Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) is an umbrella term that refers to any person of Asian or Pacific Island descent or ancestry. AAPI is a pan-ethnic identity
While AAPI is an ancestral umbrella term, Asians are not a monolith. AAPI people have a breadth of lived experiences depending on where their ancestral ties are from, when their family immigrated, and their own intersectional identities like gender, sexual orientation, skin color, and class. For this reason, one should not assume that all Asian people have the same experiences.
Anti-Asian racism has publicly increased during the COVID pandemic; the organization Stop AAPI Hate states that 11,500 hate incidents were reported to them between March 19, 2020 and March 31, 2022 with 1 in 5 AAPI surveyed experiencing a hate crime in 2020/2021. It is also important to recognize the AAPI community has faced systemic and cultural racism since this country’s founding. Although there are a wide variety of ways this racism manifests, the American culture actively denies the experiences of the AAPI community through the Model Minority Myth. The Model Minority Myth is a cultural assumption that characterizes Asian Americans as a polite, law-abiding group who have achieved a higher level of success than the general population through some combination of innate talent and pull-yourselves-up-by-your-bootstraps mentality. This assumption is not only false but has become ingrained within the wider American culture. Although AAPI people encounter structural racism similar to other non-white American people, due to the Model Minority Myth, many people mistakenly assume that they do not.
Adapted from the Pratt Institute Libraries' Asian American and Pacific Islander Resources
Image Credit: Stop Asian Hate by Victoria Pickering 3/21/21 license CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Stop AAPI Hate was formed in response to the alarming escalation in xenophobia and bigotry resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. The AAPI Equity Alliance (AAPI Equity), Chinese for Affirmative Action (CAA), and the Asian American Studies Department of San Francisco State University launched the organization on March 19, 2020. The coalition tracks and responds to incidents of hate, violence, harassment, discrimination, shunning, and child bullying against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United States. Their mission is to advance equity, justice, and power by dismantling systemic racism and building a multiracial movement to end anti-Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) hate. (taken from About Stop AAPI Hate)
REPORT A HATE INCIDENT at the Stop AAPI Hate website (multiple languages available).
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