About Asian

An Asian American is generally defined as a person of Asian ancestry or origin who was born in or is an immigrant to the United States. The origin of the term “Asian American” is credited to the historian Yuji Ichioka, but civil rights activists in the 1960s advocated for its widespread usage. Today it is the accepted definition for government and academic purposes.

Definition	Regions of Asia
	Northern Asia    Central Asia    Western Asia    Southern Asia    Eastern Asia    Southeastern Asia

The term “Asian” in the United States is most commonly refers to people of East Asian heritage. In this context, the term ‘heritage’ is used loosely and can refer to ancestry or cultural practices, but usually to some arbitrary combination of the two. Asians from the Indian Subcontinent and Southeast Asia (including the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia) are frequently considered to be Asian Americans by the government and in academic work. To a lesser extent, some government agencies also classify Middle Easterners as “West Asians.” For most of the history of South Asian Americans in the United States they have been classified as non Whites; however, South Asians were previously categorized in the white racial category together with immigrants from the Middle East by some independent organizations. Lobbying by South Asian business groups resulted in their placement into the “Asian” category.

Asian American, like White Americans or Hispanic Americans, cannot be defined as a homogeneous group of people sharing similar cultures or physical features. For example, Indian Americans, Filipino Americans, and Japanese Americans are very different from each other in both culture and physical features. Like the term “White American”, saying that a person is “Asian American” is not specifically referring to a certain lifestyle or culture and could refer to a wide range of different Asian ethnic sub-groups. In other words, “Asian American” is not a very precise or accurate term, and some people prefer it being replaced by the use of separate terms for each Asian cultural or geographical group.

While immigrants from the Asian Middle East (e.g., Iran, Southwest Asia, and Central Asia) are all from the continent of Asia, they have generally neither been sufficiently visibly distinct as a group in America nor have they historically arrived in such large numbers to warrant attention as a major American racial or ethnic group until very recently (see September 11, 2001 attacks). As a result, they are not considered by most Americans to be “typical” Asians or Asian Americans, and are classified as “whites” for official racial purposes and popularly referred to as “Middle Eastern”. For these same reasons, northern Asians such as Siberians and peoples from formerly Soviet Central Asian states are usually not spoken of as “Asian Americans” either and are part of Europe for the US Census racial purposes. Some people advocate use of Asian-Pacific American, which includes people of Pacific Islander ancestry, most notably Hawaiians.

The history of this development can be seen in several key Supreme Court decisions that defined “white” with respect to people from different parts of Asia. In the 1922 case Takao Ozawa v. United States, Associate Justice George Sutherland wrote that only Caucasians were white, and therefore the Japanese, by not being Caucasian, were not white and instead were members of an “unassimmilable race”, lacking provisions in any Naturalization Act. The next year, in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, Sutherland again ruled that Mr. Thind was not eligible for naturalized citizenship. Justice Sutherland wrote that “It may be true that the blond Scandinavian and the brown Hindu have a common ancestor in the dim reaches of antiquity, but the average man knows perfectly well that there are unmistakable and profound differences between them to-day.”

Usage
In the United States, the term has widely supplanted “Oriental” to describe East Asian people regardless of nationality, upbringing, or origin. Some have argued that “Oriental” is politically loaded and referenced a colonial “other”. To many people, the term “Oriental” is often seen as an unfriendly, even derogatory term. This is similar to the transition from “Negro” or “colored” to “black” or “African American.”

Even though “Asian American” is now a very widely used term in the United States, it is mostly the younger generation of Asian Americans who refer to themselves this way. A simple analogy would be the use of terms “Irish American” and “Italian American”. The double allegiance represented in such denominations (Asian and American) was largely discouraged in the early twentieth century. Ford Motor Company, for instance, encouraged all recent immigrants to think of themselves as American and not as Irish American. The civil rights movement (re)introduced the use of hyphenated names (although the hyphen is not used any longer). Today, many younger Asian Americans speak of “Asian Pride.” First-generation Asians are more likely to refer to themselves as “Chinese,” “Korean,” “Vietnamese,” etc. This is mainly because first-generation Asian Americans are much more conscious of their Asian sub-group backgrounds and cultures and tend to avoid generalizations. However, “Asian” is almost never considered an unfriendly word, and is still currently widely used in many English-speaking countries.

Early History
A large number of Chinese and Japanese began immigrating to the U.S. in the mid 19th century. Many of these immigrants worked as laborers on the transcontinental railroad. A surge in Asian immigration in the late 19th century gave rise to a fear from some, referred to as the “yellow peril.”
In Hawaii, both Chinese and Japanese laborers were brought in during the 19th century to work on sugar plantations. Later, Filipinos were also brought in as laborers.
Source: Wikipedia