Identity Work as Deliberation: AAPI Political Discourse in the 2016 US Presidential Election

Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) are perceived as the "model minority" with a monolithic identity, in contrast to other marginalized racial groups in the United States. In reality, they are composed of different ethnicities, socio-economic backgrounds, and political ideologies. AAPIs share their political views online, engaging in the public sphere through a collaborative process we coin, “identity work as deliberation.” Using the 2016 US Presidential Election as a case study, we retrieved 4,406 Reddit comments posted between October 2016 to December 2016. We examine how users engage in an online community through a deliberation lens to understand the extent to which Reddit supports identity work as a deliberative process. Under the collective AAPI umbrella, we find that ethnic identifications complicate the types of discussion possible within r/asianamerica. We discuss how the expression of identity, and thereby solidarity, in a politicized online setting may lead to a social movement.