The term and all the other -american prefixes has always weirded me out. It feels othering with a veil of progressiveness. I often find US progressives almost loop back around to enacting segregation again
Tbf, just using the term “American” can sometimes leave out important context. Cuz of white defaultism.
In certain places in the world, the term “American” usually gets the image of a white person in their mind, sometimes black people, but an Asian person is never in their mind. So like, if you are like on the internet, and you don’t say “Asian American”, people usually just assume you look like some white hillbilly in the US south.
If I’m running for office or at a polling place or if, god forbid, ICE shows up, I’m just “American”, but if racial conflict is involved like if Covid and Anti-Asian hate crimes is the topic, then leaving the “Asian” part out of “Asian Americans like me are being targeted in a wave of hate crimes” would result in a meaningless sentence.
The term and all the other -american prefixes has always weirded me out. It feels othering with a veil of progressiveness. I often find US progressives almost loop back around to enacting segregation again
Tbf, just using the term “American” can sometimes leave out important context. Cuz of white defaultism.
In certain places in the world, the term “American” usually gets the image of a white person in their mind, sometimes black people, but an Asian person is never in their mind. So like, if you are like on the internet, and you don’t say “Asian American”, people usually just assume you look like some white hillbilly in the US south.
If I’m running for office or at a polling place or if, god forbid, ICE shows up, I’m just “American”, but if racial conflict is involved like if Covid and Anti-Asian hate crimes is the topic, then leaving the “Asian” part out of “Asian Americans like me are being targeted in a wave of hate crimes” would result in a meaningless sentence.
It all depends on context.