| Chapter 2: | Asian American Identity: A Review |
For instance, the countries that once comprised the Former Soviet Union (Russia and Bosnia) as well as Iran and Lebanon are all Western Asian countries. However, individuals from these countries are most commonly classified as Slavic and Middle Eastern, respectively (Prashad, 1998). Thus, the criteria for inclusion within the Asian racial category in the United States is less clear when one considers that individuals from Western Asia have been reclassified as members of other ethnic and racial groupings based upon other cultural and phenotypic characteristics. These distinctions become even more complicated when one considers that individuals from Southeastern Asia and South Asia, who were among later waves of Asian immigrants to the United States, were not included in the original conceptualization of the Asian American racial group (Omi, 1993; Prashad, 1998). The irony of this exclusion is that individuals of Southeastern Asian and South Asian descent (Vietnamese and East Indians, respectively) are now among the most highly populous Asian groups living in the United States (U.S. Bureau of Census, 2004).
The discrepancies between who is labeled or accepted as Asian American still persists today, but not without protest from scholars within the academy (Shankar & Srikanth, 1998). These important scholarly theoretical critiques about what constitutes membership in the Asian American racial group (Kibria, 1996, 1998; Prashad, 1998), as well as the fissures that have occurred within ethnic-specific groups, exemplify the need for empirical research to determine whether the theorizing on this topic can be tested quantitatively to better understand the significance and meaning that individuals attribute to both of these (racial/ethnic-specific) identities.
Given that Asian Americans are diverse in many ways as previously discussed, the present work will address this diversity by examining racial and ethnic-specific identity in a variety of individuals of Asian origin. Individuals having ancestry in Asia are included in this examination.