The Failure to Recognize Anti-Asian Discrimination

Anti-Asian discrimination remains prevalent in the United States but continues to be reported and charged at low levels. In the current research, we seek to understand this puzzle in the context of workplace discrimination. Integrating the literature on the U.S. racial status hierarchy—which positions Asian Americans as an intermediate status group situated in between White and Black Americans—with the prototype model of attributions to discrimination, we propose that lay observers do not consider Asian Americans to be prototypical targets of racial discrimination. As a result, we predict that observers are less likely to attribute potentially discriminatory incidents to discrimination when those incidents involve Asian (compared with Black) targets. We find evidence supporting our predictions across two studies assessing prototypes of targets of racial discrimination (Studies 1 and 2), three preregistered experiments comparing attributions to discrimination for Asian and Black job candidates (Studies 3–5), and a data set of Equal Employment Opportunity Commission discrimination charges (Study 6). Our research makes theoretical advances on the racial experience of Asian employees by identifying Asian Americans as nonprototypical targets of racism and underscoring the relative failure of attributions to discrimination as an insidious problem that likely perpetuates anti-Asian racism at work. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2024.18628 .