9.5: Region

Finally, the US government also lumps people together by the continent of the origin of their ancestry. African-American and Asian-American are the most common examples of this type of ethnic marker. Both terms are problematic.

“Asian-American” is an absurdly broad term. It is nearly useless because it lumps several hundred ethnic groups from a vast continent together as one. People whose ancestry is traceable to China, Japan, Korea, India, Pakistan, Iraq, Turkey, and parts of Russia are all technically “Asian”, though they generally think of themselves as quite different from one another. Further complicating the term is the way many Americans use the term “Asian” to refer to an appearance-based racial group that includes only people from Eastern Asia (China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Cambodia, etc.).

African-American is another similarly confusing category. Mostly, the term is used as a racial category, but we must keep in mind that Africa is a region with about 50 countries and probably 500 ethnicities. Somehow though, only people whose ancestry is from Sub-Saharan Africa are widely considered “African-American”. Secondly, some immigrants from Africa are white, especially South Africans. Some African-Americans reject the label, preferring the term “Black” instead, partly because “African-American” has no equivalent, such as, “European-American”, but also because of how the term “black” evolved as a source of cultural pride and ethnic power during the Civil Rights era. The terms “colored” and “Negro” fell from common usage during the Civil Rights era as the term “black” gained currency.

White people are also overly broadly categorized. This category is used to classify people who are European, or whose ancestry is mostly European; but “white” also sometimes includes people from Northern Africa and Southwest Asia (Moroccans, Egyptians, Iraqis, Saudis, Turks, etc.). Depending on the context, the term Caucasian may reference either only Europeans or people from a vast swath of Europe, Asia, and Africa.