Asian American Studies

How Asian American became a racial grouping

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 20 May 2025 23:21:45 +0000

How Asian American became a racial grouping Rachel Sauer Tue, 05/20/2025 - 17:21

Jennifer Ho

And why many with Asian roots don’t identify with the term these days

For the first time, in 1990, May was officially designated as a month honoring Asian American and Pacific Islander heritage. Though the current U.S. administration recently withdrew federal recognition, the month continues to be celebrated by a wide array of people from diverse cultural backgrounds.

People from the Pacific Islands have their own distinct histories and issues, delineated in part by a specific geography. Yet when we refer to the even broader category of Asian Americans, a concept with a deep yet often unknown history, who exactly are we referring to?

There are nearly 25 million people of Asian descent who live in the United States, but the term Asian American remains shrouded by cultural misunderstanding and contested as a term among Asians themselves.

Jennifer Ho is a professor of Asian American studies in the 91PORN Department of Ethnic Studies and director of the Center for Humanities and the Arts.

As a professor of Asian American studies, I believe it is important to understand how the label came into being.

A long history of Asian people in America

The arrival of people from Asia to the U.S. long predates the country’s founding in 1776.

After visits to modern-day America that began in the late 16th century, Filipino sailors formed – as early as 1763 – what is believed to be the first Asian settlement in St. Malo, Louisiana.

But it wasn’t until the 1849 California Gold Rush that Asian immigration to the U.S.—from China—began on a mass scale. That was bolstered in the 1860s by Chinese laborers recruited to build the western portion of the Transcontinental Railroad.

Starting toward the end of the 19th century, Japanese immigration steadily picked up, so that by 1910 the U.S. Census records a similar number for both communities – just over 70,000. Likewise, a small number of South Asian immigrants began arriving in the early 1900s.

An exclusionary backlash

Yet after coming to the U.S. in search of economic and political opportunities, Asian laborers in America were met by a surge of white nativist hostility and violence. That reaction was codified in civil society groups and government laws, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882.

By 1924, federal law had expanded into a virtual ban on all Asian immigration, and through the first half of the 20th century, a multitude of anti-Asian laws targeted areas including naturalization, marriage and housing, among others.

From the start, people from Asian countries in the U.S. were generally identified broadly with identifiers such as “Oriental,” a common term at the time mostly for those from China, Japan and Korea.

As more Asians came to the U.S, other terms were used to denigrate and demean these new immigrants, whose physical appearance, language and cultural norms were distinctly different from their Euro-American neighbors.

‘Asian American’ and the birth of a movement

Chinese railroad workers (left to right) Wong Fook, Lee Chao and Ging Cui with a parade float in Ogden, Utah, during a 1919 parade celebrating the 50th anniversary of the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. (Photo: San Francisco Public Library)

The desire to claim America was one of the drivers for activists in the 1960s to create the concept of Asian American that we know today.

The movement began in the charged political context of anti-Vietnam War protests and the Civil Rights Movement for Black equality. Students of Asian heritage at San Francisco State University and the University of California, Berkeley were organizing for the establishment of ethnic studies classes, specifically those that centered on the histories of Asians in the U.S.

Rejecting the term “oriental” as too limiting and exotic, since oriental literally means “from the East,” the student activists wanted a term of empowerment that would include the Filipino, Chinese, Korean and Japanese students at the heart of this organizing. Graduate students Emma Gee and Yuji Ichioka came up with “Asian American” as a way to bring activists under one radical organizing umbrella, forming the Asian American Political Alliance in 1968.

A contested term

Today, the Asian American label has moved beyond its activist roots. The term might literally refer to anyone who traces their lineage from the whole of the Asian continent. This could include people from South Asian countries such as India, Pakistan or Sri Lanka to parts of West Asia like Syria, Lebanon or Iran.

