Skin color stratification in police contact among Asian-descent people

Research suggests policing disparities exist not only between but also within monolithic racial categories, namely via colorism. However, this literature renders Asian-descent people empirically invisible. To fill this gap, I build on the colorism and criminal legal contact literature to argue that skin color significantly shapes the policing of Asian-descent people, and I frame my analysis vis-à-vis theoretical discourse about how colorism operates. Multivariable logistic regression analyses of nationally representative data (N = 2970) from the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey show skin darkness is positively associated with police contact among aggregated Asians and in subgroup-stratified analyses of South and Southeast Asians, but not East Asians. I argue that these findings partially support a feature-based mechanism linking colorism to policing, and while alternate explanations are offered for the non-significant findings among East Asians, they may also be suggestive of a category-based path. This study is among the very few to investigate colorism in the policing of Asian-descent people and the first to do so by disaggregated subgroups. Thus, it draws long overdue attention to an overlooked aspect of Asian-descent people’s racialization and emphasizes the theoretical and empirical noteworthiness of studying this population to advance our knowledge of racialization and social control.