In California, a battle over data disaggregation has reached a fevered pitch.
Earlier this year, Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) advocates worked tirelessly in conjunction with state legislators to draft and advance Assembly Bill 1726 (AB1726, nicknamed “The AHEAD Act”), which would disaggregate healthcare and higher education data pertaining to the AAPI community using the same guidelines as the federal Census Bureau. AB1726 is the second effort to pass such a law in the state of California; Governor Jerry Brown vetoed an earlier data disaggregation bill passed with near unanimous support in 2015.
In April, I wrote about why we need data disaggregation. I noted the broad diversity of the AAPI community that creates vastly unequal access to services such as education and healthcare for many specific AAPI ethnic groups. Yet, those ethnicity-specific inequities are often lost by state and federal data collection systems that treat AAPIs as an ethnically homogenous group. That invisibility, in turn, protects and preserves structural injustices faced by many AAPIs. Data disaggregation is not just an important issue; it is one of the core civil rights issues facing AAPIs today.
As far as I’m concerned, it’s a “no brainer” for AAPI advocates to support data disaggregation. Previous efforts to disaggregate AAPI demographic data — including, most notably, successful efforts to disaggregate Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders in Census data as a separate racial category — have yielded a plethora of valuable data concerning these communities. Activists have subsequently mobilized to develop programs specifically focused on the NH/PI community. For a community long damaged by our invisibility, AAPI must agree: efforts to improve data collection around the AAPI community are a good thing.
So, how can one possibly oppose The AHEAD Act?
Continue reading “We Cannot Disregard Data: How Opposition to Data Disaggregation Hurts AAPI”