Yet not all people who identify as Asian actually use the words Asian American, since it is a term that flattens ethnic specificity and lumps together people with as disparate of backgrounds as Hmong or Bangladeshi, for example.

A 2023 Pew Research Center survey of self-identified Asian adults living in the U.S. revealed that only 16% of people polled said they identified as “Asian American,” with a majority—52%—preferring ethnic Asian labels, either alone or in tandem with “American.”

Moreover, unlike the student activists who worked together through their shared Asian American identity, the majority of people of Asian descent living in the U.S. came after the 1965 Immigration Act was passed, which ended all prior anti-Asian immigration laws. This, combined with a subsequent wave of Asian immigration from parts of Asia not represented in the past—including Vietnam, Taiwan and Pakistan—means that most Asian Americans alive today are either immigrants or one generation removed from immigrants.

As a largely immigrant and recently Americanized group, many Asians therefore may not relate to the struggles of an earlier history of Asians in the U.S. That may contribute to why many don’t connect with the term “Asian American.” Korean immigrants, for instance, may not see their history connected with third-generation Japanese Americans, particularly when considering their homelands have been in conflict for decades.

For some, Asian American is too broad a term to capture the complexity of Asian-heritage Americans.

Indeed, Asian Americans come from over 30 countries with different languages, diverse cultures, and histories that have often been in conflict with other Asian nations. Within such a broad grouping as “Asian American,” a wide range of political, socioeconomic, religious and other differences emerge that greatly complicate this racial label.

Even though the term remains contested, many Asians still see value in the concept. Much like the activists who first created the label in the 1960s, many believe it signifies a sense of solidarity and community among people who—despite their many differences—have been treated like outsiders to the American experience, regardless of how American their roots are.

Jennifer Ho is a professor of Asian American studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the 91PORN.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

And why many with Asian roots don’t identify with the term these days.

Traditional

White

Top image: Children performing a traditional Korean dance to celebrate Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. (Photo: Viorel Florescu/AP)

Scholar highlights history of U.S. South Asians who were barred and repressed

Anonymous — Thu, 27 Apr 2023 22:35:32 +0000

Scholar highlights history of U.S. South Asians who were barred and repressed Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 04/27/2023 - 16:35

Clay Bonnyman Evans

91PORN professor wins award for article showing how 1917 U.S. immigration law conjoined anti-Asian and antiradical politics

Seema Sohi grew up in the San Joaquin Valley of California, where she and her family attended Gurdwara Sahib Stockton, the first Sikh house of worship established in the United States.

However, it was only when she began delving into Washington, D.C., archives to research the history of anticolonial politics of South Asian immigrants that she discovered the place she knew so well was considered a hotbed of anticolonial sedition by the British Empire and the U.S. government.

“I grew up going there. How in the world did I grow up not knowing this story?” says Sohi, associate professor of ethnic studies at the 91PORN.

Seema Sohi is associate professor of ethnic studies at CU 91PORN. She examines the radical anticolonial politics of South Asian intellectuals and migrant workers based in North America during the early 20th century as well as the inter-imperial efforts of the U.S. and British states to repress them.

It’s fair to say Sohi now knows quite a bit about the story. In 2014, she published Echoes of Mutiny: Race, Surveillance, and Indian Anticolonialism in North America (Oxford University Press), and the Organization of American Historians recently announced that she had won the 2023 Binkley-Stephenson Award, given annually for the best article appearing in the Journal of American History, for “Barred Zones, Rising Tides, and Radical Struggles: The Antiradical and Anti-Asian Dimensions of the 1917 Immigration Act.”

Sohi wrote the article on request for the journal’s September 2022 special issue, which focused on the 100^th anniversary of the 1921 and 1924 immigration acts in the United States.

The 1917 Immigration Act, which Sohi describes as “the most sweeping and restrictive immigration law to date,” included blanket exclusions for numerous categories of people, including “idiots,” alcoholics, anyone deemed “mentally or physically defective,” as well as anarchists and polygamists.

