A Forgotten Minority? A Content Analysis of Asian Pacific Americans in Introductory American Government Textbooks

Abstract

Textbooks are the most important pedagogical tools in higher education and they should convey suffi cient and accurate information on minority groups and women in the United States. Yet textbooks tend to marginalize these groups in their depictions. This article examines the coverage of Asian Pacifi c Americans in twenty-eight American Government or Politics textbooks. Asian Pacifi c Americans have faced a unique history of exclusion, discrimination, and stereotyping. The content analysis of the textbooks reveals that textbooks do not fully cover their history and contributions to US politics, either measured by page numbers or by historical events and fi gures important to Asian Pacifi c Americans. To rectify this lack of coverage, this article concludes with fi ve constructive recommendations, including an option to invite scholars on Asian Pacifi c American politics to serve as textbook reviewers and textbook coauthors.

It’s (Not) in The Reading: American Government Textbooks’ Limited Representation of Historically Marginalized Groups

“…Tolley (2020) found that Canadian political science textbooks often silo their representations of immigrants and minorities in diversityspecific chapters, presenting oppression of these groups as historical artefacts, not contemporary issues. Novkov and Gossett (2007), Wallace and Allen (2008), Takeda (2015), and Monforti and McGlinn (2010) found similar ghettoization. To test whether this is still the case in American government textbooks, deduplicated pages were coded for the chapter in which they appeared in each book and whether that chapter was the civil rights chapter.…”

“…Their findings concur with Wallace and Allen's (2008), in both the limited amount of coverage and the exiling of that coverage to civil rights chapters. Takeda (2015) used an index-search-based approach on the most recent editions of the textbooks in Monforti and McGlynn (2010) for coverage of Asian American/Pacific Islanders and found that an extremely small number of pages included coverage of this group.…”

The Broader Scholarly Context of Asian American Politics

“…In an era of some prosperity, some progress, myriad challenges, and also oppression, we know that good work on race and ethnicity could have an important role in public policy discussions. If we do believe in equal protection, then we should strive to teach students and faculty colleagues about historical and contemporary Asian American politics, which encompass myriad issues and historical moments that are largely absent in textbooks on American politics (Aoki and Takeda 2008;Takeda 2015). We also have the ability to serve as role models for students in real life, above and beyond our research and writing.…”

A Forgotten Minority? A Content Analysis of Asian Pacific Americans in Introductory American Government Textbooks—Corrigendum

“…Coding errors resulted in incorrect table figures for seven of the twenty-eight textbooks shown in Table 1 of the Takeda’s (2015, 434) article. The correct data are shown in bold in the revised excerpt of Table 1 below.…”

“…With the corrected figures, the average total number of pages with APA-specific mentions in textbooks increased only from 1.13 pages, as originally reported, to 1.16 pages (column f); the average percentage of APA specific pages in textbooks increased only from 0.19 %, as originally reported, to 0.20% (column h). The author’s corrections are based on the 2011-2013 textbooks reviewed in Takeda (2015) and do not reflect any updates that may have been made by textbook authors in more recent editions of the textbooks. These errors are solely those of the author.…”