The United States is a land of immigrants, with many racial and ethnic groups. How the US government counts them changes regularly, and the latest revisions affect all minority groups, including Asian Americans. For immigrants to the US, including those from South Korea, it is often a shocking transition for them as they are identified via the racial categories in the US.

Certainly, for new arrivals from Korea, China, India, the Philippines and other countries in Asia, it’s not obvious why we/they are categorized under the panethnic group “Asian or Asian Americans.” However, there is a history behind these racial categorizations, and the US Census (actually the Office of Management and Budget, or OMB) has continuously revised these categories to reflect the current population and context of the US.

The new revisions from March 2024 from OMB encourage the official data collection of race and ethnicity to have one combined question that asks respondents to select as many of the following categories as they wish: (1) American Indian or Alaskan Native; (2) Asian; (3) Black or African American; (4) Hispanic or Latino; (5) Middle Eastern or North African; (6) Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander; and (7) White. The question about Hispanic/Latino origin is now asked in the same race question -- previously officials argued that Hispanics can be of any race, so the question “Are you of Hispanic/Latino origin” was asked in a separate question. Another major shift is that Middle Eastern or North African is no longer combined with the white category, reflecting the growth of Americans from those geographic regions. Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander was earlier combined with Asian American (you may have seen the term AAPI, which stands for Asian American/Pacific Islander). In fact, May still represents AAPI or APA Heritage Month in the US. (Note that when BTS visited the White House, it was in May and President Biden noted that it was in celebration of AAPI Heritage Month).

Moreover, federal and state agencies are now encouraged to include questions about race/ethnicity that go beyond the panethnic labels. In other words, instead of having “Asian or Asian American,” they are encouraged to include categories like “Chinese,” “Filipino,” “Korean,” etc. For those of you who are not social scientists, you might wonder why we didn’t do this before. Let me explain.

The US Constitution requires us to count the US population in a decennial census beginning in 1790. At first, we only distinguished the racial categories (1) free white males; (2) free white females; (3) all other free persons; and (4) slaves. It was not until 1870 that we began tracking individuals of any Asian ancestry when we added the category, “Chinese.” In 1882, the US passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which was the first to exclude an immigrant group based solely on national origin. In the 1880 Census, we added the category, “Japanese.” However, by 1907-08, the US and Japan jointly passed the Gentlemen’s Agreement, which restricted immigration from Japan to the US.

The US then passed the Immigration Act of 1917 or the Asiatic Barred Zone Act, which restricted immigration from countries "not possessed by the United States adjacent to the continent of Asia," including much of Asia and the Pacific islands. This act added the following categories of people to Asians: “All idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded persons, epileptics, insane persons: persons who have had one or more attacks of insanity at any time previously; persons of constitutional psychopathic inferiority; persons with chronic alcoholism; paupers…” By 1920, the US Census added the ethnic categories: (1) Filipino; (2) Korean; and (3) Hindu to its Asian categories.

By 1921 and later 1924, the US passed additional immigration laws that restricted (but not eliminated) the numbers of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe by establishing quotas based on earlier census counts. The passage of the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act or Hart-Celler Act reopened our borders to immigrants without targeting a specific country by name (although we still differentiated between the Western and Eastern hemispheres).

The term "Asian American" came out of political struggles in the 1960s as part of the Civil Rights Movement. At San Francisco State University (then San Francisco State College) and the University of California, Berkeley, minority students engaged in Third World Liberation Front strikes to demand that courses recognize the histories of non-European countries and peoples (the precursors to Ethnic Studies). At the same time, historian-activists Yuji Ichioka and Emma Gee started using the term Asian American to signify a unified political alliance of Americans of Asian descent. Because immigration from China and Japan had largely ended by the 1920s, those who were here in the 1960s were second generation -- meaning they were born in the US of immigrant parents. They identified fully as Americans whose native language was English. The total Asian American population in 1960 was just under 1 million, while the total US population was 179 million. This means Asians comprised just 0.55 percent of the total US population in 1960.

It was not just an issue of size that made it logical to use an umbrella term. By dint of its immigration laws, Asians had been lumped together. Hate crime cases such as the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin, a Chinese American autoworker who was killed in Detroit because two unemployed white men were angry about the influx of Japanese cars. Most recently, during the COVID-19 pandemic, many Asian Americans found themselves bearing the brunt of blame for the crisis. These experiences made it clear to Asian Americans that whether we like it or not, the fates of Asian Americans are bound to one another.

Still, the Asian American population in the US is more diverse than ever. We now number 24 million, or about 6 percent of the US population. We come from a large number of groups. Six groups -- Chinese, South Asian, Filipino, Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese -- make up about 85 percent of the total population, with another 15 groups that comprise no more than 2 percent of the Asian population. Asian national-origin groups also have very different levels of educational and income backgrounds, which makes it important to differentiate between them. Most Indians in the US are college-educated, but only a small percentage of Hmong immigrants have college degrees. However, if we did not aggregate to an Asia panethnic label, it’s likely that policymakers and the media would be less interested in differentiating among the over 20 largest Asian groups. For most of its history in the US, it was better to be counted together than to be ignored.

When I was studying sociology at UC Berkeley in the 1980s (where the strikes occurred), it was still rare for me to read about Asian Americans in my sociology classes. The world was still described in black and white, so I was grateful to study Asian Americans starting in graduate school. For me, the Asian American identity will always resonate. I hope new immigrants, including those from Korea, will also understand why it is important to be counted as Asian American.

Grace Kao

Grace Kao is an IBM professor of sociology and professor of ethnicity, race and migration at Yale University. The views expressed here are the writer’s own. -- Ed.