Can we use the “Pacific” for a new Asian racial identity?

Asians are the most ambiguous and misspecified racial or national group in the world. Its meaning and content have been constantly shifting to accommodate colonial statistical needs or the immigration landscape. In the U.K., Asians exclusively refer to Indians, Pakistanis, Bengalis, who lived on the former British colonial territories. Asians in the U.S., initially were comprised of all under the same banner of Chinese in the first few censuses. Later on, it expanded and shrank, to occasionally include Hawaiians and Indians into the category. When I taught sociology classes at Kentucy, I used this site from Pew to show students how the definition of “Asian” has changed so drastically since the first census of the U.S. As of now in the U.S. census and federal statistical criterion, Asians and Pacific Islanders as one racial category refer to people of East Asian, Southeast Asian, South Asian, and Pacific Island origins.

This definition arbitrarily excludes all Middle Easterners from the Asia continent. It also face an ambivalence regarding the racial categorization of people between East Asia and the Middle East. Currently all Middle Easterners are considered white. But should Kazakhs, Uyghurs, Uzbekis, Turkmen, Iranians be more white than Pakistanis and Pushtun? Some of them don’t look any different from Turkish people, but their compatriots would carry strong Mongoloid physical characteristics.

It is reasonable to classify race NOT based on geographical cutoffs, thus geographical Asia bears no sensible buttress to make Arabs “Asian”. We know the race is a cultural and socially constructed social fact before any bio-genetic underpins. If so, racial classification should be based on cultural and linguistic continuity.

With this principle, we may consider a new nomenclature for Asians. We should instead call “Asians” the Pacific people. These are facts:

1. besides South Asians (Indian and Pakistani), all Asian and Pacific Islanders originate from areas circling and surrounding the Pacific Ocean. We tend to see landmass as the center of human history, but this may commit a grave error. Ocean and waters make up the majority of the earth, and numerous Asian civilizations develop along waterways and oceans. Civilizations like the Polynesian (Maori, Hawaii, etc) hop with their nautical devices from island to island and spread their culture. They do not rely on continent to survive, but islands and oceans give them a livelihood. If we consider the Pacific Ocean as the center, all countries from which Asian American heritage came from are situated next to the Pacific: China and Korea at the northwest of the Pacific Ocean rim; Japan, Taiwan, Philippines, Polynesia, Micronesia, New Zealand, Hawaii are all in the middle of the Pacific; Vietnam, Laos, Thailand at the southwest of the Pacific Rim; Malaysia and Indonesia on the southern stretch of the southwest Pacific rim. One thing all of them share in common is the Pacific. Pacific a beautiful name too.
2. All the Pacific people belong in a few independent and standalone linguistic families. Koreanic-Japonic, Sino-Tibetan, Kra-dai, Mon-mien, and Austronesian. These few language families consist of all nations that can be legitimately called the Pacific without having ambiguous cutoffs. People from India speak Indo-European languages, thus making them more connected to Europeans. They, Indians and Pakistani, are therefore not the Pacific people.
3. The relationships between the linguistic families, hence cultural groups, of the Pacific people are more intertwined than they do with any other major groups. Austronesians may seem a large and diverse language family that comprises of irrelevant groups. This is false. Austronesians share countless common customs from war dance to nautical technology. Taiwanese are closely related to Hawaiian in more ways than we are commonly taught; they again are related to the ancient Liangzhu Civilization people lived in Jiangsu and Zhejiang of China. Koreanic Japonic languages and cultures closely interacted with Sinic culture. Mong-mien and Kra-dai also mutually influenced and both interacted with the Chinese intensively. The entire Pacific people form a cultural clad and linguistic sprachbund that is hard to tear apart.

For other current “Asians” like Indian in the U.S., they should be classified altogether and retain the name “Asian”. These people live on the rest of the Asia continent are the real Asians. All Turkic people, South Asians, Persian, Arabs are obviously often mistaken for each other as evident in numerous past hate-crimes where Indians were often falsely attacked as Arabs. Grouping Iranians and Arabs with South Asians in the Asian group also avoid the embarrassing problem of grouping Middle Easterners in the Caucasian category. This embarrassment arises from the need now to acknowledge this heavily discriminated cultural and religious minority group is one of the majority and privileged. Putting Middle Easterners in the white category wouldn’t make biological, religious, political sense at all, nor would it fit well with folk ideology.

Then there is an existential question, should there be racial classification at all. Why can we not do away with race, let alone having any new nomenclature. We don’t need any more imperial anthropological classification on colonial subjects. Race classification still matters because it reflects and reminds policymakers and legislature that some constructed and collective identity may reveal a common pattern. This is exactly why we need to update constantly the constitution of this collective construct so that it more accurately reflect its underlying condition of the people it comprises of. To reflect the common lifeworld and experiences underwent by people who came from or have parents and ancestors came from Asia continent, it is better to actually depict the underlying driver of their common experience — that is history, language, physical appearance. Grouping people live around the Pacific Ocean, speak similar languages, look similar is a better way to depict such an underlying makeup of the racial experience. At least, the Pacific Race makes much more senses than having an Indo-European man whose physical appearance is often mistaken as Arabs put together with a stereotypical Korean computer scientist guy.