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Happy AAPI heritage month to the Americans out there! Go out and ask someone where they're *really* from to celebrate. Also, why is this even a thing?
AAPI is one of the most useless labels on the planet. "Asian American" is already dumb because when people say it, you know they mean people from East Asia. Maybe Southeast Asia is included in that if they're really globally-minded. Anyone else is out - Indian people still get told that they're not Asian, and let's not get started on West Asia!
But people keep trying to push the idea that all people from Asia qualify as Asian American when that is clearly not the connotation in the US.
To be fair, trying to shove that many people into one label is a fool's errand unless we're talking about factual demographic information. "Asian" should be a geographic label, not a cultural one.
But it's not a geographic label right now, so it's disengenuous to pretend that the phrase "Asian American" is supposed to refer to all people of Asian descent by occasionally throwing a token Indian or Arab person into "AAPI" programming that's otherwise filled with E/SE Asians. (Also, lumping E/SE Asians together isn't that useful either.)
Throw the "PI" in there and I am thoroughly convinced that nobody knows what the fuck they're doing here. Charitably, I will venture a guess that maybe people are mainly thinking of Hawaii, which has a lot of people of Asian descent living there, but there are also a lot of indigenous Hawaiians who have nothing to do with Asia whatsoever.
I feel like I shouldn't have to say that Pacific Islanders are an entirely culturally distinct group from any Asian ethnic group. They don't even suffer from the same targeted oppression that Asians do (and Asians already don't suffer from the same targeted oppression as each other). And, again, AAPI stuff barely includes Pacific Islanders even as a token gesture, so why bother?
(This doesn't even address the fact that East Asians are happy to throw other Asian ethnicities under the bus whenever it's convenient. So much for Asian solidarity or whatever!)
At this point we might as well start including Europeans in AAPI stuff since Europe is really just an extension of the Asian landmass.
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