There was a time when Asian Americans didn’t exist.
Sure, people whose ancestors hail from Asia have a long history in the U.S., but nobody called them Asian Americans until 1968, when a group of UC Berkeley students and community activists coined the term as an attempt to unite disparate groups of Asians into a political and social force.
It was Yuji Ichioka, a UC Berkeley graduate student, who came up with the idea for “Asian American” at a meeting of six students and community activists in a Berkeley apartment.
“He just said, ‘I think we should call ourselves Asian American,’ ” Vicci Wong told me in an interview last week. She was part of the group, along with Richard Aoki, Emma Gee, Floyd Huen and Victor Ichioka. “We just looked at each other and it was like the fireworks went off, the light bulb was invented … That was it. That made perfect sense.”
So much sense that the term is now widely used and a generation of “Asian Americans” has grown up with the moniker. Government agencies and businesses use it, and a field of study — Asian American studies — exists partly because of Yuji Ichioka’s idea. And May is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.
There are about 21 million Asian American and Pacific Islanders, 6% of the U.S. population. AAPIs are the fastest-growing demographic in the country and a voting bloc large enough now to influence elections.
Back in 1968, Asian Americans were primarily Chinese, Filipino, Japanese and Korean. During the past 50 years, however, the Asian American population has grown and diversified with Pacific Islanders now folded in.
Though there is some shared history over immigration or racism they’ve faced, does having one umbrella term still make sense for the 20 or more ethnic and racial groups and subgroups that can now fall under it? There’s no common language or culture that ties them together. Does an Indian American Silicon Valley engineer have much in common with a Hmong immigrant from Laos?
AAPIs collectively have high income and education levels. However, dig deeper there are some glaring differences. For example, some Southeast Asian and Pacific Islander groups have some of the nation’s highest poverty rates and lowest levels of higher education attainment.
Viewing AAPIs as a monolith erases the needs of some communities and leaves them behind.
“If we lump everyone together, we are and we have missed those differences, and it has led to this belief, this falsehood, that there is no need to focus on educational equity,” said Cynthia Choi, co-executive director of the civil rights group Chinese for Affirmative Action.
What Choi described is the model minority myth about the collective success of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. So, why is it bad to be seen as prosperous?
All stereotypes are harmful and this one affects non-AAPIs, too. The myth is used as a wedge with other minority groups. If Chinese and Vietnamese Americans can come to this country and pull themselves up by their bootstraps, the argument goes, why can’t Black folks or Latinos?
What that belief discounts is how racism and discrimination affected some groups ― slavery for instance ― that recent Asian immigrants and others never faced.
And as Choi said, putting all AAPIs together creates disparities. That’s why there are efforts to disaggregate more demographic data from government agencies, which often consider AAPIs as one group or leave out some subgroups.
In California, a watered-down bill was enacted in 2016 to expand what the state disaggregates to include health data on AAPIs. The original bill also called for breaking down higher education data. Southeast Asian and Pacific Islander groups supported the legislation. The opposition that forced education to be jettisoned came from a vocal set of Chinese Americans, many of them immigrants. They feared the bill was a stealth attempt to reintroduce affirmative action at state universities, which was banned in 1996.
The debate over data disaggregation in California showed just how much AAPIs are not a monolithic group and how stark some community differences are.
So, is it time to break up the AAPI family and go our separate ways?
“Despite (our) tremendous diversity, there is a remarkable level of consensus around certain issues,” said Janelle Wong, co-director of the research group AAPI Data and an Asian American studies professor at the University of Maryland. “We see remarkable consensus on issues like universal health care, on the environment, on gun control. So, I think there is an Asian American political agenda to be tapped and cultivated for leaders who want to do so.”
The term Ichioka coined in 1968 was an inelegant solution to the complex problem of racial identity in America. Though it can be messy to define, the shared identity, strength and resilience of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders is real.
Vicci Wong can remember a time before that existed — when AAPI representation in politics and media was nonexistent, and when she was routinely called “Yoko Ono” and “oriental.”
“I can’t stress to people enough, especially younger people today,” Wong said, “… what it was like.”
There’s been progress since 1968. Even before “Everything Everywhere All at Once” was everywhere, and Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan won Oscars, AAPIs were starring in more movies and TV shows. We have an Indian American vice president and numerous AAPI leaders in business and government.
Yet AAPIs are still called “orientals” and worse. Three years of heightened anti-Asian hate makes it clear we are still viewed as the “perpetual foreigner,” and inelegant or not, there is still no solution to that.
Reach Harry Mok: hmok@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @harrymok
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Does using the term 'Asian American and Pacific Islander' make sense anymore? - San Francisco Chronicle
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