Asian America. Pawan Dhingra

2 Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Sexuality

      “You speak English so well! How long have you lived in the United States? Where do you really come from?” Many Asian Americans have encountered these remarks, even those born and raised in the United States. This is an example of a racial micro-aggression, how Asian Americans experience race as presumed non-Americans in their everyday lives. This chapter explains this experience, along with ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, which future chapters then elaborate upon. The chapter first overviews key sociological approaches to understanding these social dimensions. It then defines key terms and reviews the dominant Asian-American stereotypes. It borrows heavily from racial formation theory in order to understand Asian Americans’ racial experiences. More than reviewing stereotypes, the chapter explains how they operate within the constructs of the nation, patriarchy, capitalism, and imperialism. Attention also is paid to how assimilation theory, which anticipates little if any racism against upwardly mobile minorities, makes sense of Asian-American race relations. Substantive issues that demonstrate these hierarchies include immigration laws, hate crimes, and racial profiling.

Defining race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality

      One of the most commonly used terms in sociology is “social construction.” Sociologists refer to popular notions that appear as biologically based or as simply common sense and “natural,” as actually the result of social construction. This means that they are created by a society and are not “real” in a predetermined way, though they are sufficiently “real” to have consequences for people’s lives. Race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality are all social constructions. We will discuss and define each one. We then will concentrate on how Asian Americans experience race and how and why race is socially constructed in the United States.

       Race as a social construction

In the United States, when we see someone, we generally think we can identify that person’s “race.” In fact, whether we are fully conscious of the fact that we are doing it, many of us who have spent a significant portion of our lives in the United States immediately attempt to categorize the people we encounter every day into a specific race. Race is such a significant way of organizing and categorizing people in American society that we are often confounded when we encounter a person whose “race” we cannot immediately make sense of. People typically “look” Asian or Native American or black or white or Latinx.¹ People have distinguishable skin tones, hair textures, facial features, eye contours. These are biologically based. So how is race a social construction? While people have genetic distinctions, it is not the case that people classified as the same “race” have more in common genetically with one another than with those of different races.² There is no single gene particular to one race. The physical differences that are seemingly apparent between races, such as skin color, have no bearing on other characteristics, such as intelligence, skills, and so on. These physical differences stem from the geographic regions of origin of one’s ancestors. Yet, in American society, these physical differences have been used to differentiate people into separate groups such as white, black, or Asian, both on an everyday level and at the level of government classification. Moreover, these categorizations are ordered in hierarchical ways, which has resulted in people being treated unequally.

Race developed as a way of distinguishing people from European colonial times (Feagin 2009; Prashad 2000). Colonizers used phenotype as a way to differentiate themselves from the colonized and to rationalize the exploitation of people considered morally different by mere fact of their phenotypic difference. Race developed as a concept, and notions of racial difference and hierarchy emerged in order to justify the slavery of Africans in the United States. In other words, race and racism did not lead to slavery as much as slavery led to racial formations and racism. Race similarly was used to define Native Americans, Latinxs, and Asian Americans as in some way deviant and threatening to white Europeans in order to secure greater resources (e.g. land, jobs, higher wages, better work conditions, etc.). Racial difference created and continues to sustain privileges for some and disadvantages for others. Specifically, because race as a concept emerged in the context of European colonialism, it is organized around a logic of white supremacy, that is, those who are considered white are considered intellectually and morally superior over those who are nonwhite. Minority groups are racialized differently so as to support various aspects of white supremacy (Smith 2015). For instance, blacks are framed as physically strong, lower skilled, and less deserving in order to justify racial capitalism that positions them as poorly paid and incarcerated labor. Asian Americans are racialized as foreigners, as threats to the nation, and as morally backwards in order to justify American military power and white-racial conquest. For most sociologists, it is important to understand racism not simply as a form of individual prejudice (i.e. ill-informed, preconceived notions of people) but from a structural perspective (Bonilla-Silva 1997).

      Racial classifications have changed historically, further indicating that racial categories are a political and social invention rather than biologically based. For instance, Irish Americans always have been phenotypically white but were not always considered “racially” white (Ignatiev 1995). In the mid-1800s, Irish

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