What’s wrong with the “Asian” part:

The “Asian” in #AsianPrivilege is meant to refer to Asian Pacific Americans as they stereotypically exist in the American imagination — well-to-do communities who coast through the university system in droves and comfortably find roles as doctors, lawyers and engineers. But in a setting like Twitter — a global forum where context is all but surrendered — this doesn’t quite register.

When one says “Asian,” the baseline meaning is in reference to those originating from the greater continent of Asia. That’s a LOT of people. “Asian” does mean privileged members of Asian Pacific American communities, but also people in the Philippines who live in extreme poverty. It means the rising Chinese middle class which has made the globe its ground for tourism, as well as Tibetans who are legally barred from naming their home. It means South Koreans who enjoy the world’s fastest fiber-optic network, as well as natives of Bikini Atoll who can’t return to their homeland because of deadly levels of radiation left behind from American nuclear testing. To point this out in the conversation of #AsianPrivilege is not splitting hairs. It’s acknowledging the vast portion of the world population which the term marginalizes.

Let’s humor the assumption that #AsianPrivilege can confidently be interpreted by all as encompassing only Asian Pacific Americans — we still find ourselves on an equally shaky terrain, as it can only apply to the assumed success, intelligence, and altogether upstandingness of Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese, Korean, and Indian Americans in the American imagination, while sidelining everyone else.

Here’s where I reintroduce my own privilege. Admittedly, ethnic groups like mine have enjoyed the distinct privilege of being the conspicuous faces of Asian Pacific America en masse. While battling the Model Minority myth, we do everyone a disservice by perpetually ignoring in our conversations the majority of APA ethnicities who don’t fit into that mold. As a result, we live in a twilight zone where the largest Asian immigrant group since the 1980s — Filipinos who often come via low-paying service sectors — aren’t encompassed in the “Asian Pacific American” imagination. Made invisible are also Cambodians and other Southeast Asians whose anxiety of deportation are congruent to that of many Latino groups; Pacific Islanders who suffer among the highest rate of incarceration out of all American ethnic communities; South Asians who are constantly targeted and detained due to post-9/11 discrimination; and native Hawaiians who are consistently left out of the already-rare discussions of indigenous American oppression. These acts of marginalization have propelled and been propelled by a privilege that indeed exists within certain members of the APA population, but it’s damaging to call it an “Asian” privilege. For me to accept #AsianPrivilege as a term that only points to a selected few would be to exercise the very privilege that allows Chinese Americans like me to shrug and abide to a statement like, “we don’t mean those people when we say Asian.”