Asia” is a European concept that artificially imposes uniformity on diverse groups.

Originating from Ancient Greek, the term “Asia” imposes uniformity on the others - lands, peoples, and cultures - beyond the east border of the Western world. Home to more than half the world’s population, Asia includes approximately 50 countries with hundreds of languages, many religions (e.g., Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism), and countless social norms. In the United States, Asians are the most rapidly growing immigrant group, with 2 out of 3 Asians being immigrants, and are estimated to exceed Hispanics by 2065. They originate from East Asia (e.g., Chinese), Southeast Asia (e.g., Thai, Vietnamese), and South Asia (e.g., Indians). Each region has many ethnicities with distinct physical features and complex histories of dominance and oppression within and across ethnicities that predate U.S. history by thousands of years. Yet, these heterogeneous populations are lumped together by the term “Asia.” Health datasets usually do not disaggregate these populations, masking health disparities. Viewed as monolithic, Asian individuals are too often confused with another Asian person with totally different skillsets or physical appearances, facilitating a discriminatory bamboo ceiling for career advancement to leadership positions.Subhuman caricatures, offensive words, and images of Asians that originate from historic events like wars (e.g., “Japs”, “Chinks”, “gooks”; fetishized or sexualized images of Asian women) predispose Asians to violence.

2. The history of structural racism against Asians in the United States is untold.

The United States has a long history of viewing Asians as “perpetual foreigners” since the arrival of the first wave of Chinese immigrants in the 1850s. Xenophobia led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first and only U.S. immigration law that targeted all people of a specific ethnic or national origin. On February 19, 1942, Executive Order 9066 authorized more than 110,000 persons of Japanese ancestry, regardless of US citizenship, to be forcibly removed from their homes, careers, and communities in the western United States to live in American concentration camps, despite no evidence of espionage. Japanese people who underwent physical, mental, and material traumas of incarceration kept silent and seldom talked about the shame of “camp” even with their children. Many of their offspring did not know much about their experience until dedicated groups of individuals advocated for justice decades later.