Multiple Identity in Asian-Americans

The designation of nineteenth-and twentieth-century Asian immigrants as "Asians" was not a label Asians brought to the United States. By the beginning of the twentieth century, most Asian immigrants were either Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Filipino, and they self-identified either in ethnic-specific terms or even more precisely (for example, in terms of a Chinese province). By helping immigrants find work and deal with racism, ethnic-specific loan associations, churches, and other formal and informal organizations reinforced an endogenous ethnic-specific identity.

Nevertheless, collective identities were quickly imposed exogenously (by white Americans). Occasionally panethnic identities were actively protested, as in the case of Japan's opposition to segregated, so-called Oriental schools, where all California Asians were to be educated. Usually, however, Asian-Americans had no say, and exogenous panethnic identities dominated.

The impulse for this exogenous emphasis on a collective identity sprang from the categorization of various Asian groups as from one, nonwhite race. For centuries the West viewed nonwhite races generally as "Others"—"not us" and more specifically "nonwhite." It viewed Asians, in particular, as alike in their fundamental and extreme contrast to Westerners. Once Asian-Americans were classified as a racial Other, additional distinctions between them were usually dismissed as irrelevant. Prohibitions against naturalized citizenship and entry into unions as well as other actions designed to restrict Asian-Americans' socioeconomic mobility and political power put Asians into similar socioeconomic circumstances, which further reinforced beliefs about their similarity.

Gradually, though, suspicion and fear of the racial "Other" and differences in the power and foreign policy of Asian countries spurred exogenous efforts to make ethnic-specific distinctions, often mirroring differences in the immigrants' nationality. These changing perceptions produced an array of classifications by the Census Bureau which, at various times, categorized Asian-Americans as nonwhite, Other, Oriental, or in ethnic-specific terms.

Reflecting public concerns, the Census Bureau has long focused more attention on distinguishing between nonwhite than between white Americans. Accordingly, at a time when U.S. relations with Asian countries varied widely, the 1930 census distinguished between white, "Negro," Hindu, Indian, Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Japanese, and all others—which was, Sharon Lee points out in "Racial Classification in the U.S. Census: 1890–1990" (1993), a striking number of distinctions between Asians then constituting less than 0.25 percent of the U.S. population and at a time when the United States had basically stopped further immigration of Asians.

Fear of the racial Other, coupled with a belief in white racial supremacy, led to preemptive efforts to undermine a coalescing of Asian workers under a panethnic identity. Asian workers on white-owned Hawaiian plantations, for instance, were residentially segregated and paid on ethnic-specific pay scales. Similarly Asian-Americans were pitted against other minorities, as in the case of Filipinos replacing striking African-American railroad workers; doing so promoted and sustained the economic superiority of white Americans while undermining the development of a collective identity and political mobilization with other minorities.

Throughout the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth century, the white American public viewed Asian-Americans as inferior, all-alike Others. This view was created from portrayals established for self-serving purposes. Much as portrayals of enslaved African-Americans were self-serving reflections of the slaveholders' desire to minimize contradictions between their self-concept as good Christians and their treatment of the enslaved, self-serving characterizations of Asian-Americans were created by plantation owners paying Asians less per hour than white workers, by missionaries reporting the reasons they failed to convert Asians, and by competing workers. Because of the belief that Asians were homogeneous Others, portrayals of the first Chinese immigrants (as sneaky, for example) were extended to subsequently immigrating Asian groups, such as the Japanese and Koreans. Much like musical, television, and movie depictions do now, popular magazine serial and minstrel show depictions of almost interchangeable Chinese, Japanese, or Filipinos propagated an identity as homogenous Others.

In the early 2000s dominant exogenous views of Asian-Americans still emphasized Otherness. In a world divided into mutually exclusive and oppositional East versus West and in a country typically imagined as either white or black, Asian-Americans are usually classified as essentially Asian and foreign (which is the reason Asian-Americans are never said to have "all-American good looks").

The culture forming the supposed basis of their ethnic identity has been exogenously depicted as Oriental—a mystic, unchanging, centuries-old, anachronistic if not mythical culture supposedly deeply ingrained in the twenty-first century's Asian-Americans, who have been only superficially influenced by experiences in the United States. Explanations of European-Americans' behaviors in the early twenty-first century typically bypass reference to three-hundred-year-old influences on Western culture as too far removed from current motives to be pertinent; but caricatures of Asian-Americans in terms of 2,500-year-old Confucian thought—gross equation of Asian-American cultures to a vague Orientalized past—are commonplace. Yet for many U.S.-born Asian-Americans, a sense of connection to ethnic ancestors in Asian countries is a stretch of the imagination; Orientalization is a fiction akin to feeling connected to Adam and Eve and eclipses the ethnic identities Asian-Americans actually create.

Orientalizing portrayals also oversimplify. The varied cultural backgrounds of Chinese-Americans—with ancestors from Cambodia, Hong Kong, Laos, the People's Republic of China, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam as well as differences in socioeconomic status and acculturation—expose the faulty assumption that an Asian-American group, much less Asian-Americans generally, can be defined in terms of a single (much less Orientalized) culture. Because their ancestors came at different times in history, various Asian-American groups are not creating and redefining an ethnic identity from the same experiences in America.

Nevertheless, inaccurate exogenous portrayals still dominate because Asian-Americans' perspectives are usually unsought. Representations of Asian-Americans' lives are either absent (for example, in the curriculum) or distorted (for example, by mass media), resulting in caricatures that racially marginalize Asian-Americans as foreign, out-of-step, ancillary, and irrelevant.