| Chapter 2: | Asian American Identity: A Review |
Distinguishing Racial and Panethnic Identity
In contrast to the definition of race (in the present study), in this work, racial identity is defined as that part of the person’s self-concept that is related to her membership within a racial group (Sellers, Rowley, Chavous, Shelton, & Smith, 1997). It refers to the significance and meaning that individuals attach to their racial group membership. Thus, in the present work, racial identity refers to an individual’s experiences as a member of a racial group and the meaning she attaches to being categorized in such a group. “Racial identity has very little to do with any biological classification, but is born out of a need for a racial classification system primarily derived from the West, which lumps various groups of people together primarily based upon phenotype under the premise that they are related to one another based upon some genetic similarity” (R. M. Sellers, personal correspondence, May 11, 2005). Thus, the racial categorizations that have been used in the United States are largely artificial and often serve political and social agendas aimed at maintaining the status quo and creating a need for other groups to assimilate to the mainstream (Tuan, 1998).
The major distinction between how scholars in psychology view a racial versus a panethnic identity is that the panethnic term implies an empowered perspective in which the group or individual is not reified by a biological conception of race. As previously mentioned, the term race among Asian American scholars is often equated with sociobiological explanations or research on racial typologies (see, e.g., Rushton, 1995), rather than treated as a reality that minority group members must contend with (Helms et al., 2005; Tanaka, Ebreo, Linn, & Morera, 1998).