When Brook Soso, a new Asian-American character in the second season of “Orange Is the New Black,” arrives at the federal prison in Litchfield, New York, a fellow inmate named Lorna Morello provides her with a toothbrush and bar of soap. Morello, who is white, is an enforcer of the strict racial divisions (black, Latina, white and other) that define the show’s social landscape — “it’s tribal, not racist,” she explained in the first season — but here she makes an exception. “I don’t normally bend the rules like this,” she says, “but you don’t look full … Asian.”

Morello turns out to be right — Soso is half Scottish — but Soso’s arms-length adoption by white prisoners such as Morello is in many ways still evocative of the shifting position Asian-Americans hold in the United States today. Being Asian and being white are becoming less and less mutually exclusive and the boundary between them (particularly in arenas such as work and education) increasingly porous. But the induction of Asian-Americans into whiteness doesn’t alter the meaning of whiteness; rather, it’s a reminder that whiteness has never been defined by a person’s country of origin or genetic makeup. It’s simply a tool, one that can continue to operate even with the inclusion of certain minority groups.

A recent example of how Asians may be functionally folded into whiteness came on May 29, when Google revealed for the first time the demographic makeup of its employees. In addition to being overwhelmingly male, Google’s workforce is 61 percent white and 30 percent Asian. Just 3 percent of Google’s workers are Latino, and 2 percent are black. The rest are two or more race or ethnicities or identified as “other.” If you look at only the tech jobs at Google, Asians make up an even higher percentage: 34 percent.

The same day, Mother Jones released a report on the demographics of Silicon Valley’s 10 largest firms. The picture was similar. Whites and Asians dominate the tech industry’s jobs, while blacks and Latinos are grossly underrepresented.

Attempts to analyze these findings and address the imbalance of representation in high-paying jobs have resulted in a reconfiguration of the white/person-of-color binary. The Mother Jones report states that tech jobs are “far less diverse” because “94 percent of those workers are white or Asian.” The definition of diversity has shifted from not white to not white or Asian.

This is a common and understandable formulation for anyone attempting to discuss areas of achievement — such as college admissions — where Asian-Americans are statistically well represented. It’s also a practice ripe for exploitation by those who wish to discredit any kind of race-based affirmative action program, such as Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Volokh discussed the relocation of the color line in a blog post provocatively titled, “How the Asians became white.” (It’s a title he’s used twice before.) To Volokh, the Google staff numbers prove the absurdity of calls for diversity because Google would have to fire large numbers of Asians and hire more blacks and Latinos. Volokh sees the potential penalization of Asians as the linchpin in his argument against racial preferences in hiring or school admissions.

But Volokh is wrong that the inclusion of Asians in whiteness somehow negates the meaning of whiteness. What is white in America (and what isn’t) has always been subject to revision. The Irish and Italians are examples of groups that have been invited into whiteness. The Boston Marathon bombers are examples of how one might be escorted out. Despite their light skin and Caucasian ethnicity, the Tsarnaev brothers were depicted as dark-skinned “Islamic terrorists” on the cover of The Week magazine. American whiteness may be able to absorb mass shooters of schools and movie theaters, but once a bomb was involved, the media seemed eager to relocate the Tsarnaevs to an imaginary Middle East.

