facta non verba

On Thursday, the New York Times published a video about the racism that Asian-Americans face every day, a compilation of stories gathered from the hashtag #ThisIs2016.

The video was a follow-up to an earlier Times article from editor Michael Luo, in which he responded to a person on the street who told him to “go back to China.”

Unfortunately, according to some Asian-Americans, the video erased the complex reality of the United States’ Asian population by featuring people of East Asian descent almost exclusively, with one self-identified Filipino American represented and no South Asians.

Several Asian Americans penned open letter, published on the Huffington Post, which reads:

Your video told us, “You’re still invisible!”

You did this during Filipino American History Month ? the month when we are supposed to be most proud of our brown presence in the U.S. And you did this during election season ? when xenophobia against South Asians is on the rise and Islamophobia is so overt that Muslim Americans (and South Asian Americans who are presumed to be Muslim) expect to be discriminated in their everyday lives.

Dr. Kevin Nadal, a trustee of the Filipino American National Historical Society and author of Filipino American Psychology, co-signed the open letter. He said he was “shocked” when he watched the video.

“I saw one East Asian face after the other, until one woman appeared and disclosed she was Filipina,” Nadal said in an interview. “And when I finished I was shocked. No South Asians at all? How the hell were they not included.”

This is not the first time the Times has left Filipinos and South Asians out of the equation. The Times produced a roundtable video earlier in April entitled “A Conversation With Asians on Race,” and among the 37 participants in the two videos, only one was Filipina and five were South Asian.

The video did not accurately show how these groups are represented in society, as Filipinos are 19% of the U.S. Asian population and South Asians represent 18% of all Asian-Americans.

Anthony Ocampo, assistant professor of sociology at California State Polytechnic University and author of The Latinos of Asia: How Filipino Americans Break the Rules of Race, created a graph comparing the demographics of Asian-Americans versus how often the Times represents them in coverage.

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