Listened to an interesting interview this morning with the author of a new book, The Latinos of Asia: How Filipino Americans Break the Rules of Race. There was a lot to agree with and disagree with, but it rang true in many ways for me because I have had a fair number of students with roots in the Philippines. An early portion of the interview illustrates an important dynamic. The author himself has parents from the Philippines and when his university was running a study on alcohol consumption and those of “Asian” ancestry. When he approached to be a participant though the researchers said that what they were looking for were people of Japanese, Korean and Chinese ancestry, because they had the right “population structure.”

Naturally this was somewhat offensive. The author pointed that as a sociologist he believes race is a “social construct.” It is also the case that people from the Philippines occupy a someone liminal position of both “Asian” and “Latino” identities. As a South Asian I can relate, as I am “Asian”, but not “typically” Asian.

From what I can gather the research group was rather artless in the way they communicated their necessary conditions for their project, but the researchers probably were correct in excluding the author. Alcohol flush reaction segregates in only a finite set of East Asians. With limited resources it is rational for them to exclude individuals from populations where the variants of interest are not present, or at very low frequencies.

The problem is that the author confuses the terminology, “Asian”, with reality. A common tendency in the “post-modern” style of thought is putting primacy in the power of language to shape our perception of reality. The fact is that people from the Philippines have very distinct genetic structure in relation to Northeast Asians. Whether they are categorized as Asian or Latino does not truly impact that fact, unless one is of Chinese background and from the Philippines. To me it is ironic that so many scholars place into language so much power when language is only an imperfect mapping onto reality.