One Blood

To attempt to provide a survey of Asians who reside in the United States is a daunting task because of the sheer quantity of people groups who identify as Asian. According to the United States Census Bureau, “Asian” refers to a person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent, including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and Vietnam. It includes people who indicated their race(s) as “Asian” or reported entries such as “Asian Indian,” “Chinese,” “Filipino,” “Korean,” “Japanese,” “Vietnamese,” and “Other Asian” or provided other detailed Asian responses. [1] The above description demonstrates it is impossible to generalize Asian Americans. [2] A much more reasonable goal for this post is to provide an overview of Asian immigration to the United States, as well as a rough sketch of challenges that exist when members of a particular group interact...

Some of the greatest challenges for multiethnic people who live in North America are misconceptions regarding their dual heritage. Ninety years ago, a woefully misguided concept gained credulity among both experts and laypeople. The popularization of the “Marginal Man Theory” in the early twentieth century reinforced society’s view that multiethnic people were maladjusted and dangerous. Sociologist Robert E. Park invented this concept and elaborated on it in a 1928 article: One of the consequences of migration is to create a situation in which the same individual—who may or may not be a mixed blood—finds himself striving to live in two diverse cultural groups. The effect is to produce an unstable character—a personality type with characteristic forms of behavior. This is the “marginal man.” [1] In 1937, sociologist Everett V. Stonequist continued to develop the theory, [2] and contemporary reviews of the work explained how the author wrote of how “racial hybrids” face extreme...