The Future of Asian American Politics

Abstract

This paper offers an outline of an assessment of the future of Asian American politics. I synthesize both the rapidly expanding scholarship on Asian American politics as well as a broader body of research on Asian American incorporation and assimilation. This paper builds on a range of works that have explored similar questions, such as Gary Okihiro’s Margins and Mainstreams (1991), Claire Jean Kim’s “The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans” (1999), and David Palumbo-Liu’s Asian/American (1999). I focus on two broad concerns: Asian American relations with other ethnoracial groups, and the prospects for Asian American panethnicity. Both of these have important implications for race in America more broadly, a topic I will explore in an expanded version of this paper. I note an irony of Asian American politics: the worse things are, the better the prospects for organizing — and the more successful that community groups are in battling discrimination and creating equal opportunity, the dimmer are the prospects for their organizations enduring. While some form of Asian American politics seems likely to endure for the foreseeable future, the specific form is hard to forecast at this point. The tension between ethnic-based (e.g., Filipino or Korean) and panethnic-based (Asian American) politics persists. Although we have benefited from a wealth of new data, it continues to be point in different directions regarding the prospects for ethnic or panethnic politics.