The Word "Asian" Doesn't Mean What You Think

[00:00:00]who counts as Asian? Because the US government officially classifies Indians and Pakistanis as Asian. But when researchers actually ask Americans, including other Asian-Americans, who counts as Asian, barely one in three pointed at South Asians. Roughly four in five pointed at East Asians. And I'm even more confused because I grew up Canadian and there's actually no Asian category. And it's not a feeling.

[00:00:27]Scientists measured it. The word Asian is doing at least four completely different jobs depending on who's using it. And the DNA data, the hard science that's supposed to settle this makes it worse. We'll get there.

[00:00:40]>> Where are you from?

[00:00:42]>> San Diego.

[00:00:43]>> Yeah. Like, well, where are your people from?

[00:00:45]>> And by the end of this video, I'll tell you whether I think I've been using the word wrong or not. I spent months looking at the Pew data, academic research, and online discussion on this topic. In the next few minutes, I'll cover four social forces, explaining why nobody can agree on who's Asian, the history that designed the word, the immigration patterns that split its meaning, five contradicting definitions people are arguing from without realizing it, and a $30 billion cultural industry that's making the label desirable at exactly the wrong time.

[00:01:22]In 2019, [music] Lee and Rama Christian ran the study I mentioned earlier that should have ended this debate. They showed Americans photos of people from different Asian backgrounds and asked a simple question.

[00:01:35]Who counts as Asian? The results confirmed what most people felt but can't articulate. And South Asians were actually more likely to call themselves Asian than other Asians were to call them that. That asymmetry is the whole thesis in one data point. South Asians are claiming a label that the broader community isn't recognizing and neither side is wrong because they're operating on different definitions of the same word.

[00:02:00]>> That Asian content in a way we all are Asian.

[00:02:08]Stack that with selfidentification data and it gets stranger. Pew Research surveyed over 7,000 Asian adults in America in 2023, and only one in four actually use the label Asian or Asian-American. The majority use ethnic labels like Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese. So, roughly three and four of the people I've been calling Asian in my titles don't call themselves that.

[00:02:32]I'm applying a label the people it describes mostly reject. So, why does the label survive? because it's not useful. Not to the people inside [music] it, but the governments that conduct them, the advocacy groups that lobby with them, and the media that needs a shortand. It doesn't survive because it describes something precise. But the fight over who's inside it only started when the label became worth something.

[00:02:56]And it flips depending on where you are.

[00:02:58]Across the Atlantic, an Asian means something completely different. The 2021 census found nearly 1 in 10 people in England and Wales classified as Asian, Asian British or Asian Welsh. But the breakdown tells you everything. Indian and Pakistani at around 3% each.

[00:03:15]Bangladeshi at one and Chinese trailing at under one. South Asians dominate the category. The Chinese are a footnote.

[00:03:24]Same word but the default is reversed.

[00:03:27]>> We are part of the continent. Of course we are Asian. There's no doubt about it.

[00:03:30]So, an American hearing Asian pictures an East Asian face. A Brit pictures an Indian face. The word Asian is supposed to describe someone. The problem is nobody can agree on who. But this confusion doesn't come from nowhere because the word has a history and it's shorter and stranger than you think.

[00:03:58]>> [music] >> The word Asian is at least 3,400 years old, tracing back to Asua, a Hittite name for a region in what's now northwestern Turkey. The Greeks borrowed it first as a name for Anatolia, and the Romans kept it for their province there.

[00:04:14]And over centuries, it stretched eastward until it covered everything from the Mediterranean to the Pacific.

[00:04:22]one word for everything from modern Turkey to Japan to India. And the people who spread the term had never set foot in most of what it eventually [music] described.

[00:04:32]>> You know what? I think we're going to be friends.

[00:04:34]>> Then in the late 1700s, European naturalists decided to classify everything in nature, plants, animals, inevitably people. Johan Friedrich Blumenach joined the project and eventually produced the most influential version, five varieties of humankind.

[00:04:51]And what he needed was a name for the European category. He picked Caucasian because the Cauasus mountains, that ancient boundary between Europe and Asia, sat where most people believed Noah's ark had landed. Also, he thought a Georgian woman's skull from the area was the most beautiful thing he'd ever measured. Biblical geography plus a pretty skull. That's what Caucasian and Asian is built on.

[00:05:18]>> Perfection. Fast forward to UC Berkeley 1968. Yujiioa and Emma founded the AsianAmerican Political Alliance. Before that, people said oriental or used ethnic labels. Asian-American was built as a political coalition designed to unite Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and Koreanameans into a single political identity.

[00:05:42]>> That is one big pile of >> And it wasn't just about visibility.

