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CHAPTER 6 Debbie Hippolite Wright and Paul Spickard Pacific Islander Americans and Asian American Identity Item: One widely used textbook on Asian Americans includes chapters on several ethnic groups-Pacific Islanders along with Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Asian Indians, Koreans, and Southeast Asians (Kitano and Daniels 1988). Another textbook does not address Pacific Islanders at all. (Chan 1991) Item: A posting on the main Asian American studies Internet listserve describes a Seattle Samoan boy who was the celebrated lover of his sixth-grade teacher as "a lovestruck, messed-up young yellow brother." (Kim 1998) Item: More than fifty universities teach Asian American studies courses. Only five teach a course on Pacific Islander Americans, and none of those is in an Asian American studies program or department.1 Item: As the 2000 Census drew near, some community activists called for the separation of Pacific Islander figures from the Asian and Pacific Islander aggregate; others called for Hawaiians to be grouped with Native Americans. (U.S. Office of Management and Budget 1997)2 These items all point toward ambivalence in Asian American communities and in Asian American studies circles about the relationship between Asian Americans and Pacific Islander Americans. One often sees the term"Asian Pacific Islander" or an analogue in print (Rimonte 1989). In what senses and for what purposes may one consider Pacific Copyrighted Material 106 CHAPTER SIX Islanders to be Asian Americans? For more than two decades, Asians and Pacific Islanders have been linked in the eyes of some government agencies, some community activists, and some ethnic-studies scholars. Yet Pacific Islanders have never been central participants in the construction and performance of Asian American identity and institutions. They have been marginal at best-guests at the Asian American table, if you will. In the 1970s and early 1980s, some scholars pointed toward what they believed would be an emerging panethnicity that would include such peoples as Chamorros, Hawaiians, and Samoans along with Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese, and otherAsians. At the end of the century, Pacific Islanders seem to be moving in rather a separate direction. This chapter addresses the historical assertion that Pacific Islanders belonged in the same social category as Asian Americans; the forces that tended to support that gathering of disparate peoples; and the forces that currently are loosening that assertion of panethnic connection. Lumping the Unlumpable: Ascription by Outsiders According to a lot of people who are neither Asians nor Pacific Islanders, these groups belong together. That most official expression of white American racial thinking, the U.S. Census, says so. In 1980 and 1990, the census listed, essentially, five racial categories or panethnicities: white, black, American Indian or Alaskan Native, Hispanic, and Asian or Pacific Islander (Espiritu 1992; LoU 1998: 31).3 Few people at the Census Bureau really thought that Fijians, for example, were some variety of Asians, but there were not very many Fijians or other islanders, and the Census Bureau had to put them somewhere. This feeling-that there must be a larger box in which Pacific Islanders belong, and the Asian box will do-is a legacy of the Enlightenment yearning after universal laws and a place to put everything. The result for racial thinking in America and Europe is the pseudoscientific idea of race. This is perhaps the ultimate modernist project, built out of the perceptions ofother peoples formed by northern Europeans as they colonized the world. The idea of the Swedish taxonomist Linnaeus was that all living things can be classified into a descending pyramid ofkingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species, with the several items at each level entirely separate from one another and neatly nested in a larger box above. Blumenbach and Gobineau took that idea one step further and came up with a definitive list of four or five discrete races into which all varieties of humankind must be made to fit. The idea, of course, was hash, but it caught on. And so the racists had to find a place for people who did not fit the system neatly: Arabs, for example, were stuck into the white race, and Pacific Islanders, eastern Turks, and others got to be Asians (Marks 1995; Spickard 1992;Tucker 1994). The artificial planting of Pacific Islanders in the Asian category is related to the fact that people who are neither Asians nor Pacific Islanders often cannot tell them apart. They seem to many European-derived Americans to come from more or less the same place: somewhere west, over the ocean...

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