After the horror of the Atlanta shootings that killed eight people—six of them Asian women—the question arose again: Just who in the West is Asian? Covering the Biden administration’s response to the Atlanta attacks, media outlets such as Buzzfeed and the New York Times emphasized that Kamala Harris is the “first Asian American” to hold the vice presidency. Although Harris’s Indian heritage certainly allows her to identify as such, the pointed use of the term following an attack in which the victims were primarily East Asian immigrants strikes a discordant note. That points to a wider problem with the way the Asian experience is defined in the United States, especially when those definitions affect the way identity is seen in other countries. As an ethnically Chinese British woman working in Washington, these issues aren’t just abstract ones; they’re part of the challenges of identity that I, and others, face every day.
Asian-ness, unlike Blackness, is geographically defined. The Black Lives Matter slogan can speak to Black British people as well as Black Americans since there’s a shared understanding of what it is to be Black. But definitions of “Asian” differ markedly among countries. Because the U.S. story is inseparable from the enslavement and exploitation of Black people, the U.S. conception of race has become rooted in the literal notion of skin color. East Asian people did not become as central to Western conceptions of race as Blackness, nor was there an Asian equivalent of the one-drop rule in the United States that defined anyone with any amount of African ancestry as Black. That creates further confusions over mixed-race people; Blackness is often inherited in the United States, but “being Asian” is a matter of fervent debate.