[00:05:46]Berkeley in 1968 was deep in far-left politics, anti-war, anti- capitalist, third world liberation movements. Its members studied MA alongside black power attacks, supported the Black Panthers, and joined the Third World Liberation Front alongside black, Chico, and Native American student groups.

[00:06:05]>> We want freedom by any means necessary.

[00:06:09]>> Asian-American was born inside that movement. The term was a revolutionary coalition identity from day one and not a serious demographic label. And Ichioka's reasoning had a practical layer too. Asian groups kept showing up to protest individually and getting lost in the crowd. So a shared banner meant [music] shared power, but the people it was designed for were overwhelmingly East Asian because those were the communities at Berkeley in 1968. Over time, this ideologically loaded term got adopted by the [music] census as if it was a neutral demographic category.

[00:06:46]That's the slight of hand. A word built to mobilize got adopted as a demographic label. Landing on a census form made it look like neutral description, which [music] it never was.

[00:06:56]>> Wow. Holy smoking.

[00:06:59]>> And a census tells the story in bureaucratic time lapse stuff like 1870.

[00:07:04]Chinese [music] was the first Asian category. gold rush context. Then in 1920 to 1940, Hindu [music] existed as a separate thing entirely. Indians weren't grouped with East Asians. In 1980, Asian Indian gets its own checkbox on the census listed aside Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean. By 1990, they're all grouped under Asian for the first time.

[00:07:32]So, South Asians had officially been Asian on the US census for over 45 years.

[00:07:39]The government definitions have been clear for decades, but the perceptual cultural definition never caught up. Two back-to-back cases crystallizes the tension. In 1922, the Supreme Court denied a Japanese immigrant named Takao Ozawa citizenship. Ozawa had argued he was white based on his skin color and decades of American life. But the court said the test was scientific race, not assimilation, and Japanese weren't Caucasian. Three months later, Bagot Singh Thind, a Punjabi immigrant and World War I veteran who'd already been granted citizenship, faced the government trying to take away the citizenship. Thinds cited Lubenbach directly. High cast Indians are Aryan.

[00:08:21]Aryans belong to the Caucasian race.

[00:08:24]Caucasian equals white. by the science the court had just used to reject Ozawa then qualified but the Supreme Court ruled unanimously against him anyway not on science but on what the common man would think and no that's it let the science speak >> Indians don't look white that's enough the court used science to exclude Ozawa then threw out science to exclude thin and in the aftermath up to 50 Indians who'd already been naturalized lost their citizenship thin story is way more complicated than I'm telling it here.

[00:08:57]So, look it up if you're interested.

[00:08:58]Thinn passed the biological test but failed the phenotype test, the fancy word for what you look like. He had the legal definition changed under his feet by a court that basically said, "We know it when we see it."

[00:09:11]>> Some people are really stupid.

[00:09:14]>> So, the word Asian was always political, but political words get shaped by who shows up. But who showed up in America versus Britain was where the split became permanent. Quick plug. If you're interested in these sorts of cultural deep dives, hit sub.

[00:09:31][music] The American pipeline built Asian around East Asians by default. Chinese gold rush workers in the 1850s. [music] The Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 was the first US law targeting a nationality by name. And that cemented the template that Asian meant Chinese. But they weren't alone. Around the 1900s, Japanese farmers and laborers came after Japan opened up. Filipinos entered the US as colonial subjects, too. And the Philippines was an American territory, so they weren't even technically immigrants. Korean war immigration in the 1950s. Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laian refugees in the 70s. By the time the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act abolished national origin quotas, the Asian template was already [music] set.

[00:10:24]South Asians arrived in significant numbers decades later, accelerating through the 1990s to 2020s with tech sector demand. But by then, Asian already has a face in America. And that face is East and Southeast Asian.

[00:10:38]>> Wait a minute, who are you? And once a category has a face, every newcomer gets measured against it. Psychologists call this prototype effects. Categories are defined by their most typical example.

[00:10:52]And a prototype for Asian in America was set by hundreds of years of East and Southeast Asian immigration [music] before South Asians arrived in numbers.

[00:11:01]And once a category has a face, that [music] face sticks. And that's the framework I grew up with in Ottawa and Toronto, too. It wasn't until I got to Oxford that I heard a different one because Britain's story is the mirror image but for South Asians.

[00:11:13]>> Now it's my turn.

[00:11:15]>> Post 1948, British Nationality Act opened the door to migration and Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshies filled factory floors and NHS wards.

