| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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In contrast, an individual who emphasizes his or her ethnic-specific identity may be more sensitive to ethnic-specific discrimination due to a heightened awareness of social disparities between one’s own ethnic group and the majority population. In response to this need to understand the intricacies of ethnic-specific identity and how it relates to other social phenomena, there has been a growing body of literature on ethnic-specific identity in Asian Americans and its relationship to other psychological outcomes and experiences (Goto, Gee, & Takeuchi, 2002; Lee & Yoo, 2004; Tsai, Ying, & Lee, 2000). Despite this growth in the literature, there is a surprising dearth of empirical studies that have examined how an individual’s identification with being Asian American (racial identity) versus a member of one’s own ethnic-specific group might vary across a number of Asian ethnic-specific groups. These differences in identification may have important implications for other psychological outcomes (e.g., psychological functioning, perceived discrimination, etc.). It is this diversity of experiences that the present work will address.
In the process of trying to understand the experiences of Asian Americans as a group, it is important to acknowledge how the naming of this group developed. The construction of the term Asian American can be traced back to the civil rights movement of the 1960s when antidiscrimination laws provided incentive for minorities to lobby collectively for equal rights (Espiritu, 1992). The allocation of resources and the nature of affirmative action laws necessitated that culturally distinct ethnic-specific groups unite under a larger panethnic (this term is synonymous with “racial”) label to gain a larger political platform (Nagel, 1986). Thus, rather than acknowledging the unique aspects of different ethnic-specific and cultural groups in the United States, communities of color had to de-emphasize their differences and come together as an organized bargaining unit.