Who Is Asian?

An Iranian immigrant to the US described to me his first contact with American racial concepts. He had to fill out a form and label himself with one of the listed options. When he chose Asian, he was told "You aren't Asian."

How odd. As far as he was concerned, Iran is a large country in Southwest Asia; you can hardly miss it. It is larger than France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom combined (and its population is larger than that of France or Italy or the UK). How could he not be Asian?

In the United States, Asians are a minority group. On the planet, much more than half the population is in Asia, so that non-Asians--everyone on all the other continents and islands combined--are a minority. Our majority traces its roots to Europe, which we have promoted to a "continent"; but a look at a map suggests that it would be more accurate to view it as a peninsula on the Asian continent.

Racial concepts are folk concepts and change with changing conditions. Asian in the US has traditionally meant East Asian, especially Chinese and Japanese. With increased immigration from many countries, the expanded category also includes Southeast Asians. In contrast, as the Iranian example indicates, Southwest Asians seem to be excluded from our Asian folk concept, and are often thought of as Arabs--though this is inaccurate geographically, linguistically, and culturally.

With regard to South Asians--immigrants and their descendants from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka--as their numbers have grown, the ways Americans have categorized them and they have classified themselves have been in flux. Are they white, black, Asian, or something else? Well over a fifth of the world's population is in South Asia, but their relatively small numbers here have only recently grown to create a category "problem" in our racial labeling. As a "solution," there are signs that a Desi identity is developing among South Asian Americans, providing strength in numbers in a parallel to a Latino identity. But it is unclear whether the term Desi will be adopted by other Americans, or whether South Asians will eventually be viewed as "different from Asians," "a kind of Asians," or simply "Asians."

There are obvious disadvantages to classifying people by race--including stereotyping, the potential for discrimination, and promoting cultural misunderstandings through mislabeling. However, the naïveté of American outsiders, especially regarding the horrors of events in Asian History, creates space for people within a racial category to ignore cultural prohibitions. Thus, a marriage between a Chinese American and a Japanese American would not raise white eyebrows, because they are "both Asian." The same goes for a marriage between the children of immigrants from India and Pakistan ("both South Asian")--or, to pick a recent European example, Serbia and Croatia ("both white").

Over time, it is likely that answers to the American questions "Who is Asian?" and "What does it mean to be Asian American?" will continue to change. And might the merging of ethnicities be a signal that certain historical antagonisms are fading, at least in America today?

Image Source:
Khalid Mahmood: Punjabi kids in friendly mood
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Punjabi_Kids.JPG

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