Asian American and Pacific Islander Resources

Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) is an umbrella term that refers to any person of Asian or Pacific Island descent or ancestry. AAPI is a pan-ethnic identity that began to be popularized in the 1960s during the Civil Rights Movement, as Chinese Americans, Filipino Americans, and Japanese Americans in the San Francisco Bay Area were concerned with the living conditions in primarily Asian American residential areas, such as the International Hotel, and fought for the inclusion of their stories in college curriculum, through the Third World Liberation Front. Tragic events such as the death of Chinese American Vincent Chin, in 1982, furthered the national pan-ethnic movement for Asian American rights. In the 1980s the term became popularized nationally as it became used in Asian American Studies courses and adopted in the wider Asian American Rights social movement.

AAPI includes many diverse communities. Subgroups are broadly defined by both geographical and ethnocultural terms as follows: 

• East Asian: The eastern region of Asia including China, Hong Kong, Japan, Macau, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, and Taiwan.
• South Asian: The southern region of Asia consisting of Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, the Maldives, and Sri Lanka. Although there are additional countries in the southwest region of Asia, those are generally recognized geographically as the Middle East and ethnically as Middle Eastern.
• Southeast Asian: The southeastern subregion of Asia, consisting of regions that are geographically south of China, east of the Indian subcontinent, and north-west of Australia. Southeast Asia consists of two geographic regions:
  • Mainland Southeast Asia, also known as the Indochinese Peninsula and historically as Indochina, comprising Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Peninsular Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam.
  • Maritime Southeast Asia, also known as the Malay Archipelago and historically as Nusantara, comprising the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Brunei, East Malaysia, East Timor, Indonesia (except Western New Guinea, which is considered a part of Oceania), the Philippines, and Singapore.
• Pacific Islander: Pacific Islanders, Pasifika, or Pasefika, are the peoples of the Pacific Islands. It is used to describe the inhabitants and diaspora of any of the three major sub-regions of Oceania: 
  • Melanesia: Includes the island of New Guinea, the Bismarck and Louisiade archipelagos, the Admiralty Islands, Bougainville Island, Papua New Guinea, Western New Guinea (part of Indonesia), Aru Islands, Kei Islands, the Solomon Islands, the Santa Cruz Islands (part of the Solomon Islands), New Caledonia and the Loyalty Islands, Vanuatu (formerly New Hebrides), Fiji, Norfolk Island, and various smaller islands.
  • Micronesia: Includes Kiribati, Nauru, the Marianas (Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands), the Republic of the Marshall Islands, Palau, and the Federated States of Micronesia (Yap, Chuuk, Pohnpei, and Kosrae, all in the Caroline Islands). 
  • Polynesia: Islands scattered across a triangle covering the east-central region of the Pacific Ocean from the Hawaiian Islands in the north, New Zealand in the west, and Easter Island in the east. Polynesia includes the Samoan islands (American Samoa and Western Samoa), the Cook Islands, French Polynesia (Tahiti and The Society Islands, Marquesas Islands, Austral Islands, and the Tuamotu Archipelago), Niue Island, Tokelau and Tuvalu, Tonga, Wallis, and Futuna, Rotuma Island, Pitcairn Island, Nukuoro, and Kapingamarangi.

While AAPI is an umbrella term for all the people with ancestry from the regions listed above, Asians are not a monolith. AAPI people have a breadth of lived experiences depending on where their ancestral ties are from, when their family immigrated, and their own intersectional identities like gender, sexual orientation, skin color, and class. For this reason, do not assume all Asian people have the same experiences. International Asian students who are in the United States for college have a very different experience than Asian American college students. Even with the AAPI umbrella, students have differing rates of educational attainment, for example, 9% of Bhutanese American people have a college degree compared to 72% of Indian American people. The varying experiences of AAPI people across different social and ethnic backgrounds reflect the need to disaggregate AAPI data and uplift the voices of Asian voices, artists, and creators to dismantle the Asian monolith stereotype.

It is also important to recognize the AAPI community has faced systemic and cultural racism since this country’s founding. Although there are a wide variety of ways this racism manifests, the American culture actively denies the experiences of the AAPI community through the model minority myth. The Model Minority Myth is a cultural assumption that characterizes Asian Americans as a polite, law-abiding group who have achieved a higher level of success than the general population through some combination of innate talent and pull-yourselves-up-by-your-bootstraps mentality. This assumption is not only false, as again, the AAPI community is not a monolith, but has become ingrained within the wider American culture and led Asians to be perceived as “the good minority.” This myth feeds into the concept of AAPI people being the Invisible Minority; so although AAPI people encounter structural racism similar to other non-white American people, due to the model minority myth, it is assumed that they do not.

The following guide expands on many of the concepts presented in this introduction but is not meant to encapsulate all experiences of AAPI people. Use this guide as a starting point to learn about the history and diversity of the AAPI community, and for resources supporting AAPI people.