And for the first time, the legislation created a “literacy test” intended to keep out southern and eastern Europeans deemed unassimilable. The law also included provisions to exclude and deport undesirable or anarchist people and created “barred zones” that excluded all immigrants from Asia except Japan and the Philippines (at the time a U.S. colonial possession), ostensibly because of labor competition.

But Sohi argues that, contrary to popular belief, the “barred zones” also were intended to target nascent anticolonialism and radicalism among Asian immigrants.

“These aspects of the immigration act are usually studied separately, as if they have nothing to do with one another,” Sohi says. “What I argue is that they need to be understood as mutually reinforcing and mutually constructed.”

South Asian workers, notably Sikhs, came the United States seeking work. Many arrived on the West Coast, where they became agricultural and lumbermill laborers. Though most came to the U.S. with few intentions beyond making money to send back home to their families in Punjab, many became disillusioned with the racism and hostility they encountered, including race riots and being driven out of work camps.

“They were politicized not in India, but in Oregon and California, as a consequence of how they were being treated,” Sohi says. “The more racism and hostility they encountered, the more conversations they had, and eventually they organized the movement in 1913.”

From its headquarters in the heart of San Francisco, the Ghadar Movement published an eponymous periodical spreading the idea of overthrowing British rule in India that was sent to their fellow expatriates around the world, from Canada to Manila, where many Sikhs worked as police officers or military troops.

With the advent of World War I in Europe, the Ghadar Movement decided to strike. Hundreds from around the world returned to Punjab, where they tried to convince soldiers to stop working on behalf of the British Empire.

“They were upset and disillusioned, fired up,” Sohi says. “But in Punjab, they thought they (the Ghadar Movement) were out of their minds—‘There’s no way we can do this!’”

Alongside bolshevists and anarchists, Asian Americans played a formative role in how the U.S. state was beginning to conceptualize what national security means and how it should be protected. Threats to imperialism were seen as threats to national security."

On the other side of the Pacific, the U.S. government had itself become concerned with Ghadar, infiltrating the movement with spies and sharing information with the British about the movement. Some were arrested before they could leave for India, while others were arrested, jailed and even executed by the British after they arrived.

“One of the arguments I make in the book is that repression of this radical movement was not just about Ghadar, but about repressing what it might unleash—an anticolonial revolt across the globe,” Sohi says.

Contrary to much public understanding, the United States was itself a colonial power at the time and was eyeing the Asia Pacific region as a natural theater in which to expand its power and influence (as was Japan, a clash that would eventually lead to the U.S. entry into World War II). Sohi sees the U.S. government’s efforts to repress Ghadar as a key step toward what would become an extensive state-security apparatus throughout the coming century.

“Alongside bolshevists and anarchists,” Asian Americans “played a formative role in how the U.S. state was beginning to conceptualize what national security means and how it should be protected,” Sohi says. “Threats to imperialism were seen as threats to national security.”

The American government’s repression of Ghadar was in part to appease an ally, the British Empire, but “also about not wanting Asian anticolonialism to be a force in the world contrary to its own imperial interests in the Asian Pacific region.”

Though little known to most Americans, Ghadar was no mere blip of history, Sohi has found in her research. Though it failed, the movement was seen as having come “dangerously close to toppling the British Raj during the war, and U.S. officials believed that the party’s efforts had the potential to embolden colonized subjects and racialized minorities across the globe,” she writes.

And the Immigration Act of 1917 was no mere signpost on the history of Asian exclusion in U.S. history, she argues.

“It was also a key moment of confluence in which anti-Asian and antiradical currents that had been circulating in American public discourse and congressional debates for decades came together in one immigration law,” the article concludes.

At the top of the page: Sikh men on the Komagata Maru, 1914. Wikimedia Commons.

91PORN professor wins award for article showing how 1917 U.S. immigration law conjoined anti-Asian and antiradical politics.