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Post your thoughts about the reading. Try to identify what made you think, what you struggled with, and what you'll take away from the reading. Then reply to two other students.

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Read this article Download articleand discuss the questions below.

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Read this article Download articleand discuss the questions below.

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What do the Asian American communities have in common?Are the similarities sufficient to justify the omission of national origins through the use of a broad label like Asian American? Why or why not?Which groups does the term Asian American exclude?

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"-it is absolutely
essential to have an Asian American movement. Each of these groups is too small, and there
are similarities,” says Ramakrishnan.

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"Such dynamics have led some Asian Americans to distance themselves from their identities when they were younger, and to embrace them more fully later in life."

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We are “grounded in our history of exclusion laws and immigration bans,” emphasizes
Ramakrishnan. “What makes us Asian is a history of exclusion.”

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"Members of ethnic groups that have more recently come to the country as refugees — including Hmong, Burmese, and Laotian people — have also faced restrictive immigration policies that have focused on deportation."

"One such instance was in 1982, when 27-year-old Vincent Chin was murdered by two white autoworkers who saw him as representing the increased competition the US was facing from Japanese manufacturers.

"The idea that people of Asian descent didn’t belong to the US, or were inherently foreign to this country, has fueled tropes like the fetishization of women, the emasculation of men, and insults about people’s accents, food, and appearance."

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“The thing that these Asian American communities [have in common] is the experience of
perhaps being viewed as outsiders,” says Indiana University’s Dina Okamoto. “Maybe you arrived 10 years ago, but maybe your family has also been in the US for generations. There are experiences of being othered these communities share.” (par. 2)

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For many Pacific
Islanders, America happened without our consent.”

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“The hypersexualization that I faced, probably as young as [when] I was 6, changes how you

consider sex and sexuality,” says Elim, 26, an organizer in Doraville, Georgia, who worked at

her parents’ anime shop as a child and dealt with men constantly telling her how much they

loved Asian women — and how exotic they found them. (Page 10)

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white writers pushed the idea of the “model minority myth” — a racist trope that suggests
that all Asian Americans are well off and pits them against other groups — page 2

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"The label aspires to unify a wide range of communities with common cause and shared experiences. But many feel it flattens and erases entire cultures."

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“I think the first word I think of is ‘invisible.’ Aside from stereotypes of Asian women being
very quiet, which I’ve, in my whole life, intentionally fought against, I have been thinking a
lot about social situations where I just don’t have any social capital,” says Annie, 26, a
graphic designer in New York City. “I have to compensate for that by presenting myself in a
very loud way through what I wear or the way I speak. I’ve tried to walk more aggressively.”

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We are “grounded in our history of exclusion laws and immigration bans,” emphasizes Ramakrishnan. “What makes us Asian is a history of exclusion.”

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Found that the reasoning for the umbrella term Asian American was influenced by the black power movement and there strength in numbers

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“Many of us had immigrant parents, and their focus was on surviving and making a life for

themselves and their families,”

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"'Trying to enter spaces with predominantly wealthy, light-skinned East Asians, there was a dismissal of us"'

-Highlighting how the term places Asians in a stereotype that not all of them fit into, and ultimately hurts the ones who don't.

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Before “Asian American” was popularized, the word “Oriental,” a label that othered and exoticized those it described, was common parlance.

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“In America, whiteness is your standardized identity. And that was amplified in the neighborhood I grew up in,”

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"Asian Americans not only have the largest income gap of any racial group but also massive health care, education, and economic disparities that rarely get addressed.

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When policymakers simply group all Asian Americans together, none of these inequities are
visible, meaning help often doesn’t get to the groups that need it most. pg 14

“It erases way too many people,” says Elim. “That’s bullshit. We’re not all the same.” pg 13

"22 percent of Nepalese Americans
don’t have health insurance compared to 6 percent of Japanese Americans." pg 14

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page 4 "There were so many Asians out there in the political demonstrations but we had no effectiveness," Ichioka has said previously in an interview with UC San Diego ethnic studies professor Yến Lê Espiritu. "Everyone was lost in the larger rally. We figured that if we rallied + behind our own banner, behind an Asian American banner, we would have an effect on the larger public."

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"the rise of 'model minority' stereotype, too, only added to the perception that all asian Americans are broadly successful, camouflaging the struggles and diversity of many community members"

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“… Chinese immigrants were barred from becoming citizens because they were seen as competition for white workers… Indian people were similarly barred… Japanese and Korean people were barred as well.”

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“There has long been a problem of lumping all of the groups together, which makes Asian
Americans look well-off by some measures when averaged out as a sociopolitical group,” says
Umemoto. “But we’re a bifurcated community, with wide differences in well-being within
and across ethnic groups.”

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"When people of Asian
descent have been targeted in America — both in recent attacks related to the coronavirus
and historically — such racism is often directed at people of many Asian ethnicities"

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"We share ... a continued history of being scapegoated for America’s ills — literally and
figuratively — and never being accepted as full and equal members of society,” says Karen Umemoto, the director of the Asian American Studies Center at UCLA" (Page 8)

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"“People are not just one thing,” echoes Espiritu. “I do identify as Asian American — it is a
political identity."

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Deijah Prak Preaster, an ARISE Youth Leader, said in a 2020 report. “I am always forced to
check off the ‘other’ box for the question on ethnicity. The feeling of not being counted or
seen hurts; it makes me feel my identity does not matter.” pg 17

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"I think it’s an opportunity to talk about the ways we’re leveraged against each other, the way
that East Asians have been used as a wedge and this shining example,” says Elim. “None of
these communities are monolithic, and we perpetuate a lot of violence toward each other.” Pg 17