Asian Americans, a Term in Transition

Asian Americans, a term used to represent a U.S. socially constructed racial category, was coined by the late Yuji Ichioka in the 1960s during the civil rights movement. The racial category includes those Americans whose families were from Asia and often encompasses those from the Pacific Islands. The terms Asian Pacific Americans and Asian/Pacific Islander Americans are also commonly used to refer to individuals whose family origins are from Asia and the Pacific Islands. For the same reasons that other racial groups such as African Americans rejected historically used racial terms such as Negro, many Asian Americans rejected the term Oriental because of its negative connotations and associated stereotypes, and they embraced the new term with pride.

The term includes members of at least 40 distinct ethnic groups because of their common ethnic origins in Asia and the Pacific Islands and their perceived similar physical appearance. The ethnic groups subsumed under this racial category include Americans of East Asia (e.g., China, Japan, Korea), Southeast Asia (e.g., Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos), South Asia (e.g., India, Pakistan, Bangladesh), and the Pacific Islands (e.g., Philippines, Samoa, Guam).

Asian Americans are one of the fastest-growing racial groups in the United States. According to the 2000 U.S. census, 4% of the U.S. population, totaling 10.2 million persons, identify with an Asian ancestry (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2000). Chinese Americans are the largest ethnic group within the Asian American population, numbering 2.4 million, closely followed by 1.9 million Filipino Americans. The Asian Indian population has rapidly grown 106% since the 1990 census, numbering more than 1.6 million. In addition, the Vietnamese American population has shown a significant increase of 83% in the past decade (Asia Source, 2001).

Investigators studying Asian American populations have primarily focused on Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, and Southeast Asian refugees, while other Asian American ethnic groups, such as Asian Indians, Indonesians, Guamanians, and Samoans, have rarely been studied (Uba, 1994). Asian American research participants with different ethnic origins are often aggregated when different Asian American ethnic groups are included in the sample, and separate analyses are generally not performed on the different ethnic groups. However, this trend is slowly becoming less acceptable as a research practice (Fisher et al., 2002).

Takanishi (2003) strongly believes that the use of Asian and Asian Americans as a research category is outdated, unhelpful, and misleading in terms of policy and program implications, because of the withingroup differences among the more than 40 ethnic groups who are subsumed under the term Asian Americans. These differences include cultural practices and customs, language, religion, values, history, immigration and relocation experiences, acculturation levels, family structure and intactness, educational levels, socioeconomic status, and other factors. The result of these differences is that each Asian American ethnic group has its own distinct needs and concerns that must be specifically addressed. Thus, researchers and policymakers must carefully consider the appropriateness and usefulness of categorizing individuals into the racial group of Asian Americans and evaluate any conclusions drawn when the category of Asian Americans is used.