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Email This Post: AA vs. APA vs. API - should we care?

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Back in my day as a college student, when multiculturalism and politically correct language was just starting to hit the streets, my peeps pretty much stood contentedly under the banner of “Asian American” to represent our cultural identity and interests to the campus at large.  Back in the good ol’ days when kids were raiding Salvation Army stores for vintage corporate logo uniforms and wearing them ironically as grunge apparel, I picked out a work shirt that had a ready-made brand to tell the world who I was (see left).



In recent years as I’ve been working with AA community groups in the NYC area, I’ve noticed that the terms Asian Pacific American (APA) and Asian Pacific Islander (API) are being used with increasing frequency in place of the good ol ‘AA. I didn’t really think too much about what these new acronyms signified, other than that the extra letter made them kind of cumbersome to my mind (a superficial observation, I know). I always considered Samoans, Fijians, Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders to be Asian, if not geographically, then certainly racially (moreso than Asians from the Middle East). But I was brought to think more seriously about a video I produced and posted on YouTube on behalf of the Coalition for Asian American Children and Families (CAAF) announcing a new national health care partnership got the following comment:


 
Read the rest here: http://ningin.com/blog/comments/aa_vs_apa_vs_api_should_we_care/

Email This Post: AA vs. APA vs. API - should we care?

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