Most Asian students surveyed at Penn experienced racism during the pandemic, according to research

Tiffany Tieu saw how her friends and family members were dealing with anti-Asian racism during the pandemic and wondered how many of her classmates at the University of Pennsylvania had experienced it, too.

So she embarked on a research project for her honors thesis with another student, Hope Cho, and under the direction of their professor Melissa Hunt.

What the project found surprised her: More than three-quarters of the 224 students surveyed reported that they had been victims or witnesses of anti-Asian racism, either on campus, in the city or elsewhere amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Sixty-one percent said they had been victims of hate or discrimination. Student respondents included both undergraduate and graduate students, East Asian and Southeast Asian, Asian American and Asian international students.

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“I knew we were going to find something, but I was shocked at how high it was,” said Tieu, 23, a 2022 Penn graduate from Cheltenham, whose research was conducted during the 2021-22 school year and recently featured in Penn Today, a university communications publication. “Not many people at Penn had known about it.”

One student reported that a man used a racial slur, punched him, and hit him with his truck on campus. The attacker was arrested, according to the student.

Others said they were spit at or coughed on or verbally harassed.

“A truck drove by and a man stuck his head out the window and screamed a racist remark about us being Asian and the coronavirus,” one student reported.

Avoidance or stares, “COVID racism/joking” and harassment on social media also were reported by the students.

“It was just incredibly poignant and heartbreaking,” said Hunt, associate director of clinical training in Penn’s Department of Psychology and a practicing clinical psychologist. “It really drove home the point that, unfortunately, racism is alive and well in this country and ... we need to be proactively taking steps to address the impact of systemic racism on the people who are victimized by it.”

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Hunt emphasized that the experiences are not exclusive to Penn. That just happened to be where students conducted their research.

“This is a problem across the country of trying to figure out how institutions of higher education can best support racial minority students, particularly in the face of escalating rhetoric and racism at the highest levels of the country,” she said.

Hunt estimated that about a third of reported incidents occurred on campus, a third elsewhere in the city, and a third in students’ home communities.

The work looked at what steps colleges can take to better support Asian students and students from underrepresented groups. They found that diversity training must include specific examples of “the actual lived experiences ... of people on the receiving end of anti-Asian hate.”

Students in the study also asked for an anonymous hotline to report incidents, said Tieu, who was the lead author. And Tieu and Cho heard from the participants that it’s important for schools to create spaces for students from underrepresented groups to gather.

Tieu, Cho and Hunt shared their findings with Brighid Dwyer, vice dean for diversity, equity and inclusion at Penn’s School of Arts and Sciences.

“I really applaud the students on doing this research and really shining a light on the topic,” Dwyer said.

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Penn last fall expanded campus space and resources for its cultural resource centers and coalition groups. The university began renovations on its Arts, Research, and Culture House and designated it as the home for the university’s main minority coalition groups and cultural resource centers. It followed years of campaigning and advocacy by Penn students.

About 27.5% of Penn undergraduates identify as Asian. That does not include international students.

Tieu and Cho also presented their findings at the annual Asian American Psychological Association convention last October.

The students also are trying to get the research published in a journal. In one case, it was a bit disheartening. A professional reviewer at a well-respected journal said the students shouldn’t have counted sexual “fetishization” or cultural appropriation as acts of racism because people were actually appreciating Asians and it was positive.

“How do we even respond to that,” Hunt said. “They were starting from completely the wrong assumption. It’s emblematic of how some of this is just accepted in society.”

Students in the study also reported microaggressions.

“I had one professor who taught a class of only eight people and by the end of the semester was still getting the three Asian kids in the class mixed up,” one student reported.

While the first part of the study was conducted through a survey, the second part included focus groups with a total of 16 students in which they discussed their experiences and what they would like to see happen to address the problem. Tieu and Cho got $1,250 in grant funding to conduct the work.

Tieu, who was a psychology major, works at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia as a clinical research assistant, looking at the longitudinal impact of the pandemic on mothers and their children and the racial disparities. She plans to apply to graduate school and become a clinical or counseling psychologist.

Cho, 23, who is from Atlanta and also graduated in 2022, is a clinical research coordinator at Columbia Medical Center in New York. She was also a psychology major.

She said the work was particularly important because Asian students tend not to report things that happen to them and the research was a chance to highlight their voices.

Both Tieu and Cho said they, too, had experienced racist incidents. At a Starbucks in the city, Cho said, a male customer said to her, “‘You are the people who started COVID.’”

He then followed Cho and her friends for a bit when they left the Starbucks, she said.

At times, Hunt said she was worried about Tieu’s and Cho’s well-being, hearing about all of the things that had happened.

“It was emotionally taxing,” Tieu said. “They were our classmates, our friends.”

But they were motivated by the hope that their work would lead to positive changes, she said.

“It’s made me even more motivated to do research on my community,” Tieu said.