[00:11:25]This was for decades before significant East Asian migration from Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore arrived. So when a Brit says Asian, their prototype is South Asian. same mechanism, but the face is reversed. If you widen the frame, you'll realize every English-speaking government handles this differently, and none of them agree. The US, one umbrella for everything from Far East to Indian subcontinent. The UK keeps that umbrella, too, but South Asians dominated, and Chinese got added later. Canada ditched the umbrella entirely. Australia split it three ways.

[00:12:00]And in Singapore, there's no Asian category at all. Six countries with no consensus. Only the US and the UK still insist on keeping the umbrella. And even they can't agree on who it covers. Six countries, six definitions. Now, I've had my identity reclassified every time I landed somewhere new. [music] I lived in Canada, Korea, the UK, the US, and Hong Kong. And every time I landed in a different box. And that's where today's sponsor comes in. Sy is an app from the creators of NordVPN. After a decade of crossing borders, I know this. The moment you land, you need data. You don't want airport Wi-Fi, [music] and you definitely don't want a sketchy SIM card from some guy outside the terminal.

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[00:13:10]I've already got mine set up for my Asia trip this summer, where I'll go to Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, and Indonesia.

[00:13:16]Download the SY app and use my code, Dr. Tam, at checkout for 15% off your EIM data plan. And if your device isn't EIM compatible, they'll give you a full refund. The description and the pinned comment has the link and QR code. So the word Asian changes every time you cross a border. But this only explains the different definitions between countries, not why the argument has gotten so heated within them. Because everyone in this debate is right. They're just right about different layers.

[00:13:55]The reason the same Reddit and X debates keep repeating is that people are arguing from different definitional layers without naming them. There are at least five ways to define who counts as Asian and probably more, but they're not equally strong and they contradict each other. Let's start with the two that people use to settle the argument fast, but both fail. Geography is logically unbeatable. India is in Asia. So was Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka.

[00:14:23]People online make this point constantly and they're right. India is geographically Asian. But follow the logic. Russia is in Asia. Turkey is partly in Asia. If Asian is purely geographic, half of the world's population qualifies and the word loses all meaning. By that logic, Saudi Arabians are Asian. Good luck selling that on Reddit. The geographic definition is true, but also completely useless as an identity category.

[00:14:53]>> Stop it. Get some help.

[00:14:56]>> History doesn't help either. As I said earlier, Asian in America and the UK was based on who showed up first. So, neither geography and history settle the question. So, what do people actually use when they decide on who's Asian?

[00:15:10]Well, they use their eyes. Phenotype, how you look. In North America, Asian has a face, monolid eyes, straight black hair, lighter skin, probably a flatter nose. And Lee and Rama Christian study proved it. But for the US, in Britain, the face is different. Darker skin, hairier, South Asian features. But if you dig deeper into phenotypes, even the East Asian prototypical group is not monolithic. Northern Chinese tend to be taller, lighter skinned with more step ancestry. Southern China tend to be shorter, darker, with dialects so different a Cantonese grandmother and a Shanhinese grandfather can't order each other's lunch. And they treat each other like separate peoples.

[00:16:00]>> Even if you look at me, I don't have monolids, right? I have double lids. Is that what they call it? And also, I'm super pale for someone who's supposed to come from southern China, right?

[00:16:11]>> DAMN. And the layer that's supposed to be objective, genetics, breaks it further. Consumer DNA companies don't recognize a unified Asian category. 23 andMe, which is no longer around, separates East Asian from Central and South Asian entirely. Identifying over [music] 40 specific genetic groups within South Asia alone, each genetically distinct. Ancestry DNA classifies ancestry into three overlapping clusters. East Asian, Southeast Asian, Central and South Asian. And studies of Central Asian populations found that genetic clustering follows language family, not [music] geography. So, Turkish speakers cluster with East Asians. Indo-Iaranian speakers cluster with Western Eurasians.

[00:16:58]The border between Asian and European in genetic terms runs through Central Asia along linguistic lines, not along any continental boundary. And then the last one, self-identification.

[00:17:11]Anyone can call themselves Asian, but self ID only works if other people accept it. You can identify as whatever you want, but it doesn't necessarily mean the room agrees. And the Lee and Rama Christian data already showed us the gap. South Asians call themselves Asian at higher rates than other Asians call them that. But self ID without recognition is just a claim. And in Asia itself, the whole question is meaningless. You're Chinese in China, Korean and Korea, Japanese and Japan.

[00:17:42]Nobody walks around calling themselves Asian. That's purely an export label.

[00:17:47]Something that only exists in census forms of countries where these communities are minorities. Uncle Roger nailed it in a Jubilee video.

