seen this happen with public safety, education, and more. Through listening sessions, interviews, and surveys, we aim to unpack this complex paradox and identify pathways toward justice-aligned engagement. We are sharing a look into our process and learnings as this project unfolds.

A Wide Range of People and Issues

After completing two listening sessions with community organizations in our networks who responded to an open invitation to kick off our research in April, I admit I felt overwhelmed. The range of issues and concerns shared by the 24 participants, who work at frontline organizations–including immigration, the role of police, data disaggregation, Gaza, caste discrimination, and more–felt disjointed and disconnected. The organizations work with LGBTQ+ Vietnamese youth, Nepali-speaking Bhutanese communities, class- and caste-diverse Indian Americans, Asian American and BIPOC people in Atlanta, Chinese low-English proficiency immigrants, Asian American college students and more. This diversity reflects both the richness and the challenge of aligning on shared priorities within the Asian American movement.

Here are some of the issues that organizations, and our teammates, have found difficult to discuss, or that may cause backlash, with constituents:

Patterns in the Chaos

Looking at the wide range of issues, and processing the notes from the listening sessions, I felt overwhelmed. I didn’t feel alone, though. Frustration, confusion, disappointment, sadness, and more, were all feelings I detected during the listening sessions. As a group, participants had much to say about the difficulties and challenges of discussing these issues, as well as the disinformation they were frequently up against. However, participants, like us, struggled with identifying solutions. It felt like all of us were just trying to make sense of a problem that felt much bigger than any one organization or community. No one had found a silver bullet.

I turned to one of my favorite tools, Miro, to mindmap my way to clarity. A few insights shared in the listening sessions, such as the idea that meritocracy is a “convenient” frame for recent immigrants adjusting to a new country; the invisibility some Asians feel in a Black-White racial binary; that equity can sound zero-sum for Asians who are both privileged and marginalized; or the lamentation that there is no pride in being working-class, all stood out. This was fascinating. I had never heard meritocracy described as “convenient” before.

These underlying problems tied to bigger, universal questions, like “How do I succeed in America, and what should success look like, if the American Dream may not be accessible to all?” “What’s enough, in a time when everything is so expensive?” “What is the racial positionality of Asian Americans, as people who experience both privilege and marginalization?” “Where do I truly have agency, and where am I beholden to the system I’m part of?” I saw how the range of issues did have some coherence, once I dug a little deeper into the feelings and questions motivating the backlash. And, they tied to deeply held, but sometimes harmful, values about assimilation, scarcity, and invisibility.

Here’s how issues mapped to underlying problems, ideas and values:

The underlying questions, problems, ideas and values raise so many questions for me. I see some of these questions being contested in popular culture. There is no shortage of content espousing traditional gender roles, lamenting the high cost of living, or the disappearance of good jobs. But I don’t see as many answers to “What’s enough?”, much less “what could the American Dream 2.0 look like?” that feel aspirational and accessible. I wonder–Are people actually getting wedged on these questions, rather than the issues themselves? Can promoting issues without answering these questions lead to more polarization?

There is a lot to unpack here–and I probably won’t understand most of it in this project alone. However, I am excited to see how the underlying questions framework shows up, or not, in our future work. Stay tuned as we share more about our next step, social listening, to understand how public conversations are unfolding about the issues and underlying questions we named.