Years ago, staff at the Oregon State Capitol asked leaders of my nonprofit, the Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon, if they spoke English. There was no real reason to wonder. The visit had been scheduled in advance, the signage was in English, the t-shirts were in English. When someone clarified that yes, obviously, everyone spoke English, the response was worse. They apologized for not having anyone on hand who spoke "Asian," as if that were a language rather than sixty countries and thousands of dialects.
We didn't dwell on it. We came back. We kept showing up at the capitol, at town halls across the state, building the kind of regular presence that eventually makes a community impossible to wave off with a comment like that.
I've thought about that exchange for years, because it gets at something real. "Asian American" is a category that does genuine work and also flattens almost everything it describes.
The category is younger than most people assume. Student activists at Berkeley coined the term in 1968 as an explicit political coalition, modeled in part on the language of Black Power organizing. Before that, "Asian American" wasn't an identity at all. It was a Census box or a slur. The whole point of the term, at the start, was strategic solidarity. Communities with little shared history, language, religion, or politics decided there was more power in standing together than apart, partly because we often experienced the same discrimination and were treated the same way regardless of those differences anyway.
That coalition has accomplished things. It built advocacy infrastructure, political representation, and visibility that individual communities couldn't have built alone. It has also never been a clean fit, because the boundaries of who counts keep shifting depending on who's drawing them and why.
The data tells part of that story. While I was a volunteer at APANO, a researcher was hired to disaggregate state education data after officials proposed pulling funding from dual language learning programs. The aggregate numbers showed Asian students outperforming on metrics like high school graduation rates, which made the programs look unnecessary. Once the data was broken apart by specific community, a different picture emerged. Nepali, Burmese, and Hmong students were performing substantially worse than the aggregate suggested. Cutting the program based on the combined number would have quietly gutted support for exactly the students who needed it most, while the aggregate "Asian" category absorbed and hid the damage. The same pattern showed up in healthcare, with hospitals defaulting to a Chinese-speaking interpreter for any patient coded as Asian, regardless of whether that patient spoke Korean, Vietnamese, Tagalog, or nothing close to it at all.
The legal boundaries of "Asian" have moved just as much as the bureaucratic ones, and not because biology changed. In United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), the Supreme Court was asked to decide whether a Punjabi Sikh war veteran, classified by the racial science of his own era as Caucasian, was "white" enough to naturalize. The Court said no. The justices decided whiteness meant whatever "the common man" understood it to mean, and the common man, in 1923, didn't see Thind that way. Indian Americans who had already naturalized had their citizenship retroactively revoked. The category bent to fit the politics of the moment, not the other way around.
Wong Kim Ark, decided a quarter-century earlier, drew the opposite line, affirming birthright citizenship for a man born in San Francisco to Chinese immigrant parents against a government that wanted to exclude him anyway. Both cases were about the same unstable question: who gets to belong, and who gets to decide. That instability hasn't gone away. Middle Eastern and Persian communities still sit in a genuinely contested space between racial categories that were never built with them in mind, debated as much from inside those communities as from outside them, over questions about power, assimilation, and how much of a distinct identity to preserve while sitting adjacent to a bigger, more politically organized category.
I've lived a version of this instability inside my own band.
I'm Taiwanese and Chinese American. Several of The Slants' founding members were Filipino, not East Asian at all by the categories most people default to. Others were mixed race. The name itself leans on a stereotype, slanted eyes, that didn't describe most of the founding members and doesn't describe a feature unique to any one part of the world. The association between "slanted eyes" and "Asian" ignores how that trait shows up across populations on every continent. We reclaimed the word anyway, fully aware that the stereotype it referenced wasn't even accurate to most of the people standing on stage. I named our debut album Slanted Eyes, Slanted Hearts as a nod to that same idea: identity, political participation, and the label imposed on us, all tangled together in one phrase.
What surprised me more, over the years, was watching new band members go through something I hadn't expected. More than one person who joined told me later that they hadn't really identified as Asian American before, not strongly, not as something central to who they were, until they became part of a group built explicitly around that identity. Joining didn't reflect an identity they already held. It produced one.
That complicates any clean theory of identity, including mine. Sometimes "Asian American" is imposed from outside, through the kind of shorthand a capitol staffer reaches for when they don't know what else to say. I didn't embrace the label myself until my mid-20s. Growing up I mostly saw myself as American, and whenever I visited Asia, that's how I was treated anyway. People could tell that whatever I was, I wasn't quite one of them. My parents would laughingly call me an ABC, American Born Chinese. For people in China, identity tends to be about shared language and culture more than racial heritage, and by that measure I clearly wasn't theirs either. Other times the label is built from within, deliberately, the way it was built in 1968 and the way it gets rebuilt every time someone joins a band, a coalition, or a community that didn't exist for them until they stepped into it.
I'm not arguing against the category. Coalitions accomplish things individual communities can't, and "Asian American" has done that work for over fifty years. I'm arguing for holding it loosely enough to remember what it actually is: a strategic, political, occasionally useful fiction, built by people who needed it to mean something specific at a specific moment, not a stable biological or cultural fact waiting to be discovered.
Disaggregate the data, or the most vulnerable communities inside the umbrella disappear into an average that was never built to describe them. Keep the identity flexible enough that people can find their way into it, or out of it, without the label overwriting the more complicated truth of who they are.
We don't speak "Asian." We never did. What we speak, when we speak at all, is dozens of different things, occasionally in the same room, sometimes because we chose to be there together, and sometimes because someone else decided we should be.
I speak on identity, civic engagement, and the gap between political categories and lived experience at universities, civic organizations, and corporate events. If these questions connect to work you're doing, simontam.org/speaking is the place to start.
