Valuing Asian‐Ness, Eschewing Whiteness: Ethnic Hierarchies and the Relative Salience of Minority Ethnicities Among Mixed‐Race Asians in the United States

Based on 44 in‐depth interviews with a diverse sample of mixed‐race Asians in the United States (who are a mixture of Asian and non‐Asian ancestries), this article argues that their multiracial identifications reflect a hierarchy of ethnic desirability. Asian and Latinx heritages were positively regarded by interviewees as the most culturally distinctive and interesting with ethnically inclusive communities, whereas African American ethnicity was seen as less distinctive and desirable and quite exclusionary, but still valued for its legacy of racial struggle. In contrast, whiteness was devalued as ethnically unmarked and ordinary and was associated with racism and the marginalization of mixed‐race Asians. Therefore, mixed‐race Asians find minority ethnicities to be more desirable. Such ethnic preferences upend structural hierarchies where whites are positioned higher than Asians, with Latinx and black minorities positioned below them. In terms of perceptual hierarchies—the ranking of ethnicities based on subjectively perceived desirability—whites seem to be no longer on top, at least in the eyes of mixed‐race Asians. In the future, such changing ethnic perceptions may become more widespread.