Abstract

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, accounts of violence against Asians–and those of Chinese descent especially–have risen dramatically. These disturbing episodes have sparked a rapidly growing research agenda that uses well-controlled research designs to explore the extent, nature, and origins of hostility against Asian Americans in the current moment. Unfortunately, however, researchers undertook few such well-controlled studies examining discrimination against Asian Americans in the years before the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, scholars have limited experimental evidence upon which to understand and benchmark recent research. We examine data from two large-scale, independently conducted correspondence audits of public school principals before the pandemic. Our research provides clear evidence that discrimination against individuals of Chinese descent in the U.S. is definitively not a new phenomenon driven only by the COVID-19 outbreak. This discrimination is large and widespread in American public schools. Moreover, we find that among public school principals, discrimination against Asian Americans is considerably larger than discrimination against Hispanic and Black Americans. Additionally, discrimination against Asian Americans is larger in areas that have greater shares of White and Republican-voting populations. Our evidence shows that discrimination against Asian Americans is systemically present and does not vary by local mean income or educational attainment. Our two large experiments show that in vitally important contexts, Asian Americans have faced deeply troubling, yet subtle and hard to detect, levels of discrimination that are large by any standard of reference. Discrimination against Asians is an enduring aspect of life in the United States.