[00:17:55]>> I grew up great in Malaysia. I was around all Asian people. I am the default race there. and Singapore manages Indian Chinese Malay coexistence without a pan Asian umbrella at all. The CMI framework Chinese Malay Indian others adopted in 1959. Singapore's answer to who counts as Asian is basically wrong question. And maybe that's the point. The question who counts as Asian already assumes the category is real and just needs better boundaries. But every layer that we walk through says the category itself is the problem, not who's inside it. So, none of the layers agree. But there's a reason this argument exploded in the last decade. And a reason has a dollar sign in front of it.

[00:18:47]Growing up in the 80s and '90s, nobody was fighting over the label Asian. In fact, growing up in North America, most people were kind of embarrassed by it.

[00:18:56]The fight started when the label became worth something. When K-pop concert tickets sold out in minutes and anime conventions drew 200,000 people, the label went from bureaucratic checkbox to cultural capital. And suddenly, the boundary mattered. And the cultural capital is overwhelmingly East Asian.

[00:19:15]Global anime markets nearly $40 billion in 2025, projected to double by 2033.

[00:19:22]K-pop BTS alone generated an estimated 5 billion annually for South Korea's economy at peak. Korean wave exports cover music, drama, film, beauty, food, a vertically integrated cultural machine. And Chinese gaming blew up.

[00:19:38]Tennant owns Riot Games, holds a majority stake in Supercell, and is the largest outside shareholder in Epic.

[00:19:45]While Mihoyo's Genshin Impact became one of the highest grossing games on Earth, East Asian cultural exports made Asian cool. Its global mainstream Tik Tok came from China cool.

[00:20:01]And Bollywood [clears throat] global box office outside India roughly half a billion dollars annually, a 50th of anime's market size. That's about what one DreamWorks sequel about a Chinese CGI bear made in a single run.

[00:20:16]Now, to be clear, the gap isn't quality.

[00:20:18]I'm not bashing Bollywood cuz it's bad.

[00:20:19]All right.

[00:20:26][music] It's about commercial integration. Asian as a brand is being powered overwhelmingly by East Asian content.

[00:20:35]And while doing research for this video, I found that people online are saying it explicitly. People are literally calling out South Asians are pushing to claim Asian identity at the exact moment East Asian soft power made the label desirable and the timing is suspicious.

[00:20:50]I literally did not see anyone claiming this label when I was growing up. So that's my lived experience and the data from their own communities make it harder to ignore. A study from Pujerie from 2024 analyzed South Asian community forums during co and found that South Asians themselves frequently rejected the Asian identity during the pandemic.

[00:21:09]viewing anti-Asian racism as primarily an East Asian problem. So, while stop Asian hate was a movement, they were literally saying, "We're not Asian, so don't hit me." So, the same community that's pushing for inclusion under the Asian umbrella said, "No thanks." While being Asian meant getting harassed on the street, but to be fair, South Asian campus organizations were fighting for inclusion in the pan-Asian groups in the late 1980s, 30 years before CO and BTS.

[00:21:36]So, the push to be viewed as Asian in the US isn't new, but it never went mainstream until the label was worth [music] something.

[00:21:45]>> So, take that for whatever you want. But notice what happened. Nobody stopped to ask whether the category made sense.

[00:21:51]They just fought over who gets inside of it. Which brings me to the container problem. What words hold what groups?

[00:21:58]And Asian isn't even the worst offender.

[00:22:01]Every label was built to hold a geography and then asked to carry a race, a coalition, a culture, an identity, and whatever else people needed it to mean that week. Asian cracked first because it stretched the widest. Hispanic and Latino aren't far behind. Neither is brown. And the newer ones like Wayan and Blazian, they will hit the same wall. The labels were never built to do what we now demand of them.

[00:22:27]And the question is whether you keep pretending the container works [music] or describe what's actually inside it.

[00:22:34]So, have I been using the word wrong on this channel? Yes, loosely. And I knew it. I have a freaking PhD in this kind of stuff. [music] >> When I say Asian in my titles, I mean East and Southeast Asian because I'm from North America and my audience is mostly American and East Asian. That's my YouTube analytics and not geography or the census. But the main thing is it's what the word actually does in most people's heads. And after everything this video just walked through, I think you can see why. And if that bothers you, fair. But we're both stuck arguing inside a stupid box that two grad students at Berkeley plagiarized from a 2500year-old hittight word and turned into a protest banner. And it worked.

[00:23:21]Now we have 5 billion people cramped together inside this box. And once you're inside, every argument you have, who's in, who's out, who's really Asian, happens on terms you didn't choose. And we'll continue arguing as if the container itself makes sense. If you like this video, you like this one. And if you made it this far, don't forget to like and