| Chapter 2: | Asian American Identity: A Review |
Race and Panethnicity
Race is defined in the present work as a mere categorization of an individual into a particular racial group. One’s classification into a race or racial group is devoid of any identification—that is, one’s identification with this race may not be very significant or important in one’s self-definition. For example, an individual of Indonesian descent may be required to fill out a form in which she is asked to identify herself with regard to her racial background. This individual of Indonesian descent will mark the box “Asian” because this category best describes her ancestry in the Western world (and particularly in the United States). This naming does not mean that the individual takes on this identity for herself. However, this act does achieve one significant feature that is central to the present study; this individual learns that she is “Asian” in the American context. She is not counted or categorized as “Indonesian,” or a native of Sumatra or Borneo—rather, she is categorized or racialized as “Asian.”
Another term that has been used more frequently in the psychological literature in recent years is panethnicity. Pan (the Greek word for “all”) has been used to characterize movements seeking to extend nationalism to a supranational form (Snyder, 1984, as cited in Espiritu, 1992). Examples such as religious unity (Pan-Islam), hemispheric cooperation (Pan-Americanism), and racial solidarity (Pan-Africanism) demonstrate that pan-movements involve shifts in levels of group identification from smaller boundaries to larger-level affiliations (Espiritu, 1992). “Panethnicity—the generalization of solidarity among ethnic subgroups—is largely a product of categorization” (Espiritu, 1992, p. 6). Others have also noted that panethnicity may be appropriated as a political resource and can mobilize and empower an emergent collective culture (Chung et al., 2004). However, other scholars note that panethnicity gives rise to a process of racialization (or the construction of racial identity and meanings) driven by a dynamic relationship between the specific group being racialized and the governing body (Omi & Winant, 1994).