The Asian American Exclusion
There is a common practice of discussing inequality in the United States without reference to Asian Americans, which permits the suggestion that the inequality is due to race or racial bias. Here's a recent example:
To stay out of poverty follow these simple norms: 1. Don't get fired 2. Have white skin https://t.co/Mi7V9khIn3 pic.twitter.com/YKvTUNmhXS
— Sean McElwee (@SeanMcElwee) November 24, 2015
The graph reported results for Hispanics disaggregated into Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and other Hispanics, but the graph omitted results for Asians and Pacific Islanders, even though the note for the graph indicates that Asians/Pacific Islanders were included in the model. Here are data on Asian American poverty rates (source):
The omission of Asian Americans from discussions of inequality is a common enough practice [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] that it deserves a name. The Asian American Exclusion is as good as any.
It's ridiculous to suggest that leaving Asians out of a figure "permits the suggestion that the inequality is due to race or racial bias." The status of Asians does not say anything about what causes differences between Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics. As I have argued in my multiple analyses of Asians and inequality, the lumping together of a very diverse, yet pretty small, group into one category (as in the figure you post) is not usually informative.
See especially, Do Asians in the U.S. have high incomes? (https://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2012/06/25/do-asians-in-the-u-s-have-high-incomes/)
On disparities among Asians in women's employment patterns, see also:
Kang, Jeehye and Philip N. Cohen. 2015. "Household extension and employment among Asian immigrant women in the US." Journal of Family Issues. (https://www.terpconnect.umd.edu/~pnc/JK-PNC-JFI-preprint.pdf)
Read, Jen'nan Ghazal and Philip N. Cohen. 2007. "One Size Fits All? Explaining U.S.-born and Immigrant Women’s Employment across Twelve Ethnic Groups." Social Forces 85(4):1713-34 (https://www.terpconnect.umd.edu/~pnc/SF07.pdf)
Hi, Philip. Thanks for the comment and the links.
You might be correct that lumping together Asian American subgroups is usually not informative, but it seems preferable to consider whether lumping together Asian American subgroups is informative with regard to the particular analysis that is being conducted.
Let's consider whether reporting data for Asian Americans would have been informative in this particular case. The ACS codebook that you posted had separate items for identifying Asians and Pacific Islanders, so it does not appear necessary to consider variation between Asians and Pacific Islanders.
Figure 3 in the source that I used (https://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/acsbr11-17.pdf) reported poverty rates for Asian American subgroups disaggregated into Asian Indians, Chinese, Filipinos, Japanese, Koreans, and Vietnamese. None of these Asian American subgroups had a poverty rate above 15%. (Koreans were the highest, at 15%. See the text on page 2).
Therefore, each of the listed Asian American subgroups had a poverty rate much lower than the rate for blacks or African Americans (26%, reported on page 2), much lower than the rate for American Indians and Alaska Natives (27%, reported on page 2), much lower than the rate for Hispanics or Latinos (23% or so, eyeballed from Figure 3), lower than the rate for Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders (18%, reported on page 2), and lower than the rate for persons of two or more races (18% or 19%, eyeballed from Figure 3).
So while there is variation in the poverty rate among the Asian American subgroups listed in Figure 3, that variation is not very large compared to the relatively high poverty rate for blacks, Hispanics, and American Indians; moreover, the poverty rate for each listed Asian American subgroup is consistently lower than the poverty rate for other nonwhite groups listed in the Figure 1 that I posted.
Among Asian American subgroups, poverty rates are relatively high for Cambodian Americans (19%, based on this source, https://cdn.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/AAPI-Cambodian-factsheet.pdf) and for Hmong Americans (27%, based on this source, https://cdn.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/AAPI-Hmong-factsheet.pdf), but Cambodian Americans and Hmong Americans are respectively 1.6% and 1.7% of the total Asian American population (231,616 and 247,595 of 14,327,580, based on Table 5 here: http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-11.pdf).
The six Asian American subgroups listed in Figure 3 in the source that I used comprise 87% of the total Asian population (12,482,101 of 14,327,580): Indian (2,843,391), Chinese (3,347,229), Filipino (2,555,923), Japanese (763,325), Korean (1,423,784), and Vietnamese (1,548,449). It's not obvious that the poverty rate for the residual 13% would substantially alter the inference that, among racial and ethnic subgroups in the United States, the poverty rate for Asian Americans is relatively low or at least that the poverty rate is often relatively low among Asian American subgroups.
But the choice was not between reporting and not reporting results for Asian Americans in your figure. It would have been possible to report results for Asian Americans with a note that Asian Americans are a small and diverse group. If the goal is to be informative, then that fuller reporting seems preferable to completely excluding results for Asian Americans.
---
I'm not sure of the basis for your claim that "It's ridiculous to suggest that leaving Asians out of a figure 'permits the suggestion that the inequality is due to race or racial bias.'" Sean McElwee, in his tweet that you retweeted, posted your figure and listed two norms for staying out of poverty. His first norm -- "Don't get fired" -- is presumably meant to be causal. His second norm is "Have white skin". What do you think that Sean McElwee meant when he claimed that "Have white skin" is a norm for staying out of poverty, other than to suggest that race or racial bias is a cause of poverty?