FYS 18 AAPI: The History of a Racial Category
How do racial categories get constructed in the United States? Who and what decides which groups get lumped together and which should be classified separately? This seminar will explore the history of the AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islander) racial category. Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders share histories shaped by US wars and militarism, racialized exclusion, and community activism of resistance. But settler colonialism, which has led to Indigenous movements to reclaim land and political control, shaped Pacific Islander (PI) histories in ways Asian Americans typically have not experienced. Many Pacific Islanders "became American" through annexation and/or colonization by the United States, not through im/migration. In this way, PI history has as much or more in common with Native American and indigenous histories as it does with Asian American history. These differences have had implications for the possibilities of solidarity both historically and in the present. Such complications will be the basis for an exploration in this seminar of different sites of racial construction, including law and policy, popular culture, community and grassroots activism, and academic scholarship. Open only to first year frosh.