Ethnicity

Ethnicity appears prominently among Asian Americans and in Asian American studies as a basis for the group’s and field’s inaugural formation in the 1960s, when participants in the later period of the civil rights movement advocated for the coherence of several Asian-descent and historically affiliated populations into one coalition. Even though one may argue that “Asian American” itself is mostly thought of as a race-based designation, people with different ethnic origins comprise this category, thereby making ethnicity undisputedly a marker that is racialized in the same fashion as other ethnicities within certain racialized categories are collectively configured. Examples of ethnic groups within the classification Asian American include Japanese American, Filipino American, Chinese American, Vietnamese American, and South Asian American.